Kit Carson and the Indians

Abstract

Carson and the Indians. By Tom Dunlay. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. xxii, 537. Illustrations. $45.00.) Thomas W. Dunlay, writer, historian, and author of Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 186090 (1982), has written a valuable study of famed frontiersman Christopher Kit Carson. The book is not a comprehensive biography of Carson, nor is it intended to be. The book's principal intent is to explore how Carson interacted with his Native-American contemporaries. However, the book does more than that. Carson is one of a pantheon of erstwhile national heroes whose reputations have been impugned by the successive waves of revisionist scholarship that have rippled forward from the 1960s. Revisionists have called Carson a genocidal racist (9) and likened him to Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, and-believe it or not-Oliver North. Dunlay thoroughly assays these charges by investigating how Carson related to Indians and by contextualizing those relationships with respect to the standards of Carson's time and to the values that Carson personally espoused. As Dunlay himself says, the intention is not to write a simple brief for the defense but to try to understand Carson in his human complexity(17). In 1809, Carson was born into Missouri's hardscrabble, feisty, and fractious Scotch-Irish backcountry. The chronic insecurity of this backcountry promoted an ethic that exalted force above reason and that sanctioned violence as a mechanism for solving problems and defending personal honor. The Scotch-Irish generally had poor relations with the natives, and in all probability, Carson was raised to dislike and fear Indians. It seems, then, that Carson's formative years would have cast him as an Indian-hater. However, such was not the case. In his years as a mountain man, Carson adapted to beyond-the-frontier exigencies. He treated the natives of the Rocky Mountains as situation required: as friends, trading partners, or, especially in regards to the Blackfeet, deadly competitors. Carson married an Arapaho woman who bore him two children, and when she died, he married a Cheyenne. His relations with Indians seemed not to be determined by racial prejudice, and when he did combat Indians, it was within the framework of the law of retribution, a law that all men of the Rocky Mountains-native and white-understood and respected. Dunlay interprets Carson as very much a Middle Ground (43) figure who succeeded because he was able to operate perceptively within a foreign host culture. Carson's chance meeting on a Missouri River steamboat with John C. Fremont put him on a trajectory to national fame. Fremont contracted the services of the experienced mountain man for several western expeditions, and Carson distinguished himself as a savvy (and occasionally violent) guide. Fremont's published reports, which recounted Carson's daring exploits, made Carson a nationally-acclaimed frontier hero and bestowed upon him a reputation of mythic proportions. After he completed his service to Fremont, Carson was appointed as a federal Indian agent in New Mexico. From 1854 to 1861, Carson mediated affairs with various Indian groups including the Utes, the Apaches, and the Indians of Taos Pueblo. During the Civil War, Carson served in the Union Army; at the war's conclusion he decided to assist the army in its campaign against the Navajos. The campaign was orchestrated by the imperious General James H. …