Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (80 page)

A host of other problems began to mount at the bosque, problems that kept Superintendent Carson endlessly busy. Many hundreds of Navajos developed dysentery and other intestinal illnesses as a result of drinking the alkaline waters of the Pecos. Although they had no choice but to drink from it, some Navajos thought the river was poisonous, infected with evil spirits.

The American soldiers also found the water repugnant. “The Rio Pecos,” one soldier wrote home to his wife, “is a little stream winding through an immense plain, and the water is terrible, and it is all that can be had within 50 miles; it is full of alkali and operates on a person like castor oil—take the water, heat it a little, and the more you wash yourself with common soap, the dirtier you will get.”

Perhaps an even bigger problem than the bad water was the lack of firewood. Within a few short months the great trees of the bosque had been chopped down to construct the various buildings of Fort Sumner. Now the Navajos had to venture farther and farther away to collect fuel—and usually the only wood they could find was the scrubby, poor-burning mesquite whose deep roots they painstakingly clawed from the ground, often with their bare hands. Later, work details of soldiers and Indians would venture twenty or thirty miles north, cut down stands of piñon, and float the wood downriver.

To control the abuse of food distribution, the army issued paper ration tickets each day, but the Navajos were able to copy the designs printed on them and generate fraudulent tickets by the thousands. Hoping to combat these forgeries, the army then started manufacturing metal tokens. But the young Navajo blacksmiths, who had only recently learned their craft under American tutelage at the bosque, proved singularly adept at counterfeiting the tokens. The army had to send to Washington for coins whose intricate patterns were finally beyond the Navajos’ duplication skills.

Syphilis ran rampant throughout the reservation and the army post alike, the epidemic spread by soldiers who found they could enjoy the services of a Navajo girl for the price of a meal ticket or a pint of cornmeal. Symptoms of the disease were everywhere—strange rashes, patchy hair loss, blindness, the sudden ravings of mental illness. Syphilitic sores were so common that many of the soldiers found it difficult to sit on a horse. The 1st California Cavalry, the outfit to which many of the Fort Sumner soldiers were originally attached, reportedly had the highest incidence of venereal disease of any unit during the Civil War, with army surgeons treating at least 50 percent of the ranks each year.

One officer wrote that the Navajo women “lack the slightest idea of virtue” and suggested that they be kept “as far from the fort as possible,” but his recommendation came to little avail. Some Navajo parents coerced their young daughters—as young as twelve or thirteen—to prostitute themselves so their families could have something to eat. Over time, many Navajo women who frequented the soldiers’ quarters became pregnant; according to Gerald Thompson, a number of these women, ashamed to be carrying the child of a
bilagaana
soldier, “lost their lives in crude attempts at abortion.”

Another constant worry for the Navajos was the threat of raids from Comanche Indians. Bosque Redondo was set on the edge of Comanche country, and once these ancient enemies of the Navajo realized how vulnerable the reservation was to attack, they went on the warpath. The Comanches would swoop in the predawn hours and steal sheep, horses, women, and children. And because Carleton would not allow the Navajos to be adequately armed, they were virtually helpless to defend themselves.

It was an odd reversal of fate: Now the Navajos had become victims of the same menace they had once so successfully visited upon the New Mexicans. The soldiers at Fort Sumner sometimes gave chase to the raiding Comanches, but usually to no avail. The problem became so grave that by late summer General Carleton began to draw up plans for a major military expedition against the Comanches.

The one success story, it seemed, was that bumper crop of tasseled corn basking in the summer heat. The great furrowed field, and the promise it held, was the only thing that kept Bosque Redondo together. There lay the pride and future—if there was any—of Carleton’s “grand work.”

Only a few weeks before harvest, a soldier inspecting the crop noticed something strange. Little worms, fuzzy and writhing, had infested the stalks. Shucking one of the ears, the inspector saw trouble: The kernels were nubbed and stunted almost beyond recognition, the silk lusterless, the ears rotten. Moving down the long rows, he saw that this ravenous pest, whatever it was, had eaten its way over the whole field. “The cursed insects seem to devour all the grain from the ear,” one puzzled officer wrote General Carleton.

What made the scourge surprising, and so pernicious, was that the worm did its work out of sight, deep inside the husk, offering no outward clue of the damage it was causing. As the seemingly healthy stalks grew tall, the ears were slowly being destroyed from within.

After more investigation, the insect was determined to be a cutworm, and it spelled disaster. Army agronomists were at a loss to explain where it had come from, and so were the Navajos. It was as though an Old Testament plague had descended upon them. Not uncommon elsewhere in the United States, the cutworm had never been a problem in the West before; it seemed to have arrived suddenly and opportunistically, with the first introduction of large-scale monoculture.

When Carleton learned about the cutworm, he became frantic. He urged the soldiers to go into the fields and try to remove the worms from each individual husk
by hand
—a laborious and of course completely impractical idea born of desperation. He ordered his men to set out pans of molasses at strategic points in the hope that the sweet, sticky liquid would attract the egg-laying moths and drown them.

He tried everything he could think of to arrest this “visitation from God,” as he called it, but it was no use. The corn crop of more than three thousand acres was ruined. The first test had failed. And now, with winter around the corner, it seemed likely that the Navajos would starve.

Kit Carson would not have to deal with the consequences of the cutworm blight. By mid-September 1864, his short tenure as reservation superintendent was over. Although he had been at the bosque only three months, Carson was called away on an even bigger assignment, in some ways the biggest assignment of his career: General Carleton ordered him to venture east onto the plains of Texas to lead a large-scale expedition against the Comanches.

That year the Comanches, along with their allies the Kiowas, had been wreaking unprecedented havoc. In addition to their nearly constant attacks on the Navajos at the bosque, the Comanches had been preying on emigrant wagon trains and army caravans along the Santa Fe Trail. According to Capt. George H. Pettis, a California volunteer then serving in New Mexico, these “lords of the southern plains” had “held high carnival…There was not a week of that whole season, but that some outrage was committed by them.”

The Comanches were now expressly targeting Anglo-Americans. At a place called Walnut Creek in western Kansas, a band of Comanches descended on a wagon train and killed ten white men and scalped two boys alive. In August, Comanches murdered five whites leading a caravan across southwestern Kansas; several Hispanic survivors returned to New Mexico to report that, after the attack, the Comanches boasted they would “kill every white man that came on the road.” The Comanches even threatened to kill General Carleton himself if he ever sent a force after them. An army colonel then serving in New Mexico wrote: “You cannot imagine a worse state of affairs than exists now on this route.”

The stepped-up rampages of the Comanches may have been an echo effect of the Civil War. Army authorities believed, on the basis of credible evidence, that Texas Confederates had incited the Comanches to attack wagon trains in the hope of disrupting Union supply lines. Whether or not Texans were indeed the ultimate source of the trouble, the Comanches by late summer of 1864 had nearly succeeded in halting the mails and cutting off Carleton from his superiors back east. The general fretted: “We have been greatly embarrassed in getting supplies from the States.”

Trying to run an enormous military department during the fevered height of the Civil War, Carleton knew that something had to be done to fend off these attacks. And who better to do it than Carson? He had succeeded against the Mescaleros and the Navajos—why wouldn’t he also succeed against the Comanches?

So Carleton gave Carson his next assignment, flattering him that “a great deal of my good fortune in Indian matters here—in fact nearly all—is due to you.” Now, the general said, Carson must turn his attention to the Comanches and do his utmost “in punishing these treacherous savages before the winter fairly sets in.”

In truth, Carson was physically not up to another campaign in the field. He was now constantly in pain. People who knew him commented on the marked change in his appearance. He’d lost weight and his eyesight was steadily worsening. Like a raisin, he appeared to be wrinkling and withering from within. A close acquaintance wrote that “his face seemed haggard and drawn with pain,” as though a disease “had fastened itself upon him.”

Carson knew that any campaign against the Comanches was likely to be strenuous as well as risky. He had fought several skirmishes with the Comanches over the years and had enormous respect for their prowess in battle. Arriving on the southern plains sometime in the 1700s, this Shoshone-language people had developed elaborate warrior societies and were known to gather and fight in large numbers. Though Comanches had caused nearly constant troubles since the conquest of 1846, the U.S. Army had sent only one modest punitive mission to fight them in the heart of their own country, but the expedition had returned unsuccessful.

It was an encounter with the Comanches that had produced what was perhaps the most colorful story in the whole compendium of Carsonian tall tales. Sometime in the 1830s, while hunting buffalo on the plains east of Bent’s Fort, Carson was surrounded by a large band of Comanches on horseback. While still mounted, he reached around his own mule’s neck and slashed its throat with his knife. The mule dropped to the ground and promptly expired. Using the carcass as a makeshift barricade, Carson took up his rifle and proceeded to fight off wave after wave of onrushing Comanches. He could not shoot them all, however, and some of the warriors drew perilously near. But when they did, their horses smelled the fresh blood of Carson’s mule and became spooked. They halted in their tracks and would advance no farther. Finally, the exasperated Comanches gave up and galloped away across the prairie.

Whether this story is actually true—Carson doesn’t mention it in his memoirs—it was widely told and widely believed. And it served to illustrate a larger truth: Like so many men who had lived and traveled in the Southwest, Carson had nearly lost his life fighting Comanches. With the possible exception of the Blackfeet, he believed they were the fiercest Native American tribe one could encounter. They’d killed Jedediah Smith and Robert Bent, the youngest of the Bent brothers. They’d killed many other men Carson had known over the decades. Carson did not need to be reminded that the only thing worse than being killed by Comanches was being caught by them: Their tortures were too grotesque to contemplate.

Still, Carson did not hesitate to take on the assignment. In some ways it was the same old pattern; his sense of duty all but compelled him to accept General Carleton’s call. Yet there was more to it than that. Carson’s three months at Bosque Redondo had convinced him that the Comanches were now the greatest menace in the territory. Their attacks on the struggling and virtually defenseless denizens of the bosque threatened to derail the fragile project he had set in motion, while their depredations on the Santa Fe trail threatened to halt the very supplies necessary to ensure the reservation’s immediate survival. He felt he had no choice but to go after them.