Christopher (Kit) Carson was legendary almost before he was out of his 20s (he even gets a shout-out in “Moby-Dick”). A skilled hunter, trapper, scout and explorer, he guided John Charles Fremont on the exploratory expeditions that earned Fremont the nickname “The Pathfinder” (when the true pathfinder was Carson). He admired the Native Americans he lived among (two of his three wives were Indian), and they in turn respected a man who took the trouble to learn their customs and languages. One Navajo called him “a very pure White Man.” And yet, he was not just a more than occasional–and completely remorseless–Indian killer, but the point man for the Navajos’ removal from their lands. He was truly a man caught between cultures. Though able to “read” almost any landscape in which he found himself, he was illiterate. Confident in the wilderness, he floundered in a city, such as Washington, where his insecurities put him at the mercy of men who were in no way his equal. No man ever loved the wilderness more than Carson, and no one ever did more to help, unwittingly, to destroy it.
Whenever Carson appears, “Blood and Thunder” takes off. When he exits, it drags. Sides never settles for one word or one anecdote when he can use two or three. But verbosity is a minor sin when set against his superb description of a government’s arrogant invasion of foreign territory, and its subjugation of people it never bothers to understand. This is a cautionary tale with no expiration date.
