Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (76 page)

And they waited.

Col. Kit Carson left Fort Canby on the cold, gray morning of January 6,1864. Six inches of snow powdered the ground. The nearly five hundred men under his command moved slowly, and the oxen groaned at the weight of the wagons. Most of the men were on foot, the snow crunching under their boots. They were draped in blankets or serapes, or buttoned up tight in wool greatcoats, their numb hands thrust deep in the pockets. They hated having to greet the New Year in such bleak surroundings, so far from home, in a wilderness so godforsaken. To pass the hours they invented their own battle song, a bit of doggerel that they belted out over the winter solitudes—

Come dress your ranks, my gallant souls, a standing in a row

Kit Carson he is waiting to crush the savage foe

At night we meet and march o’er lofty hills of snow

We’ll first chastise

Then civilize

Bold Johnny Navajo

Colonel Carson rode up and down the column, his jaws clenched in resolve. A few days earlier Carson had assured Carleton that he had “made all the necessary arrangements to visit the Canon de Chelly” and thought Carleton would be relieved to learn that the expedition he had so long insisted upon was finally happening. “Of one thing the General may rest assured,” Carson vowed to Carleton. “Before my return, all that is connected with this canon [canyon] will cease to be a mystery. It will be thoroughly explored [with] perseverance and zeal.”

Carson had divided his command into two units. Taking the larger contingent of 375 enlisted men and 14 officers, Carson himself would head toward the western mouth of the canyon, while a smaller party of approximately 100 New Mexico Volunteers under the command of Capt. Albert Pfeiffer would aim for the eastern end. The plan, which General Carleton played a large role in devising, called for executing a kind of pincer movement, with the two separate detachments traversing the chasm from opposite sides and reuniting somewhere in the middle. The idea was to stopper the canyon at both ends so that its denizens could not easily escape. It was a strategy, Carleton hoped, that would also allow him to achieve maximum shock value. He recognized the symbolic power that Canyon de Chelly held for the Navajos. If Carson could sweep the entire length of it, puncturing its aura of impregnability, the maneuver might demoralize the Navajos far more profoundly than the resulting casualties might suggest. In this sense, the thrust of the coming campaign was less purely military than it was psychosocial: By cutting into the soul of the nation, Carleton hoped to break the people’s collective will to fight.

The snow was more than Carson had bargained for, however. What should have been a three-day march took six, and the oxen, already weak and straining, began to collapse. Along the way, twenty-seven of the beasts died, their hulking bodies capsizing in the drifts and soon freezing solid, their hooves pitched in the air.

On January 12, Carson arrived at the mouth of the canyon, near the present-day town of Chinle, Arizona, and promptly sent out reconnaissance parties in various directions, both along the rims and down in the canyon itself. Sgt. Andres Herrera, with a detachment of fifty men, intercepted a band of Navajos who were attempting to escape through a side canyon. Herrera attacked and soon the vast ochre walls echoed with gunfire. Herrera’s troops killed eleven Navajo warriors and captured two women, two children, and 130 goats and sheep. The battle for Canyon de Chelly had begun.

The next morning Carson began a more ambitious study of the south rim in preparation for his big offensive surge into the canyon, which he planned to undertake in a few days. For many miles he marched along the rim, peering down into the spectral depths, worrying over the puzzling landscape and the ease with which it could conceal snipers or ambushing parties. The idea of taking a party of men through the canyon went against his best mountain man instincts and offended his sense of caution. It looked to him like a trap.

Carson also began to wonder where Albert Pfeiffer and his company might be. Surely Pfeiffer had reached the eastern entrance of the canyon by now and had begun marching westward. Yet as Carson and his men scoured the canyon from its southern rim, they saw no sign of him.

Capt. Albert Pfeiffer was a colorful and somewhat tragic figure. Though a heavy drinker, he was one of Carson’s ablest officers. He had kind blue eyes and a stout build, and while he was an immigrant from the Netherlands, he had lived for some time in New Mexico and had, like Carson, married a local woman. Pfeiffer was tranquil by nature, except when he got into a tight situation. The possibility of combat threw him into a blind rage, causing him to curse wildly in Dutch and transforming him, said one contemporary, into “the most desperately courageous fighter in the West.”

Captain Pfeiffer was still recovering from a brutal incident that had befallen him several months earlier, down in Apache country, where he had campaigned with Carson in the Mescalero roundup. It seems that Pfeiffer suffered from some sort of skin problem—exacerbated by alcohol—that Carson repeatedly chided him about. “When will you have sense?” Carson admonished the Dutchman in a letter. “Can’t you try and quit whiskey for a little while, at least until you get your face cured? If your face ain’t well when I next see you, you had better look out.”

To cure his dermatological malady, Pfeiffer regularly soaked in a mineral hot spring not far from an army fort where he was stationed. One bright day he and his wife were bathing in the spring when a band of Apaches set upon them. Pfeiffer was seriously wounded by an arrow and his wife was killed. Half naked, Pfeiffer somehow managed to straggle back to camp, becoming badly sunburned in the process. Some accounts have it that the murder of his wife changed Pfeiffer forever, turning him into an inveterate Indian-hater.

Captain Pfeiffer and his company of one hundred rank and file reached the eastern end of Canyon de Chelly without incident on January 11, a day earlier than Carson entered the western end. Traveling lighter, and with most of his men on horseback, he had been able to keep a brisk pace. Pfeiffer wasted no time—he dropped down into the canyon, following the route of an ice-rimmed creek until it spilled into a deep gorge. Then he started plodding west.

But he had entered the wrong canyon. Somehow he had skirted the main branch of Canyon de Chelly and had instead entered Canyon del Muerto, a secondary though no less awesome artery of the de Chelly complex.

Pfeiffer blundered ahead, employing teams of sappers, equipped with pickaxes, to break trail through ice and snow. It was extremely tough going, and one of the mules bearing a particularly heavy load broke suddenly through the ice and “split completely open.” With every turn, the canyon’s multifaceted walls bulked larger, enveloping them in an eerie silence. Some men chiseled their names or the letters U.S.A. in the sandstone facades—Kilroys visible to this day. The men found it impossible not to gape at the great opiates of rock and the half-hidden ruins and petroglyphs gracing the walls. But their reveries were quickly punctured when they realized that there were Navajo warriors all around them—perched on the rim, hidden in crannies, watching every move the Americans made. Some of them rose up, Pfeiffer wrote, “and jumped about on the ledges, like Mountain Cats, hallooing at me, swearing and cursing, and threatening vengeance on my command in every variety of Spanish they were capable of mustering.”

Along the way the soldiers captured eight Navajo women and children who were clearly surprised by Pfeiffer’s sudden appearance from the east and had apparently been expecting soldiers to come from the
other
direction—Carson’s direction. Pfeiffer could see they were desperately scared and impoverished—“in an almost famishing condition, half-starved and naked,” as he later described them. Elsewhere his men came upon the frozen corpses of several Navajos who had apparently starved to death—further evidence, it seemed, that the Navajos were in truly dire straits and that Carson’s long campaign of crop and livestock destruction had exacted a much more serious toll than the Americans realized.

Pushing deeper into Canyon del Muerto, Pfeiffer’s men encountered more and more resistance from Navajos who scurried high along the walls. Some of them presented their backsides to the Americans, and others tried unsuccessfully to detour the invaders into cul de sacs and side canyons. Now the Navajos could be seen on both sides of the canyon, “whooping and cursing, firing shots and throwing rocks down upon my command.”

Captain Pfeiffer had had enough: He ordered his men to open fire. “A couple of shots from my soldiers with their trusty Rifles caused the Red Skins to disperse and gave me a safe passage,” Pfeiffer writes. The volley killed “two Buck Indians and one Squaw who obstinately persisted in hurling rocks and pieces of wood at the soldiers.”

The following day, January 12, Pfeiffer and his men passed Fortress Rock and apparently had no inkling that three hundred Navajos were hidden on top—certainly no mention is made of it in Pfeiffer’s reports. But as is clear in the oral history of the Navajos, the sight of Pfeiffer’s soldiers threading through the canyon left a vivid impression on the refugees camped atop the monolith. Teddy Draper, recounting a story told by his grandmother, says in a published oral history that all the people “were instructed to stay quiet until the soldiers passed us by. From where I was they looked very small, but they were well armed and had good horses. They camped below us at the junction, but our men didn’t try to attack them.”

The warriors restrained themselves, Draper says, only because their leader, a wealthy headman named Dahghaa ’i, informed them that many more
bilagaana
soldiers had been sighted “at the mouth of the canyon. Their chief commander’s name is Bi’ee’ Kichii’ii—Kit Carson—a very pure White Man.”

As the bleak winter sun slipped behind the canyon walls, the Americans ransacked an old hogan for wood. Bonfires were soon crackling, and the men wrapped themselves in their bedrolls. That night some of the Navajos on Fortress Rock couldn’t resist the temptation to harass the sleeping soldiers with a constant stream of catcalls. Wrote Pfeiffer, “At the place where I encamped the curl of the smoke from my fires ascended to where a large body of Indians were resting over my head, but the height was so great that the Indians did not look larger than crows, and as we were too far apart to injure each other, no damage was done except with the tongue.”

Pfeiffer’s men struck camp early the next morning and kept moving through the bitter cold. At every bend Pfeiffer kept expecting to run into Carson’s men—he thought surely by now he would have seen signs of the larger detachment. Seizing more Navajo prisoners as he went—he now had a total of nineteen—Pfeiffer worked his way through Canyon del Muerto until he reached the place where it junctions with the main branch of Canyon de Chelly. It was only then, as he gazed back at this other, even more massive chasm, that he began to suspect his error. Not knowing what else to do, he continued marching west.

The three hundred people sequestered on top of Fortress Rock were safe for the moment—the threat had passed them by. But several weeks later a well-armed party sent by Carson would return and lay siege to the citadel. The soldiers opened fire, killing or wounding some twenty warriors who’d given away their position by hurling stones from an alcove midway up the face. After the battle the Americans camped at the base of Fortress Rock beside a stream called Tsaile Creek and attempted to starve the beleaguered Navajos into final submission. But unknown to the soldiers, the Navajos on top were already slowly perishing from thirst; the snows had melted away and the natural cisterns had run dry.