Been Readin’

NewMexiKen finally got around to finishing Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West last night. I had started it when it first came out last year, but set it aside about a 100 pages in and just got back to it.

Despite that personal experience with it, I do recommend this book. As Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday wrote in his review:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

It is a fascinating and important story well told. Surely anyone with any abiding interest in New Mexico and Arizona history should read it. I must say, however, that I found the episodic mixed chronology in the first third of the book terribly annoying. And Sides does let some anachronism float into his text — I don’t think Matthew Brady used flash bulbs, for example — and some lapses of fact. It’s not, in other words, a dry encyclopedic narrative. He tells a good story fervently and fairly.

The book I began before I was interrupted by my interest in Kit Carson — and will take up again today — is Craig Childs’s House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest. Childs, who grew up and lives in the southwest, takes a personal look at the Anasazi (or Ancestral Puebloan) ruins across the Four Corners area (Chaco, Aztec, Mesa Verde) as well as southeast Arizona and Mexico, and speculates about the people who lived there 700-1000 years ago and what happened to them and their magnificent cultures.