Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (67 page)

It was a pitiful sight—so pitiful that at least one of the Coloradans was moved to feel sorry for the enemy as he dragged homeward, never to be seen again in New Mexico:

Poor fellows! The climate and Uncle Sam’s boys have sadly wasted them. They are now fleeing through the mountains with a little more than a third of the number with which they first assaulted us at Fort Craig. Very many softly lie and sweetly sleep low in the ground. Let their faults be buried with them. They are our brothers, erring it may be, still nature will exact a passing tear for the brave dead. And doubt not there are those who will both love and honor their memory if we cannot. Any cause that men sustain to death becomes sacred, at least to them.

The Texans were gone, yet still the war was not over. In the welcome calm, New Mexico awoke to realize that while the army had been preoccupied with ejecting Confederate invaders from the territory’s front yard, the Navajos had been attacking from the rear. Manuelito and the other warriors did not understand why the two
bilagaana
armies were fighting one another. They could not have guessed the underlying concepts of secession, or states’ rights, or the hovering issue of slavery as it was practiced in a wet, green world that existed somewhere far to the east, beyond the Staked Plains.

But the Diné quickly saw opportunities in the conflict. Many of the American forts were abandoned, and along the Rio Grande the flocks still grazed, ripe for the taking. The chain of logic wasn’t complicated: American soldiers were somewhere else, so the Navajos pounced. Emboldened by what they correctly perceived as a power vacuum, and still outraged over the massacre at Fort Fauntleroy, the Diné warriors raided almost without check through the drought-stricken year of 1862. William Arny, a former Indian agent who was now territorial secretary, estimated that New Mexico’s property losses to Indian raiders in 1862 amounted to $250,000; more than thirty thousand sheep were stolen by the Navajos that year. James Collins, superintendent of Indian affairs in New Mexico, reported that the record of murders committed by Navajos had become “truly frightful…This death list is not made up of a few lives lost. Its number will extend to nearly three hundred for the past eighteen months.”

Something had to be done—the people of the territory cried out for retribution as never before. The
Santa Fe Gazette
clamored for all-out war, reminding its readers that “for months the bells of your sacred edifices have tolled the obsequies of your slaughtered citizens.”

And so Col. Edward Canby, in his own slow and methodical way, turned his attention to the matter. In the late spring of 1862 he began to formulate plans for a campaign into Navajo country unlike any other. It would be ambitious, it would be decisive, and it would result in the creation of a true Navajo reservation far to the west, carved from Diné land, possibly along the Little Colorado River in what is now northeastern Arizona. As far as Canby was concerned, the time for half measures had passed; this would be the ultimate solution, the endgame. The colonel wrote to his superiors in Washington that “there is now no choice between the Navajos’ absolute extermination or their removal and colonization at points so remote from the settlements as to isolate them entirely from the inhabitants of the Territory.”

Canby’s plan would not come to fruition, not exactly, not in the way he envisioned. History would have played out quite differently, for Edward Canby was above all a practical man, and the campaign he was planning, however ruthless, would have been far better for Navajos and non-Navajos alike than what was to come. But in the summer of 1862, Canby was promoted to general and recalled to serve in the East. His plodding but sensible mind was needed in the frantic halls of wartime Washington. That fall, Canby was replaced by another career frontier soldier, a formidable figure of the West who had his own deeply held notions about the Navajo conflict.

How to describe the singular personality of Brig. Gen. James Henry Carleton? A pedant, a prig, a man who thought of everything and whose perfectionism seldom gave him an occasion to apologize. But also an officer of rare excellence, rigid ethics, fine manners, and multifaceted competence. An officer with a probing but perhaps overly tidy intellect. In another place, in another time, perhaps in another profession, James Carleton might have been a great man of towering good deeds. Instead, his entrance upon the stage of New Mexico during the late summer of 1862 resulted in one of the most tragic collisions in the U.S. government’s long, sorry relationship with Native Americans.

It would be facile to call him, as many have, a villain and a fiend and be done with it. But Carleton was a much more nuanced man than he is usually given credit for. He wasn’t an entirely unlikable man—many people found him extremely gracious and kind. As a friend he was steadfast to a fault. His hobbies and interests were refreshingly eclectic. He climbed mountains, collected rare seeds, read voraciously. He had a talent for waltzing. Though he did not attend college, he knew eminent figures of science and literature, men such as Audubon and Longfellow. He penned authoritative articles for the Smithsonian Institution about archaeological ruins, one of his great loves. He wrote the first comprehensive book on perhaps the most crucial engagement of the Mexican War, the Battle of Buena Vista, where he served with distinction under Gen. Zachary Taylor.

Perhaps self-conscious about not being a West Pointer, Carleton had made it his life’s work to catch up with his better-connected colleagues by outdoing them in abstrusities of military science, natural history, and other fields befitting a gentleman officer of his day. Whatever it was that drove him, Carleton was a perpetual motion machine, always burrowed in some interesting pet project or cranny of amusement. He was, for example, the nation’s foremost military expert on the cavalry tactics of the Russian Cossacks, having made a formal study of the matter at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. From time to time, during his nearly constant Western travels, he took it upon himself to ship unusual minerals and specimens of flora and fauna to Harvard University. He had a facility for boat design—he was especially fond of building Mackinaws. Perhaps his greatest extracurricular hobby was meteorites, and while in Arizona he discovered an important one, a 632-pound hunk of cosmic metal—“discarded by Vulcan himself”—that he hauled all the way to San Francisco (to this day it’s still known as the Carleton Meteorite).

Forty-eight years old, he was a New England Calvinist with the posture of a lamppost. There was a snap and rigor to his movements that fairly telegraphed his titanic work ethic. His sun-crisped face, hedged in a trim topiary of muttonchop sideburns, projected the intellectual pugnacity of Teddy Roosevelt. In photographic portraits, his pronounced jaw is often tensed, his teeth gritted, his lupine eyes trained on something far away, as though he were intensely preoccupied with another, better world. Carleton by all accounts liked the sound of his own voice and had much to say, enunciating with shrill precision in the flinty inflections of his native Maine.

It can’t be said that Carleton came out of nowhere. On the contrary, he was a well-established and highly regarded officer, the cream of the frontier army. Carleton seemed to know everyone: U. S. Grant, William Sherman, John C. Fremont, George McClellan, George Crook, the whole pantheon. His wife Sophia was the niece of Gen. John Garland. As a young officer, Carleton had trained as a proud dragoon at Fort Leavenworth under the late great Stephen Watts Kearny, and it was General Kearny, that consummate soldier-student of the prairie, whom Carleton seems to have consciously emulated.

Over his long career as a dragoon, Carleton had ridden all over the West—from Oklahoma to Utah to California—and he had dealt with countless Indian tribes. The only place he had lingered for any length of time, however, was New Mexico. For five years during the 1850s, he had been stationed at various forts in the territory, chasing Indians, protecting immigrant trains, and immersing himself in the peculiar problems of the Southwest. In those years he had seemed to hate everything about the place save its magnificent ruins. He once wrote with disgust that the local people of New Mexico were “utterly ignorant of everything beyond their corn fields and
acequias
” and noted a “universal proclivity for rags, dirt, and filthiness. The national expression of
quien sabe
(who knows?) appears deeply written on every face.”

Carleton believed that the Navajo conflict was the largest reason for New Mexico’s depressing backwardness; the wars sapped resources, rendered enterprise impractical, made travel unsafe, produced a perpetual cycle of enslavement, and gave life in the territory a quality of chronic despair. He recognized that if slavery was the underlying issue of the Civil War as it was being fought in the East, then slavery was also the underlying issue here. As a New England Calvinist from an abolitionist state, he could not countenance the concept of human chattel. There was no hope for any advancement in New Mexico until the citizens confronted what he called “this great evil.”

He had been away for five years, and during his absence he’d thought long and hard about how to solve “the Navajo problem.” Now, for better or worse, New Mexico would experience the second coming of James Henry Carleton.

To reach the territory, he had marched all the way from California, leading a column of fifteen hundred soldiers and miner volunteers. He had come with the original intention of helping Canby repulse the invading Texans. By the time he reached the Rio Grande, however, the main action was over. Carleton and his California column did successfully flush the territory’s southern precincts of avowed Confederates; he instituted martial law and reclaimed Tucson, Mesilla, and other important southern towns for the Union. But he and his men were sorely disappointed to have missed out on the laurels of real battle.

Then, in September 1862, he was named commander of the 9th Military Department, and Carleton rode north to assume his office in Santa Fe.

For the next four years he would preside over New Mexico virtually as a dictator. But he was an uncommon kind of despot: a Puritan schoolmaster with a zeal for social engineering, a martinet of the cod liver oil–dispensing, this-is-for-your-own-good variety. He was a utopian in an odd sense, and a Christian idealist. Carleton saw a perfect world on the horizon but could not imagine the real-world horrors that would be required to reach it. C. L. Sonnichsen, a historian of the Southwest Indian wars, wrote that if Carleton had “never had to function as God in a war-torn and distracted country, his determination and organizing ability might have been put to better use. He had intelligence and foresight, driving energy, and a consuming ambition to do well. His trouble was that he could not admit an error, or take a backward step.”