Book Review

This is an ambitious and first-rate book. Its author, Tom Dunlay, does three central things in his treatment of the legendary Kit Carson. First, he offers a dispassionate presentation of the frontiersman's career and his dealings with western Indian groups. Interspersed within that discussion he places nineteenth-century ideas about the man's accomplishments and his near-legendary status within his own lifetime. Dunlay's third intellectual thread follows the shifting scholarly ideas about and labels for the scout's actions from the 1960s to the present. His presentation weaves these three sets of data and ideas together skillfully. It shows Carson as a man of wide experience and considerable accomplishment but also as a person who fell far short of his contemporary popular images. He represents individual frontiersmen, usually far ahead of settlement, who followed an identifiable set of principles that grew out of their experiences. Thus Carson neither hated nor loved Indians, but dealt with them in a variety of ways—some kind, others not. He tried to do what he thought was honest and right, often in the face of the Indian-hating standards of his day.

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