![]() ![]() "Before there were Stetson hats and barbed-wire fences," Mr. ![]() Fame embarrassed him, but it hounded him for most of his life, as news of his exploits drifted back to a public ravenous for pictures of life on the frontier. Sides's book, a mesmerizing star.Ĭarson was actually a squat, bowlegged little man who could neither read nor write, but he was indeed cool and courageous, a crack shot and a wily warrior, a man of few words but a sly sense of humor. He is hero, antihero and, in every page of Mr. It was Carson whose feats of daring on the wild frontier were presented to the public in the pulp novels known as blood and thunders, where he was described as a colossus, whose "lynx-like eye" and "imperturbable coolness" made him invincible in a thousand battles. A legendary mountain man and Indian fighter, he accompanied Fremont on his mapping expeditions, served with General Kearny's Army of the West, fought on the Union side against Texas and brought the Navajo nation to its knees in a ghastly war of attrition. The short answer is, Kit Carson, the one man who figures in each of Mr. Not until the reader arrives, breathlessly, at the last page does a nagging question arise: What exactly was all that about? It has everything, in fact, except a point, although the action moves so quickly that this shortcoming nearly passes unnoticed. Sides's fast-paced, panoramic history, which carries the tellingly vague subtitle "An Epic of the American West." Like a Cinemascope western, "Blood and Thunder" abounds in colorful characters, bristles with incident and ravishes the eye with long, lingering pan shots of the great Southwest. Stars indicate obscure Civil War battles.Īll this and much, much more figures into Mr. Stephen Kearny's Army of the West in 1846, the Oregon Trail and the Long Walk. Maps inside the book's front and back covers, with dots and dashes sprawling all over the Western United States, trace the route of Fremont's third expedition to California, the march of conquest undertaken by Gen. Within this larger story he concentrates on the territory of New Mexico and the long, losing struggle of the Navajo to defend their land and way of life, culminating in the exodus from their tribal lands known as the Long Walk in 18. ![]() Fremont's, and by the creation of trade and migratory routes like the Santa Fe and Oregon trails. ![]() More broadly still, he places this war of conquest within the great westward movement made possible by expeditions like John C. Broadly, he describes the acquisition, by force of arms, of the vast Mexican-held territory that would eventually become New Mexico, Arizona, California and Texas. Sides, who told the story of a daring World War II rescue mission in "Ghost Soldiers," here works on a much larger historical canvas. Sides's rousing, full-throated rendition of an old story, the making of the American West. The promise and the price of this great mission propel "Blood and Thunder," Mr. Yet it was the dour, deeply uncharismatic Polk who made real the potent dream of Manifest Destiny: a new American nation stretching from sea to shining sea. Fussy, grim-faced, iron-willed, he was, as Hampton Sides puts it, "plodding and colorless." In an age that venerated great oratory, he was "a master of the single-entendre." Like Delaware among the states, he is among those most likely to be left off the list in a game of Name the Presidents. Polk does not loom large in the American collective memory. The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.Blood and Thunder An Epic of the American West By Hampton Sides Illustrated. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file. This file contains additional information such as Exif metadata which may have been added by the digital camera, scanner, or software program used to create or digitize it. ![]()
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