Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (86 page)

Carson made a short train trip to Boston and possibly consulted another doctor there. Then he rode the new Union Pacific Railroad all the way to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and took a stagecoach to Denver, where he had to stop and rest in a hotel. Each day crowds of well-wishers held vigil outside his window. When he emerged in slightly better health three days later, the general stood up on a dry goods box and thanked the people of Denver for their prayers. Most of the way home he rode in an open wagon, lying in the back wrapped in blankets. Josefa met him with a carriage in the tiny Colorado town of La Junta on April 11, and they hurried home to their three-room house.

Two days later she gave birth to a baby girl. Carson named her Josefita, after her mother.

Carson was so frail from his cross-country odyssey that he could scarcely hold his new daughter. He spent the next two weeks lying on the floor of his house, on a pallet of blankets, sometimes lost in an opium haze. Dr. Tilton thought the trip had all but killed him. The aneurysm had “progressed rapidly,” Tilton wrote, “and the tumor, pressing on the pneumogastric nerves and trachea, caused frequent spasms of the bronchial tubes which were exceedingly distressing.”

Josefa was not feeling well, either. She was suffering from complications related to childbirth, an infection of some kind. Her fever would not go away. When Dr. Tilton saw her, he could only describe her as a woman “who had evidently been very handsome,” but sickness had leached the beauty from her face.

On the evening of April 27, Josefa must have been feeling better, for somehow she summoned the strength to rise and interact with her children. Teresina, who was thirteen, came to her, and for a few moments she brushed her daughter’s hair. Suddenly the bottom dropped from her spirit. “Cristobal, come here!” Josefa cried out. Carson rose from his pallet in another room and shuffled to her as fast as he could.

Her eyes were vacant. “I’m very sick,” Josefa said. Then she died in his arms.

She was buried in a garden five hundred yards from the house, near the banks of the Purgatory. Carson was wrecked with grief. “He just seemed to pine away after mother died,” Charles Carson recalled years later.

He wrote to Ignacia Bent in Taos and summoned her to come take care of his motherless children. Shortly after Ignacia arrived he began to cough up blood, and Dr. Tilton urged him to cross over to the fort before the rivers rose any higher.

On the afternoon of May 23, Carson rallied. He told Dr. Tilton he was hungry—not for the thin broths and meager gruels he had been subsisting on, but something substantial. He wanted a big buffalo steak like old times, cooked rare, maybe served up with a mess of red chili like he always preferred it. And a big pot of coffee. And after that, a smoke from his clay pipe.

Dr. Tilton got to it, and soon the general had his request. He ate and smoked his fill, there on the floor, sprawled on his buffalo robes. Then, at 4:25 in the afternoon, he started coughing violently, and blood spouted from his lips. The aneurysm had ruptured. Carson yelled out, “Doctor,
compadre, adios!
”

Dr. Tilton rushed to his side. “I supported his forehead on my hand,” he wrote, “while death speedily closed the scene.”

Other friends appeared in the room. Tilton shook his head. “This is the last of the general,” he said.

They took his body across the Arkansas, across the Purgatory, and laid him beside Josefa, the dirt still disturbed from her burial. They were married twenty-five years, and died less than a month apart. At Fort Lyon, a bugler played taps and the flag was flown at half-mast.

Four days later the
Rocky Mountain News
in Denver ran a notice of Carson’s death: “Over what an immense expanse of plains, of snow-clad sierras, of rivers, lakes, and seas, has he cut the first paths? His guiding instinct was an innate chivalry. He had in him a personal courage which came forth when wanted, like lightning from a cloud.”

 

And Monster Slayer said, “Some things should be left as they are. Perhaps it is better for all of us in the long run that certain enemies endure.”

 

—FROM
DINÉ BAHANE,
THE NAVAJO CREATION STORY

On a bright morning in late May, the same week that Kit Carson died, several thousand Diné gathered on the plains of Bosque Redondo, away from the Pecos, out on the hard, bright ground where they could all see one another. A chant rose up from their midst, a song that slowly built on itself as the collective energy took hold. Then, the Navajos began to clack stones together, and a clear pulse ran through the tribe.

The sound of the clicking rocks puzzled the soldiers over at Fort Sumner. At first they feared it was the first stirrings of an insurrection, and they climbed to the rooftops of the Issue House to investigate. From there they watched a strange scene unfold.

The Navajos had formed a circle several miles in diameter, so large that any person standing on the circumference could look across the plains and see only tiny human dots on the circle’s opposite side. Then, taking small, measured steps, they began to close the ring. As they stepped forward, the Navajos continued to chant and clack their rocks. Slowly, the circle began to shrink on the plain, tightening like a great noose.

In the center, a young coyote stood up and began to run in fright. As the circle closed up, the coyote ran frantically this way and that, until it finally understood it had nowhere to go: It was trapped inside a human corral.

Whether out of sheer terror or an instinct to feign death, the coyote lay down. Then Barboncito, the small, bearded medicine man from Canyon de Chelly, stepped inside the circle and approached the trembling animal. Several others helped him hold the coyote down. Barboncito opened his medicine bag and removed a bead of abalone shell. Carefully, he placed the white bead in the coyote’s mouth and began to pray over the animal.

The chanting and the percussion of the rocks stopped, and in the silence, each person on the circumference slowly backpedaled: The great noose was opening up again.

Barboncito was keen to see in which direction the coyote would run. That was the purpose of the ceremony, in fact. It was an ancient ritual, one that Navajo medicine men performed only in extreme circumstances, to look for signs that concerned the future of the tribe.

Suddenly Barboncito and the others pulled away, and the coyote sprang up. It looked confused at first. And then it turned in the direction Barboncito had hoped. The coyote bolted across the thickets of cholla and mesquite, and escaped from the confines of the human circle.

It was running headlong toward the west.

A few days later, on May 28, 1868, Gen. William Sherman arrived at Bosque Redondo with his entourage from the Great Peace Commission. He stepped from his carriage and strode briskly about the reservation, taking mental note of everything he saw. Now forty-eight years old, Sherman was a ruddy, craggy, self-assured figure who moved with the brusque manner of a man who had seen nearly everything there was to see in the department of human misery and could not be easily impressed.

He must have known that his friend Kit Carson had died five days earlier. Everyone in New Mexico had heard the news, and all over the territory, flags were flying at half-mast. Sherman understood that with Carson’s passing, an era had ended and a new one had begun. “Kit Carson was a good type of a class of men most useful in their day,” Sherman later wrote, “but now as antiquated as Jason of the Golden Fleece, Ulysses of Troy, the Chevalier La Salle of the Lakes, Daniel Boone of Kentucky, all belonging to a dead past.”

Carson helped to put the Navajos here, and now Sherman had the authority to undo what his friend had done. He had been given an extraordinary power and was not timid about using it. Navajo women clutched at his coat as he moved about the reservation. Everywhere he went the Navajos struggled to get a glimpse of the great and powerful man.

Sherman was no softhearted advocate for the Indians, but he could see that the reservation was an abject failure, that the Navajos were despondent and the farms fallow. “I found the Bosque a mere spot of grass in the midst of a wild desert,” he later wrote, “and that the Navajos had sunk into a condition of absolute poverty and despair.”

General Sherman joined the other members of the commission in one of the buildings on the grounds of Bosque Redondo. There they met a small delegation of Navajo headmen, led by Barboncito and Manuelito. Two Spanish interpreters translated the proceedings, and army stenographers recorded everything.

General Sherman rose and spoke first. “The Commissioners are here now for the purpose of learning all about your condition. General Carleton removed you here for the purpose of making you agriculturalists. But we find you have no farms, no herds, and are now as poor as you were four years ago. We want to know what you have done in the past and what you think about your reservation here.”

Barboncito stood up to answer for the Navajos. The Diné had finally come to realize the importance the
bilagaana
placed on having a leader, a single representative of the whole tribe. They regarded Barboncito as their most eloquent spokesman. He had great poise, a calmness at the center of his being. But an unmistakable passion also rose from his words and gestures. As he talked, his long whiskers bristled and his tiny hands danced. He spoke for a long time, and Sherman let him go on without interruption.

Barboncito said that he viewed General Sherman not as a man but as a divinity. “It appears to me,” he said, “that the General commands the whole thing as a god. I am speaking to you, General Sherman, as if I was speaking to a spirit.”