Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides Page B

and his comrades broiled their steaks and shared pots of bitter coffee—or “black soup,” as the definitive beverage of the frontier was sometimes called. The men drew straws to see who would get the fatty ribs from the bison’s hump, which was considered the tastiest cut. The dung charcoal, which burned like bricks of peat, imparted a slight bitterness to the flesh, but to famished soldiers the buffalo tasted divine.
    Laying out their bedrolls, they stretched beneath the glorious speckling of stars. They turned the tongue of their lead wagon toward the North Star so they would be better oriented in the morning. And in their exhaustion they soon fell asleep to the low growl of buffalo bulls in rut and the cry of the gray wolves, whose “long and doleful bugle-note,” as one put it, “makes a night upon the Prairies perfectly hideous.”

    In the final weeks of July 1846, as the country grew ever more desolate and severe, the Army of the West struck the braided Arkansas River and marched for many days alongside its cottonwood-skirted banks. Then one day, like an apparition, snow-dusted mountains leapt into view. Off to the northwest the soldiers could see Pikes Peak, vaporous and shimmering and unaccountably huge. And to the southwest loomed the Spanish Peaks, twin conical mountains known to local tribes as Wah-to-Yah, “the Breasts of the World.”
    The men of Missouri had never seen mountains, real mountains, like these—and they were dumbstruck. One diarist among them wrote that the “jagged peaks are towering in mid-heaven all around us…grand beyond description.”
    By early August, Kearny’s troops were spread out over hundreds of miles of the Santa Fe Trail, inching forward in scores of separate caravans. Before making the final push into New Mexico, Kearny decided to pause long enough to concentrate his forces on the Arkansas at Bent’s Fort, the adobe citadel where Kit Carson had briefly worked as a hunter back in the early 1840s.
    Commanding an impressive vantage along the Santa Fe Trail, the fort’s high castle tower was equipped with a nautical spyglass for keeping an eye on hostile Indians. Two live bald eagles held vigil from the rooftop, caged in the belfry. Friendly Plains tribes often pitched their tepees nearby to trade and gamble and drink at the fort. Bent’s was a loud and bustling agora, its denizens coarse-mannered but usually friendly when not too drunk, its labyrinths of storerooms stacked with beaver pelts and buffalo robes and barrels of Taos Lightning, the stout New Mexico whiskey.
    This outpost of American civilization boasted all sorts of incongruous pleasures and amenities, including peacocks that roamed the compound, a French tailor, white tablecloths in the dining room, ice for the fort’s signature mint julep–like drink, which the Bents called a “hailstorm,” and the most outlandish luxury imaginable, a billiards table .
    Kearny’s dragoons set up an encampment on the north side of the Arkansas while the legions of Missourians pitched their tents in a sprawling meadow just south of the river. The volunteers picketed their exhausted horses and mules in the pasture, but others were turned loose to graze. Something spooked them—one witnesss claimed it was merely the snap of a falling tree limb—and they began to stampede.
    In an instant the constrained horses broke free of their irons and galloped off with the others—with dangling picket pins biting into their flanks and spurring them to greater fury. For miles the prairie swirled with hoofbeats and manic patterns of dust. General Kearny was livid at the volunteers for letting the horses graze loose. On the Santa Fe Trail, stampedes like this were considered a disaster of the first order, and a danger even graver than Indians. In their madness, many horses bolted for the far horizon and were never seen again. The Missourians spent a whole day recapturing their scattered animals, several of which were found more than