Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West Book

Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson & the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides was a powerfully written and meticulously researched tale of the American West primarily from the early nineteenth century through the Civil War when President Polk's vision of Manifest Destiny was the ideological vision of the United States of America sweeping from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Having grown up in Colorado, New Mexico and California, I loved this book not only for its rich history but for its vivid descriptions of the southwest.

"They all had Spanish names and had had them since before the pilgrims sailed to Plymouth Rock: The Sandias. Manzanos. Ortiz. Jemez. Los Cerillos. Sangre de Cristos. San Mateos. Atalaya. Some seemed so close they could plucked as effortlessly as pendulous fruit, others more than a hundred miles off, thin blue phantoms rising from the Navajo country in the hazy west."

"The sagebrush gave way to cornfields and sheep pastures and then scattered houses, and finally the men dropped down to the somber capital--the Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi. Although it had a fabled name with a venerable history--it was founded in 1609--Santa Fe was not a town that sought to impress anyone, numbering at most seven thousand inhabitants."

But at the heart of this saga is Christopher "Kit" Carson who was an integral part of this story. "There was something uncanny about Carson, in the way he popped up from the shadows and impressed his name on the scenes of history. . . . he did have a curious knack for making himself present at the critical instant. Whenever an expedition was in trouble--real trouble--he was there to bail it out."

It was also the chilling tale of the Navajo nation who found themselves unwilling participants in the last stages of Manifest Destiny. "It was not a single migration, but a series of them. . . But taken all together, it was a forced relocation of biblical proportions, one of the largest in American history--second only to the Trail of Tears of the Cherokees."