HAMPTON SIDES WRITES about what happens when worlds collide. He unravels the moments of chaotic first contact between cultures, and shows us the men who behave, often brutally, in those moments.
He did this for New Mexico in his classic Blood and Thunder, where he documents the Anglo occupation of the Southwest through the life of Kit Carson. He neither builds a monument to Carson nor pulls it down, but gives us an x-ray view of one man’s complexity, moral ambiguity, and bad choices. He shows how people, often heroic, are frequently destroyed by the systems that made them.
He dropped by the other day to talk about his life in New Mexico and his adventures as a writer.
Why is Santa Fe unique?
There’s something about the swirl of cultures here, sometimes colliding cultures, sometimes collaborating cultures but old cultures, Spanish and Native American, and Anglos, the more recent arrivals. There’s something about the weird combination of high altitude and southern latitude that feels a little bit, well, it’s probably the closest thing I think we have in the United States to an expat community of people who feel like they’re living in another country – related to the United States but not exactly 100% in the United States.
I think we should become a city state like the way Athens was, away from the empire, with no one to bother us.
Yeah, and instead of being surrounded by oceans, we’re surrounded by lots of barren land in all directions. It does feel like we’re isolated from the US, physically but also mentally, spiritually. I love the people, the cross section of unusual people, a lot of mavericks, a lot of free thinkers. And, yeah, a lot of writers, although I don’t honestly think I hang out much with other writers. But I am good friends with Doug Preston.
I think there’s just something really special about this town. It’s fragile though; I worry we’re growing too fast and there’s probably not enough water to sustain whatever growth seems to be happening now.
You made a decision to stay here after working at Outside magazine.
I came with the magazine from Chicago and raised our three boys here. Once you do that, you develop so many roots that there’s just no way. We could never leave even if we decided we wanted to, because we have so many connections and friends. Too many times when I’m trying to write a book and I’m against some deadlines, I almost have to go somewhere else for a little while just to get the book written because there’s so much going on, so many friends, so many art openings.
Is there a through line in some of your explorations?
It’s only in retrospect that you begin to see patterns or themes. I guess one of the themes that keeps cropping up — and some of this came from being an magazine editor at Outside — is survival stories. What combination of traits that people are able to summon within themselves? Sometimes it’s traits they didn’t even know they had until they found themselves in an extreme situation, a survival situation, a difficult expedition, or a wartime scenario. What combination of traits are people able to summon to get them through to the other side? That seems to be a theme I’m drawn to repeatedly. Maybe part of it is vicarious; I’m thinking to myself, would I be able to get through the Bataan Death March? Would I be able to get through Captain Cook’s third voyage? I think readers who are drawn to exploration narratives are asking that same question: how would I have survived this?
We’re all so soft.
We’re all so spoiled and entitled. I am drawn, repeatedly, to older stories where people really knew what suffering and sacrifice was.
In your new book, The Wide Wide Sea, you spend a lot of time showing how extraordinary someone like the 18th century explorer Captain Cook was…
I certainly try to portray him with all of his faults and shortcomings too, but I’m amazed by the guy. I’m amazed by what he accomplished, that he was able to do in three voyages around the world. I think we forget how hard it was back then without GPS, without maps, because he was making the maps. There weren’t maps for these parts of the world where he was exploring. We now kind of think, oh, it must have been a Carnival cruise. They just hung out in Polynesia.
Cook did this horrible thing, where he brutalized a bunch of islanders for no real reason. It’s something very dark.
Captain Cook, on his third voyage, started to display a number of alarming tendencies, including violence towards his own men and towards natives. These were qualities that really were not apparent in his earlier voyages. He would snap, and a number of historians and biographers over the centuries have asked what was ailing him, what was wrong with him, did he have brain damage, did he have a parasite of some sort?
On the island of Moriya, which is a sister island to Tahiti, Cook demanded the natives return a goat of his, and it wasn’t returned after a few days. So he went on a scorched earth campaign across the island trying to find the goat – burning homes, destroying canoes. All for this goat that seemed to have outsize importance in his own mind, because he had brought it all the way from London, and it was destined to reproduce on the islands and fulfill the ambitions of King George III, who really wanted to bring proper English farms to Tahiti. Why did Cook do this? His officers couldn’t understand it, they thought he was being cruel, and this was just bizarre. It would take decades for this little island to recover psychically and even physically from this scorched earth campaign. It was a descent into some kind of madness.
You frequently show us first contact between civilizations.
First contact was an amazing thing, there was this magical brief moment where anything could happen, where both sides were equally astonished by the other and it could become a violent situation, it could become a beautiful situation, to find an island that had never been on a map before. The very first time Cook comes through the Hawaiian Islands, he anchors off of Kauai and the natives apparently thought that they were giant manta rays emerging from the sea, flapping their fins, but it was the action of the sails.
Other native islanders thought that they had come from outer space. They’d never seen white people before, they’d never seen pockets and they saw the whites reach into their bodies and pull out treasure. They’d never seen people smoking before, and so they called them the volcano people because they’re seething smoke from their mouths.
Each island, it’s like a slightly different world, so it’s sort of like Captain Kirk and Star Trek, going to another planet and another galaxy and each culture is just slightly different from the last one. It was a lot for me to get my arms around.
You also tell the story of James Earl Ray, the Martin Luther King assassin.
I grew up in Memphis and I was six-years-old when it happened. My father was a lawyer in Memphis for this firm that represented King. I remember just getting an earful of stuff from my dad about what was coming, and how worried he was. I was just old enough to remember the emotional texture of it as a city.
I’ve heard it said that a writer has to always go back to the place where they came from, and for me it was to go back to not just the place, but the time, the moment, the seismic moment. It is the biggest thing that ever happened in Memphis, and it’s still unfinished business in Memphis. There’s still a lot of conspiracy theories, and a lot of doubt about did James Earl Ray really do it? So I was interested in just deconstructing and then reconstructing this moment.
I started getting into James Earl Ray and what he was reading, what he was thinking, all the lies that he told, all the stories that were half-true, and I decided to structure the story as a story of three chases. The first is J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI chasing Martin Luther King and trying to ruin the movement and ruin him and fuck up his legacy. The second chase is James Earl Ray chasing Martin Luther King, stalking him. And then the third chase is J. Edgar Hoover chasing James Earl Ray around the world, literally around the world.
It was like Robert Johnson’s song Hellhound on My Trail, making a deal with the devil, so he could play guitar at the Crossroads, and finally, knowing someone’s coming for you. So the story went in a different direction, with the blues and barbecue and the river.
What produces a man like James Earl Ray? It’s all too relevant because of the scary-ass things that are happening in this country.
Martin Luther King was pushing this thing called The Poor People’s Campaign. He was interested in the problem of multi-generational systemic poverty and what it does to people. It was focused on Black folk and on Appalachia and other impoverished areas.
The irony is that James Earl Ray was exactly the kind of person that the campaign was aimed at. He came from unbelievable poverty in southern Illinois, close to the Mississippi River, sometimes called Little Dixie. You might say white trash, very poor people with a lot of strong racial ideas.
His family was so poor they didn’t have any heat, so they took apart their house bit by bit and burned it for firewood, to the point where the house fell in on itself. That’s how poor they were.
Poverty is one factor here. But also a weird kind of ambition – Ray wanted to do something big. He wanted to be known for something. He was kind of a hustler. He also was someone who loved to thumb his nose at authority, any kind of institutional authority. He was never as happy as he was when he was on the lam.
By the way, I did come to the not very satisfying conclusion that Ray in fact, bought the gun, did the deed, pulled the trigger.
Interestingly, he also became enamored of George Wallace. He even volunteered for the George Wallace campaign in California. Now, Wallace didn’t say Hey, crazy people out there, go kill King. But the things he was saying were so incendiary and an inflammatory you can see how the culture could have propelled him in some way.
Do you worry about some of the similar language that Trump uses?
Yeah. These demagogues put this stuff out there and you don’t know how it’s being received by crazy people who have a tendency to violence, who want to do something and have their name imprinted on history.
King had a premonition he would die…
The mountaintop speech. People have said, oh, well, God, he must have had this premonition that he was gonna die the next day. In fact, he gave versions of that speech for the previous six months.
But, yes, he thought his time was coming, somehow, someway, somewhere. He talked about that even the night before, mentioning one of my sick white brothers. I think he just more generally had a premonition that someone was gonna take him out.
After all, he got daily death threats and he must have known as he stood up there on that balcony, that this was one of the most exposed spots. At the Lorraine Motel, it’s like he’s just up on a stage.
I think he was resigned to it. I think he, well, that’s the biggest, the most amazing thing about King is the courage to go into these situations every single day. I think that day, as that shot came in, I bet he thought, this is the way it’s supposed to happen. I’m supposed to die.
What’s your process of constructing your books?
I read as much as I can get my hands on and I buy a lot of books; I’m very much old fashioned, I need books. I underline my books. I’ve got an amazing library full of ruined books.
Then there’s the part when you physically go to the site, it gives you a lot of confidence when you’re writing those scenes. You think you know a place, but you have to squint a lot to see it as it was. I do a lot of squinting when I’m going on my travels.
I go to local bookstores and find something like local history, local cultural history, local natural history, what kind of plants are growing there or what birds are there. Because you never know, there might be one little teeny detail that makes the place come alive on the page.
And then the question becomes, well, how many details are too many? Someone recently asked me how do you keep from chasing rabbits? Too many rabbits? I thought about it and I said I try to only chase the rabbits that I think I can catch.
I do most of my research myself. I know some historians who hire undergrads or even grad students to do a lot of their work, a lot of their research. But I couldn’t do that.
You have managed to get yourself a great job.
It’s a dream job.
Of course there are moments of drudgery, when you’re in the midst of writing and trying to meet deadlines. It’s not always fun. But I basically get paid to get in a time machine and meet people and describe situations. So I’m going to keep doing it ‘til I croak, I guess.
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