Why is Mars red? Why is Mars dead?

Our ruddy neighbor bares the bruises of a long lifeless past, a death aeons ago.  But popular assessments fail to factor in a thinking mind behind her horrible demise.  Might her blistered angry complexion come from a more accute illness, a cataclysm sired by some powerful civilization?  If so, her lifeless surface might have hosted all manner of life mere generations ago.  Why so much rusted dust?  What littered her canyons and mountains before the iron oxide grit blanked every inch of her tortured terrain?