“Before there were Stetson hats and barbed-wire fences, before there were Wild West shows or Colt six-shooters to be slung at the OK Corral, there was Nature’s Gentleman, the original purple cliché of the purple sage.

“He was the prototype of the Western hero,” Sides writes. The book centers on diminutive, illiterate Kit Carson, an often maligned historical figure these days, who was a larger-than-life mountain man, scout and soldier transformed into hero of pulp fiction-the so-called “blood-and-thunders” from which Sides derives his title. Sides is quite correct to begin his narrative much earlier, putting the events in historical context, bringing history to life. In fact, the Long Walk and Bosque Redondo cover only a small portion of the end of the book. soldiers in New Mexico during the Mexican War. His 460-page tome chronicles the conquest of the Navajos, beginning in 1846 with the arrival of U.S. Yet Blood and Thunder grew into something much larger. In 2002 Sides set out to write about the tragic fate of the Navajo during the Long Walk and their four-year internment at Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory, from 1864 to 1868. 14 on the Times bestseller list, merely cements Sides’ reputation as the best narrative historian in America today. And Blood and Thunder, which debuted at No. Actually, Hampton Sides found success with the critical and commercial hit Ghost Soldiers (the basis of the movie The Great Raid). You know you’ve hit the big time when The New York Times assigns Pulitzer Prize– winner N. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.Wild West Book Review: Blood and Thunder Closeīlood and Thunder: An Epic of the American Westīy Hampton Sides, Doubleday, New York, 2006, $26.95. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation.

Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.Īt the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. From the author of Ghost Soldiers comes a magnificent history of the American conquest of the West-'a story full of authority and color, truth and prophecy' (The New York Times Book Review).

Blood and thunder by hampton sides