Kit Carson: Hero or villain?
Best-selling author speaks to large crowd in Rehoboth

ABOVE: Santa Fe author Hampton Sides responds to an audience question Thursday night after lecturing on and reading a portion of his book, "Blood and Thunder" at Rehoboth Christian Church. Sides is currently working on his next book, which will be about the events around the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. BELOW: Hampton Sides signs a poster and copies of his book, "Blood and Thunder" after giving a talk and reading from the novel Thursday night at Rehoboth Christian Church. Sides said he never thought he would write a western, but is book focuses around the life of the controversial Kit Carson. [photos by Jeff Jones / Independent]
By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Staff writer

REHOBOTH — Just 150 years ago, people in this region — Navajos, Puebloans, Hispanics, and Anglo Americans — were embroiled in a drama full of human conflict. A central figure in that drama was Kit Carson, a pulp fiction hero to many Americans during his lifetime and a man still deeply hated by many Navajo people today.

On Thursday, acclaimed writer Hampton Sides, author of “Blood and Thunder/The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West,” spoke to a local audience about his efforts to put the “story” back into this particular history and his efforts to depict Carson as a real human being rather than just a cardboard hero or villain.

Nearly 200 community members attended Sides’ talk, which was sponsored by Rehoboth Christian School. As Sides noted during the question and answer session, the book’s story “lives on” today as demonstrated by the evening’s audience, which included a number of local residents who are descendants of people who lived the Blood and Thunder story.

Sides, who lives in Santa Fe, talked about discovering the subject of the book, which draws its title from 19th century “blood-and-thunders.” Those were poorly written, cheap westerns of the era, Sides explained, that often featured Carson as their over-the-top protagonist.

“I never in a million years thought I’d write a western,” he admitted. According to Sides, while growing up in Memphis, Tenn., he was uncomfortable with horses and uninterested in John Wayne movies or Zane Grey novels. In his opinion, most westerns were “overdone” or “a little bit hackneyed,” and most traditional history books were “deadly, deadly boring” and seemed designed to put readers to sleep.

Some years back, however, a Navajo tour guide in Canyon de Chelly exposed Sides to the Navajo perspective on Carson — as a ruthless enemy who rounded up the tribe and forced them on the infamous Long Walk. In contrast, Sides explained, he had dim childhood memories of stories that portrayed Carson as a swashbuckling hero.

“How do you reconcile these two portraits of the same guy?” is a question Sides found himself asking.

Comparing different eras of historical writers to the opposing positions of a swinging pendulum, Sides said previous generations of American historians were white writers who viewed the “winning of the West” as a glorious tale of Manifest Destiny featuring brave, white heroes. In contrast, he said, over the last few decades, recent writers have focused more on the “losing of the West” and viewed the history as a shameful story of genocide with whites portrayed broadly as villains.

Sides said he believes the pendulum has swung somewhere in the middle now. As a narrative historian, this shift in perspective allowed him to “open this story back up” and explore all the characters in the drama as real human beings with both virtues and flaws.

As for the central character in “Blood and Thunder,” Sides said Carson’s virtues included being a good and loyal friend, husband, and father and being an unassuming man who didn’t promote himself or his celebrity status.

According to Sides, Carson was a hugely popular celebrity in 19th century America. In the 1851 American classic novel “Moby Dick,” author Herman Melville compared Carson to Hercules. The poorly written “blood-and-thunders” continued with this theme of portraying Carson as a mythical hero.

“He hated the blood-and-thunder books,” said Sides. “The stories were greatly exaggerated, to say the least.” In addition to being terrible books, Sides explained, they were written without Carson’s consent, and he earned no money from them. Because Carson was illiterate, he also couldn’t even read the books himself.

As for Carson’s flaws, Sides said Carson could be an extremely cold-blooded killer at times. He lived in world that was “unbelievably violent” and that violence was “part of the language of the day” of the American West. Comparing Carson to a member of the Mafia or a character in the film “Gangs of New York,” Sides said Carson lived by the philosophy that any enemy of his friend became his own enemy.

Sides said he doesn’t believe Carson was motivated by any grandiose beliefs like Manifest Destiny. Rather, he said, Carson’s strong sense of personal loyalty and his need for employment were the primary motivations that guided his actions.

Sides disagreed with Carson’s critics who have compared his often violent career in the West with the mass genocide authorized by Hitler and Stalin. Sides also disagreed with his own critics who have questioned why he would write about such a polarizing historical figure like Carson.

“We need to understand our villains,” Sides said, “just like we need to understand our heroes.”

“He had all these contradictions and ambiguities in his own life,” Sides said of Carson. When we look at Carson’s life, he said, it’s almost like looking into a mirror and not liking what we see.