Tracing the Nautilus

Abstract

Tracing the Nautilus Virginia Scharff (bio) Susan Lee Johnson, Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 528 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. $29.95. Long ago, I did Susan Johnson a disservice. After hearing a conference version of her landmark essay on George Armstrong Custer and gender, "A Memory Sweet to Soldiers," I opined that the last thing we needed in Western history was another anything about Custer.1 This is my chance to say in print: I was wrong. Johnson's queering of Custer was exactly what we needed. Her prize-winning Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000) showed how gendering men's history and attending to the centrality of race revealed a whole new way of understanding the California Gold Rush and the history of the American West. Over the years since, her interventions and innovations have shaped the field, and my own work (chiefly about women) in profound ways. I believe my error arose from alarm at the turn from "women" to "gender" as the preeminent subject of feminist scholarship. I worried that women had never gotten their due as subjects of history, that before that ever happened they would once again be left off the page. It turned out that once again I was wrong. Indeed, the turn to gender, along with the work of women scholars and activists of color who critiqued racist history, decentered white women as a subject, and birthed a far richer, more promising history of women and femaleidentified and genderqueer people than I could have imagined at the time. Johnson's new book, Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West, represents a landmark in the fulfillment of that promise, but also more. In this sometimes ruminative, sometimes gripping volume, Johnsons shows how women's history does not simply add to, but transforms our broader understanding of history. Carolyn Brucken and I argued in our 2010 Autry Museum exhibition and book, Home Lands: How Women Made the West, that seeing women in history makes history look different. Here, Johnson shows us exactly how that works in a novel work of scholarship and lyrical narrative, enriched and enlivened with memoir, loaded with impressive research, careful citation, historiography, and bibliography. [End Page 187] Titles should explain what a book is about. Every word of a title should do some work, as is the case here. This book is about writing, and about Kit Carson, erstwhile army scout, explorer and fighter, Great Westerner, Dear Old Kit. But the colon between the main and subtitles knocks both Carson and The West off their pedestals: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West. Johnson has set out to look beyond the little blond man, Christopher Carson, to those who built a legend around him. She tells some of their stories as a means of opening up an inquiry into how The West (as a set of places, and as what we say about those places, and why we might say those things) has changed. In order to even see these stories, we have to clear away monumental heroes. 2020 has seen many such topplings, both imaginatively and literally across our nation and others. In New Mexico, monuments to Kit Carson and other conquering soldiers have been hauled down or disappeared. The places where they stood are empty or encased in blank plywood boxes festooned with public health notices and graffiti. The effort to replace the myths they represent will be earnest, sometimes angry, and always partial. It will require considerable thinking, action, time, and, yes, writing. It's not an easy task even for those of us who do much of our iconoclasm within the four corners of offices. Idols can be very insistent about occupying central places. I have experience with importunate idols. When I wrote a book titled, The Women Jefferson Loved (2010), I was determined to try to understand the lives of the women in Thomas Jefferson's biracial family. I wanted to show how knowing about those women changed our understanding of Jefferson's life and work. I thought a lot about the function of "love...