Read Online Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Hampton Sides
Tags: United States, General, History, Biography & Autobiography, Military, Native American, 19th century, Indians of North America, Adventurers & Explorers, Frontier and Pioneer Life, Wars, West (U.S.), West (U.S.) - History; Military - 19th Century, Indians of North America - Wars, Indians of North America - History - 19th Century, Frontier and Pioneer Life - West (U.S.), West (U.S.) - History - 19th Century, Navajo Indians - History - 19th Century, United States - Territorial Expansion, Carson; Kit
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animal deft at landing on its feet, unharmed. For his first five years he would have been surrounded mainly by women: aunts and sisters and girl cousins and grandmothers. Raised by so many mothers, Narbona began to learn the singsong language of the Navajo—with its thousand finicky inflections and its delicate glottal stops and its vague echoes of Siberia—while also cultivating the Diné’s famous sense of humor, their unslakable appetite for teasing and puns, their delight in any incongruous or absurd situation.
Narbona received his first pony when he was six, and it was at this early age that, like most Navajo boys, he was taken from the daily attentions of the women to spend more time with the men, preparing himself for a life of hunting and war. Before dawn, he would rise and run for miles toward some distant point in the bitter cold, wearing only a leather thong and moccasins stuffed with sand to toughen his feet. To strengthen his wind, he would run with his mouth full of water, breathing only through his nose. He would jump in a freezing spring or roll in the snow, hollering at the top of his lungs to develop his warrior voice. Then, as the morning sun nudged over the horizon, he would race back to the hogan, covered in a rime of ice that cracked with his stride.
With other boys, he wrestled and competed in broad-jumping, stone-throwing, and archery contests. There were all kinds of traditional games of chance and amusement—stick dice, cat’s cradle, the moccasin game. Narbona learned to hunt rabbits and other small game. Every day he practiced his horsemanship, the quintessential Navajo skill. The Navajos were always holding races, often gambling on the results. They rightly prided themselves on their riding prowess—a tradition that continues to this day. (A journalist in recent times noted that “getting bucked off a horse is one of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a Navajo.”)
When he turned twelve Narbona was given his first sinew-backed bow, and arrows made expressly for him (the bow stood exactly his own height), and he began to range over the country on his first hunts. Narbona’s world was defined not by cities, villages, or roads, but rather by many thousands of natural landmarks spreading out haphazardly over many thousands of acres, little quirks of geography with names like Bank Caving Down, Lake Between the Shoulders, White With Reeds, Aspens Coming Down, Two Red Rocks Pointing Together. These were the ordinary places of his life, the places of daily hunting and grazing, but there were larger and more spectacular places, too—immense red buttes and deep gorges, moraines and lava flows. The Dinetah, as the Navajo called their land, was a wrinkled country studded with monumental rock formations that conjured up the shapes of animals or mythic monsters.
Navajo country has moved modern geologists, ordinarily a reserved lot, to adopt a vocabulary of doom: Paradox Basin, Defiance Uplift, the Great Unconformity. Geological maps of the Navajo lands are ominously annotated with “upwarps” and “cinder cones” and “structural disarrays.” Not far from Narbona’s home lay enormous forests of petrified wood, which the Navajo believed were the bones of Yeitso, a terrible beast slain by the war god Monster Slayer and left to rot on the plains, the creature’s blood congealing into lava flows. Throughout Navajo country could be found canyon walls embedded with the fossils of sea organisms—corals, bryozoa, trilobites—that had lived in the ocean more than 300 million years ago.
To the north of Narbona’s camp, often visible over the Chuska plain, loomed Tse’ Bit’ A’i, or the Rock With Wings. This neck of an explosive volcanic vent had eroded over thousands of years into a breathtaking monolith that looked something like the spiny backbone of an enormous dinosaur. In the 1860s, American explorers, fancying that this strange formation resembled a clipper ship, coined the
Narbona received his first pony when he was six, and it was at this early age that, like most Navajo boys, he was taken from the daily attentions of the women to spend more time with the men, preparing himself for a life of hunting and war. Before dawn, he would rise and run for miles toward some distant point in the bitter cold, wearing only a leather thong and moccasins stuffed with sand to toughen his feet. To strengthen his wind, he would run with his mouth full of water, breathing only through his nose. He would jump in a freezing spring or roll in the snow, hollering at the top of his lungs to develop his warrior voice. Then, as the morning sun nudged over the horizon, he would race back to the hogan, covered in a rime of ice that cracked with his stride.
With other boys, he wrestled and competed in broad-jumping, stone-throwing, and archery contests. There were all kinds of traditional games of chance and amusement—stick dice, cat’s cradle, the moccasin game. Narbona learned to hunt rabbits and other small game. Every day he practiced his horsemanship, the quintessential Navajo skill. The Navajos were always holding races, often gambling on the results. They rightly prided themselves on their riding prowess—a tradition that continues to this day. (A journalist in recent times noted that “getting bucked off a horse is one of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a Navajo.”)
When he turned twelve Narbona was given his first sinew-backed bow, and arrows made expressly for him (the bow stood exactly his own height), and he began to range over the country on his first hunts. Narbona’s world was defined not by cities, villages, or roads, but rather by many thousands of natural landmarks spreading out haphazardly over many thousands of acres, little quirks of geography with names like Bank Caving Down, Lake Between the Shoulders, White With Reeds, Aspens Coming Down, Two Red Rocks Pointing Together. These were the ordinary places of his life, the places of daily hunting and grazing, but there were larger and more spectacular places, too—immense red buttes and deep gorges, moraines and lava flows. The Dinetah, as the Navajo called their land, was a wrinkled country studded with monumental rock formations that conjured up the shapes of animals or mythic monsters.
Navajo country has moved modern geologists, ordinarily a reserved lot, to adopt a vocabulary of doom: Paradox Basin, Defiance Uplift, the Great Unconformity. Geological maps of the Navajo lands are ominously annotated with “upwarps” and “cinder cones” and “structural disarrays.” Not far from Narbona’s home lay enormous forests of petrified wood, which the Navajo believed were the bones of Yeitso, a terrible beast slain by the war god Monster Slayer and left to rot on the plains, the creature’s blood congealing into lava flows. Throughout Navajo country could be found canyon walls embedded with the fossils of sea organisms—corals, bryozoa, trilobites—that had lived in the ocean more than 300 million years ago.
To the north of Narbona’s camp, often visible over the Chuska plain, loomed Tse’ Bit’ A’i, or the Rock With Wings. This neck of an explosive volcanic vent had eroded over thousands of years into a breathtaking monolith that looked something like the spiny backbone of an enormous dinosaur. In the 1860s, American explorers, fancying that this strange formation resembled a clipper ship, coined the
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