It’s enough to give you whiplash, but the good kind of whiplash, like when you turn away from your video game to see your kids doing something cute.ĭespite the overstuffed nature, Sides keeps things manageable by utilizing two backbones to carry the narrative. One moment you’ll be reading about James Henry Carleton investigating the Mountain Meadows Massacre the next you’ll be with soon-to-be Sand Creek villain John Chivington as he’s fighting the Confederacy at Glorieta Pass. (And on Halloween, Easter, their birthdays. This is a sometimes-wildly digressing story, hopping manically from one place to the next, like my kids on Christmas morning. There are battles and massacres, explorations and discoveries, triumphs and tragedies. You have the Mexican-American War that Polk orchestrated, as fought in New Mexico and California. You have the underrated political genius of James Knox Polk and his ambitious continental designs. You have General Stephen Watts Kearny taking the Army of the West on one of the longest marches in U.S. All the stuff that used to fill the dime-store “blood and thunders” that lends this book its tongue-in-cheek title. The two decades in between are stuffed with drama, horror, and heartbreak. It starts in 1846, with American soldiers arriving in Santa Fe, and ends roughly around the time of the First Battle of Adobe Walls in 1864. Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder is a sprawling account of the opening of the American southwest. This is the kind of book that spoils you for other books. Narbona could not have known that “The Army of the West,” in the midst of the longest march in American military history, was merely the vanguard of an inexorable tide fueled by a self-righteous ideology now known as “Manifest Destiny.” For twenty years the Navajo, elusive lords of a huge swath of mountainous desert and pasturelands, would ferociously resist the flood of soldiers and settlers who wished to change their ancient way of life or destroy them.
As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquished-but what did the arrival of these “New Men” portend for the Navajo?
He had come to see if the rumors were true-if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people’s chieftains, looked down upon the small town of Santa Fe, the stronghold of the Mexican settlers he had been fighting his whole long life. A Magnificent History of How the West Was Really Won-a Sweeping Tale of Shame and Glory
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