Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (8 page)

Meanwhile, the beaver trade was seriously on the wane, in part because of the Panic and in part because of the vicissitudes of high fashion: In an inexplicable turn, silk hats had replaced beaver hats as objects of patrician desire in the cities of the East and all across Europe. And in truth, there weren’t very many beaver left. The fur companies had been so successful in penetrating the Western rivers that the beaver population had been pushed to the brink of extinction. Eastern markets were drying up; the summer rendezvous grew smaller and drearier each year. The mountain men, through skillful persistence, were the agents of their own demise, having depleted the very resource that had enriched them. Like most of the trappers, however, Carson seemed only dimly aware of his own role in the phenomenon. “Beaver was getting scarce” was all he said on the subject in his memoirs, adding, “It became necessary to try our hand at something else.”

Sometime in 1839, Singing Grass gave birth to their second child, another daughter whose name is not known. Singing Grass developed a fever following childbirth and soon became gravely ill. She lay on her bed of buffalo robes while the medicine men treated her with herbs and tapped a drum to the exact beat of her pulse. It was all in vain—the infection, probably puerperal fever, soon took her. The grieving Carson now realized he would have to raise their two girls on his own. The Arapaho relatives mourned in the self-flagellatory tradition of the tribe—pulling out hanks of their hair, tearing at their own skin, perhaps cleaving a finger. They wondered why Carson was not wailing like they were, and, according to one biographer, “Kit had to explain that he was crying in his heart, after the manner of white men.” We do not know the place or method of burial, but if the Arapaho custom was followed, Singing Grass’s body would have been hoisted on a platform high in a tree with some of her favorite personal belongings and then torched, the charred remains left to be consumed by prairie birds.

In the summer of 1840 he somehow managed to attend the summer rendezvous on the Green River—which, as it happened, was the last mountain man gathering ever held. The fur trapper was truly a moribund breed, and at that dismal 1840 gathering, everyone seemed to know it. One participant lamented: “Times was hard, no beaver, and everything dull.”

With the death of the trapping trade, Carson was increasingly drawn to Bent’s Fort, a teeming mercantile establishment on the Arkansas River in what is now southeastern Colorado. Founded in 1833, the fort was an important nexus for American trappers, traders, mountain men, and assorted other adventurers worming their way into the West. Resembling an ancient Algerian citadel, with adobe walls three feet thick, Bent’s Fort was strategically perched on the northern bank of the Arkansas River in present-day southeastern Colorado (the Arkansas River then defined the border with Mexico). Owner Charles Bent and his brother William were shrewd businessmen, sons of a St. Louis lawyer who had once been surveyor of the Louisiana Territory.

The Bent brothers offered Carson steady employment as a hunter, and he had numerous friends at the fort who helped him look after his girls. As a hunter, Carson ranged widely over the Southern plains, hunting antelope and buffalo not only for their valuable hides but also for meat to sustain the hundreds of people who lived in or worked out of Bent’s.

Sometime in 1841, Carson married a Cheyenne woman named Making-Out-Road (the meaning is lost in translation). She was a beautiful but shrewish woman well known around Bent’s Fort for her headstrong independence. Carson’s union with Making-Out-Road was as miserable as his marriage to Singing Grass had been blessed. His new wife wanted nothing to do with raising his half-Arapaho girls. The couple fought all the time. The marriage lasted only a few months before she evicted him, with all his belongings, from her tepee. (Making-Out-Road went on to marry and divorce a brisk succession of other men, both Native American and Anglo.)

Carson had a brief affair with a Hispanic woman with a loose reputation named Antonia Luna, but by 1842 he had fallen in love with Josefa Jaramillo, the beautiful teenage daughter of a prominent Taos family. The two were soon engaged. Carson decided sometime that year that his daughter Adaline, who at four was now approaching school age, would be better off with his relatives back in Missouri, where she could get a solid education. So in April 1842 he signed on with a merchant caravan captained by Charles Bent and headed east along the Santa Fe Trail with Adaline in tow, having left her little sister with the Bent family in Taos. (He would never see his baby girl again. Shortly thereafter, the toddler was scalded to death when she fell into a boiling vat of soap tallow.)

The Bent train stopped in the small outfitting town of Westport, on the Missouri River, in what is now Kansas City. Carson feared what people in the settlements would say about his having a half-Indian girl, and wanted little Adaline to look clean and pretty. She was primitive-looking in her animal skins, he realized, and her manners left much to be desired. In Westport he bought her new outfits and had them specially tailored to fit her. Susannah Yoacham, the daughter of a Westport tavern owner, recalled Adaline well. “Carson brought this little girl with him to be educated,” Yoacham said. “She came to us dressed in buckskin and left dressed in the finest goods [that] could then be bought on the border. She was uncivilized. She pulled up all my mother’s vines and was chewing the roots when we found her at it.”

Carson went to his former home of Franklin, only to find that it had been washed away in a flood, the town moved to higher ground, its residents scattered. He located his youngest brother, Lindsey, and learned that his mother, Rebecca Carson Martin, had died the previous year. “It had been sixteen years since I had been among civilized people,” he said in his memoirs. He knew that some members of the Carson clan would not understand the outlandish life he’d led in the mountains and would never accept his marriage to an Indian. A first cousin, Thomas Kelly Carson, certainly viewed Kit as a black sheep of the family, judging him “a wild uncouth boy who married, of all things, an Indian squaw and had a little half-breed girl.”

But to Carson’s relief, most of his immediate family around Franklin was welcoming to Adaline. He was able to leave her with a niece who had a farm not far from a decent country school. He hated to say good-bye, but she was in good hands, among his own people.

Throughout his long lifetime, the esteemed Navajo elder Narbona had always known war. The Navajos had been in nearly perpetual conflict, if not with the Spanish, then with the Utes, the Comanches, or various combinations of the Pueblo tribes—and often with all of these groups at the same time. To be sure, his people had enjoyed times of relative peace, but the cycles of attack and reprisal, escalating and abating with the seasons, had been an aspect of Navajo existence ever since he was a boy.

By the summer of 1846, Narbona was nearing eighty. At his senescent age, he found it increasingly hard to perceive change, let alone react to it. What he knew was that his people were survivors. The ancient rhythms of their culture had persisted through myriad conflicts, through drought and want, since the time of myth and legend. But now a new kind of foe was marching inexorably west across the plains, an enemy he could scarcely imagine.

Narbona was born in 1766 to the Red-Streaked Earth People, his mother’s clan. He spent his first years in the embrace of his mother’s people, who lived and herded in the Chuska Valley on a sweep of land in present-day northwestern New Mexico that extended from the crest of the Chuska Mountains all the way to the Chaco River. He was not known as Narbona then—that was a Spanish name, given to him many years later. His Navajo name has been lost to history, and subsequent generations of Diné, leery of uttering the names of dead people for fear of stirring up their ghosts, have seemed to prefer that the identity of their greatest patriarch remain comfortably murky. Even when he was alive, the Navajos would not have called him by his own name to his face—the people considered such directness rude.

As a baby in his cradleboard, Narbona probably was not called anything at all, for Navajos, who tended to view early infanthood as an extension of gestation, did not usually give names to their children until specific personal characteristics began to show themselves—Hairy Face, Slim Girl, No Neck, Little Man Won’t Do As He’s Told. Although Navajo parents followed few hard rules about how to name their children, it was generally agreed that the watershed moment when a baby could definitively be said to have passed from infanthood into something more fully human was the child’s “first spontaneous laugh.” First laughter was an occasion for much celebration, and it was the time when many Navajos held naming ceremonies for their young; it is likely that this is when Narbona received his original “war name,” whatever it might have been.

Strapped to his mother’s back like all young Navajo children then were, the infant Narbona saw the world from a jouncing cradleboard that, in lieu of diapers, was lined with shavings of cedar bark. For good luck and protection in case of a fall, his cradleboard may have been festooned with the customary squirrel’s tail—the squirrel being an agile animal deft at landing on its feet, unharmed. For his first five years he would have been surrounded mainly by women: aunts and sisters and girl cousins and grandmothers. Raised by so many mothers, Narbona began to learn the singsong language of the Navajo—with its thousand finicky inflections and its delicate glottal stops and its vague echoes of Siberia—while also cultivating the Diné’s famous sense of humor, their unslakable appetite for teasing and puns, their delight in any incongruous or absurd situation.

Narbona received his first pony when he was six, and it was at this early age that, like most Navajo boys, he was taken from the daily attentions of the women to spend more time with the men, preparing himself for a life of hunting and war. Before dawn, he would rise and run for miles toward some distant point in the bitter cold, wearing only a leather thong and moccasins stuffed with sand to toughen his feet. To strengthen his wind, he would run with his mouth full of water, breathing only through his nose. He would jump in a freezing spring or roll in the snow, hollering at the top of his lungs to develop his warrior voice. Then, as the morning sun nudged over the horizon, he would race back to the hogan, covered in a rime of ice that cracked with his stride.

With other boys, he wrestled and competed in broad-jumping, stone-throwing, and archery contests. There were all kinds of traditional games of chance and amusement—stick dice, cat’s cradle, the moccasin game. Narbona learned to hunt rabbits and other small game. Every day he practiced his horsemanship, the quintessential Navajo skill. The Navajos were always holding races, often gambling on the results. They rightly prided themselves on their riding prowess—a tradition that continues to this day. (A journalist in recent times noted that “getting bucked off a horse is one of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a Navajo.”)

When he turned twelve Narbona was given his first sinew-backed bow, and arrows made expressly for him (the bow stood exactly his own height), and he began to range over the country on his first hunts. Narbona’s world was defined not by cities, villages, or roads, but rather by many thousands of natural landmarks spreading out haphazardly over many thousands of acres, little quirks of geography with names like Bank Caving Down, Lake Between the Shoulders, White With Reeds, Aspens Coming Down, Two Red Rocks Pointing Together. These were the ordinary places of his life, the places of daily hunting and grazing, but there were larger and more spectacular places, too—immense red buttes and deep gorges, moraines and lava flows. The Dinetah, as the Navajo called their land, was a wrinkled country studded with monumental rock formations that conjured up the shapes of animals or mythic monsters.