Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (14 page)

These were important skills, all of them, though they were hard to measure and quantify. But in the right person, a person who was also cheerful on a trail he already knew well, who had a few jokes up his sleeve and possessed an absolute honesty—they were invaluable.

Fremont’s nickname, The Pathfinder, was a misnomer several times over. For it was Carson, not Fremont, who had usually “found” the path—and often as not he was merely retracing trails that had already been trod by trappers, Indians, or Spanish explorers. In Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series, the main protagonist, Natty Bumppo, a.k.a. Hawkeye, a.k.a. the Pathfinder, wears buckskins, lives with the Indians and follows their ways. It was Carson, not Fremont, who actually lived a life that resembled Cooper’s hero.

Fremont seemed to understand that in curious ways, Carson complemented him. If Fremont was impetuous, visionary, erratic, and at times vainglorious, Carson was cautious, pragmatic, steady, and always humble. Though Fremont brought flourishes of high culture to the trail, the illiterate Carson was versed in a different kind of learning, a practical knowledge that was just as eclectic and even harder won. Fremont described Carson as “prompt, self-sacrificing, and true.” He was a man “of great courage; quick and complete perception, taking in at a glance the advantages as well as the chances for defeat.” In another passage Fremont fairly sang, “Mounted on a fine horse, without a saddle, and scouring bare-headed over the prairies, Kit was one of the finest pictures of a horseman I have ever seen.”

But there was one particular passage in Fremont’s second report that crystallized Carson’s reputation and forever fixed his name in the public mind. Naturally, the episode had to do with Indians. Somewhere on the Old Spanish Trail, deep in the Mojave Desert, Fremont’s men encountered a desperate Mexican man named Andreas Fuentes and an eleven-year-old boy, both of whom had been ambushed by Indians (which tribe is unknown). The attackers had stolen thirty horses and killed two men Fuentes was riding with, leaving their mangled bodies on the trail. Two women riding with the party had been staked to the ground and badly mutilated before they, too, were killed.

On hearing this tragic tale, Kit Carson and fellow mountain man Alex Godey took pity on Fuentes and vowed to help. For two days Carson and his comrade followed the horse tracks and chased down these “American Arabs,” as Fremont called them. Finally Carson and Godey located the thieves and rushed into their crowded encampment. The Indians had already eaten several of the stolen horses. Dodging their arrows, Carson and Godey promptly shot two of the Indians, scattered the rest, and seized the surviving horses. Before leaving the scene, Godey stooped to strip off the scalps of the two slain Indians. But according to Fremont, when Godey raked his knife over the second Indian’s scalp, the warrior “sprung to his feet, the blood streaming from his skinned head, and uttered a hideous howl,” firing an arrow at Godey that passed through his shirt collar.

Godey raised his rifle and “quickly terminated the agonies of the gory savage.”

The following day Fremont was amazed to hear the sound of approaching hoofbeats. It was Carson and Godey returning with Fuentes’s recaptured horses. Godey was carrying his rifle like a pole, from which dangled two fresh Indian scalps. Fuentes shed tears of gratitude, and Fremont was in awe. As far as he was concerned, this act was the apotheosis of chivalry. He wrote, “Two men, in a savage desert, pursue day and night an unknown body of Indians into the defiles of an unknown mountain—attack them on sight, without counting numbers—and defeat them in an instant. And for what? To punish the robbers of the desert, and to avenge the wrongs of Mexicans whom they did not know.”

Who would do such a thing? Fremont asked rhetorically in his report. “Kit Carson, an American, born in the Booneslick county of Missouri…trained to western enterprise from early life.”

And so by 1845 the image was already sealed: Kit Carson became a kind of action figure hero, the noble rescuer, righteous avenger, white knight of the West. That his brutality might have an inglorious underside seemed not to cross the adoring public’s mind, any more than did the possibility that both the Fremont and Fuentes parties were trespassing on ancestral Indian territory. Fremont could count on his scout to find the way and set things right—and readers could, too. More than any other single factor or incident, this passage from Fremont’s second expedition report is where the Kit Carson legend was born; he would have to live down the legend, and respond to the expectations it created, for the rest of his life.

Carson could not read Fremont’s glowing words about him, of course, and it is doubtful whether he even knew about them. But Carson’s gratitude to Fremont ran deep. The two men had traveled many thousands of miles together and had fought their way out of many scrapes. For all his peculiarities of manner and lapses in judgment, Fremont had proven a brave and tough explorer—and he was never dull. In many situations he had shown flashes of brilliance (although he was usually the first to admit it). There was no questioning his abilities as a field topographer, and in his own fitful, grandiose way he had demonstrated a certain talent for leading and inspiring men.

In any case, Carson genuinely seemed to like his boss and felt much in his debt. Fremont had given him a new lease on life—the promise of a new career just as the trapping profession was drying up—and he’d paid the unheard-of sum of a hundred dollars a month. Carson was the sort of person who, once befriended, was steadfast as a family dog. It was perhaps the sweeter flip side of the Scotch-Irish revenge trait: Like a grudge, he wouldn’t let you go. Years later, in praising Fremont in his dictated memoirs, Carson said that he found it “impossible to describe the hardships through which we passed, nor am I capable of doing justice to the credit which Fremont deserves. I can never forget his treatment of me while I was in his employ, and how cheerfully he suffered with his men.”

And so for the rest of his life, Carson would always remain in the Fremont camp. The loyalty was mutual. When in the summer of 1845, Fremont set out for yet another assignment to explore the West—this one proving his most ambitious and far-flung odyssey of all—he of course chose Kit Carson to be his guide.

In 1818, when he was fifty-two, Narbona led another campaign against the Spanish, this one far more successful than the earlier assault on Cebolleta. He made his war plans from atop a Navajo stronghold called Yoo Tsoh, or Beautiful Mountain, where he assembled hundreds of braves to make arrows and shields and other implements of war. He was sure of his timing; most of the Spanish soldiers had left the region to put down a major rebellion deeper in Mexico. When Narbona’s warriors were ready, they mounted their horses and swooped down on the valleys, plundering the unprotected ranches and slaughtering anyone who tried to resist.

But Narbona’s bloody campaigns of 1818 were successful in a wider sense beyond the great bounty of stolen property they yielded: The following year the Spanish drafted a treaty that for the first time established tribal boundaries and recognized many of the Navajo grievances. The Spaniards, in turn, demanded a stop to all raids. They further insisted that the Navajos convert to Catholicism and build permanent villages so that they might settle down beside their churches and become full-time farmers like the Pueblo Indians—a notion that would crop up over and over again in the Navajos’ later dealings with Spanish, Mexican, and American authorities. Narbona would do what he could to halt the raiding, but he knew his people would never agree to this latter sweeping request—which amounted, in the Navajo view, to cultural suicide.

That year, however, Narbona had far bigger concerns than the Spanish. A terrible drought had descended over the Southwest, and the Chuska Valley, semiarid even in good times, turned a crackly brown. The grass dried up and a pall of fine dust hung over the land. On the surrounding mesas, a species of bark beetle began to ravage the shriveling stands of piñon trees that were now unable to produce enough sap to discourage the invading insects. Narbona’s sheep and other livestock began to starve.

The situation became so severe that Navajos all over the region were forced to abandon the Chuska Valley. They collected their belongings, wrapped up bundles of seeds, gathered their herds and flocks—and left. For months Narbona and his people wandered westward, looking for a new place they might graze and farm, but everywhere they went, the Navajos were similarly famished. It seemed that the Diné prayers no longer held their magic.

The Navajos always said that “when the land is sick, the people are sick,” and it did seem as though the people themselves were now accursed. They began to eye each other suspiciously, wondering who among them had gone astray and displeased the gods and upset the delicate order of things. It must have saddened and humiliated Narbona to see his once affluent outfit reduced to such a desperate refugee existence, leading their dwindling flocks, depending on the generosity of ever more distant circles of friends and relatives, until they had passed out of familiar country altogether and into the red rock wilderness of what is now northern Arizona.

As the drought worsened, Narbona had no choice but to keep moving in search of a better place. The sheep had become so skinny, it was said, that “their bones stuck out like handles for us to carry them by.” They were approaching the western periphery of Navajo country—to the southwest they could see the giant peak they called Light Always Glitters on Top. It was another of the four sacred mountains, this one anchoring the southwestern corner of the Navajo lands (the mountain is now known as the San Francisco Peaks, which rise to an elevation of more than twelve thousand feet near present-day Flagstaff, Arizona). For Narbona, the mountain loomed as a forbidding landmark; he realized he could not lead his people farther west without angering the gods.

Here and there Narbona encountered pockets of life, little communities clustered around a feeble river or an underground spring. He found one such place in a well-watered valley below the Hopi settlements of Black Mesa. Narbona climbed up to the mesa to seek the Hopis’ permission to squat on their land until the drought had passed. An unchristianized tribe of Pueblo Indian farmers little influenced by the Spanish, the normally peaceful Hopis were ancient foes of the Diné—they called the Navajos the
tasavuh
, or “the head pounders,” for their brutal habit of bashing in skulls with stone axes.

Certainly the Hopis had good reason to be skeptical of Narbona’s proposed living arrangement. But for some reason the Hopis assented, and Narbona’s people settled down. It was a testament to Narbona’s diplomatic skills that he was able to secure safe haven among ancestral enemies—he doubtless sweetened the deal with many sheep and goats and other gifts, and promises of more when the drought ended. He may have also floated threats at the Hopis, who perhaps feared that more Navajos were coming to reinforce Narbona’s warriors. (Visionary artists and inspired metaphysicians known for their elaborate dances and their fine kachina dolls, the Hopis were inferior fighters; so ingrained was their habit of running that the Navajos called them “little rabbits.”)

By whatever methods of persuasion, Narbona lived among the Hopis for much of the 1820s, more than a hundred miles to the west of his beloved Tunicha foothills. During their exile, his people became close friends with the Hopis—learning their elaborate songs and dances—and three of his children even married members of the tribe.

But sometime in the late 1820s, news reached Narbona that the Tunicha Mountains were packed with fresh snow: The drought was over. Soon the people gathered their things and made the happy exodus back to the Chuska Valley.