Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

Blood and Thunder’s Prologue opens with a slice-of-life snapshot of a frontier community in mid-August 1846. The people of Las Vegas live a rural, idyllic lifestyle hemmed in by danger: “Impoverished in every way except faith, they were pioneers, resolute in their battles with nature yet accepting of what they could not control” (25-6).

The President of the United States—James K. Polk, yet unnamed in the text—has just declared war on Mexico. The New Mexicans have heard that the Americans “would rape the women in the village and burn the letters ‘U.S.’ on their cheeks with branding irons” when they arrive (24-5). Still, they are unprepared when the attack comes not from the Americans but from another, more familiar enemy: the Navajo.

Sides describes a typical Navajo livestock raid, detailing their whoops and war gear as they drive away the Las Vegan sheep and goats. The New Mexicans are trapped between two overwhelming forces: a new war with the Americans, and a very old war with the Indians.

Kit Carson was the quintessential frontier man, impossibly connected and almost mythic in his omnipresence in the West: He “was present at the creation, it seemed” (31-2). Carson is 36 and has already lived for two decades in the frontier.