Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (73 page)

At the same time, Carson believed there was no stopping the tide of Anglo-American immigration. As historian Tom Dunlay has pointed out, not even in moments of introspection did Carson question the legitimacy of American expansion into the West, a process that he, along with Fremont and a few others, had done more to set in motion than any American alive. Whites were here now—it was simply an irreversible fact. And their presence put the traditional life of all the Western Indians in jeopardy. Native Americans would have to change, he believed, or they would all die out. Predicted Carson, “If permitted to remain as they are, before many years they will be utterly extinct.”

And so, more or less in keeping with the Tejon model, Carson had throughout the 1850s advocated with growing vehemence the creation of reservations for the Utes and other tribes, at places located far away from all Anglo or Hispanic settlement, where they might learn the arts of cultivation and husbandry while holding on to their own traditions. As he put it, the Indians must be “set apart to themselves.” He truly believed that mingling with whites was ruining their culture. “They should not be allowed to come into the towns,” Carson insisted, “for every visit an Indian makes is more or less an injury to him.” In their encounters with whites, he said, “Indians generally learn the vices and not the virtues” of settled living. Perhaps the biggest problem was liquor—Carson had seen alcohol rip the soul from whole bands of once-proud Indians. “They become accustomed to the use of ardent spirits,” he said, and soon become “a degraded tribe.”

If at all possible, though, Carson preferred creating reservations within, or at least in the vicinity of, a given tribe’s ancestral lands. “In all cases of locating reservations,” he once said, “it would be best to show some deference to the expressed wishes of the tribe.” Euro-Americans, particularly in the boom-and-bust West, were relentlessly mobile. They blew about in the wind—deracinated, it seemed, always in search of better fortune. Miners, traders, trappers, merchants, missionaries, they thought nothing of moving great distances and starting all over when new opportunity struck. The hunger to push on, particularly in a westward direction, was an attribute of the (white) American. But Carson knew enough about Indian culture to recognize that even among nomadic tribes, the familiar landmarks of one’s homeland were profoundly significant—in fact, they were sacred—and one strayed from them with great trepidation. Homeland was crucial in practical terms, but also in terms of ceremony and ritual, central to a tribe’s collective identity and its conception of the universe.

Certainly this was true of the Navajo. They constantly moved about, it was true, but it was a localized nomadism; they seldom traveled far from their outfit. There were taboos against leaving the confines of the four sacred mountains. Carson understood that to uproot the Navajo from their ancient ground and move them hundreds of miles ran the risk of demoralizing the tribe so completely that it could smother all chances of a reservation’s success.

Yet, by experience and association, Carson had plenty of other reasons to want the Diné far removed to a reservation. As an Anglo who had happily married into a Hispanic society, he had doubtless adopted some of the biases and perspectives of his in-laws; living as he did in a Spanish-speaking household with many extended relatives under his roof, it would have been difficult for him not to become, in a sense,
Hispanicized
in his outlook. During all his years in New Mexico the Hispanic population had regarded the Navajos, often with good reason, as Public Enemy Number One. The Navajo conflict was, Carson said, “an hereditary warfare” that had “always existed.”

As an Indian agent, Carson had become a friend and advocate of the Utes, and the Utes had always considered the Navajo their archenemy. Over the years Carson had also befriended many people from Taos Pueblo, who likewise viewed the Navajo as an age-old nemesis. So in the simplest terms, Carson’s tribal fidelities prejudiced him against the Diné. Throughout his life Carson had always been a loyalist, unwavering in his allegiance to any person or group with whom he had, for better or worse, thrown in his lot. One can imagine that the loyalist in him must have welcomed the opportunity that Carleton now laid at his feet: to remove the scourge of his people, to vanquish the foe of his friends.

Still, Carson begged off. He was just plain tired. He didn’t have much fight left in him. He wanted some taste of a normal home life.

But James Henry Carleton was not an easy man to turn down, any more than Stephen Watts Kearny had been. Carleton refused Carson’s resignation and went to work on him, pulling out all the stops on his peculiarly forceful personality. As a patriot, as a soldier, as a friend, Carson must see this through. It would be the crowning achievement of his career. The people of New Mexico were counting on him.

The campaign began innocuously enough, with groups of soldiers steadily massing in Santa Fe and in Los Pinos, on the Rio Grande, and then filing slowly westward toward Navajo country. They did not seem in a hurry, nor were they fired with the familiar excitements, the war-whoops and revenge-lust, that ordinarily animated the seasonal slave expeditions into the land of the Diné. These soldiers moved with a solemn and methodical sense of purpose, as though they were conserving their energy. This time they knew they were not making the usual punitive sortie and then returning in shallow triumph with souvenirs and a few slaves. This time they knew they were going away for a long time, and that they were not coming back until they had broken the spirit of an entire nation, forcing twelve thousand people to give up nearly everything they’d ever known.

It was early July 1863. Day after day the sun shone with an impaling brightness, and all along the river the crops were taking shape in the wilting heat. Silty water trickled through the ditches and races to feed the thirsty stalks of beans and corn. It was siesta weather, the middays baking in a torpor that made the inhabitants along the Rio Grande live in the way of lizards, burrowing into the shade of their
portales,
snoozing under brush arbors with their flocks of sheep gathered about them in the shade of the flickering cottonwoods. Now the people roused from their naps and shouted out encouragement, some tipping their sweat-warped sombreros in salute as the soldiers threaded West.

Col. Kit Carson rode at the head of the column, of course. It’s not clear what Carleton said to induce him to stay on board, but it worked. Apprehensively, and with some reluctance, Carson was now embarked on the most ambitious assignment of his career.

All told, he would command nearly a thousand men, including U.S. Army officers, New Mexican volunteers, auxiliaries from a number of Pueblo tribes, and scouts recruited from among the Utes. Carson was especially proud of his Ute warriors, many of whom he knew personally from his days as an Indian agent. Hiring them had been his idea. He correctly surmised that the profound hatred the Utes held for the Diné would give them a heightened motivation, while their presence in the field as official allies of the
bilagaana
troops would disturb and demoralize the Navajos. “The Utes,” Carson wrote Carleton, “are very brave, and fine shots, fine trailers, and uncommonly energetic in the field. The Navajos have entertained a very great dread of them for many years. I believe one hundred Ute Indians would render more service in this way than double their number of troops.” In finally approving Carson’s idea, Carleton stipulated that he hire only the cream of the Ute warriors. “We will have none but the best,” Carleton insisted. “Our work is to be thorough, and we must have the men to do it.”

Carson often preferred riding in the company of the Utes than with either his white or Hispanic comrades. And so on July 7, when Carson left the Rio Grande with his long column of men, he trotted in the vanguard with some of his favorite warriors, including one of their leaders, a man named Kaniache. Carson was hot and uncomfortable in his army blues, the pain in his chest a frequent vexation, his thoughts doubtless clouded by the intricate conquest that lay before him. He was fifty-three years old, and showing his years. It had been especially difficult to pull himself away from Taos this time. During his short leave of absence following the Mescalero campaign, he had savored the pleasures of home in the springtime at the feet of his beloved mountains, the Rio Don Fernando running swift with snowmelt through the town. His family was still growing. Josefa was now pregnant with their sixth child.

Carson’s column filed past the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma and bored into the Diné lands. He turned his horses loose among the Navajo fields of corn and wheat and destroyed whatever the animals did not eat. Finally he made his way to Fort Defiance, the abandoned outpost set deep in Navajo country, where his men went to work refurbishing the now ruined buildings that had always been such a stark outrage to Manuelito. Defiance—along with its sister outpost, Fort Wingate—would serve as Carson’s headquarters during the long campaign, the place from which he would mount the countless incursions he knew would be required to bring the Navajos to their knees. His men worked long hours to restore the fort, and when it was deemed ready for operation, Carson christened it Fort Canby, after Carleton’s stalwart predecessor who, besides checking the Confederate invasion, had done much to lay the groundwork for the present hostilities with the Navajos.

On July 20, while Carson was at Fort Canby, an important if somewhat arbitrary deadline came and went. Six months earlier General Carleton had held a parley at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe with some eighteen Navajo headmen. The Diné leaders were apparently quite worried by alarming reports of Carson’s Mescalero roundup and rightly feared they would be next. During this summit, General Carleton struck an extremely aggressive pose with the Navajo delegation. The leaders, he said, had until July 20 to return to Santa Fe with assurances that the whole tribe would completely surrender and voluntarily move to Bosque Redondo. If the headmen did not present themselves by that date, Carleton would prosecute a war like none other that had ever been visited upon them, and he would
force
them to move.

Through a Spanish translator, Carleton told the Navajo leaders: “We have no faith in your promises. You can have no peace until you give other guarantees than your word. If you do not return to Santa Fe [by July 20] we will know that you have chosen the alternative of war. After that day every Navajo will be considered as hostile and treated accordingly. After that day the door now open will be closed.”

And so now that deadline had passed, and not a single one of the headmen had returned to meet with Carleton. This was all the general needed. Having satisfied the legalistic requirements of his Christian conscience, Carleton had the pretext he wanted for waging total war, a pretext that enabled him to couch the campaign not as an offensive at all, but rather as a diplomatically justified, and indeed almost obligatory, response to the Navajos’ failure to heed his explicit warning.

The coming invasion, in other words, would be all their fault. “The consequences,” as he later put it, “rested on them.”

Carleton drew up a brusque declaration of war bearing the dry, institutional title General Orders No. 15. “For a long time past, the Navajo Indians have murdered and robbed the people of New Mexico,” the document read. “It is therefore ordered that Colonel CHRISTOPHER CARSON, with a proper military force proceed without delay to the Navajo country and there…to prosecute a vigorous war upon the men of this tribe…”

Carleton trusted “the distinguished commander of the expedition,” as he called Carson, and gave him carte blanche to purchase supplies “to insure the cardinal requirements of health, food, mobility, and power.” But at the same time the impatient general was ever anxious to know all the nitty-gritty facts of the campaign, and to know them as quickly as the mails would permit. As soon as Carson left the Rio Grande and passed into the desolation of Navajo country, Carleton grew antsy for news and found himself unable to stifle his tendency toward micromanagement from afar. A nearly constant stream of letters issued from his goading pen—full of fussy reprimands and minute suggestions written in a formal hand so neat and razor-sharp it seemed turned out by a machine.

Miffed that Colonel Carson had not written him in a while, the general dashed off a note early in the campaign that made it clear he was to send regular, thorough updates.
“Make a note of this,”
Carleton snipped at Carson. “You will send me a weekly report in detail of the operations of your command. Let me know all about the crops destroyed, their extent and location; all about the stock captured; when, where, by whom, and the kind and number; all about the Navajos killed, and the exact number of captured women and children. Be sure and make
timely
requisitions for supplies. The value of time cannot be too seriously considered. Make
every
string draw.”