CONTENTS Title Page Dedication Epigraph Prologue: Hoofbeats BOOK ONE: THE NEW MEN 1. Jumping Off 2. The Glittering World 3. The Army of the West 4. Singing Grass 5. Blue Bead Mountain 6. Who Is James K. Polk? 7. What a Wild Life! 8. The Ruling Hand of Providence 9. The Pathfinder 10. When the Land Is Sick 11. The Un-Alamo 12. We Will Correct All This 13. Narbona Pass 14. The Uninvaded Silence 15. On the Altar of the Country 16. A Perfect Butchery 17. The Fire of Montezuma 18. Your Duty, Mr. Carson 19. Daggers in Every Look 20. Men with Ears Down to Their Ankles 21. The Hall of Final Ruin 22. The New Men BOOK TWO: A BROKEN COUNTRY 23. The Grim Metronome 24. Lords of the Mountains 25. The Devil’s Turnpike 26. Our Red Children 27. Cold Steel 28. El Crepusculo Photo Insert 1 29. American Mercury 30. Time at Last Sets All Things Even 31. A Broken Country 32. The Finest Head I Ever Saw 33. The Death Knot 34. Men Without Eyes 35. Blood and Thunder BOOK THREE: MONSTER SLAYER 36. The Fearing Time Photo Insert 2 37. People of the Single Star 38. The Sons of Some Dear Mother 39. The Round Forest 40. Children of the Mist 41. General Orders No. 15 42. Fortress Rock 43. The Long Walk 44. Adobe Walls 45. The Condition of the Tribes 46. Crossing Purgatory And Monster Slayer said... Epilogue: In Beauty We Walk A Note on the Sources Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Art Credits Also by Hampton Sides Copyright Anne I follow the scent of falling rain And head for the place where it is darkest I follow the lightning And draw near to the place where it strikes —NAVAJO CHANT Prologue HOOFBEATS One morning in mid-August 1846, in the cool hours before dawn, the New Mexican villagers of Las Vegas slumbered anxiously. The Americanos were coming. In distant Washington, D.C., for reasons murky to the inhabitants of Las Vegas, the president of the United States had declared war on Mexico. Now scouts had brought word that the invading gringo army was only a few days away, marching steadily westward, and the townspeople were deeply fearful. They had heard from their priest that the United States would outlaw Catholicism, that the soldiers would rape the women in the village and burn the letters “U.S.” on their cheeks with branding irons. The villagers even debated among themselves the merits of torching their own church to prevent the Americans from using it as a stable or a barracks. Las Vegas—“The Meadows” in Spanish—was a hodgepodge of adobe houses, set among rustling cornfields irrigated by a muddy acequia that seeped from the Gallinas River. The town lay at the feet of the Sangre de Cristos—the Blood of Christ Mountains—the magnificent southernmost peaks of the Rockies, which rose more than twelve thousand feet over the prickered plain. Set on the eastern periphery of Spanish settlement, the village was a spore-speck of civilization. Las Vegas was a three-day ride from the capital of the territory, Santa Fe. Its only tie to the larger world was the Santa Fe Trail, which passed along the outskirts of town—the same road the American army would be marching in on. To the east, the prairie seemed to stretch out forever, to the Staked Plains of Texas and the buffalo grasslands beyond—and eventually, if one kept on going, to the land of the American diablos. Hunters from Las Vegas, the ciboleros, rode out on the plains in search of antelope and buffalo. Often the villagers made trips to Santa Fe to buy supplies or confer with the military and religious authorities there. But mostly the people kept to their homes, and to the pageants of their church. Impoverished in every way except faith, they were pioneers, resolute in their battles with nature yet accepting of what they could not control. Although Las Vegas was a new settlement, founded by a land grant only eleven years earlier, most of the frontier families living here were descended from Spanish colonists who had arrived in New Mexico as early as 1598. The people of New Mexico, especially in rural outposts like Las Vegas, led a defensive, medieval sort of existence, clinging to Catholic folkways ossified by isolation. They labored in the safety of their coyote fences and mud walls, raising peppers and corn, beans, and squash, and tending sheep as their forefathers had in the shadows of the ancient mountains. August was always a pleasant month in this part of New Mexico. The nights were cool, the mornings golden. Days were hot and dry, the sleepy afternoons frequently doused by thunderstorms that rumbled in from the west. Gardens swelled with vegetables. Flocks grew fat on the grass that greened in the foothills from the new moisture of the monsoonal rains. By all outward appearances, Las Vegas seemed as it always did in this favored season, and yet the people knew that when the Americans arrived, their world would change utterly. Early on the morning of August 12 the fitful quiet of Las Vegas was punctured by the sound of hoofbeats. By the time the villagers heard the sound and discerned its menace, it was already too late: The invaders had cut across their fields and penetrated the town margins. To the people’s surprise, however, these weren’t the anticipated American invaders. This was an attack just as dreadful but much more familiar: Navajos. The raiders came boiling out of the mountains, painted for battle. At the last moment they let out a blood-chilling war-whoop that sounded to the villagers something like an owl—ahuuuuu, ahuuuuuu. The Navajo warriors rode bareback or on saddles made of sheepskin, and guided their mounts with reins of braided horsehair. They wielded clubs and carried shields made of buckskin layers taken from a deer’s hip, where the hide is thickest. They had images of serpents painted on the soles of their moccasins to give them a snakelike sneakiness as they approached their quarry. Their steel-tipped arrowheads were daubed with rattlesnake blood and prickly pear pulp mixed with charcoal taken from a tree that had been struck by lightning. Many of them wore strange, tight- fitting helmets made from the skinned heads of mountain lions.