A terrific new book is out about a tragic old subject.
"Blood and Thunder" by author/historian Hampton Sides tells what the United States of America did in the name of Manifest Destiny to the American Indian and, to a lesser extent, to Mexico.
I read the book on a recent 14-hour airplane flight to Australia and when I landed I wanted to find Sides and thank him for helping the flight fly by. And I wanted to find an Aborigine and apologize to him, proxylike, since that continent's original inhabitants were treated in roughly the same manner as our Indians.
Now before you go thinking Benson's gone all bleeding-heart liberal, please read the book. It's not hard to find. It's a nationwide bestseller, available in libraries and bookstores. Time magazine included it in its list of the top 10 books of the year. The History Book Club named "Blood and Thunder" its book of the year. Dreamworks has optioned the movie rights.
Sides, who also authored the World War II bestseller "Ghost Soldiers," uses biographical sketches of a handful of characters, led by mountain man/Indian fighter Kit Carson and legendary Navajo leader Narbona, to tell an overarching story about three groups of people — the Spaniards, the Indians and the Americans — all wanting the same not inconsequential chunk of land, namely the American West. (The name alone is a clear indicator of who prevailed.) That includes, by the way, every bit of territory here in the land of the Utah Indians where you and I have built our houses.
It isn't a flattering history — to anyone. Abuse knew no bounds, and Sides relates the details of men behaving badly without taking sides.
"I'm not a political historian. I'm not trying to prove a point," the author said when I reached him at his home in New Mexico. "As a narrative historian I try to spell it out and let the reader decide. History is complicated, and it's not black and white. There's good and bad in the same person, and I think we've reached a point in the evolution of our culture, at least I hope we have, that we can now look at this foundation myth and see these were all human beings."
The book spells out how James K. Polk, elected as a one-term president of the United States in 1844, was obsessed with stretching America's boundaries to the Pacific. The Mexican War was Polk's obsession — it became known as Polk's War — and it was fueled by a national sentiment, whipped to fever pitch by the president, of America's "Manifest Destiny" to possess the continent from sea to shining sea in order to advance "the great experiment of liberty."
That meant bringing American-style democracy to the Mexicans and the Indians.
Because our current president, George W. Bush, seems to have a Polk-like war obsession, I asked Sides about that.
"In the book, I don't try to draw parallels between the Mexican War and what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "But it's hard to ignore the similarities and the echoes. I think Manifest Destiny is alive and well. We have a curious mixture of brutality and idealism in our dealing with others. We don't like to be viewed as conquerers even when we're conquering. We don't really want this land, it's just that we're spreading democracy. I happen to believe democracy is the best form of government, but ramming it down the throats of others may not be the best way to spread it."
Clearly, the sorting out of the American West was full of plenty of that.
I'm not sure the results wouldn't have been the same without all the ramming. The Indians, for all their founders' rights, could hardly have been expected to hang on to such an enormous expanse of land without concessions and compromise. (Consider that the Navajo, after all was said and done, wound up with a reservation area larger than most states that includes all of the traditional Dine' homeland.) And Mexico's loose and lightly populated grip on the land only dated back to Spain's own version of Manifest Destiny. Mexico's claim to what is now the American West, starting with the Mexican revolution in 1821, hardly constituted clear title. Border disputes were inevitable.
But where there might have been diplomacy, respect and consideration, there was mostly might, arrogance and entitlement. And all of it fueled by the notion that our way is better than yours.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.