Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (4 page)

In 1828, after making a caravan journey to El Paso and working long stretches of the Santa Fe Trail, Kit signed on as a cook for another mountain man named Ewing Young, who had opened a store in Taos to outfit trapper expeditions. The eighteen-year-old kid apparently was a competent chef, but then these greasy wayfarers, accustomed as they were to such odd field entrées as cougar, dog, mule, bear, and prairie oysters, were decidedly unpicky eaters known for their blasé culinary motto, “Meat’s meat.” (It was said that the trappers’ diet was so full of lard that it made a mountain man “shed rain like an otter, and stand cold like a polar bear.”)

By the spring of 1828, Kit had become proficient enough in Spanish to sign on as a translator for a merchant caravan that was bound for Chihuahua City, a thousand-mile journey round-trip along the Camino Real. The ancient capital, with its ornate cathedral, its beautiful stone aqueduct, and its stately colonial architecture hewn from the brutal wealth of Chihuahua’s silver mines, was the largest and most dazzling city Carson had ever visited, and throughout his wildly peripatetic life, Chihuahua would remain the southernmost extent of his travels.

Carson returned from his sojourn and took a job as a teamster in the Santa Rita copper mines of southwestern New Mexico. Then, in the spring of 1829, Ewing Young asked him to accompany a party of some forty Taos fur men on a journey deep into unexplored Apache country to trap the tributaries of the Gila River. Carson had at last received his wish: Although still a greenhorn, he was embarking on his first full-fledged expedition as a trapper, an occupation that would hold his interest for the next dozen years.

It was an insanely difficult way to make a living, but, for Carson, that was no deterrent. A congressional survey of the trapping profession, completed in 1831, described the mountain man existence this way: “The whole operation is full of exposures and privations…leading to premature exhaustion and disability. Few of those engaged in it reach an advanced stage of life. The labor is excessive, subsistence scanty, and the Indians are ever liable to sudden and violent paroxysms of passion, in which they spare neither friend nor foe.”

Although Carson probably did not know it, trapping was already a storied profession in the East. The mountain men became popular avatars of a wild and free life that was romanticized by such writers as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. The fur trade would produce many legendary names, men like Jim Bridger and Jedediah Smith. But through a peculiar confluence of events, Kit Carson would become the most famous mountain man of them all.

Carson’s first paid voyage into the mountains was an especially ambitious and dangerous one, for in addition to the usual hardships—grizzlies, Indians, hypothermia, the prospect of a killing thirst or starvation—this mission was strictly illegal. Most trapping excursions ventured north into the unclaimed wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, but this time Young planned to trap within the jealously held, if extremely porous, borders of Mexico. The government in Santa Fe rarely issued trapping permits to foreigners, so in order to confuse suspicious officials, Ewing led his party north into the mountains, then doubled back and rode southwest through the country of the Navajo and the Zuni before striking the Gila River. The Gila watershed had scarcely been trapped, and Young’s men found it incredibly rich in beaver and other game.

From Young and his international ragtag of mountain men, Carson began to soak up the nuances of the trapping trade—how to read the country and follow its most promising drainages, how to find the “slicks” along the banks where beavers had slithered from their tree stands, how to set and scent the traps with a thick yellow oil called castoreum taken from the beaver’s sex glands, how to prepare and pack the pelts, how to cache them safely in the ground to prevent theft and spoilage. And when the traps came up empty, how to invade and dismantle a dam and club the unsuspecting animals in their dark, wet den.

From his new comrades, Carson learned to savor beaver tail boiled to an exquisite tenderness—the trapper’s signature dish. He became expert with a Hawken rifle and a Green River skinning knife. He began to pick up the strange language of the mountain men, a colorful patois of French, Spanish, English, and Indian phrases mixed with phrases entirely of their own creation. “Wagh!” was their all-purpose interjection. They spoke of plews (pelts) and fofurraw (any unnecessary finery). They “counted coup” (revenge exacted on an avowed enemy), and when one of their own was killed, they were “out for hair” (scalps). They said odd things like “Which way does your stick float?” (What’s your preference?) They met once a year in giant, extended open-air festivals, the “rendezvous,” where they danced fandangos and played intense rounds of monte, euchre, and seven-up. Late at night, sitting around the campfires, sucking their black clay pipes, they competed in telling legendary whoppers about their far-flung travels in the West—stories like the one about the mountain valley in Wyoming that was so big it took an echo eight hours to return, so that a man bedding down for the night could confidently shout “Git up!” and know that he would rise in the morning to his own wake-up call.

From these men, too, Carson began to learn how to deal with the Western Indians—how to detect an ambush, when to fight, when to bluff, when to flee, when to negotiate. It is doubtful whether any group of nineteenth-century Americans ever had such a broad and intimate association with the continent’s natives. The mountain men lived with Indians, fought alongside and against them, loved them, married them, buried them, gambled and smoked with them. They learned to dress, wear their hair, and eat like them. They took Indian names. They had half-breed children. They lived in tepees and pulled the travois and became expert in the ways of Indian barter and ancient herbal remedy. Many of them were half-Indian themselves, by blood or inclination. Washington Irving, writing about Western trappers, noted this tendency: “It is a matter of vanity and ambition with them to discard everything that may bear the stamp of civilized life, and to adopt the manners, gestures, and even the walk of the Indian. You cannot pay a freetrapper a greater compliment than to persuade him you have mistaken him for an Indian brave.”

The fur trappers knew firsthand that Native Americans were ferocious fighters—some legendarily so, like the Blackfoot and the Comanche. But they also knew that the Indian style of battle was often very different from European warfare, that it was difficult to engage Native Americans in a pitched battle, that their method was consistently one of raid and ambush, attack and scatter, snipe and vanish. The mountain men said that Indians were often like wolves: Run, and they follow; follow, and they run.

The trappers murdered Indians in countless kill-or-be-killed scenarios, and some made a practice of hammering brass tacks into the stocks of their rifles for every native dispatched. But their greater slaughter was unwitting: As the forerunners of Western civilization, creeping up the river valleys and across the mountain passes, the trappers brought smallpox and typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath they whispered the coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way.

That spring Carson and Ewing Young’s party worked along the Gila tributaries, moving into increasingly strange country that had never been mapped. One day Young’s camp on the Salt River was approached by Apaches. Sensing hostility, most of Young’s men concealed themselves beneath packsaddles and blankets, emboldening the Apaches to swoop down on what they thought was an easy target. Soon “the hills were covered with Indians,” as Carson recalled, but when the attackers drew within range, Ewing’s men sprang from their hiding places and drew their beads. Aiming his rifle, Carson killed his first Indian, shooting him, as an early biographer put it, “straight through the nipple at which he had aimed—straight through the heart within.”

He does not mention it in his autobiography, but according to one account, Carson then removed his sheath knife and pulled back the dead Apache’s scalp, as was the common custom among the mountain men.

Carson was nineteen years old.

All across New Mexico, the threat of Navajo raiders gave life an undertow of anxiety. The settlers dwelled in a state of vigilance, always half-listening, scanning the sagebrush for movement. Everyone knew some family whose child or mother had been carried off. In the foothills, cairns often studded the pastures. Decorated with crosses or flowers, these markers memorialized shepherds who had been cut down. At a very young age, New Mexicans learned to hate and fear the word “Navajo.”

Other tribes preyed upon the New Mexican settlements as well. The Utes in the north, the Kiowas and Comanches in the east, the Apaches in the south. But the Navajos were the strongest, richest, and most creatively adaptable of all the raiding tribes. They were the ancient scourge of an ancient province. As a result of Navajo attacks, the very first Spanish colonial capital of New Mexico, a promising settlement on the Rio Grande called San Gabriel, had been quickly abandoned in 1610 and relocated to the safer remove of present-day Santa Fe. The word “Navajo”—a word of Pueblo Indian origin meaning “people of the great planted fields”—first appeared in a Spanish document in 1626. (The Navajo called themselves “the Diné,” which simply means “the people.”) An account from the early 1600s by a Spanish friar referred to “the Nabaju” as “a very bellicose people…who occupy all frontiers and surround us completely.”

In 1659, Fray Juan Ramirez referred to the Navajos as “heathens who kill Christians and carry off others alive to perish in cruel martyrdom.” A half century later, Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez condemned the Navajos for “their crimes, their audacity, and their reckless depredations upon this kingdom.”

The Spanish had tried for a time to Christianize the Navajos—literally chaining them to church pews, according to one account—but they would not tolerate Spanish missionaries. In 1672 a group of Navajos hauled a priest out the doors of his church, ripped off his clothes, then killed him at the base of an outdoor cross by smashing his head in with a bell. By 1750 the Spaniards had given up on all efforts to proselytize among these
indios barbaros
. In that year a priest dolefully noted that the Navajos “could not become Christians or stay in one place because they have been raised like deer.”

For centuries the Spanish had mounted retaliatory expeditions into Navajo country, to reclaim stolen livestock as well as to capture women and children to serve as slaves, but these military forays did little to stop the raids. The Navajo lands were so wrinkled, so mazelike, and so huge that the expeditions were scarcely worth the exertion; conquering the Navajos seemed as hopeless as converting them. The Navajo country, noted one Spanish chronicler in the 1630s, “is vaster than all the others…In journeying westward through this nation, one never reaches the end of it.”

The Navajos lived far away, yet paradoxically they seemed to be close at hand, as though the desert distances did not apply to them, as though miles alone could not check their peregrinations. It was the Navajo menace as much as anything else that made New Mexico so poor, so militarily anemic, and so unready to resist the coming American invasion. Manuel Armijo, the governor and general of New Mexico, said it best in an 1846 letter to his authorities in Mexico City. “The war with the Navajos,” he said, “is slowly consuming the Department, reducing to very obvious misery the District of the Southwest.”