For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of, and I was ashamed of it, most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.”

He told the Senate: “A deed has been done from which the country will not be able to recover for a long time, if ever it has dropped a curtain between the present and the future, which to me is impenetrable.” Nicholas Trist, the American envoy sent to Mexico City to negotiate the treaty, later recalled sitting down with the Mexican officials and trying to hide his guilt about concluding a treaty that sheared from Mexico nearly half of its territory: “Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was strong…. Calhoun of South Carolina, who had at first so staunchly supported the war (as a way to extend slavery), began to have his doubts.

Grant, to name one prominent doubter who actually fought in the conflict, would call the Mexican War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Even Sen. And as they marched, they chanted-”īlood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West As Manuelito put it, “We wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so.” They continued marching in the direction the coyote had run, toward the country they had told their young children so much about. When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time, the Navajos fell to their knees and wept. Somewhere in the midst of it walked Barboncito, wearing his new moccasins. The straggle of exiles spread out over ten miles. In yet another mass exodus, this one voluntary and joyful, the entire Navajo Nation began marching the nearly four hundred miles toward home. But some of them were so restless to get started that the night before they were to leave, they hiked ten miles in the direction of home, and then circled back to camp-they were so giddy with excitement they couldn’t help themselves. The Navajos would have an army escort to feed and protect them.

After Barboncito, Manuelito, and the other headmen left their X marks on the treaty, Sherman told the Navajos they were free to go home. Still, it was a vast domain, nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, an area nearly the size of the state of Ohio. The Navajos agreed to live on a new reservation whose borders were considerably smaller than their traditional lands, with all four of the sacred mountains outside the reservation line. “We do not want to go to the right or left,” he said, “but straight back to our own country!” A few days later, on June 1, a treaty was drawn up.

Blood and thunder by hampton sides