Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (51 page)

If renaming is the first act of conquest, then Simpson had struck a lasting blow. The new place-name stuck, and today this deep cleft in the Chuska Mountains, Narbona’s old stomping ground, is known as Washington Pass. The irony is not lost on the Navajo.

Simpson did not stop with one renaming, however. He took a long look at the great peak to the south, the one the Navajos called Blue Bead Mountain. Perhaps because it was old and craggy and majestic-looking, it reminded Simpson of Zachary Taylor, the Mexican War general who had become such a national hero that he was easily elected president in 1848, succeeding James Polk. Unbeknownst to “Old Rough-and-Ready,” who now sat in the White House, an obscure topographer had decided to name a Western peak after him. The name appeared on Simpson’s map and continues to this day: Mount Taylor.

On the back side of the Chuskas, the Washington Expedition saw no Navajos for several days, but detected fresh signs of their presence. The Navajos were deft at disappearing and lived in a country riddled with good hiding places—concealed caves, box canyons, high mesas reached by inscrutable paths in the sandstone. Clearly, Navajos far and wide had been forewarned of the expedition’s approach, and they had scattered with scarcely a trace. There was something eerie about how completely they and their belongings had vanished from the scene—warriors and women and children and even their herds, all gone—leaving nothing but vacant hogans and strewings of sheep dung.

“Innumerable signs of stock, principally sheep, have been seen along the route,” Lieutenant Simpson wrote. “The road we have been traveling looks as if it might be one of the great thoroughfares of the nation.” The lieutenant seemed confounded by the Navajo, and their knack for living a life “thoroughly scattered and locomotive.” It did not seem to occur to Simpson that the Navajos, having heard the details of Narbona’s death, were also terrified of the approaching American army and thought it best to keep themselves scarce.

At night, however, Navajos in small parties were seen and heard—or at least sensed—by Washington’s soldiers. The Americans knew they were being watched, could almost feel the bore of Navajo stares. Several times, their pack animals mysteriously disappeared in the night. When it came to livestock, the Diné were incorrigible. Animal theft was the provocation that had brought the American army into their midst in the first place, and, of course, it was a stolen horse that had got Narbona killed. Yet the temptation was irresistible—they kept on stealing, or tried to, yards from Washington’s sentries.

The Navajos had no qualms about robbing from the Americans. They had many causes to be angry at these invaders, not the least of which was that everywhere Washington’s army went, it helped itself to the Navajo gardens and melon patches and turned its animals loose in the cornfields to devour and trample the Diné’s source of winter food. Simpson notes that one night the army camped right in the fields and enjoyed “an abundance of forage for the animals and fine roasting ears for the men.” From the Navajo point of view, it was the Americans who were doing the real stealing.

After three more days of determined marching, Washington’s troops dropped out of the high timbered mountains and found themselves at the silty mouth of Canyon de Chelly. Here the stone margins of the canyon were scarcely higher than a man and the soft sand floor was broad and flat. But looking ahead, the soldiers must have felt a sense of imminent claustrophobia, a tingling awareness that the walls were steadily closing in, the sheer faces of rock climbing higher with every coming bend.

Water braided through the canyon, yet most of the flow was subterranean, oozing just a few inches beneath the sand. The men had to be extremely wary, for the sloughs were wet and deep enough in places to swallow a horse to its withers. (Even today, Canyon de Chelly is famous for its greedy quicksand, which can cause a pack horse to become so deeply mired that it must be pulled out with a winch, with the animal often breaking a leg in the trauma and having to be put down.) To find water, Washington’s thirsty men dug holes in the muck five feet deep and filled their buckets with the turbid brown liquid, which they made potable by repeatedly straining through linen cloth until it was tolerably clear.

As they pushed deeper into the canyon, the expeditioners began to realize that Navajos were watching them from every ledge and outcrop. “The enemy are hovering around us,” Simpson wrote, but they would not present themselves. In broad necks of the canyon, the soldiers encountered hogans clustered around cornfields or peach orchards, yet the occupants refused to come into the light of day. To flush them out, Washington ordered his troops to set fire to the hogans in his path—yet another action that might have convinced the already skeptical Navajos that this army of peace was actually on the warpath. Simpson found the sight of the burning lodges thrilling. It was “exciting,” he wrote, “to observe the huts of the enemy, one after another, springing up into smoke and flame, and their owners scampering off in flight.”

Yet the torching may have had its desired effect: The following morning two Navajos came into camp and consented to talk. One of them, who went by the Spanish name of Martinez, wore a great blue coat made of blankets and called himself, absurdly, “the principal chief of the Navajos”—or at least he did not seem to disavow the title when Washington’s interpreters suggested it. Colonel Washington was characteristically curt.

WASHINGTON:
Are he and his people desirous of peace?

INTERPRETER:
He says they are.

WASHINGTON:
Tell the chief the stolen property which the nation is required to restore is 1,070 head of sheep, 34 head of mules, 19 head of horses, and 78 head of cattle. When can the chiefs collect here to make a treaty with me?

INTERPRETER:
He says the day after tomorrow.

WASHINGTON:
Tell him that if they do not enter into a treaty in good faith, it will result in their destruction.

INTERPRETER:
His people will do all he has promised.

With an effusive show of emotion, “Chief” Martinez and his companion bid the colonel adieu and vanished into the unseen folds of the canyon, vowing to return in two days.

Then Colonel Washington was visited by a Mexican captive of the Navajos. He was a thirty-year-old man who said he had been kidnapped seventeen years earlier. He had been a boy herding sheep in a field on the outskirts of Santa Fe when the Navajos came spurring out of the west and whisked him away with his flock.

Colonel Washington naturally assumed that the man had come to petition the Americans to take him back home, that he was relieved now to be free of his Indian captors. Several Mexican volunteers on the expedition had apparently recognized the young man, and they wanted to bring him home to his family. But to their disbelief, and then to their frustration and fury, this son of Mexico wanted to remain a savage here in a heathen land.
This
was his home now, the man insisted. Bright and energetic, he spoke and carried himself and dressed like a native-born Navajo. His Spanish had grown thick and faltering.

“He did not wish to be restored to his people again,” Simpson records in mild consternation. “Indeed, he did not as much as ask about his friends living at Santa Fe.”

All this time, Lieutenant Simpson seems to have been looking over his shoulder, peering distractedly down the canyon reaches, desperate to explore. Washington’s dreary negotiations did not hold his attention. Simpson was not much interested in people anyway—especially not when he had a puzzle of geology spread before him. So on September 8, having a couple of days to kill before the treaty talks were supposed to commence, Lieutenant Simpson pushed east to make the first American reconnaissance of Canyon de Chelly. He brought the Kern brothers with him and, for protection, an escort of about sixty men.

Within a few miles the canyon walls began to “assume a stupendous appearance,” Simpson said. “Almost perfectly vertical, they look as if they had been chiselled by the hand of art…. They are laid with as much handsome precision as can be seen in the custom-house of the city of New York.” He was dazzled by the facets of “red amorphous sandstone” ranged tightly about him and towering over his head, each block cracked and riddled with “imperfect seams of stratification.” The immense stone slabs held the day’s heat, so that hours after the sun dropped behind the rim, the peach orchards and cornfields on the canyon floor basked in the long-lingering hothouse effect. In many places the golden-pink sandstone was streaked with a brown patina that curled like a witch’s fingers down the massive alcoved walls.

Richard Kern immediately set himself to work sketching and would produce the first known illustration of Canyon de Chelly, a work that, if not exactly lovely, comes close to capturing the enveloping grandeur of this natural labyrinth. Kern seemed stunned by the canyon’s magnificent intrigues, its whispers of an epochal wrath, with so many twisted monoliths and crumbled heaps of talus testifying to the steady violence of erosion. The “fabulous rocks,” as Kern put it, “became wilder at every turn.” Simpson, equally amazed, wrote that he was “highly delighted” by “this wonderful exhibition of nature that will always command the admiration of its votaries, as it will the attention of geologists.”

The expeditioners pushed nine miles into the canyon, taking rock samples and measurements and making sketches as they went, but then Simpson realized they could go no farther, for Colonel Washington expected them back by the following day. Already the lieutenant was beginning to suspect that the “much-talked about Navajo presidio” was a myth. Although he was premature in saying so—the expedition had explored only a fraction of the one-hundred-mile canyon complex—his suspicions were correct. “The mystery of the Canon of Chelly is now, in all probability, solved,” he confidently asserted. “The notion that the canon contains a high fort is exploded.”

And yet Simpson kept seeing stone structures everywhere—not fortresses, but formidable-looking cliff dwellings stashed in odd places high along the walls. The structures all appeared to be uninhabited (and indeed the local Navajos never ventured into them, out of respect for the spirits of those who had once lived in them, and out of fear of the corpses that were often buried nearby, in rock fissures and secret caves). The lieutenant correctly surmised that these ruins were built by the same Indians who constructed the marvelous pueblo complexes he and Richard Kern had studied two weeks earlier at Chaco Canyon. He wrote: “I observed upon a shelf fifty feet above the bottom of the canyon a small pueblo ruin of a style and structure similar to that found in the ruins on the Chaco.”

But Simpson wrongly assumed that the present Navajos were direct descendants of the builders of these pueblo-like cliff dwellings, which led the lieutenant, perhaps inevitably, to make disparaging comparisons to the crude simplicity of the Navajo lodges seen all about the canyon. Simpson did not think much of hogans. “How is it that they have retrograded in respect to their habitations when they have preserved it in their manufactures?” Simpson wondered. “It seems anomalous to me that a nation living in such miserably constructed mud lodges should, at the same time, be capable of making, probably, the best blankets in the world!”

The “ancient ones” had left other signs of their presence. Scotched into the canyon walls, following faint cracks and meandering fissures, were numerous hand-and toe-hold routes that the Anasazi had cut into the rock many hundreds of years earlier. When the Navajos moved here sometime in the early 1600s, they had made use of these vertiginous routes, too, and had expanded on them, so that now all the various canyon branches were dimpled with improbable paths dotting up the sheer rock hundreds of feet to the rim. At one point Simpson spotted a couple of Navajos standing on a high shelf, and then was astounded to see them “tripping down the almost vertical wall as nimbly and dexterously as minuet dancers.” Simpson thought the spectacle of these human crabs scuttling over the rock faces was “one of the most wonderful feats I’d ever witnessed.” In general, the Navajos hid from the expeditioners, but on one occasion a woman presented herself and laid out several blankets on the ground for the soldiers. When she unfurled them, they were delighted to find generous piles of ripe peaches from the Navajo’s prized orchards.