Blood and Thunder

As part of his narrative approach to history, Sides uses real historical figures to embody major themes in Blood and Thunder. Stephen Watts Kearny represents the levelheaded peacemaker. John Fremont represents a privileged class of easterners whose ambitions outstripped their talent. Most importantly of all, Sides uses the life of frontiersman Kit Carson to trace the lifecycle of the American West. The story of the West unfolds with Carson as a guide: its halcyon wilderness beginnings, its bloody middle, and finally, its death rattle with the subjugation of the Native Americans. The phases of Carson’s life eerily mirrored those of the West itself. Carson is uniquely positioned to tell this story, Sides argues: He is the man who both made the West and destroyed it.

Carson grew up the early 1800s in Missouri, then the border between civilization and frontier. At 16, he became independent just as Mexico opened its borders to American trade in the 1820s, with the Santa Fe Trail serving as a transcontinental artery. For the first time, Americans could enter the West. Carson was borne on this first wave of trappers, where he was among the earliest Anglo-Americans to visit the “American Canaan, a wilderness, pure and mythic, stretching out for hundreds of miles” (271). Carson spent his young adult years here until he and the other mountain men hunted the beaver to near extinction: the first fatality of white incursion, but not the last.

Carson took the hybrid Indian/Anglo-American knowledge of the mountain men with him into the next phase of the West: exploration, research, and charting. He served as a guide for the expeditions of John C. Fremont, the right hand of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the public cheerleader of Manifest Destiny. Although Fremont technically led the expeditions, Carson’s genius secured their success (as shown by Fremont’s solo—and disastrous—Fourth Expedition). Carson’s work convinced people to migrate west; on both a practical level (maps and guidebooks) and an inspirational level (dime store novels and legends), his exploits convinced many settlers to take a chance at the pioneer lifestyle. He was one of the first white men to succeed there, and he convinced others to try, too, ushering in a new age of migration in the West.

This flow of new people into an already contested region inevitably caused conflict. Carson played a pivotal role in both conflicts. As both a Union officer in the Mexican-American War and a chief player in the Indian Wars, he almost singlehandedly altered the flow of events. Fittingly, in the West’s death throes, Carson spent the last few years of his life acting as a peacemaker for the Indians. He understood, too late, that white aggression played an oversized role in wars that had removed the Indians from their homeland to be replaced by white interlopers. Carson’s attempts to right his wrongs presage modern-day America’s struggle with how to make reparations for the atrocities committed against indigenous peoples and African Americans in the not-so-distant past.