Kit Carson

The Life of an American Border Man (The Oklahoma Western Biographies, Book 27)

De: David Remley

Narrado por: Douglas R. Pratt

Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man strikes a balance between prevailing notions about this quintessential Western figure. Whereas the dime novelists exploited Carson's popular reputation, Remley reveals that the real man was dependable, ethical, and - for his day - relatively open-minded. Sifting through the extensive scholarship, the author illuminates the key dimensions of Carson's life, including his often neglected Scots-Irish heritage. His people's dire poverty and restlessness, their clannish rural life and sternly Protestant character, committed Carson, like his Scots-Irish ancestors, to loyalty and duty and to following his leader into battle without question.

Remley also places Carson in the context of his times by exploring his controversial relations with American Indians. Although despised for the merciless warfare he led on General James H. Carleton's behalf against the Navajos, Carson lived amicably among many Indian people, including the Utes, whom he served as US government agent. Happily married to Waa-Nibe, an Arapaho woman, until her death, he formed a lasting friendship with their daughter, Adaline.

Remley sees Carson as a complicated man struggling to master life on America's borders, those highly unstable areas where people of different races, cultures, and languages met, mixed, and fought, sometimes against each other, sometimes together, for the possession of home, hunting rights, and honor.

The book is published by University of Oklahoma Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

New Mexico Book Awards, Best Biography.

©2011 University of Oklahoma Press (P)2022 Redwood Audiobooks

The reader was no Bueno

Very good story I’m guessing it was accurate however the poor guy they chose to read this knew nothing of Spanish pronunciation or even Indian tribe pronunciation so that part was difficult

Great listen, very informative.

I really enjoyed this book. I appreciated the perspective it gave of that time period. I thought the narrator did a great job.

The Man behind the Myth

An incredible life Story of the journey of an Amazing Mountain Man named.
Kit Carson.

entertaining and balanced

Enjoyed the story, told not with hate or hero worship, taking into considerations of the times.

Narrator’s inflection needs work. Try another line of work maybe

Is you like your history with a big dose of bias you’ll love this book.
The author starts out by saying they want the reader to open their mind to another way of seeing these people aside from their own biases and then proceeds to give their bias each time a moment of atrocity is revealed.
The narrator constantly talks down to the reader like we’re all children for thinking anything other than what he’s trying to inflect.

Just give us the facts and allow us to make up our own minds. Instead we’re blatantly told not to think certain things but “allow him to explain”.

The author takes cheap shots at Hampton Sides “Blood and Thunder” probably because it’s a masterpiece and this book/ author are subpar revisionists.

Sometimes people in history we think were great weren’t so great. Revisionists have been plying their trade long before we got here.

The bias in this book makes it a hard pass for me recommending it to any lover of nonfiction.