Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder is a sprawling account of the opening of the American southwest. This is the kind of book that spoils you for other books. Narbona could not have known that “The Army of the West,” in the midst of the longest march in American military history, was merely the vanguard of an inexorable tide fueled by a self-righteous ideology now known as “Manifest Destiny.” For twenty years the Navajo, elusive lords of a huge swath of mountainous desert and pasturelands, would ferociously resist the flood of soldiers and settlers who wished to change their ancient way of life or destroy them. As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquished-but what did the arrival of these “New Men” portend for the Navajo? He had come to see if the rumors were true-if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people’s chieftains, looked down upon the small town of Santa Fe, the stronghold of the Mexican settlers he had been fighting his whole long life. A Magnificent History of How the West Was Really Won-a Sweeping Tale of Shame and Glory
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