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An Epic of the American West
Doubleday
October 2006
On Sale: October 3, 2006
480 pages
ISBN: 0385507771
EAN: 9780385507776
Hardcover
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Historical
A Magnificent History of How the West Was Really Won—a
Sweeping Tale of Shame and Glory
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.
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