What I Just Read

What most of us know of American history is a series of major events spaced over several centuries, with a special emphasis on wars (peace just being a break between them): Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam, the First Gulf War, the Second Gulf War. The space between these and a few other major events is left as a muddle of uneventful and certainly unexciting non-events. (The Coolidge Administration, anyone?)

But it turns out that at least one of those gaps was filled with deeds and events of the most amazing and colorful sort. This book is the story of the conquest of what is now the southwestern United States and California. The political story is the Mexican War under the administration of President James K. Polk. But the real excitement is the story of the astounding life of Christopher "Kit" Carson, the greatest of the "mountain men", and the continuing wars with the Navajo Indians, including their final submission and agreement to a disastrous relocation to a reservation outside their traditional territory, followed by a more successful re-relocation to their current reservation located well within their traditional territory.

The amazing stories jump from every page -- from Narbona, the aged Navajo head man cut down by shrapnel from an ill-conceived attack by U.S. troops in the midst of a diplomatic negotiation, to Kit Carson's astounding providential escapes from death time and time again, from Stephen Fremont's brazen combination of ambition, nepotism, swashbucking adventurism, and foolhardy pubilicity schemes, to a whiskey-swilling Confederate general who defeated every Union force he encountered in New Mexico, only to be sent skulking back to Texas, defeated by the harshness and barrenness of the territory he sought to conquer.

And all from the immensely talented pen of Hampton Sides, author of the equally eye-opening "Ghost Soldiers," the story of the daring liberation by US special forces of the Japanese POW camp at Cabanatuan in the Phillipines toward the end of World War II. Mr. Sides' writing is not to be missed.