Kit Carson and the Indians, by Tom Dunlay, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2000, $45.
LLong, long ago, when I was in grade school, I read a few accounts about Kit Carson and wrote up a report whose brown-paper cover was cut in the shape of the famous trapper’s silhouette, designed to show off his buckskin jacket and coonskin cap. I was proud of that report. As far as I knew, Kit Carson was an American hero and nobody was saying otherwise. But some people were questioning his heroic stature even then (including many Navajo Indians, no doubt), and the old scout’s critics have become far more numerous through our revisionist years. Yet those people today who say that Kit Carson was nothing more than a simple-minded racist who killed lots of Indians are farther from the mark than we hero-worshipping kids were 40 or 50 years ago. Author Tom Dunlay makes that point clear in this fine 525-page biography, even though he writes that he “did not idolize Kit Carson as a child.”
While Dunlay confesses that his book was not meant to be the definitive biography of Kit Carson, it is a thorough, balanced account that shuns any one-dimensional view of the man or simplistic interpretations of his actions. As the title would suggest, the book focuses on Carson’s relations with Indians, but that would be impossible, Dunlay points out, “without understanding something about his character and the environment that shaped him.” Yes, Carson did round up the Navajos for the infamous 1863-64 Long Walk, yet it was not his intention to cause suffering and death (though there turned out to be plenty of that). Carson, according to the author, “believed that he was carrying out a task necessary to insure peace and security” in New Mexico Territory and that a reservation far from Navajo country was better than war. More than a few times, Carson spoke up for the rights of Indians, and in his later years he was putting most of the blame for Indian vs. white conflicts on blundering, aggressive white settlers and soldiers. Toward the end of Carson’s life, there were men who said of him, “The Indians had no truer friend.”
Being illiterate, Carson never read all those dime novels and newspaper accounts that portrayed him as a buckskin-clad Indian-slayer. But he knew about them. “He never seems to have confused himself with the fictional character who appeared under his name on the printed page, and who sometimes irked and sometimes amused him,” writes Dunlay. On occasion he was an Indian fighter, but he was not an Indian hater. On the frontier, it was necessary to fight sometimes, whether you were a mountain man bent on survival or a military commander on a campaign. The author makes a seemingly simple point, but one that is often forgotten or denied: “Kit Carson lived in a real world with real Indians, and his relations with them were not simple.” And that world was the 19th-century Western frontier, not 21st-century America.
Some of the same points about Carson that Dunlay makes are also made by David Roberts in another 2000 publication, A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West (Simon & Shuster, New York, $25). Carson was guide for soldier-explorer Frémont on three expeditions into the Western wilderness, and together they did more than their share to encourage and foster Anglo-American expansion. Roberts portrays Carson as far more of a hero than Frémont, who certainly wasn’t as honest or as modest as Kit. Carson believed in loyalty, courage, keeping his word and doing his duty–even if his duties were not always pleasant and sometimes led to violence against American Indians. Those critics who don’t see Carson as heroic are perhaps setting standards that no man of his time could have lived up to…and how many of us today could have done better by anybody’s standards?
Louis Hart
