BLOOD AND THUNDER An Epic of the American West by Sides, Hampton - 2006

Doubleday. Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. 2006. First Edition. Hardcover. 0385507771 . HC/DJ - near fine. Excellent condition. Book is clean and unmarked. Jacket has two tiny tears to spine top which also affect spine top of hardcover, otherwise only slight wear to corners, not price clipped. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 480 pages; In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people’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 true—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 vanquished—but what did the arrival of these “New Men” portend for the Navajo? Narbona could not have known that “The Army of the West, ” 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 “Manifest Destiny. ” 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. [870] .