Hampton Sides
A Magnificent History of How the West Was Really Won - a Sweeping Tale of Shame and Glory,In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his peopleâ€™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. He had come to see if the rumors were trueâ€”if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquishedâ€”but what did the arrival of these â€œNew Menâ€ portend for the Navajo?,Narbona could not have known that â€œThe Army of the West,â€ 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 â€œManifest Destiny.â€ 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.
History,Nonfiction,North American Hi...,American History,Biography,Westerns,Native Americans,War,Historical,Literature,19th Century,Literature,American
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West