NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Ghost Soldiers comes an eye-opening history of the American conquest of the West—"a story full of authority and color, truth and prophecy" (The New York Times Book Review). In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.

In this critical biography, Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tales of two white women who, in the 1960s, wrote books about the fabled frontiersman Christopher "Kit" Carson: Quantrille McClung, a Denver librarian who compiled the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy, and Kansas-born but Washington, D.C.- and Chicago-based Bernice Blackwelder, a singer on stage and radio, a CIA employee, and the author of Great Westerner: The Story of Kit Carson. In the 1970s, as once-celebrated figures like Carson were falling headlong from grace, these two amateur historians kept weaving stories of western white men, including those who married American Indian and Spanish Mexican women, just as Carson had wed Singing Grass, Making Out Road, and Josefa Jaramillo. Johnson's multilayered biography reveals the nature of relationships between women historians and male historical subjects and between history buffs and professional historians. It explores the practice of history in the context of everyday life, the seductions of gender in the context of racialized power, and the strange contours of twentieth-century relationships predicated on nineteenth-century pasts. On the surface, it tells a story of lives tangled across generation and geography. Underneath run probing questions about how we know about the past and how that knowledge is shaped by the conditions of our knowing.

Describes the life of Kit Carson, discusses his activities as a guide in the West, and examines his role in the wars against the Indians

The legendary nineteenth-century figure relates his experiences as a scout, soldier, trapper, Indian fighter, explorer, and government agent.

In 1826 an undersized sixteen-year-old apprentice ran away from a saddle maker in Franklin, Missouri, to join one of the first wagon trains crossing the prairie on the Santa Fe Trail. Kit Carson (1809-68) wanted to be a mountain man, and he spent his next sixteen years learning the paths of the West, the ways of its Native inhabitants, and the habits of the beaver, becoming the most successful and respected fur trapper of his time. From 1842 to 1848 he guided John C. Frémont's mapping expeditions through the Rockies and was instrumental in the U.S. military conquest of California during the Mexican War. In 1853 he was appointed Indian agent at Taos, and later he helped negotiate treaties with the Apaches, Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Utes that finally brought peace to the southwestern frontier. Ralph Moody's biography of Kit Carson, appropriate for readers young and old, is a testament to the judgment and loyalty of the man who had perhaps more influence than any other on the history and development of the American West.

Kit Carson, the quintessential frontiersman, is remembered as a larger-than-life mountain man, explorer, trapper, guide, soldier, Indian agent, officer, hunter, and rancher. In The Life of Kit Carson, Alan E. Grey invites young readers to join Kit as he strikes out on his own at the age of sixteen to find adventure along the beaver streams; ride with him and John Fremont as they explore the untamed West, taking cover as Kit trades gunfire in the Mexican-American War; and witness his encounters with Indians in the Navajo and Southern Plains campaigns. Composed of stories discovered through years of research, this book is an exciting and easy-to-read, action-packed tale. Young readers and adults alike will find both education and entertainment in this masterfully presented life story.

"Following two journeys, Kit Carson's 1864 military expedition from Fort Bascom to Adobe Walls and Alvin Lynn's journey to document what happened are told"--