Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (75 page)

These colorful disciplinary notes go on and on, bearing sad testimony to the morale problems that clearly prevailed among this confederacy of dunces.

To his credit, Carson pursued an investigation into Blakeney’s actions, and the officer was soon dismissed, with an examining surgeon claiming that the unpopular major suffered from a “nervous debility” and a bad case of indigestion. When Carson described the Blakeney incident to Carleton in his next report, the general promptly shot back a curt letter: “You are right in believing that I do not wish to have Indians destroyed who are willing to come in. Nor will you permit an Indian prisoner once fairly in your custody to be killed.” However, Carson was not to let this minor setback deter him from the main task at hand—nor was the colonel to slacken the ferocity of his rhetoric when he next encountered Navajos willing to talk. Carleton reminded Carson to tell the Navajos that “you have deceived us too often and robbed and murdered our people too long to trust you again at large in your country…. This war shall be pursued against you if it takes years, until you cease to exist or move. There can be no other talk on the subject.”

In the fall, Carson embarked on two more ambitious scouts, but these, too, were seeming failures. Mules and horses collapsed in alarming numbers while others were cleverly stolen in the night by unseen Navajo rustlers. His Ute warriors deserted upon learning that General Carleton would not permit them to keep the booty or slaves they captured along the way. At one point Carson came very close to catching the great warrior Manuelito—or at least a man described by the Hopis as Manuelito—but the prize refugee slipped away, living with his people on secret stores of corn he had presciently stashed throughout the Navajo lands.

After a series of smaller scouts in late November produced similarly underwhelming results, Carson became truly fed up and not a little embarrassed. He was not a man used to failing, certainly not on this scale. One can sense the undertones of rising frustration in his letters to Carleton. He wrote the general that given the sorry state of his horses, he did not think he could continue to prosecute the campaign through the winter. He thought it more prudent to wait “until the weather opens sufficiently” before resuming “extended operations.” At times, it sounded as though he was giving up.

And in fact, he was—at least temporarily. Carson formally requested a two-month leave of absence that would begin on December 15. He wanted to see Josefa, who was approaching her due date. From the field, Carson had been sending her dictated letters whenever he could. One of them survives:

Beloved Wife—

Do not worry about me, because with God’s help we shall see each other again. I charge you above all not to get weary of caring for my children, and to give each one a little kiss in my name…. I remain begging God that I return in good health to be with you until death.

—Your husband who loves you and wishes to see you more than to write to you

In his request for a leave, Carson did not explicitly mention his concern about Josefa’s pregnancy; he said only to Carleton that he needed to attend to “some private business of importance.” In any case, Carleton denied Carson’s request, claiming, “I have not the authority to grant you a leave.” Winter was not the season to relax pressure on the Navajos, the general insisted. “Now while the snow is deep is the true time to make an impression on the tribe.” Carleton ended his note with a prissy addendum: “Please forward no more applications for leaves of absence.”

Carleton was willing to cut a quid pro quo deal with his colonel, however. Carson could come home for a brief visit, the general said, “
as soon as
you have secured one hundred captive Navajo men, women, and children.” It was an incentive package that captured the irritating paternalism lodged so deeply within Carleton’s personality: Perform your task, and then you can go see your wife.

But there was one more caveat. Through all his exhausting scouts, Carson had carefully stayed away from the stronghold of Navajo country, Canyon de Chelly. Back in September he had paused at the tantalizing western mouth of the canyon, but steadfastly refused to go in. Perhaps he was daunted by the scale of the chasm itself—which he regarded as “stupendous” and “impregnable”—or by the considerable logistics that would be required to mount a campaign through it, something no army had ever successfully done in wartime. Perhaps he was aware of the fact that an American colonel named Dixon S. Miles, after scouting a section of the canyon in 1858, had ominously proclaimed, “No command should ever again enter it.” Whatever the reason, Canyon de Chelly was a dread subject for Carson.

Now Carleton had other ideas. Carson would not only have to reach his quota of one hundred captives, but he would have to do it by invading Canyon de Chelly in the dead of winter—and traversing every twisted mile of it.

The Navajos knew that Carson was coming to Canyon de Chelly, perhaps even before Carson did. Or at least they
assumed
that he was coming. Down through the ages, all manner of enemies had trespassed into the great gorge, but usually they would slink home, bewildered by its endless mazes, having caused little harm. The 1805 massacre at The Place Where Two Fell Off was a grotesque exception the Navajos seldom spoke of—a tragedy ascribable to witchcraft, perhaps, or some violated taboo.

In their heart of hearts the Diné had always regarded Canyon de Chelly as their last stronghold and sanctuary, the one place where they felt truly safe. When their wider world was in turmoil, when they could find no relief from pestilence or harrying foes, they had always fallen back here, to hide in the timeless folds.

Along the floor of Canyon de Chelly grew three thousand peach trees, gnarled and scabbed with insect boreholes and now ghostly in the depths of winter, their brittle branches creaking in the wind. These orchards were the pride of the Navajos, the trees hybridized from stock dating back to the Spanish arrival in New Mexico. The succulent fruit they bore helped feed the many hundreds of clansmen who streamed in each fall for elaborate rituals; for nine consecutive nights the people renewed themselves in ceremonial chants, watching their shadows flicker on the thousand-foot-high walls, their lips and fingers sticky with the sour-sweet juice of canyon peaches.

Not only was de Chelly a bountiful place, it was, the Diné believed, protected by supernatural powers no white man could touch. The four
yei
gods lived deep in the canyon, as did Spider Woman, the great Navajo goddess. Spider Woman was a lovable old crone, cryptic but wise, who gave Navajo women the gift of weaving and otherwise amused herself by inflicting harmless and often instructive mischief on her beloved people. She lived atop a nine-hundred-foot-tall pinnacle erupting from the floor of the canyon that is still known today as Spider Rock. From her commanding perch, Spider Woman surely would look out for the Navajos and protect them from any enemies who presumed to invade her realm.

Back in the summer, when Kit Carson was leading his first campaigns across the Navajo country, the Diné who lived in the vicinity of Canyon de Chelly began to prepare themselves for the coming onslaught. Many miles inside the canyon, near an important junction of two lateral gorges, stood a massive anvil of sandstone well known to the Navajos. Fortress Rock, as it was called, soared nearly eight hundred feet and was connected to the main wall of the canyon only by a thin stone bridge sagging from centuries of erosion. To use an urban analogy, it looked rather like a natural rough draft of New York’s Flatiron Building—a thin monolithic wedge standing at the confluence of three sharply angled thoroughfares. Any stranger who happened to pass by Fortress Rock would doubtless find it impressive if not menacing, but he would scarcely imagine that a path led up its sheer walls to the tableland at its summit.

Yet it was so: Long ago the Anasazi had chiseled a fretwork of toeholds and handholds, almost invisible, into the face of the rock. On top they had discovered that there was enough room for hundreds of people to camp. Various caves and fissures provided welcome places to hide. Scattered about the surface were pocks and bowls that functioned as cisterns to capture rainwater. Fortress Rock was protected from all sides, its parapets were invisible from the canyon floor and too distant from either canyon rim to be within arrow range.

The Anasazi had apparently used Fortress Rock as a secret haven to hide from their enemies; now the Navajos would do the same.

According to Navajo oral history, the Diné met at the base of Fortress Rock sometime in the late summer and discussed what to do. “A frightened feeling had settled among the Navajo people, a feeling of danger from enemies,” says Akinabh Burbank, one of a dozen storytellers poignantly captured in a 1973 oral history. “Now they were moving into our territory to search for us and kill us all.”

The women began to stockpile foods and supplies—smoked mutton, piñon nuts, wild potatoes, juniper berries, dried grain and peaches, blankets, and water-bearing vessels of all kinds. The men, meanwhile, made improvements to the old network of Anasazi toeholds, gouging them deeper, so that children and even elderly Navajos could safely pull themselves up. They shored up a particularly precarious passage of loose rock by building a sturdy wooden bridge. As it was related to historian David Roberts, the Navajos then scaled the last vertiginous heights by laying two trunks of ponderosa pine at sharp angles—trees they had hauled from stands in the Lukachukai Mountains, some twenty-five miles away—cutting the bark with notches to function like rungs on a ladder.

It was a public works project of great ambition as well as peril, one that took weeks to complete. Fortress Rock had always been a formidable place, but through their efforts “this thrusting fin,” as Roberts puts it, had become “the most sovereign of hideouts, the place of ultimate refuge.”

Now that the way up was deemed safe, the Navajos began to haul their supplies and foodstuffs to the top—everything they thought they’d need to get them through a long siege. Then, as winter closed in, the people began to assemble. “You can go to the safe place until the soldiers are gone—we still have time,” says Navajo storyteller Teddy Draper, recalling a story passed down from his grandmother. “Kill most of the livestock and prepare the meat. It is getting cold now, so we have to start. We must be on the top before it snows. The men have been working on the trails. The ladders have been put up. Be strong and prepare to defend yourselves.”

One day in December, as it started to snow, some three hundred men, women, and children, perhaps tipped off by a sentry that the
bilagaana
army was on its way, ascended to the top and pulled up their ladders and bridges. Hoping the evil might pass beneath them, they planned to dwell in silence for months—and, if necessary, make a last-ditch defense, like the doomed Jewish rebels who defied the Romans from the stone ramparts of Masada.

Some accounts say Manuelito was among the faithful on Fortress Rock, although that is doubtful, because he was also said to be somewhere in the Grand Canyon at that time, and also around Navajo Mountain, and also in the vicinity of Monument Valley. Manuelito, in short, was everywhere—and nowhere—his phantomlike ubiquity made possible by his fame and his great wealth in sheep. His roving defiance was a rallying cry, a source of hope to his people.

As December passed into January, the three hundred Navajos atop Fortress Rock tarried at their now smokeless camps and huddled in their blankets, trying to stay warm. They heard that the American soldiers had been spotted, that the enemy would arrive any day now. They made arrows and sharpened lances while keeping their ears tuned for untoward sounds down in the canyon.