Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West
By Hampton Sides
624 pages, 5" X 8", softcover: $15.95
ISBN 978-1-4000-3110-8
Reviewed by T. C. Albert
SOMETIMES WHEN I FIRST SEE a newly released book, I just know it’s going to be a good one that belongs on my book shelf, and sometimes I actually listen to myself and buy it. Too bad I didn’t listen to myself and buy that nice first edition hardcover copy of Blood and Thunder by author Hampton Sides at the great price that big chain store had it listed for as a Christmas special back in the winter of 2006. I remember that I gave it a quick thumb through, was tempted and thought I’d pick it up later before we left the store, but I never did.
Later I consoled myself by thinking that the cover photography of that edition—a portion of the iconic photogravure Storm by Edward Curtis—was a picture of Jicarilla Apache, and not Navajo. Even though the photo was from Curtis’s Navajo portfolio, it wasn’t truly a picture of Navajo Indians. Since the book was primarily about the Navajo, Kit Carson and the historic events that occurred between them and the rest of the nation between the mid 1840s and the late 1860s, it was a small and obscure point. But I consoled myself with the thought that with a potential inconsistency like that on the cover, I was smart to pass on the book.
Well, I couldn’t have been more mistaken. For the next year, the subject matter and title haunted me, and I eventually tracked down and paid way more for a softcover edition of the book than I could have had that hardcover edition for, but after reading the book, let me tell you, I’m glad I did.
On a grand scale, the depth of the history that Hampton Sides has covered here, as he contrasts the American westward expansion and the devastating consequences it had for both the Navajo and any one else who stood in its way, is truly as eye opening as it is uncompromising. And on a minute scale, as he tells the individual stories of the hundreds of characters involved while he explains and unravels the complicated webs that tangled them all together. Hampton puts flesh and bones on many of the West’s major and not so major characters alike, and brings them all back to life.
If you haven’t read this book before, I guarantee that you have never viewed or understood Kit Carson as you will after reading it, and that alone is worth the read for students of mountain men and their lives. The title itself, Blood and Thunder, was coined after the old-time penny novels called “Blood and Thunders” that helped to make Kit famous, but any similarity to those idealized fictional romances ends right there. This book is as raw and gritty as it is engaging and informative, but above all, it never strays from the path of truth. The amount of research Sides shares with us in this book as he weaves the intersecting details of so many diverse lives into one great Western movement is amazing, and it leaves the reader feeling as if they just took and passed a very interesting and downright exciting college course on the early history of America’s great Southwest, and then some.
I could list a roster of the expected and familiar names and lives that appear in this book, like Kit Carson, Chief Narbona, John Fremont, Jim Bridger, William and Charles Bent, Ol’ Bill Williams and Tom Fitzpatrick, and could even include some relatively unexpected ones like Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, Gen. Stephen Watts Kearney and President James K. Polk. Some you would never have dreamed played even a small role like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but no matter how big I made the list and how hard I tried to explain how they all fit together, I’m afraid it would still fail to do justice to the true scope of this book. Let me simply say that if you are at all interested in a scholarly but thoroughly readable book that explains a crucial period of our nation’s history, a history filled with events that you may not have even realized ever happened, and how so many legendary American figures from this era became the household names and legends that we remember and talk about even to this day, then you have to get a copy of this book for yourself. I highly recommend it.
@ 2009 ScurlockPublishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved.