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"Kit Carson" gets beyond the myths about the man. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS) |
Television Review
There were, at the end, some 70 trashy novels about America's great Indian fighter, Kit Carson, absurdities written by people who were clueless about the man or the West where he first became famous.
They invented a strapping figure who protected whites from Indian predations and killed the enemy with abandon. Nothing new about this. We've been creating fake gods from the opening bell. But Carson was mythologized as wildly as any figure in the 19th century with the exception of Robert E. Lee.
He was, for the record, 5-foot-5. He never went on such killing sprees. He was a scout, trapper, hunter. A solitary mountain man at home in the wilds as much as the rough social polyglot of Taos, N.M., where he lived from the late 1820s on. This was the life he had in mind when he escaped the confines of Missouri, alone, at 16.
Kit Carson the man was lost well over a century ago in the jaws of our hero machine, so it is fascinating to see him properly placed in the broad flow of American history, where he looms large. "Kit Carson," which airs tonight on Channel 2 on "American Experience," does this job well, although what is good at 90 minutes would have been great at 60.
Carson was nothing less than the agent for change that opened the American West to whites. He was the incarnation of Manifest Destiny, an idea with which he had no truck. (Manifest Destiny was the expansionist belief that the United States should span the continent.) He simply did the jobs asked of him. There were many, from scout to Indian agent to leader of an army campaign against the Navajo.
Carson's fame came from John C. Fremont, the Army officer charged with mapping a route to the Pacific that became known as the Oregon Trail. Fremont, who hired Carson as a scout, lavished praise on him in reports to Washington.
Ironically, his feats led to the creation of a West he would abhor: a place lurching toward congestion and railroad barons. He opened a door that could never be closed. He epitomized the mountain man, a true romantic figure, whose time was passing, allowing others to feast on his identity.
But Kit Carson died reviled by the Navajo who had suffered grievously because of him, among many tribes. In 1863, Colonel Carson was ordered to put down a number of tribes, starting with the Navajo, to shoot every man and force women and children on a brutal march far away from their lands to a distant reservation.
Carson refused to kill the men, but he did burn all of the Navajo food production and eventually starved them out of Arizona's Canyon de Chelly, where they had retreated. He promised protection for what became known as "The Long Walk" to the reservation, but never came through. Hundreds died and far more simply disappeared.
Yet Carson was not an Indian hater. He had been a sympathetic Indian agent earlier in life and had married an Indian woman, Singing Grass, who died in childbirth. In his later years, he conceded the obvious: The campaign against the Navajo had been a disaster. His conclusion that future reservations must be created on the land of the Indians involved was ahead of its time.
In the end, Kit Carson really was an important figure in American history, although his accomplishments were forever stained by his remorseless treatment of the Navajo. He was, like so many other figures in the American West, a round peg that never fit in a square hole.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
