THE COMPLEXITIES OF KIT CARSON 
                                              By Steven Emanuel
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area books
                                                                 Weeks starting March 15, 2009
                                                                 Vol. 11, No. 77
            "Blood and Thunder, the Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West"  (by Hampton Sides; now available in paperback.)     It sounds like something you'd find at an airport bookstall, shelved between "The Nudist Camp Murders" and "Flying Saucers Ate My Dog."   But be not deceived; hidden behind that title is an excellent book. It is well-written, full of interesting information, and intensely thought-provoking--for the name of Kit Carson is one to provoke arguments, even today.
            Everyone who went to school in the United States--at least, west of the Mississippi--must have learned about Kit Carson.   His name is all over the landscape: you can drive up through Carson Pass and down along the Carson River, all the way to the capital city of Nevada, whose name you can guess.   Trapper, explorer, pathfinder, Indian fighter, he figured in the Mexican War and in the expansion of the United States to the Pacific.   Although he was a modest man who never sought the limelight, his reputation grew bigger than life and became the stuff of legend.   And so he became a piece of American mythology, a John Wayne-like character who fought against evildoers and rescued the weak and helpless.   In this book Mr. Sides looks behind the myth and tells us who Carson really was. 
            In 1826 Carson, aged 17, left his Missouri home.  After heading west on the Santa Fe Trail, he trapped and explored over the entire western third of what is today the United States.   He was intelligent, able, energetic, resourceful, and soft-spoken--and people tended to like and trust him.   Although not by nature a leader,  he was an extremely valuable follower, in particular to the mercurial John C. Fremont, who found him almost indispensible, and who, by praising him in dispatches, helped make the name of Kit Carson famous.  Fremont was known as "The Pathfinder," but most of the paths were actually found by Carson.   Through his wide acquaintance Carson learned to speak Spanish, French, and several Indian languages.   But he never learned to read or write, even in English.
            It was his work as a capable assistant that got his reputation into trouble.   He was known as a man who understood Indians, and knew how to "handle" them.   But when Fremont, his admired leader, told him to exact vengeance for an Indian attack, that was exactly what he did.   Locating a tranquil Klamath village, Carson and his men cold-bloodedly killed as many Indians as they could find.   It didn't concern him that these might not be the same Indians that had committed the original attack.   Modern scholarship has established that the original offenders had not been Klamaths at all; they were Modocs.  But to Carson it was all the same.  They were  Indians, and he had been instructed to show the Indians who was boss.
            Later in Carson's life this sorry incident was replayed on a much larger scale.   In 1863 Brigadier General James Henry Carleton, military commander of New Mexico, conceived a "solution" to the problem of the Navajos.   This tribe had a history of  warfare with the New Mexican population, both Hispanic and American, a tradition of mutual raiding and kidnapping that had gone on for hundreds of years.  Although fault lay on both sides, Carleton decided to put an end to the troubles by removing the Navajo en masse from their ancestral lands and sending them to a remote place called Bosque Redondo, an inhospitable hole far from the Navajos' home.   Carson was assigned to do the nasty job, and he executed it with great success, using a scorched-earth policy.    He and his soldiers systematically destroyed the Indians' crops and orchards and made it impossible for them to survive.   Reduced to a state of starvation, the Navajos at last had no choice but to give themselves up and be marched--four hundred miles--to Bosque Redondo, where they remained in increasing misery for several years.   Eventually word of their situation made it back to Washington, and after a fact-finding visit by General William T. Sherman  they were released and allowed to walk back to their ancestral lands-- those who were left.  Of the nine thousand Navajos who had been sent to Bosque Redondo, about three thousand died. 
            Carson was not a talkative or self-analytical man.   No doubt he would have been unwilling to address the question, but if he had, he might have said that he was a patriot and was only following orders.   Once he had even remarked that most of the Indian troubles "arose from the aggressions of  whites."  Yet somehow he never thought that what he did was wrong. 
            This book is marvelous therapy for those who like to think of the old West as a romantic place.   It was a terrible place, where, as author Sides remarks, no one was an outlaw, because there wasn't any law.   Reading about the injustices and cruelties of that time are enough to make one ill.   Yet "Blood and Thunder" is very much worth reading, not least for its wealth of detail about early California and New Mexico.   And that isn't all.
            History, at its best, is more than a recitation of events.   This book  raises deep questions about personal conscience and national honor. 
            "Blood and Thunder, The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West," by Hampton Sides.   First paperback edition: Anchor Books, 2007, 578 pp, $15.95.

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        Steven Emanuel is a regular London-based theater reviewer for artssf.com.
    Coverage of theater in London or New York stems from the observation that those plays, if vital, gradually make their way to the West Coast.
   These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly)will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists, and a few departures into books (by authors of the region) and theater as well.
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