Fremont’s, and by the creation of trade and migratory routes like the Santa Fe and Oregon trails. More broadly still, he places this war of conquest within the great westward movement made possible by expeditions like John C. Broadly, he describes the acquisition, by force of arms, of the vast Mexican-held territory that would eventually become New Mexico, Arizona, California and Texas. Sides, who told the story of a daring World War II rescue mission in “Ghost Soldiers,” here works on a much larger historical canvas. Sides’s rousing, full-throated rendition of an old story, the making of the American West. The promise and the price of this great mission propel “Blood and Thunder,” Mr. Yet it was the dour, deeply uncharismatic Polk who made real the potent dream of Manifest Destiny: a new American nation stretching from sea to shining sea. Fussy, grim-faced, iron-willed, he was, as Hampton Sides puts it, “plodding and colorless.” In an age that venerated great oratory, he was “a master of the single-entendre.” Like Delaware among the states, he is among those most likely to be left off the list in a game of Name the Presidents. Polk does not loom large in the American collective memory.
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