Book Description
Often portrayed by past historians as the greatest guide and Indian fighter in the West, Kit Carson (1809–68) has become in recent years a historical pariah—a brutal murderer who betrayed the Navajos, an unwitting dupe of American expansion, and a racist. Many historians now question both his reputation and his place in the pantheon of American heroes. In Kit Carson and the Indians, Tom Dunlay urges us to reconsider Carson yet again. To Dunlay, Carson was simply a man of the nineteenth century whose racial views and actions were much like those of his contemporaries.
Customer Reviews:
In-depth Analysis of a Complex Personality.......2006-11-07
This is an excellent book and is highly recommended for anyone wanting to learn about Kit Carson, especially his relationship with Native Americans in general and the Navajo in particular. I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico where Carson is often denegrated, particularly in regards to his treatment of the Navajo. While Dunlay's book is not an easy read, it does a good job of presenting and discussing the activities and achievements of Kit Carson within the context of his times, analyzing all facets of his life. He was a complex man who lived in changing times.
Compelling, charismatic study.......2006-09-30
An authoritative and spellbinding examination into the life of our great frontiersman Christopher Carson.
Dunlay delves into every crevice, explores behind and under every rock and examines every shred of research to justify Carson's character toward the American Indian. The premise here is to thwart the image of Kit Carson as an "Indian-hater", racist and genocide advocator. The author has done just that.
Yes, in his youth Kit had killed numerous Indians, but only when warranted. Oftentimes it was kill or be killed from the 1820's to early 1840's. There were good Indians and bad. There were good whites and bad. When the mountain man came west, he was another 'tribe' who had battles to fight.
Later in life when Carson became Indian agent, scout, soldier and superintendent of Indian affairs, his entire demeanor towards the Native American changed dramatically. He did support violence but only to the few hostiles. All told he was there to protect and save the Indians from extermination by white encroachment.
His continued and tireless efforts of feeding and clothing hundreds upon hundreds of Indians, promoting the reservation system to separate whites from Indians in order to suppress troubles between the two cultures, etc. are conclusive evidence of his caring.
I read his autobiography several years ago and thought I was well informed, but these memoirs conclude in 1856. Much more happened to Kit (and the nation) up until his death in 1868. This book by Dunlay covers his entire life.
An absorbing and significant read.
tour de force.......2005-11-08
This is a thoroughly researched and balanced treatise on Kit Carson and his complex relationship with Native Americans. Recommended!!!
Average customer rating:
|
Kit Carson: Indian Fighter or Indian Killer?
Manufacturer: University Press of Colorado
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| United States
| Historical
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Old West
| 19th Century
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Expansionism
| 19th Century
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
West
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Southwest
| Native American
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0870813935 |
Customer Reviews:
Presentism Fails Again.......2007-08-30
In the historical profession the term "Presentism" denotes writing a history book or article using the values of the present to judge the events of the past. For instance, apologists for the Confederacy--called neo-Confederates--have attempted to rewrite Civil War history. They attempt to prove--from their modern perspective--that slavery was wrong and had nothing to do with the outbreak of the Civil War because the "noble" leaders of the Confederacy could not have fought for so evil a cause. Much better to claim that they fought for states rights. Similar attitudes damn Presidents Washington and Jefferson for holding slaves despite the fact that abolition was an idea that had barely appeared in the American consciousness of their time. Similarly, other "presentists" damn the whites for taking land from the Indians at a time when taking land from aboriginal inhabitants any where in the world was then the norm. One wonders what sins our generation will be condemned for two or three centuries in the future because we did not have the wisdom to see that far ahead.
In this vein, R.C. Gordon-McCutchan, as editor of "Kit Carson: Indian Fighter or Indian Killer" has collected essays from modern scholars who have done their best to place Carson in his correct time and place. In short these authors have tried to let Carson live by the standards of the mid-19th Century rather than those of the 20th (the book was published in 1996).
Carson lived in a time and place where, since 1607, the Navajo raided first the Spanish, then Mexicans and finally the Americans. During this long period the Navajo also raided the resident Hopi, Pueblo, and Zuni, whose urban-agricultureal life produced a wealth worth stealing. There is some irony in the fact that both the archaeological and historical evidence clearly shows the Navajo were themselves invaders of the area.
The Americans were simply another group to raid as were any other non Navajos of the area. Kit Carson, as a man of the 19th Century, was in reality just carrying on an established pattern, and he did it, according to the research in this book, in a remarkably--for the time-- humane manner. The Navajo rendidtions of his cruelty are mainly, according to this book, legends that were spawned in the 1970 through the 1990s. They were not part of the Navajo opinion of the 1860s,
Timothy R. Roberts Ph.D (Univesity of Missouri 1976)
Customer Reviews:
Straightforward autobiography.......2001-09-04
Kit Carson was everywhere and did just about everything. I must agree with other reviewers and Milo Milton Quaife in his introduction, that because of Carson's nature, the book seems somewhat curtailed of descriptive events. What may have taken a few months to happen, Kit says it all in a paragraph. That aside, he came out west at the age of sixteen to become a mountain man. As time went by he was involved with trapping adventures, expeditions with Fremont, the Mexican War and as an Indian agent. Maybe it was a sign of the times, but Carson certainly does not hesitate to boast about how many Indians he killed during his day to day adventures. This may have been brought about by his upbringing as a young child. The settlers in his part of Missouri where he was living at the time had to "fort" themselves against the activities of hostile Indians. This may have carried on into adulthood. Nevertheless, this was a good book on an extraordinary and remarkable man of the early American west.
Excellent, But Too Short!.......2000-07-19
Kit Carson was a man of few words in life and in his own autobiography. It is unfortunate that such a dynamic individual didn't write down more! Quaife does a terrific job with the notes. Explaining everything that Carson failed to include. This is a common problem as, for example, Kit Carson will say something to the effect: Fought indians today, and Quaife will fill in all of the details about what tribe, how many, who was killed or wounded in both parties, etc. I am fascinated by how much detail is known of Carson's time. Very readable, my only complaint was that it was too short! The editor has included a nicely laid out index. I found the book well worth the purchase price! BTW, for those of you looking for information on William F. Drannon, he is not mentioned anywhere in Carson's autobiography.
Kit explains it all!.......2000-06-22
Disclaimer: Kit Carson is my first cousin, five times removed! And that's why I read this book.
It took a while to sink in, but the compelling feature about Kit's autobiography is the editing. There are extensive footnotes throughout that put Kit's text in historical perspective, point out errors in his memory, and round out the story.
He describes his 16-year life as a Mountain Man in almost monosyllabic terms. In other words, he compresses a whole year into a single paragraph. A short paragraph!
But it gets better when he has something to say about his scouting and Indian relations roles.
Why does it explain it all? Because I have this wanderlust locked up inside me, and I've always wondered where it came from!
A very good book that is well edited........1999-02-01
Christopher Houston Carson was born in 1809 and was reared on the raw Missouri frontier sans a formal education. He was orphaned in childhood, apprenticed as a leather worker, and began his legendary career at the age of sixteen after running away from his employer. Carson joined a wagon train bound for New Mexico and embarked on a journey that spanned the opening of the American West through the subjugation of the Navajo nation.
Numerous books, including cheap dime novels, have been written about Kit Carson and his famed career. It's hard to separate the real Carson from the image honed by these writers over the many decades since his death. Kit Carson was described by a friend as "quiet and unassuming in all his actions...he had endured all imaginable hardships with a steady perserverance and unflinching courage." This is an apt description of Carson and a reading of this autobiography will reinforce that assessment.
Carson wasn't an impressive man: small, round shouldered, fair skinned, long in the body and short in the legs. His appearance was deceptive as he was the West's greatest free lance Indian fighter and the only Brigadier General in the U. S. Army who neither read nor could write anything beyond his own name. Carson was never cowed by his lack of education and consistently surpassed his contemporaries in every job he undertook.
It was in 1856, that Carson prompted by a desire to capitalize on his growing reputation dictated his life story and gave it to Jesse Turley to be used for their mutual benefit, Turley passed it on to Dr. DeWitt Peters who fleshed out Carson's efforts and published a 534 page biography in 1858 entitled, "The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, The Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, From Facts Narrated by Himself."
There was much padding of an unrealistic nature that caused Carson to remark, upon having the book read to him, that he thought Dr. Peters, "had laid it on a leetle too thick." Until 1922, readers were unaware the actual Carson autobiography was a slim 138 pages, straightforward and unadorned, which unlike Peters' book rang with the truth of actual events. Carson's memory was remarkable even though he was somewhat confused and his chronology was in error in several instances.
Editor Quaiffe does an excellent job by supplementing Carson's account. This book is a reliable source although sketchy in pertinent details. Of all the adventurous fur trappers who roamed the frontier, only Kit Carson has become so widely known that he has achieved the status of a legend. This book covers Carson's life through 1856, so it doesn't encompass the highlights of his later career as an army officer, conqueror of the Navajo Nation, Indian agent, and so forth.
Carson was very subjective in selecting those events that would or would not appear in his autobiography. An unpleasant incident not mentioned occurred in 1846, with the Bear Flag Party in California. Carson and others captured Francisco and Ramon de Haro and their uncle, Jose de los Barreyesa. Carson was told by John C. Fremont, "I have no use for these prisoners. Do your duty." Carson construed this remark in its darkest sense and had them shot. Carson failed to mention his Arapaho wife Waa-nibe, Singing Wind, or their daughter. He also forgot his second wife Making Out Road, a Cheyenne, who divorced him Indian style. Carson later married 15 year old Maria Josefa Jaramillo, and they eventually had eight children.
Carson's narrative unknowingly indicts the allegedly benign California Mission System. A Padre from the San Rafael Mission asked him to recover Indians who had fled the mission. Carson chased, fought, and defeated fellow Indians who had sheltered the runaways. The remnants of the mission runaways were returned by Carson to San Rafael's peonage system. Carons's touted respect for Indians' rights is further suspect considering his plan to allow Utes to keep Navajos as slaves or to allow them to be sold to New Mexicans citizens as domestics or farm help. Carson's plan was vetoed.
The effectiveness of this book lies in its simplicity. Carson was famous in his lifetime yet modest about his accomplishments. There is little of the self-advertised showman in Carson; he was a bona-fide legend. There is less difference between the real Kit Carson and his legend than is usually the case with alleged frontier heroes as Buffalo Bill. Carson was a man with admirable qualities and more than a few reprehensible traits yet he was a giant among his peers - a person who inspired legends.
In 1860 while hunting in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, Carson fell under his horse and rolled down a steep slope entangled in his reins. He was severely injured in his chest and never wholly recovered. He died in 1868, a month after his wife. They were transported from Colorado to Taos, New Mexico, and buried near Carson's old home.
Kit Carson was a true frontier icon imbued with mythical qualities and this autobiography supports the myth. There is little of Carson's dark side in this book which isn't unusual as sensitivity for the rights of others wasn't a prevailing trait in the 19th century. His story is interesting and slightly purified but the thoughts, actions, and results are pure Kit Carson.
Book Description
Volume 1 of Kit Carson Days shows Carson running away from his Missouri home at age fifteen in 1826. He joins a caravan headed toward Santa Fe and in the coming years shuttles between poverty and prosperity as a wrangler, teamster, and trapper. He lives all over the unplotted West, helping to open trails, harvesting fur, befriending mountain men, and fighting and trading with Indians. Carson's reputation grows after John C. Frémont engages him as guide in 1842. He proves indispensable to the Pathfinder in three expeditions and plays a part in the Bear Flag Rebellion. The first volume is an encyclopedia of activity in the West during the first part of the nineteenth century, bringing into play such figures as Ewing Young, William Ashley, Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Hugh Glass, John Colter, William Sublette, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, William Bent, Stephen Kearny, President James K. Polk, John Sutter, and Nathaniel Wyeth. This revised edition includes vivid chapters on the mountain man, his character, habits, clothing, and equipment. Edwin L. Sabin, author of Wild Men of the West, concludes with an assessment of Carson's character and place in history. Introducing these volumes is Marc Simmons, an authority on Carson and the author of Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande, also available in a Bison Books edition.
Book Description
In 1826 an undersized sixteen-year-old apprentice ran away from a saddle maker in Franklin, Missouri, to join one of the first wagon trains crossing the prairie on the Santa Fe Trail. Kit Carson (1809–68) wanted to be a mountain man, and he spent his next sixteen years learning the paths of the West, the ways of its Native inhabitants, and the habits of the beaver, becoming the most successful and respected fur trapper of his time.
From 1842 to 1848 he guided John C. Frémont’s mapping expeditions through the Rockies and was instrumental in the U.S. military conquest of California during the Mexican War. In 1853 he was appointed Indian agent at Taos, and later he helped negotiate treaties with the Apaches, Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Utes that finally brought peace to the southwestern frontier.
Ralph Moody’s biography of Kit Carson, appropriate for readers young and old, is a testament to the judgment and loyalty of the man who had perhaps more influence than any other on the history and development of the American West.
Book Description
Kit Carson (1809-1868) has long held a prominent place in the popular imagination of the American West. However, little is known about his family life thanks largely to Carson's own guardianship of his privacy. After almost four decades devoted to researching Kit Carson's personal life, Marc Simmons provides information here to further our understanding of Carson.
Carson's first wife, Waa-Nibe, an Arapaho, died in 1838, after the couple had been together only three years. His second wife, Making-Out-Road, was a formidable Cheyenne woman who divorced him after fourteen months. Three years later, in 1843, Carson married Josefa Jaramillo, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Taos family. Seven of their children survived, and the couple also adopted several Indian children in the course of their long marriage that ended when Josefa died after the birth of her seventh baby.
Viewing Kit Carson's career as a husband and father sheds new light on the life choices he made. The changing economy of the 1840s made it increasingly difficult for a trapper and scout to support a growing family. Carson's years as an Indian agent in the 1850s provided him stability although he was never able to spend as much time with his family as any of them would have liked and he was never able to bring in a comfortable income.
The Kit Carson Simmons portrays offers a welcome change from recent politicized interpretations of Carson's actions.
After almost four decades devoted to researching Kit Carson's personal life, Simmons provides information about Carson's family life, including as much as can be determined about his three wives.
Customer Reviews:
The Domestic Life of an American Frontiersman .......2007-10-10
Nobody in his era survived more adventures and did more hard traveling than Kit Carson. His dispatch duties during the Mexican War totalled 16,000 miles -- most of that by horseback. In the first six years of his marriage to his third wife, he spent only six months at home in Taos. Carson was restless, and also uniquely qualified to play a major role in the far-flung events taking place across the Western U.S.
That is by way of saying that Carson was hardly domesticated. Based on very limited information this book looks into Carson's life with his three wives. With the first, Waa-nibe, an Arapahoe woman, he seems to have enjoyed domestic bliss. After she died he took up residence with Making Out Road, a beautiful and willful Cheyenne woman in what proved to a relationship from hell. After escaping from -- or being thrown out of the teepee by -- Making Out Road, he married Josefa, a Mexican woman of respectable family from Taos.
It was apparently a good marriage -- although Carson was rarely there and, moreover, never earned any money. In the census of 1850, when he was 41 years old, the value of his property totalled just over $200. Carson, however, apparently was a loving and responsible parent. He put his half-Arapaho daughter in school in Missouri and raised not only his own children in Taos but adopted several Indian orphans.
This is a good book, as much about the comings and goings of Kit Carson, as it is about his family relationships. The author tells of the fate of his wives and children and has included a number of photographs of family members. There's a large literature about Carson and little information about him that has not already been explored, but this book gives a different slant on his life than other biographies.
Smallchief
The Whole Kit Carson Story.......2004-04-26
Kit Carson lived a life that many young men would have liked to have lived. He seemingly was in all the right places at the time that a nation was being born. He grew from a simple kid to being an American Patriot.
Simmons book cpatures the real Kit Carson, the man, the family, the life and times--it is not a novel, it contains 35 pages of documented footnotes--by one of the best historians of the west.
At a time when the slave trade was still happening, he raised several Indian children, along with his own, by buying the kids from the slave traders. It is a book that helps anyone understand time and place. The book has been nominated for a national award.
Book Description
1895. Ellis is the author of stories for The Flying Boys Series, Deerfoot Series, Boys Banner Series, Foreign Adventure Series, Wyoming Valley Series and many more writes a biography of Kit Carson, hunter, trapper, guide, Indian Agent and Colonel in the United States Army and one of America's true heroes. Edward Ellis's research includes original sources along with material exclusively commissioned for this book. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
Download Description
There could be no doubt, however, of the destination of the redskin, and Carson and his brave warrior were equally persistent with their horses. The ground flew beneath their hoofs. Across the stretch of prairie, along the bank of the rushing streams, around the rocks, over mountains, through torrents, they forced their way, with no thought of turning back or checking the speed of their animals. Occasionally the bright eyes of the pursuers glanced at the ground in front, when the displaced gravel or the indentation in the soft earth showed they had not lost the trail.
Book Description
Kit Carson was shown on the cover of an old dime novel slaying six Indians with one hand while protecting a fair maiden with the other. Stories about him, mainly apocryphal, circulated well before his death in 1868 and have been handed down in a multitude of biographies. Now Harvey L. Carter joins with Thelma S. Guild to present the fullest, most authoritative biography of Kit Carson ever written. Carefully separating myth from fact, the authors draw on a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, including private letters. Their scrupulous restoration of Kit Carson in his geographical and historical setting proves that scholarship can have entertaining results: Kit Carson: A Pattern for Heroes is a cracking good adventure story.
Customer Reviews:
Not as Poor a Work as Some Think.......2005-10-04
Few individuals of the nineteenth century have received more extended or favorable treatment from historians that Kit Carson. Frontiersman, fur trader, mountain man, guide, scout, Indian agent, and soldier were all appropriate descriptive terms for Carson. But the authors of this biography would attach the term "hero" to Carson as well. "He was and has remained one of America's most widely known and most deserving heroes," the authors assert (p. xi). Although there is a feeling of encountering a sacred relic, Guild's and Carter's "Kit Carson" is a fine biography. It is scholarly, well-organized, admirably documented, and certainly the most authoritative biography of Carson to appear by the 1980s.
There is also a touch of humor in the wry way in which the authors describe certain incidents. In a description of Carson's sojourn as a mountain man Guild and Carter noted: "When the trapper were not hunting meat, feeding their horses cottonwood bark, cleaning their guns, mending saddles or bridles, sharpening knives or axes, building corrals or forts, or doing whatever other tasks they felt desirable or necessary, they did as they pleased" (p. 51). The humor of this statement is obvious. Could they have done otherwise? Certainly Guild's and Carter's "Kit Carson will find a place as a benchmark in the historiography of the subject for years.
The authors take a standard approach toward their subject, organizing the material chronologically. They do not discount the years Kit Carson spent in the mountains learning its lore during the l820s and l830s, but they greatly emphasize the role he played later as guide and scout for John C. Fremont and as an expert on the Indian affairs of the Southwest. They credit Carson with much of the success of Fremont's expeditions during the mid-1840s, a recognition that seems apparent to most observers. They also commend Carson's actions as an advisor and guide for the Army during the Indian war of 1854-1855 and as commander of the difficult campaign against Navaho warriors in 1863-1864. Guild and Carter observe that Carson, although no friend of Indians, respected and in certain ways admired them. Always, they assert, he stood for just and reasonable relations between the two societies.
A History of the Man.......2000-04-05
Much like the pulp-novel persona that sprung from the legends of Kit Carson, the real man was a master of life in the West. From his early days as a mountain man to his later life as an Indian agent, Guild and Carter do a good job of illustrating the life of Carson and his role in the opening of the West. Throughout the book, the authors keep the focus on Carson and do not let the wider events in which he was involved overshadow the man. On one level this approach diminishes the importance of those events and Carson's role in them, but it also seems to provide a good illustration of how Carson viewed those events.
A sympathetic but muddled biography.......2000-02-11
This biography managed to make mundane and boring one of the most fascinating characters of the opening of the West. The fat-free, salt-free prose relentlessly rambles on with no distinction between events of monumental importance (Bear Flag Revolt, e.g. - one page) and tedious details of Carson's children. No explanatory detail is given about saddlery,horses,firearms,clothing,etc., nor is sufficient description given to the geography of the country in which he spent so much time. Most of all, the book suffers from a lack of detailed maps. On the bright side, the book seems well researched and documented and the sources are clearly indicated. Best of all, in this era of historical demonization, there is a genuine affection and sympathy for Kit Carson, quite convincing me that he was not only a fascinating pioneer but an exemplary character.
Useful information but confusing presentation........1998-01-13
Although this account of the famous explorer's life and adventures contained well documented and interesting information, I found the presentation rambling and often outright confusing. The first chapters were arranged according to specific expeditions, but the purpose of each expedition was poorly explained and it was easy to loose track of the individuals present and the chronology of events. Occasionally, events referred to in early chapters were not actually described until later chapters (i.e. the Court Martial of Fremont). Unfortunately the disjointed narrative distracted significantly from the informative content of the book.
Average customer rating:
|
Kit Carson (First Biographies)
Jan Gleiter , and
Kathleen Thompson
Manufacturer: Steck-Vaughn
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Historical
| Biographies
| People & Places
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0811493520 |
Books:
- LeMay (Great Generals)
- Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong
- Life and Campaigns of Stonewall Jackson (Battlefield Evangelism)
- Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
- Mischling, second degree: My childhood in Nazi Germany
- MY FATHER'S SECRET WAR: A MEMOIR
- New Seeds of Contemplation
- Ninth Key (The Mediator, Book 2)
- Once Upon a Crime (The Sisters Grimm, Book 4)
- Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Ready, Set, Grow!: A What's Happening to My Body
- Gumbo Shop : A New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook
- To Swim Across the World
- Who's Who in Age of Alexander the Great: Prosopography of Alexander's Empire
- A-List, The: Back in Black - Book #5: An A-List Novel
- Elementary Solid State Physics: Principles and Applications
- DK Readers: Journey of a Humpback Whale
- The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman
- The Paradox of Progress: Can Americans Regain Their Confidence in a Prosperous Future
- Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics Volume 2
Kit Carson and His Three Wives: A Family History (Calvin P. Horn Lectures in Western History and Culture.)
Kit Carson's Autobiography (Bison Book)
Son of Old Man Hat: A Navaho Autobiography
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West
A Newer World : Kit Carson John C Fremont And The Claiming Of The American West
