2023-12-05 21:12:00
He was the sort of 19th century frontier hellcat to whom they erect monuments, and it stands to reason he’d pop up — sort of — in the first edition of The Santa Fe New Mexican way back on Nov. 28, 1849.
His name is not mentioned in the story, but frontiersman Kit Carson was there for the sad death of Ann White, who, the newspaper story tells us, was “immediately shot down” as U.S. Army troops advanced on the Jicarilla Apache camp where she was being held hostage.
Carson reportedly came this close to saving her — but not close enough. He was there with the Army unit, pushing for a surprise raid on the Apache camp to help the woman abducted during a raid earlier in 1849. Alas, the soldiers did not move as fast as Carson, who briefly sped off on his own in a one-man crusade before he realized the Army officer on hand had countered his wishes and held back the troops.
The Apaches, tipped off, fled, but only after killing White.
If that foray was a personal failure for Carson, he had plenty of other, more successful missions to his credit. He traversed and scouted the Santa Fe Trail, fought Confederate troops in New Mexico during the Civil War and battled to secure California for his country in the Mexican-American War.
Monuments honoring such legacies go up easily, as is the case with one erected to fete Carson in 1885 in Santa Fe and inscribed with the words: “He Led the Way.” And they can come down just as easily, as some see them as painful reminders of racism, conquest and genocide.
Such was the case in August, when vandals, still unidentified, tore down the top part of the Carson monument in Santa Fe.
It is the dilemma of Carson today — hero to some, villain to others.
His role in pursuing a scorched-earth policy against Navajos in the 1860s, prompting a long and painful relocation to Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner in the 1860s, has played into a reconsideration of Carson’s legacy and the merit of such monuments.
Carson’s great-grandson, John Carson, doesn’t get it. Erasing a historic monument can’t erase the person or event behind it, he said.
“Taking down a hunk of rock isn’t going to change what happened — good, bad or ugly,” John Carson said. “In my opinion, people are trying to erase history, but taking down a monument doesn’t do that. Whatever that monument stands for still happened, and we can’t go back 150, 200 years, whatever the case might be, all the way back to Columbus. It doesn’t change what happened.”
But other historians say Kit Carson remains a symbol of American oppression of Indigenous people. Diné historian and University of New Mexico professor Jennifer Denetdale said westward expansion led to “the clearing of land and clearing of space and Indigenous people [being] seen as savages who need to be removed.”
That story goes far beyond the tale of Kit Carson, she said, and far beyond any monument built to his memory. Any statues honoring frontier settlers from that time period “are symbols of the dispossession of Indigenous people.”
Amid that backdrop, the quandary over Kit Carson seems almost as potent today as it did in his day.
John Carson and some historians believe Kit Carson’s work in forcing the Navajo to surrender in 1863-64 has overshadowed his role in a number of other events that helped define the West and has unfairly taken attention away from the fact he often befriended Native Americans and married into two tribes: the Arapaho and Cheyenne.
He was, in a way “a hero, even,” Santa Fe author Hampton Sides writes in his biography of Carson titled Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West.
“He was on the ‘right’ side of history at many times and in many places in his lifetime,” Sides said of the frontiersman. “He befriended many Indian tribes and was a sympathetic observer of Native American culture. For much of his young life he lived more like a Native American than a white guy among the Arapaho and Cheyenne, learning their language, marrying into their tribes, participating in hunts and ceremonies. And those were the happiest days of his life.”
But Carson’s role in rounding up the Navajo in the 1860s — which led to their forced Long Walk and despair, degradation and death — has worked to erase conceptions of him as a frontier hero.
Historian Paul J. Hutton, a professor at the University of New Mexico, said Carson “gets a particularly raw deal here in New Mexico because of the Long Walk.”
As a result, people tend to forget of Carson’s actions performed in loyalty to his country in two wars and see him more as “a poster child for bad behavior in Native American history.”
Hutton, as well as Sides and John Carson, notes there is no evidence Carson took part in the Long Walk in terms of leading or escorting it. They point out Brig. Gen. Henry H. Carleton ordered the roundup and forced relocation of the Navajos.
But Carson was the one who pursued the Navajos, destroying their crops and killing livestock to force a surrender, which in turn led to the Long Walk.
And then again, there are no known monuments honoring Carleton, Hutton said.
Which begs the question, if there were no monuments to Carson anywhere, would he be so criticized and condemned today?
Sides said often white settlers in the West, including town fathers, sought to honor pathfinders who paved the way for them and “so these various monuments were erected to him.” He said a variety of locales — Carson City, Carson River, Carson Sink and Carson National Forest — all bear the name.
The current controversy surrounding Carson is in direct proportion to “how much white Americans elevated him to heroic status,” Sides said.
“They feel a need to tear him down because we elevated him to such heights,” he said. “So if the monuments had never been there, people might say he was a very complicated and interesting figure and leave it at that.”
But, he said, people today have a right to question who we are celebrating with such public displays — and why.
“Why is it always the monuments are almost invariably white dudes on horseback who are the conquerers, the occupiers, the civilizers?” Sides said. “Why don’t we have more monuments to writers and artists and thinkers and intellects? I don’t understand that.”
Once a hero, always a hero?
Born Christopher Carson on Christmas Eve 1809 in Kentucky, Carson was a runaway teen harboring an early hunger to taste adventure when he signed on with a merchant caravan heading west to Santa Fe as a “cavvy boy,” responsible for caring for the replacement horses, mules and oxen needed for such an arduous trek.
Although Carson did not learn how to read or write, he quickly learned how to serve as a translator, teamster, tracker and trapper. Defending himself and others on his various sojourns, he also became something of a natural born killer, as Sides puts it in his biography.
He also learned to speak Spanish and French and get by in the Navajo, Ute, Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapaho languages. His first marriage was to an Arapaho woman named Singing Grass; the couple had two children. She died shortly after giving birth to the second baby.
Within a few years he married again, to a Cheyenne woman known as Making-Out-Road, leading to a relationship Sides describes in his book as “miserable.” She gave Carson the heave-ho pretty quickly. His third and most lasting marriage was to Josefa Jaramillo of Taos (a city Carson preferred over Santa Fe), who would precede him in death.
Hutton said Carson’s marriages and knowledge of various American tribes later made him “one of the best Indian Agents the West ever had. He had a real understanding of Native Americans and their problems and the fate that was befalling them. He fought them, but he also fought Confederates in the Civil War and Hispanics in conquering California. He spent much of his life as a warrior.”
Somehow, Carson ended up at nearly every crossroads in the history of the American West from the 1820s into the 1860s, tracing the main rivers, traveling the Sonoran, Mojave and Chihuahuan deserts, exploring the Rockies, the Sierra Nevadas and the coasts of California and Oregon.
Carson became something of a frontier celebrity by the 1840s after scouting for several expeditions under Captain John C. Frémont into the Rocky Mountains and beyond. He was likely befuddled by literary efforts to turn him into something of a Superman of the plains in dime novels bearing his name and likeness.
“By 1845 the image was already sealed: Kit Carson became a kind of action figure hero, the noble rescuer, righteous avenger, white knight of the West,” Sides wrote. “That his brutality might have an inglorious underside seemed not to cross the adoring public’s mind.”
Still, Carson came to realize before his death in 1868 he had helped open a big can of worms, and the worms were destroying the West he knew.
The new homesteaders, the U.S. Army, the railroad, land developers and gold miners all came forth, spoiling much of what he had helped build and further decimating or driving off the Native American population.
“He ended up setting in motion all these forces that destroyed the primeval West he loved,” Sides said of Carson. “He kind of fouled up his own West.”
The New Mexican made note of the campaign against the Navajo in January 1864, telling readers “the success of Col. Carson will distinguish him and those with him. They deserve and will receive the gratitude of the people for every Indian they have killed or made captive.”
Overwhelmed, the played-out and demoralized Navajos surrendered and were forced to march about 300 miles on the Long Walk, which ended with hundreds dying. Thousands more died in Eastern New Mexico.
The Navajos eventually worked their way back home following yet another treaty with the U.S. government in the summer of 1868, shortly after Carson died of an aortic aneurysm in Colorado. His remains would later be buried in Taos.
It’s unclear when the tide of popular opinion began to turn against Carson. Certainly not in the mid-20th century, when films, television shows and comic books popularized him as the epitome of the Western hero.
But around the time of the release of Sides’ book in 2006, some Native American activists and historians began publicly decrying Carson’s role in the Long Walk.
Many historians and media sources trace the current destruction of monuments featuring historical figures — including many who fought for the Confederacy — to the turbulent civil rights protests and movements following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020.
After that, statues of and memorials to Confederate soldiers and generals were vandalized or torn down — as were some of explorer Christopher Columbus — as anger grew around any standing symbol of racial oppression and colonialism.
Carson “was on the leading edge of American colonialism,” historian Megan Kate Nelson said, adding monuments honoring his legacy, including one in Denver that was removed by city officials in 2020, represent what people of another time thought of him.
Sides thinks Carson — a shy, reticent man who did not like to talk about himself — never would have wanted any monuments put up in his honor in the first place.
“He was not a very reflective person; he was a man of action,” Sides said. “We don’t know what he really felt or thought about so many of these important questions because he was illiterate, so many people have superimposed on him what they want to think about him.”
Paradoxically, the controversy over the Carson monument has people “still talking about him today.
“It’s fascinating [that] this issue is interesting to people because people are usually bored to tears by history,” Sides said.
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