Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (7 page)

The frontier was a long way from his roots. Stephen Kearny came from a well-to-do New Jersey family. His father was a successful wine merchant in Newark, and his mother descended from a prominent family of established Knickerbockers; her father, John Watts, was one of the founders of the New York Public Library and the first president of New York Hospital. Kearny studied the classics at Columbia for two years before hurriedly enlisting, in 1810, to fight in the looming war with Britain. His keen rush to join the army before graduating from Columbia may have reflected his desire to expunge the legacy of his father, who, as a British loyalist, had been imprisoned and then lived in humiliating exile during the Revolutionary War. The young Kearny burned to prove his patriotism against the same hated royals to which his father, a generation earlier, had so embarrassingly clung.

In one of the early battles of the War of 1812, at Queenston Heights on the Niagara River, Lieutenant Kearny distinguished himself for bravery during an action that involved clawing up the nearly vertical banks of the Niagara to take a British position on a high hill. In this stirring but ultimately ill-fated battle led by Major General Van Rensselaer, Kearny fought alongside another figure who would become famous during the war with Mexico, Winfield Scott. Years later, General Scott recalled how the young Kearny “gained the peak of the hill” at Queenston Heights and had “driven the enemy from the field,” scattering the British and their allies, the Mohawks. It was, Scott said, “one of the most brilliant engagements of the war.” The next day, however, Scott and Kearny, along with nine hundred other Americans, were captured by the British. The POWs were marched in disgrace to the old French Citadel in Quebec to serve what proved to be a brief captivity of four months.

One colorful story from Kearny’s imprisonment has been passed down. At the Citadel, American officers were occasionally allowed to dine with British officers. During dinner one night, an intemperate Englishman proposed a toast to the president of the United States. “To Mr. Madison, dead or alive!” he shouted, hoisting a glass. To which Lieutenant Kearny is said to have risen and boldly declared, “To the Prince of Wales, drunk or sober!” The dining hall erupted in shouts and near fisticuffs before the British officer who proposed the first toast was carted off and arrested.

After the War of 1812, Kearny decided, apparently against his parents’ wishes, to make a career in the military, and as he steadily rose in rank, he ventured ever westward, assigned to a series of increasingly remote posts, first in the Great Lakes region, and then on the Missouri River. Except for a very brief stint in New York City, Kearny would never serve again in the East.

In the summer of 1835, Kit Carson attended the annual mountain man rendezvous, which that season was held on a large meadow by a languid bend of the Green River in present-day southwestern Wyoming. As always happened at these notorious gatherings, various bands of Indians had also pitched their lodges to trade, gamble, and drink with the mountain men. It was not uncommon for trappers to take squaws for their wives during these monthlong festivals. Carson was twenty-five years old that summer, and during the previous trapping season he’d suffered a near-fatal shoulder wound during a vicious fight with the Blackfoot. Still sore, and perhaps impressed by his brush with mortality, he was in the mood to settle down. Or, as the mountain men liked to say, it was time for him to be “womaned.”

One of the more popular women attending the rendezvous was a young Arapaho named Singing Grass (or Waa-ni-beh in her native language, the name suggesting the keening sound of prairie wind whipping through tall grass). The beautiful Singing Grass caught Carson’s eye, but another man named Joseph Chouinard was equally smitten. The French-Canadian trapper, known as the “the Bully of the Mountains,” was a swaggering, blustering giant and an expert shot. An English adventurer described Chouinard as “a stupid-looking man,” while Carson assessed his adversary as “a large Frenchman, one of those overbearing kind and very strong.”

There are many versions of the tale—indeed it is one of the most storied incidents in the literature of the mountain men. Apparently it all started over at the Arapaho camp one night when Singing Grass picked Carson, and rejected Chouinard, from a lineup of suitors to be her partner during the ceremonial “soup dance.” The jilted Frenchman promptly insulted her and then later, according to one account, tried to rape her. Whatever happened, Carson seems to have felt a keen sense of sexual rivalry with Chouinard. “It was all over a squaw,” one of Carson’s Taos friends later said, “and the Frenchman got mad about it.”

Then, at the fevered height of the rendezvous, Chouinard went on a bender that lasted several days. Fortified by what Carson called “the demon of alcohol,” Chouinard began to menace anyone who crossed his path. He was famous for these rampages, however, and everyone tried his best to ignore him—which only got the man more lathered up. Now positively spoiling for a fight, Chouinard shambled over to Carson’s camp and disparaged the Americans there, bellowing: “Mewling schoolboys! I could take a switch and switch you!”

Carson had had enough of this drunken thug. “I did not like such talk from any man,” he later said, “so I told him that I was the worst American in camp.”

Carson wore what one witness called “a peculiar smile, as though he was about to perpetrate some excellent joke.” He told Chouinard: “Stop right now, or else I’ll rip your guts!”

The two men went in search of weapons while a large crowd of trappers and Indians thronged in the main clearing of the camp. Suddenly Chouinard and Carson came galloping into the grassy arena brandishing guns. They stopped so close to each other that their horses’ heads touched. Tense words were exchanged. They raised their hands and fired their guns, point-blank, with such perfect simultaneity that, as Carson later noted, “All present said but one report was heard.”

As he did so often throughout his life, Carson had cheated luck: Chouinard’s horse jerked as he mashed the trigger. The hot powder of Chouinard’s bullet grazed the left side of Carson’s face, scorching his eye and hair and leaving a scar under his left ear that he would carry the rest of his life.

Chouinard, on the other hand, was seriously injured. The lead ball from Carson’s single-shot pistol had ripped through the Frenchman’s right hand and blown away his thumb. Carson went for another pistol to finish him off, but Chouinard, gingerly holding his maimed appendage, begged for his life. In his dictated autobiography, Carson leaves the drama frustratingly open-ended, telling us only that the camp “had no more bother with this bully Frenchman.” Some versions of the story have it that Chouinard later died of his wound—as a result of gangrene, perhaps—while others suggest Carson in fact killed Chouinard with a second shot.

The duel became one of the most famous incidents in Carson’s life and made him renowned among the mountain men; but in many ways it was uncharacteristic of him. Although he had a lightning temper, Carson was ordinarily a much more calculating risk-taker who certainly knew enough to back out of a fight so obviously fueled by alcohol. Perhaps the incident can be explained by Carson’s youth, or by his desire to prove himself among the grizzled fraternity of trappers, or by some chivalric desire to avenge Chouinard’s insults to Singing Grass. Whatever the case, the whole hot affair was an aberration for him. He survived less by skill than by thin luck. A newspaper writer said his fight with Chouinard was “the only serious personal quarrel of Kit Carson’s life.” Certainly Carson had no regrets. Years later a close friend said: “He was pleased with himself for doing it.”

Perhaps the satisfaction had more to do with the romance that blossomed in the incident’s aftermath. Now he could pursue Singing Grass in earnest. He asked her father, Running Around, for her hand and offered a “bride price” of three mules and a new gun. The wedding, probably the following year, was a traditional Arapaho ceremony held in her father’s tepee. The ritual was complete when Running Around threw a blanket over the couple and gave his blessing. There was a feast and then the Arapaho relatives erected a tepee for the newlyweds. If Carson followed the rest of the Arapaho custom, then he did not immediately consummate the marriage; he and his bride would have slept in the same bed, but for several weeks she would have worn a tight rope cinched about her waist and loins—a chastity belt of sorts—until their probationary period was over.

By most accounts the marriage was a happy one, although we know very few intimate details since Carson neglected even to mention Singing Grass in his memoirs. With certainty, it can be said that the marriage was more than a casual “squaw arrangement.” Singing Grass was in every respect his wife. They followed the Arapaho traditions and lived with the tribe’s blessing. Singing Grass was his first love, and Carson adored her.

Arapaho relatives told author Stanley Vestal, who spent months interviewing among her band in the 1920s, that Singing Grass was highly regarded within the tribe—“a good girl, a good housewife, and good to look at.” Carson learned to speak the strange and sonorous language of the Arapaho, an Algonquin tongue whose “broad vowels, soft liquids, and smooth diphthongs” made it so beautiful, according to Vestal, “that Indians of other tribes preferred to sing Arapaho songs even though they could not understand the words.” The Arapaho were also celebrated for their intricate beadwork, and under his wife’s careful stitching hand, Carson’s clothes—his buckskins, his moccasins, his tobacco pouch and saddlebags—began to take on shiny new patterns of adornment.

With his Arapaho bride following him whenever she could, Carson trapped for two seasons with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and then signed on with Jim Bridger’s brigades, working the upper Yellowstone, the Powder, and the Big Horn. During these years he moved incessantly throughout present-day Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Trapping gave him, he later said, “the happiest days of my life.” It was an unimaginably free sort of existence, one that historian David Lavender described as “flitting ghostlike from creek to creek, with no St. Louis board of directors watching behind them and no suspicious clerks checking their balance columns with crabbed fingers.” Carson took great pleasure in those seasons spent “in the mountains, far from the habitations of civilized man, with no other food than that which I could procure with my rifle.”

Singing Grass helped with the considerable labors of this hard, roving life—and she made the cold nights more eventful. “She was a good wife to me,” Carson once told a friend, noting that Singing Grass was always waiting for him in their lodge with a boiling kettle when he returned from the traps, his moccasins soaked in icy river water. “I never came in from hunting,” he said, “that she did not have warm water for my feet.”

Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1837. Carson named her Adaline after a beloved niece back in Missouri. (Her Arapaho name, whatever it was, is lost to us, although some accounts say that Carson also called his daughter Prairie Flower.) Carson’s family life may have been blissful, but economically, times were lean. The nation was in the grip of a serious depression—the Panic of 1837—and the market for Western goods was volatile at best. The same year, a smallpox epidemic worked its way north and west from St. Louis, borne, it was said, on infected blankets. By the time the scourge had passed, whole tribes had been wiped out and one out of every ten Native Americans living along the Missouri River drainage was dead. Carson almost found sympathy for his age-old nemesis, the Blackfoot tribe, which was particularly hard hit by the epidemic. An early Carson biographer vividly described the eerie silence of a pox-ravaged Blackfoot camp that the mountain men once stumbled upon: “Teepees stood smokeless. Wolves ran about the village, fat and impudent. The Indian dead hung in swarms in the trees and brown buzzards sat in rows along the bluffs, gorged with human flesh, drunk with ptomaines.”