Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man

Remley (Crooked Road: The Story of the Alaska Highway) separates the myth from the man in this engrossing portrait of frontiersman Carson (1809%E2%80%931868), Dime novels about Carson began to appear well before his death, ruthlessly exploiting his name in fanciful fictions. In the unheroic reality, as Remley tells it, Carson left Missouri at age 16 for a life as a trapper and mountain man, "traveling the Rockies and the Far West, fighting with and living among Indians, getting revenge, killing while being shot at, recovering stolen horses, wading freezing rivers, hunting game, and surviving short days and long nights in snowbound winter camps." Marrying his third wife in 1843, he survived an Indian attack while a guide and adviser on John Fr%C3%A9mont's 1840s Oregon-California expeditions; published reports of those expeditions brought Carson unwanted fame. Contrasting dangerous days and rip-roaring action with poignant moments of Carson's family life, Remley challenges recent revisionist representations of Carson as a "trigger-happy" outlaw and scoundrel. Instead, the nomadic Carson emerges as an aggressive, helpful, and caring man, who "matured intellectually and ethically as he grew older." Remley's Old West overview permeates this rich and rewarding work of scholarship. 25 b&w illus. (May)