Blood, Thunder and Manifest Destiny

books:


	• Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West Hampton Sides Random House Audio, 2006 average customer review:based on 122 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

blood and thunder

Hampton Sides' Blood and Thunder is simply the most exiting and honest portrait of Kit Carson and his time I`ve ever read. You fly through the pages and will not be disturbed while reading. You get all the sides of Carsons personality and the sad story of the autumn of the navahoes and other indians. Too read history like this beats reading the most fantastic fiction.
Mik

Kit Carson -- Fremont's Pathfinder

When the history of the west was written Kit Carson fur trapper, scout and explorer was there and was a part of it. Carson was born in Kentucky the day before Christmas in 1809, the same year and state of Lincoln's birth. He was only eight years old when his father died and out of necessity the boy picked up his rifle and hunted game. When he was thirteen his mother married and Kit rebelled. To mollify the situation he was apprenticed to a saddle maker and worked at the trade for two years before he signed on with a freight caravan at St Louis and headed west.
In less than twenty years Kit Carson had proved his metal as scout, fur trapper and guide.
John C. Fremont hired Carson as his guide for his first expedition that would be heading out of St. Louis to North Pass. The group left in June of 1842. The expedition successfully explored the country lying between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains on a line of the Kansas and Great Platte Rivers. Carson was also along for Fremont's second expedition when they explored the Oregon Trail from South Pass to the Columbia River. Most Americans thought of Fremont as the Pathfinder, but in my opinion they were wrong. I Believe Kit Carson was the real Pathfinder.
The year was 1846 when Hampton Sides brought another important personality into that western struggle -- General Stephen Watts Kearny. Kearny moved his army west along the Santa Fe Trail with orders to capture and occupy the New Mexico Capital at Santa Fe. Kearny stopped off, almost as an after thought, and secured the town of Las Vegas for the American forces.
Kearny made a short speech to the citizens of Las Vegas. He said, "From the Mexican Government you have never received protection. The Navajos come down from the mountains and carry off your sheep and your women whenever they please." From the crowd reaction Kearny knew he'd struck a nerve and went on to tell the people that from that day forward their lives and property would be protected. "Your enemies will become our enemies."

Kearny then led his army toward Santa Fe with only a halt at Apache Canyon where he held his army in check and waited out the New Mexico militia that had gathered and planned an ambush. Following a long wait the militia abandoned their position Kearny continued to Santa Fe and occupied the town without a shot being fired.
General Kearny rode into the central plaza, dismounted, raised his hand and said, "I, Stephen W. Kearny, General of the Army of the United States have taken possession of the providence of New Mexico."

From the time Kearny and Kit Carson's first met they formed a good relationship and Carson took up the same duties for Kearny as he had performed on John C. Fremont's expeditions.
Carson guided Kearny and his army through to California.
However, at that point General Kearny and his army were worn out, the horses, mules and men all needed water and rest. But they got neither, what they got was an ambush and a fire fight at San Pasqual, which was about thirty miles from San Diego and their rendezvous point with Commodore Robert Stockton. Kearny was pinned down by the Mexicans and sent Carson and two others to try to get through to Stockton and ask for help.
As it turned all three men managed to get through the enemy lines to San Diego. Commodore Stockton complied with the request and immediately sent a force to assist Kearny. Stockton's 100-man force broke the impasse at San Pasqual, and the opposition was broken. That defeat at San Pasqual essentially ended the fight for the West. And while it didn't end all the hostilities with Mexico it was a great beginning.
Kit Carson was trusted by the military and as a consequence he was given the task of delivering important dispatches to Washington.
Carson traversed the country several times during his lifetime and probably understood the American landscape better than any man alive at the time. Among his obvious skills as hunter, trapper and guide Kit Carson was also a linguist. He spoke good English and Spanish and had command of a half dozen Indian dialects. But with all his talents Kit Carson never learned to read or write - he was in fact illiterate.
Hampton Sides has taken a large piece of American history and written a narrative that is both informative and entertaining. It's a book that will be a good addition to any library.

Tom Barnes author of novels The Goring Collection and Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone along with a non fiction remembrance The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.
[...]
[...]

Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone: The Life and Times of John Henry Holliday
Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend

for more information click here

well-researched and fascinating

Being a local, I may be biased, but this was probably the best book I read last year. Hampton Sides, a Santa Fe author, has written an absorbing, detailed account of New Mexico history, on such subjects as the Santa Fe Trail, Kit Carson, New Mexico Civil War battles, and the Navajo Long Walk. His book is impeccably researched and reads like a novel.

Ready for the movie

An engaging story of Kit Carson and his times. Book is filled with the history of the opening of the west, strange and interesting characters and the sad story the Navajos. Would make a fascinating movie.

Blood, Thunder and Manifest Destiny

This is a terrific story told in a dramatic yet even handed fashion. It helps that much of Sides narrative is focused on Kit Carson, the famous scout whose exploits made him a Western legend and the subject of numerous pulp,"blood and thunder" Western novels. Carson comes off here as an authentic hero; modest, brave and resourceful, but also much more pragmatic than the wild West shoot-em-up version of his image.

In Sides' view Carson was in effect, the chief operating officer for such frontier leaders as John C. Fremont, Stephen Kearney and John Carleton. Each would not have been able to continue their part of the pursuit of America's Manifest Destiny without Carson's guidance.

While Carson pretty much steals the show in my view, numerous other characters, including the glory seeking Fremont and overbearing Carleton are finely drawn. Additionally, Native Americans are portrayed fairly here, neither vilified nor idealized, but portrayed as stuggling to hold onto their land in the face of an expanding American empire.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people?s chieftains, looked down upon the small town of Santa Fe, the stronghold of the Mexican settlers he had been fighting his whole long life. He had come to see if the rumors were true?if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquished?but what did the arrival of these ?New Men? portend for the Navajo?

Narbona could not have known that ?The Army of the West,? in the midst of the longest march in American military history, was merely the vanguard of an inexorable tide fueled by a self-righteous ideology now known as ?Manifest Destiny.? For twenty years the Navajo, elusive lords of a huge swath of mountainous desert and pasturelands, would ferociously resist the flood of soldiers and settlers who wished to change their ancient way of life or destroy them.

Hampton Sides?s extraordinary book brings the history of the American conquest of the West to ringing life. It is a tale with many heroes and villains, but as is found in the best history, the same person might be both. At the center of it all stands the remarkable figure of Kit Carson?the legendary trapper, scout, and soldier who embodies all the contradictions and ambiguities of the American experience in the West. Brave and clever, beloved by his contemporaries, Carson was an illiterate mountain man who twice married Indian women and understood and respected the tribes better than any other American alive. Yet he was also a cold-blooded killer who willingly followed orders tantamount to massacre. Carson?s almost unimaginable exploits made him a household name when they were written up in pulp novels known as ?blood-and-thunders,? but now that name is a bitter curse for contemporary Navajo, who cannot forget his role in the travails of their ancestors.

for more information click here

hot