Stephen Watts Kearny is extolled as "one of the finest and most intelligent officers in the American army." Commissioned by President James K. For example, though Kit Carson is described as loyal, honest and kind, "a straight arrow," Sides does not pussyfoot when depicting his darker side: "He was also a natural born killer," he announces, with all the force of a well-placed punch. In dealing with the many historical figures in the book, Sides doesn't skim over their darker, least desirable attributes. A horrific chronicle of broken treaties, bloody campaigns, starvation, epidemics, bald land-grabs, retributions and American hemispheric hegemony, it reveals "the dawn of the American West in all its vividness and brutality," where an unfamiliar sound on an isolated prairie could prick terror in the heart of the bravest man and violence was usually regarded as necessary.īlood and Thunder is certainly a powerful study of character. This shameful account of how the West was really won is one of the best works of nonfiction that I have ever read. So begins yet another battle of many in Hampton Sides's epic tale of the American West. Slush formed on the edges of the Rio Grande, and the ghostly cottonwoods rattled along the banks. On a frigid Sunday morning in February, two armies stared at each other across the open plain.
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