Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (19 page)

That morning, May 10, 1846, Carson and the others wrapped the bodies of Denny, Crane, and Lajeunesse in blankets and slung them over the pack animals. Carson wanted to bury them in some nice spot by the lake near the main camp, where they had shovels to dig a proper grave. But as the party threaded through the thick timber, the now-rigid corpses kept thudding and smacking against the trunks of the trees, “becoming much bruised,” according to Carson. Realizing they could not in good conscience continue this ghoulish procession, the men scraped a shallow hole with their knives and solemnly buried their friends together, covering the grave with logs and brush to avoid detection. Fremont, exercising the explorer’s prerogative, named the nearby brook Denny Creek—a name it still carries to this day.

Fremont’s party resumed the march north. The Delaware Indians were the first to detect Klamaths in the bush. They took off in pursuit and in a few moments came the reports of their long rifles. Soon the Delawares returned, bearing two bloody scalps. “Very sick before,” one of them said. “Better now.”

They kept moving along the shoreline. Fremont picked Carson and ten other men to scout an area where he believed a Klamath settlement was located. Carson’s group surged ten miles ahead and soon found the hamlet. They crept up and viewed it from the cattails. It was a large fishing village, named Dokdokwas, built near a marshy place where the Williamson River flowed into Upper Klamath Lake. The village had more than fifty lodges and bustled with life: Dogs yapped, women wove mats out of the lake reeds, fishermen glided about in their dugout canoes. Fillets of salmon and sucker-fish dried in the curing smoke.

Suddenly the villagers became agitated, and Carson realized they’d spotted him. He called for an immediate charge, and although they were greatly outnumbered, the eleven men cantered across the shallows and raced into the now-swarming village. Carson’s small party fired away with impunity. Most of the Klamath men were out fishing or hunting, and those few present were armed only with bows and arrows. In a few minutes Carson and his men had killed twenty-one Indians. Frantically the surviving villagers scattered for the hills, and the Delawares slaughtered many of them in their hiding places. Some of the Klamath boys swam away beneath the water, breathing through hollow reeds.

It was, as Carson might say, a perfect butchery—by any standards, pure and literal overkill. “We gave them something to remember,” he said. “They were severely punished.” Although Carson claimed his men “did not interfere with” women or children, one of his men later wrote that he found at least one “old Indian woman” dead in a canoe. Klamath accounts of the attack on Dokdokwas insist that many women and children were massacred.

Carson then ordered the village destroyed. “I wished to do them as much damage as I could,” he later reasoned, “so I directed their houses to be set on fire.” His men fanned out and torched the Klamath lodges, semi-subterranean hovels made of mud and logs woven together with patterned reeds that, being brittle and dry, were extremely flammable. Soon the whole village was ablaze. It was, Carson thought, “a beautiful sight.”

Fremont saw the billowing smoke from a distance and raced to catch up. When he galloped into the burning village, the captain was sorely disappointed to have “arrived too late for the sport.” But he seemed immensely satisfied. Said Fremont: “It will be a story for them to hand down while there are any Klamaths still living on their lake.”

(True to Fremont’s prediction, the massacre at Dokdokwas is indeed a story handed down among the Klamaths—and it still serves as a reminder of what happened in their people’s very first encounter with an official party of Americans. The tribe never rebuilt what was then their largest fishing village; today Dokdokwas is a pristine and desolate swath of reedy shoreline, with no markers to indicate what happened there. According to historian David Roberts, who writes perceptively about the curious friendship between Fremont and Carson in his fine study
A Newer World
, the tragedy at Dokdokwas is deepened by the fact that most scholars now agree that Fremont and Carson, in their blind vindictiveness, probably chose the wrong tribe to lash out against: In all likelihood the band of Indians that had killed Lajeunesse and the two Delawares were from the neighboring Modocs, another lake-land tribe centered closer to the Oregon-California border. The Klamaths were culturally related to the Modocs, but the two tribes were bitter enemies.)

Later that day, one of the Klamath warriors returned to Dokdokwas and, realizing his village had been destroyed, drew a bow on Carson in the deep woods. Spying him, Carson raised his gun but it misfired. The Klamath was about to let his poison arrow fly when Fremont—riding a fearless gray warhorse he called Sacramento—glimpsed Carson’s predicament. He wheeled Sacramento and trampled the hapless warrior, whose arrow flew awry. Sagundai, a Delaware chief, then descended on the injured Klamath and pummeled him to death with a club. From that moment on, Carson felt he owed Fremont his life. “In all probability, if he had not run over the Indian as he did, I would have been shot,” Carson later said. “I owe my life to them two—the captain and Sacramento saved me.”

As Fremont and his men completed their long, brutal circuit around Klamath Lake, they continued to kill Indians in a desultory fashion, in ones and twos, but their anger was spent. Even Fremont had reached the bottom of his revenge. “I had now kept the promise I made to myself and had punished these people well for their treachery,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Now I turned my thought to the work which they had delayed.”

Fremont headed due south now, crossing out of the realm of the Klamaths and on into California. Yet as he and his expedition members dropped out of the Sierras and into the Sacramento Valley, they were nearly continuously hounded by Indians of various tribes—Yahooskins, Modocs, Shastas—whose warriors were clearly riled by reports emanating from Klamath Lake. Carson felt a constant hint of attack, an awareness that the party was being watched. At one point Carson suggested that they bypass a deep gorge where, he rightly suspected, Indians had planned an ambush. Some of those Indians followed Fremont’s party, however, and Carson decided to ride into their midst and flush them out. Suddenly one of them emerged from behind a rock. “He came from his hiding place and commenced firing arrows very rapidly,” Carson narrates in his autobiography. “I dismounted and fired. My shot had the desired effect.”

Carson was impressed by the warrior he had just killed and bore him no ill will: “He was a brave Indian, deserved a better fate, but he had placed himself on the wrong path.”

Carson collected the warrior’s “fine bow and beautiful quiver of arrows” and presented them as a souvenir to Lieutenant Gillespie. More accustomed to sea travails, Gillespie was exhausted by this nerve-racking existence and was dazzled by trail-savvy men like Carson, who seemed to have the stomach and aptitude for it. “By heaven, this is rough work!” he exclaimed to Fremont. “I’ll take care to let them know about it in Washington.”

But Fremont’s mind was elsewhere. He replied, “It will be long enough before we see Washington again.”

By mid-August, Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny’s forces were only a few days’ march away from Santa Fe. Passing through the tiny towns of Tecolote and San Miguel and then following the bends of the Pecos River, Kearny heard so many rumors about Armijo that he resolved to ignore them all. Apache Canyon might be the Scylla and Charybdis of the Southwest, but he was pressing on—averaging 20 miles a day, a frenetic pace for an army that had already logged 800. Two-thirds of the horses had died along the way, a fact that Kearny, the equine sentimentalist, found hard to bear. Most of his cavalry had become infantry, joining the larger body of Missouri volunteers who had slogged it on foot all the way from Fort Leavenworth.

Kearny’s blistered men were now practically starving; they had been on one-third rations since Bent’s Fort, and they grumbled about the smiting heat. “Our guns become so hot we cannot handle them,” Pvt. Jacob Robinson wrote, “and the sand burns our feet. The dreaded Sirocco blows as from a heated oven, burning us even through our clothes. The discontented men say, ‘Let us be anywhere rather than in this desert.’” The land was so parched, wrote another soldier, that “it appeared as though it had not been refreshed by a shower since the day of Noah’s flood.”

To make matters worse, water on the trail was hardly potable. Marcellus Edwards of Missouri’s Company D described a pool of rancid water his thirsty comrades dived into one early August morning: “It was so bad that one who drank it would have to shut both eyes and hold his breath until the nauseating dose was swallowed. Notwithstanding its scarcity, some men allowed their horses to tramp through it, which soon stirred it up to a thick mud. And to give it still greater flavor, we found a dead snake with the flesh dropping from his bones.”

Kearny dismissed all such whining and pushed on without a break. He understood the salient fact of invasion, that delays almost always favor a defense. He kept receiving strange letters from Armijo, letters maundering on in elegant phrases that said everything and nothing. Army of the West lieutenant John Hughes described one such letter as “very politely dictated, and so ambiguous in its expressions that it was impossible to know whether it was the Governor’s intention to meet Gen. Kearny in council, or in conflict.”

Still, Kearny was worried about Apache Canyon. The Santa Fe traders traveling with him knew all about the narrow pass and had been warning him since they were at Bent’s Fort that this was the most likely place where the New Mexicans would put up a fight. He sent spies ahead and kept moving as fast as he could.

Another advantage of maintaining a high rate of speed, Kearny believed, was that it kept his forces out of trouble: The pace of their march gave the men focus, it harnessed them to the task at hand, it kept their appetites from wandering. With such a large and unruly army of green volunteers spread out over a hundred miles of trail, there was every opportunity for a devolution of military order. As the war progressed in other provinces of northern Mexico, Gen. Zachary Taylor’s volunteers were acquiring a reputation for “sexual terrorism,” as one historian put it. But the Army of the West simply had no time or energy for rape or pillage.

Riding up and down the ranks, the stern Episcopalian general set a tone of probity. John Hughes saw Kearny as a “sagacious officer well-fitted for command of veteran troops,” but he believed the general unfairly expected the same high standards of “rigid austerity” from the Missourians as he did from his seasoned dragoons. The volunteers, Hughes thought, “are bred to freedom and fired by feeling, principle, and honor” rather than “the study of arms.” These young bucks feared and respected Kearny, but they did not much care for his discipline. The punishments Kearny meted out could be severe, even Sisyphean. One Army of the West diarist reported a case in which a group of five soldiers, having committed some minor infraction, were “court-martialed for insubordination” and then each sentenced to lug forty pounds of sand for a week.

After trekking all this way across the scorched continent, most of the Missourians were itching for a fight. One volunteer wrote that he and his comrades were “full of ardor, burning for the battlefield, and panting for the reward of honorable victory.” As rumors of the coming engagement at Apache Canyon spread, a palpable excitement gathered in their ranks. The pace of their march quickened, and they erupted in war songs—
Oh, what a joy to fight the dons and wallop fat Armij-O! So clear the way to Santa Fe, with that we all agree-O!

In contrast to his hot-blooded volunteers, however, General Kearny did not want to engage the enemy unless he absolutely must. In fact, he preferred not to view the New Mexicans as enemies at all. Kearny hoped to take New Mexico without firing a shot—it would be a “bloodless conquest,” he vowed. He understood that if the United States intended to occupy this province and eventually absorb it into the Union, he would have to win the people over.

And so in every settlement he passed, he met with the local leaders and gave some variation of the speech he had delivered from the rooftop in Las Vegas. His men would harm no one, he said. The United States was not hostile to Catholicism. The American army would protect them against the savage tribes. Their women were safe. No one would be branded like a steer. With his interpreters, Kearny wrote up a proclamation in Spanish that conveyed all these points and then sent riders ahead to tack up copies in every town square. In several instances Kearny’s troops captured Mexican spies who had been dispatched by Armijo. But rather than hold them as prisoners, the general decided the better course was to show mercy and release them. By doing so, he hoped they might return to Santa Fe and spread stories of American beneficence. More cynically, he trusted that they would report back to Armijo and exaggerate the might of the American forces; Kearny knew from experience that an enemy’s size had a way of growing in the excitement of retelling.