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

On a frigid Sunday morning in February, two armies stared at each other across the open plain. A stiff wind blew needles of sleet. Slush formed on the edges of the Rio Grande, and the ghostly cottonwoods rattled along the banks.

So begins yet another battle of many in Hampton Sides's epic tale of the American West.

This shameful account of how the West was really won is one of the best works of nonfiction that I have ever read. A horrific chronicle of broken treaties, bloody campaigns, starvation, epidemics, bald land-grabs, retributions and American hemispheric hegemony, it reveals "the dawn of the American West in all its vividness and brutality," where an unfamiliar sound on an isolated prairie could prick terror in the heart of the bravest man and violence was usually regarded as necessary,.

Blood and Thunder is certainly a powerful study of character. In dealing with the many historical figures in the book, Sides doesn't skim over their darker, least desirable attributes. For example, though Kit Carson is described as loyal, honest and kind, "a straight arrow," Sides does not pussyfoot when depicting his darker side: "He was also a natural born killer," he announces, with all the force of a well-placed punch. Stephen Watts Kearny is extolled as "one of the finest and most intelligent officers in the American army." Commissioned by President James K. Polk to march his Army of the West nearly one thousand miles, Kearney aimed to take possession of New Mexico, what is now Arizona, parts of present-day Colorado, Utah, and Nevada and California. However Kearney may have been motivated less by altruism than a desire for self-aggrandizement.

An appalling yet thought-provoking and poignant picture of the American Indians also emerges: exploited, defeated, demoralized, the American Indians were promised land and food that never materialized. They were massacred, their civilizations swept away. They were resettled in lands where they often languished and died. Narbona, a great Navajo chief who was considered the greatest peace leader of his time, had led bloody campaigns against the Ute and Mexicans; however, when the "New Men" began to arrive, Narbona, realizing that to lead wars against them would mean annihilation for his people, began to preach peace. Narbona was killed in 1849, during a confrontation with U.S. soldiers, when he met with a delegation to discuss terms for peace.

There were those, however, who abhorred the mistreatment of the Indians and the Mexicans. These men tried to resolve Indian issues, and they could not ignore the U.S. land-grab's darker imperial shadings. Nicholas Trist, the American envoy sent to Mexico City to negotiate a treaty with Mexico, recalls trying to hide his own guilt about concluding a treaty that sheared from Mexico nearly half of its territory, while Ulysses S. Grant called the Mexican War "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."

Sides's penetrating, well-researched study of the early West reveals the truth, which isn't always what we were taught in school classrooms. The book's truth will resonate in your soul long after you have finished reading it.