carson. the mountain man as a mythological figure, either portrayed as a folk hero or a killer of native americans. professor sides on packs this dispute and explores carson's complex relationship with the navajo indians. institution organized this event. it contains some language that viewers might find offensive. hampton: i joked around and said when i started the podcast, i said i could hit the get two if i could people to listen, my mom and my wife. the fact that the folks at the hampton institute were listening is a dream come true. everyone here is familiar with hampton sides. for the purpose of tonight, we will be talking about blood and thunder, one of his most well-known books. but that is a small percentage of what he has written. i have read it all. he's got an amazing talent for

distilling loads and loads and years and years of research of serious history into very user friendly, fun exciting books. obviously you should all read "blood and thunder," but i encourage you to check out his others if you haven't. hampton is a tennessee native. i am a north carolina native, so it is very likely that our southern accents are going to ramp up and up and no one will understand us, but i am so excited to chat with him. we are going to get right into it. is best way to go about this kind of to establish some of the major players in "blood and thunder," and from there we can take into the detail. i think first we should talk about the navajos. shouldides: no, first we talk about how tennessee barbecue is better than north carolina barbecue. -- no, this could

could turn into a brawl. that is not a good way to start. [laughter] let's talk about the novel hose. there is a line in your book where you say they are the most american of the native americans. could you talk a little bit about that, explain what that means and talk about the navajo and even their geographic location, where they lived? prof. sides: absolutely. i live in santa fe, and the navajo presence in new mexico is huge. i think all the westerns we are familiar with, the movies and tv shows, it is the sioux, the comanche, or some other tribe depicted, like the arapahoe or cheyenne. but people do not know much about who are the navajo, the people who came down the spine of the rockies and adopted the lifestyle of anyone and everyone they met.

it seems like they were the expert in hitler's of other inhalers ofexpert other cultures. they met the spanish and adopted their sheep, their foundation of amazing skills of making these rugs and weaving these which theytextiles, are famous for. of course, they adopted the horse, which accelerated their sheep culture, because it allowed them to move over vast areas of what we now call navajo country, tending to their herds. but they were not just a sheep people or a horse people. agriculturalist. they grew corn. , notwere semi-nomadic nomadic. they learned a lot from the pueblo tribes and adopted many of their cultures and ideas.

so i call them the most american of the american indians, because they seem to have a unique talent for ushering in new ideas, new blood, new concepts wherever they roamed over the southwest, and they were by far the most successful drive in the southwest at that point. they were growing in leaps and bounds in the eternal conflict between the spanish -- we say the mexicans along the rio grande and the navajo. the navajo were winning that conflict. they were more successful in their raids. they were flourishing quite , in 1846, theen united states of america and the marchingricans started west to take over this terrain and encountered the navajo for the first time. >> the second major character in the book is an individual, kit

carson. he is a historical figure that is just cloaked in mythology and it's hard to dig down to exactly who he was. before i read your book, i thought of him as a cowboy, 6'4" , a handsome guy, trotting around on a stallion, doing cattle drives, this and that, but that couldn't be further from the truth. prof. sides: yeah, 5'4". [laughter] prof. sides: unassuming, unprepossessing, awkward around the ladies, he had a certain glint in his eyes, a certain mischievous charisma or so many , many people said. he was someone who always put other people at the center of the story, not himself. and this is an age of windbags and glory hounds. you know, he was a guy who always wanted to let someone else get the glory. very likable in many ways.

most people thought he was wonderful. a true loyal husband and father, loyal to his friends. and i mean, like real loyalty, not like trump he and -- not like trumpian loyalty. both ways. you don't throw your friends under a bus. and he was that kind of person. but, he was also prone to violence. he was a natural born killer. people remarked about how in a firefight, he was the guy you wanted on your side. and it became really difficult for me as i got into the story to reconcile these two personalities. the sweet kit carson, the folk full. -- full hero, this wonderful man with a very violent guy. of course, i understand he lives in a very different time and a very different era, an era of incredible violence, an era where there were not really

outlaws yet because there were no laws to live outside of. and just a really interesting cat. as i got deeper into the story, i realized that i kept brushing the two different viewpoints of the same person. one is that he was a full or a, the other that he was a genocidal maniac. lk hero, the other that he was a genocidal maniac. routinely, people did say that about carson. the truth is somewhere in the middle. his lifeed deeply into story, and here is a great indian hater which was not an indian hater at all. his first wife was arapajo. he was close to the cheyenne and and many other tribes. he spoke seven different indian languages. he lived more like an indian than a white guy for most of his life. the truth is much more

complicated and interesting. so i realize this was a great character, iconic character, to use as the through line, as the narrative through line for understanding much bigger forces that were out there. he is sort of like a forest gump character -- not to say he was dimwitted at all, because he wasn't. he had like nine different lives. it allowed me to understand the bigger forces of manifest destiny, conquest, mapping, the describing of the west that took place during this one lifetime. >> sure. it is hard to overstate what emotions kit carson brings out. i do a lot of work in eastern colorado, near the river, there is kit carson county, the town, and just a few weeks ago, we were in the middle of a conversation with multiple stakeholders when your book came up, kit carson came up, one guy chimed in and said, he is an

american hero. and before he had even finished the sentence, another person chimed in and said he is an indian killer. it is other than water rights in the west. i have not encountered many things that bring up emotion. prof. sides: right? and try going to navajo country. i have done a lot of talks and -- in navajo country. we southerners are famous for our hospitality. but the navajo are even more so. it is just so embracing and wonderful. i had a great time everywhere i went in navajo country. i give a talk in shiprock, this woman stood up and asked me questions. she said i bought your book and i may read it but i may just use it for target practice. [laughter] prof. sides: she said it with a smile. she was a wonderful lady. i don't know what happened but that is the point, this guy is viewed almost like we southerners view sherman. who led a scorched-earth

campaign against their people, destroyed every water source, every cow, every sheep, and lead thisse, unnecessary, destructive campaign against the people that is still burned into their psyches. >> this morning in one of the sessions, the novelist molly how inas speaking about the american west there was this vacuum, we did not have king arthur or the beowulf. my question to you is, was kit carson such a dynamic individual that the myth just grew out of him or was there this vacuum and this almost demand for a myth in kit carson that worked. the myth latched on him because we americans, humans, need to have that. prof. sides: i think a little

bit of both. carson, as i described earlier, was not like the most charismatic guy when you first met him. people would meet him on the trail and they had heard about him or read about him, they would meet him, this 5'4" awkward guy, they would say, i'm looking for kit carson. he would be like, i'm kit carson. well, you're not the kit carson i am looking for. kit carson is supposed to be six foot eight, blonde, beautiful and blue-eyed, always gets the girl and always wins the day. because that is the hero of these early books, called blood and thunder's, which often featured kit carson as a hero. they were actually a pretty important kind of book in its day. it was one of the first mass pieces of literature in american publishing.

people north and south, east and west love to them, but carson was often at the center of these books. carson hated these books. absolutely hated them. because he did not understand them. he did not understand where they were coming from or who these writers were. they needed to use him as some sort of full p or a -- folk hero . they used his name without getting his permission, without paying him a cent. they would also perpetuate all sorts of lies and say things like he would kill two indians before breakfast, which was presumably a good thing back then. and he did not understand. he basically had to reckon with the celebrity for his entire life, starting around -- certainly around 1846 when carney's army was coming was. but even before because of john c fremont and his topographical books. so it is actually a big theme of carson reckonsw with -- or tries to reckon with

his own celebrity and does not understand where it is coming from. i think there is an element to which, as you alluded to -- people back east, not only government people but mythmakers, the writers, novelists, the thinkers, they needed to come up with some sort of notion that this new territory which we just seized unlawfully from the spanish and from the native americans, was already inhabited by anglo-american heroes who were doing great things. who were fair and right and all these things that carson was supposed to be, and in fact, he was most of the things. and it also helped that his name was kit carson. it has a nice alliterative ring to it, it is easy to remember. it became this kind of watchword or by word for all sorts of heroes that i think people back

east hoped and suspected were out here already somehow. but it was a difficult and awkward subject for his whole life. he really did not fully get it. and it was made much more difficult by the fact that kit carson was illiterate. so he couldn't read these damn books, even though they were not great great tomes or anything. -- not great tomes or anything. i dare you to read some of these blood and thunder's. he would have to have other people read to him around the campfire. it began in the middle part of his career, he realized that he had to seize control of his own pr. so he wrote and dictated a biography, autobiography, which is a very frustrating document by the way when you read it, because it is the bare-bones. i did this, i did that. he had this expression, he would say, i concluded to charge the indians.

done so. [laughter] is greater -- action than words, which, in fact, is the essence of his personality, that aroundadopt the house with my wife, who is here in the first row -- concluded to do the dishes i will tell my wife, done so. it is something that is very frustrating as a writer, someone trying to understand his inner life and emotional life, what did he really think about american indians? the violence he participated in, any of these things -- you don't get that in his autobiography. but he did try to seize control of his own publicity and direct it in some way. ed: one of the questions that i kept thinking about in reading the book was that he was very tight with john fremont.

and i don't think you can have two more polar opposite personalities. you know, fremont was a glory hound, wanted to be the center of attention, he was a medela megalomaniac and carson was a border follower who did whatever he said. it would seem to me that a guy like carson would be so turned off by somebody who is trying to build his name up, build up his reputation on everybody else's work, kind of like fremont was doing. how you reconcile those two relationships? it's really interesting. prof. sides: it is the double helix relationship that helps explain the american west. you have a guy like fremont was very intelligent and widely read, very ambitious, with intimate ties to important people back east in washington. foremost among those being the senator thomas hart benton, his father-in-law -- charismatic, a beautiful man by all accounts.

the women swooned over him. but, he was as you say, in love with a vertical pronoun. [laughter] prof. sides: he was the most intelligent man in the room but the first to admit it. all those kind of things. and then you have carson, who is kind of completely the opposite. i guess sort of modern addiction counselor type people would say that they enabled each other. they are codependent. carson needed -- there was something about his personality because you want to get deep in his psychology, his father died at an early age. he was orphaned, he was perhapsced, he was looking for a father figure. he knew there was this world back east of well educated and intelligent, literate

people, this society that he could never be a part of. and here comes fremont, he meets him on a steamship near st. louis. and gets a job to be a scout to go explore the american west. and fremont just won him over. a friendship -- like i said earlier, carson, once you became his friend and he became your friend, it was impossible to de-friend him. because he believed in loyalty. absolute, two-way loyalty. he expected you to be loyal to him and him to you. so he was loyal to fremont for the rest of his life. fremont did save his life several times, carson saved fremont's life many more times. they needed each other. and he was very deferential throughout his life. to anyone who was better educated than he was, and the

fact that he was illiterate, i think, played a role in some of his insecurities. but he also needed someone, most men who are married understand this -- we need a punch list. we need to be told what to do so we can go out and do it. done so. and he was one of those guys. and boy howdy, when you gave him a punch list, he went out and did it. wasometimes it incredibly violent and hard to reconcile with other aspects of his personality. so to understand carson, you need to understand these other guys in his life. one of them was fremont, the other guy was james henry carlton, who ultimately force and ordered him to go on to the navajo campaign. ed: when you're talking about loyalty, i feel like that is the

comes descriptor that with carson through his whole life. but when you fast forward to his whole life, you get to the end of his life, and he dies basically destitute because he has no assets, he has accounts receivable that his friends won't pay him, he's got on paper not a dollar to his name and in his pocket, basically nothing. as an american hero, that everybody has put on a pedestal forever, dies alone with no money. so that was the flip side, that he was that loyal to people but the people that he trusted in the financial matters did not repay it. so what does that say about the blind loyalty, i guess? prof. sides: he was a sucker, i guess, in some way. also, he grew up and came up out of a culture that was not really a money culture. it was a barter culture. the currency new mexico is beaver pelts, not a hope rugs, rugs, and- navajo

taos lightning whiskey. by the time he died, the railroad was coming west and money culture was taking over the west. and you know, it is interesting to think about carson, because a lot of people say, this ultimate american who was a blind follower of duty. he was a patriot who wanted to do what he did to advance americans, anglo-american culture. but in fact, i don't think that is true at all. he ran away from missouri to the new mexico territory. it was not even a territory yet, it was spanish, mexican territory. he was trying to get away from america. the happiest years of his life were the years that he spent as a mountain man, living with the arapahoe. living with these greasy french were trapping beaver in

the rivers of the remote american west. that was not a money culture. it produced money, obviously, it was a lucrative trade, but they lived a very different world. to understand carson really, his think, of hisn, i life, was not about being a patriot, it was about loyalty, coming back to this idea. individual loyalty and tribal loyalty, because this is how you survived when you were a mountain man. this is the code -- we talked yesterday in the seminars about. -- about the code of the west. the good of the west was absolute loyalty to your group to him. the enemy of your group is your personal enemy. hardwired into your brain when you are a 19-year-old kid coming up in that culture. certain tribes were your friend -- the arapahoe, the cheyenne, the utes.

enemy,ribes were your the blackfeet, the comanche. by the time he was 30, that was so baked into his personality that that is the way he viewed the american west. ed: when we are sitting here looking back, it is all very clear that that was not an appropriate course of action, it was -- what he did was very , very bad. but if you look at it through the lens of his people and his time, it is a different story. people were cheering him on. it reminded me of another character from one of your and howaptain delong, he had this idea to go on this polar exploration to find basically -- he theorized there was a sea in the middle of the polar ice cap. if you could find the secret passage, you can get to this warm, tropical sea. now looking back at that, you think that is the craziest

thing. you don't know why anyone would believe that. can you talk a little bit about the importance of judging these characters, whether it is kit carson, delong, or even theodore roosevelt, looking at them in their time period from where we sit? prof. sides: a lot of historians call this presentism, that you judge has characters based on present values, towards race or equal rights, or whatever. and you really have to scrape away everything that we know and think and feel. if you really want to understand who these people are, in history, you have to scrape away what we are today and all we know and all the advances we have hopefully made as a culture, as a people, and as a democracy. and get back to where they were then. that is what i certainly tried to do "blood and thunder." i don't know if i succeeded. people havelot of criticized the book for being

too pro-kit carson. other people have criticized the book for not being pro-kit carson enough. especially some of these mountain man rendezvous reenactor guys. but i feel like i am doing my job if a lot of people are criticizing me. so the truth is somewhere in the middle middle. -- in the middle, and like i say, this book is really -- i'm curious, how many of you read "blood and thunder?" a good number of you, good. it is not a biography of kit carson. it is really just using a single character -- and i can't think of a better character in the american west with the exception of fremont himself, who could do this. as a way to understand the ebb and flow and the clashing forces, this cauldron of the american west of the 1840's, 1850's, and 1860's.

he is the guy. he was everywhere. he did all this travel -- in oregon, he was in mexico, washington, d.c. and everywhere in between. he did it on the back of a mule. i did it in a volkswagen jetta. diesel, and it's got really good mileage. and i am just amazed. just the span of this man's life where all -- life and where all he went, the fact that he was a -- he was illiterate also created some really profound challenges because historians love documents. he did not really have any. but i live in santa fe and found out about the kit carson papers. they have the kit carson papers there in the state archives. we ordered up the box, they come out, rolled out this box and it is like paydirt. the kit carson papers, maybe no one even knows about this. i opened up the box and sure enough, they had the kit carson papers, both of them.

[laughter] prof. sides: so it was a real problem researching the book. but then i realized, i live in santa fe, new mexico. the new age capital of the world. home of high colonics and aura massage, we had a bunch of seances. [laughter] prof. sides: with carson himself. that is what the book is about. direct communication. [laughter] prof. sides: no, i mean unfortunately, or fortunately, even though he was illiterate, he was written about a lot, probably more than anyone on the western stage at the time. there are tons and tons of accounts all over the place. you have to go to places like the library at yale or the huntington library out in pasadena to relate to the story -- really get to the story and sift through what is false and what is fiction and what is real, but you can find it. to that is what i was going ask you, in your research -- he

worked on this book for five years. no joke. how did you sift through the nonsense and the facts? i would imagine there are equal amounts of both. prof. sides: yeah, yeah. -- ed: so from a technical historian research aspect, how did you do that? prof. sides: kit carson is like a jack-in-the-box. he pops up everywhere. people will come and say hey, we think kit carson was in our backyard, there is a true carved -- there is a name carved into it. probably not. he was illiterate. [laughter] prof. sides: there is a cave he supposedly lived in. whatever. he could've been anywhere. and of course, every county, every carson, city, nevada, every kit carson park, carson national forest, everything is named after this

guy, so it creates this kind of illusion that he must've been everywhere. and he was almost everywhere. ed: how did you sift through? prof. sides: how did i sift through. it is hard. there's all kinds of lore. there is a classic tale, carson was in a fight with the comanches and he was outnumbered by a hundred to one. he was by himself. so he reached around and slit the throat of his mule, and the mule fell and created a barricade so he could fight the 100 comanches. but the smell of the blood of off all of the approaching, attacking forces because they knew the smell of a they wouldtever and

not come close. this is in numerous blood and thunder's and as far as i can tell, it did not really happen. i am almost sure it did not happen. but it is one of the hundreds of the things you have to sift through. a guy named carl, a german writer who wrote these novels, often starring kit carson, he made up all kinds of stuff like that. and you have to sift through it all. it is usually bullshit. but the real story is more interesting, because he did do amazing things. and it seemed like whenever there was heat of action, that he was the guy to save the day and he was the coolest under pressure, killed the most people and got to safety or got the message to washington. he was also a transcontinental courier and brought these messages to washington, including possibly in one of the saddlebags was news they discovered gold in california. i don't know, i'm a little skeptical on that one. he hated washington, by the way.

nose apprise there. -- no surprise there. they treated him like tarzan. [laughter] prof. sides: this character that just came out of the wild of the west and did not know how to use a fork, stuff like that. ed: you briefly alluded to this, kit carson park. prof. sides: sacred house. ed: it is a great example of some of modern-day society's attempts to fix some of these wrongs from the old days. and if you look -- mount mckinley in alaska, that is not -- that has now been renamed to denali officially. prof. sides: do you climb? ed: i don't know about climb. i threw my weight up. but there is all this discussion about washington redskins constantly, there was this part in -- prof. sides: we used to call them the foreskins living in washington. but we digress.

ed: kit carson park. tell the story about what happened. prof. sides: it is sort of similar to what is been happening in richmond and charles hill and other places back east with confederate monuments and the question of what to do with them. should we change their name? remove statues? kit carson park is in the center of taos, and is a place where people meet and is sort of the central park of taos. it is called that mainly because he is buried there, he and his wife. it is right on kit carson avenue right up against kit carson national forest. it is just like part of the history of this town. but i understand that native americans hate this guy. and we do live in a democracy, we cannot pick and choose our history but we do live in a democracy and if people really want to debate and think and re-think and reboot, that is fine and fair. so there was a movement to

change the name of kit carson park to something else. unfortunately, the town leaders kind of just had a sort of spasm and did not have a good answer and said we will call it red willow park, which is what taos means in the local native language, people of the red willow. but they insulted the people of the red willow. the indians were not asked what , so they pitched a fit and they are back in square one. it is still called kit carson park. but kit carson was involved in the indian wars. one of the last chapters of his life, he was a mountain man, he was a hunter and a rancher, a scout, a transcontinental courier and a soldier, ultimately a brigadier general, but in the last act of his life he was an indian fighter against the navajo and the apache, several apache tribes.

so they hate him. and so -- what do i really think about it? i don't know. i think as long as you debate these things and really, really know what you are talking about, and there is education behind it and it is not a knee-jerk reaction, i am fine with it. he is buried there, however. and it is a question, what do you do with that grave, too? are you going to unearth it and move it somewhere else? i don't know. it is a debate that will live on and it is an important one. my usual answer though to this question of what to do with these statues is not to her than done but to build more statues. we need native american statues. african-american statues. more and more statues involving women in the west, for example. we have only honored these dead white guys. we need to -- the biggest corrective to this problem is to build more statues.

ed: aside from building more statues, what would you say -- ed: aside from building more statues, what would you say, and i know you're not a politician, from a practical standpoint, how do you see is getting past this divisiveness? it seems that the rhetoric on both sides, people are only retreating more and more into their corners. maybe they are just a loud people, people in the middle that are reading and thinking it through. how do you see is getting past this? it seems to be getting more and more hyped up almost on a weekly basis now in the media. hampton: it is tough. we live in a really -- i thought we lived in a divisive time before trump was elected, it has now gotten unimaginably worse to the point where families can talk to each other. they can't go on vacation together.

it is unbelievable how this has happened. there have been other times in our history where it has happened. 1950 with mccarthyism. desperate times there where people weren't able really -- democrats and republicans, not able to talk to each other. you seemed to move past these eras and hope we will continue to do so. move past this one right now. honest debate, conferences like this one where we had a lot of interesting perspectives presented in a very civilized format. i have to say honestly, just how privileged i feel to have been invited to this conference. there are actually dozens of people who are participating in this conference who made their professional life's work the study and understanding of the american west. i've got a laptop and a microphone. [laughter] i have made the west my home, and i have written one book, but i am not a scholar of the american west like these amazing folks are in different disciplines.

anyway, civilized conversation and listening to each other, and venues like the aspen institute are certainly an important way to get a conversation going that will lead to something positive. ed: one of the things i loved about your book was read it pretty soon after moving west, and it gave me this base level of knowledge, but then when you look at the 50 pages of footnotes and endnotes, it is a jumping off point to get a read on infinite number of other subject. that's what i loved about it. this is a hard question. if you had to pick two to three books that you would recommend, after people read "blood and ," where should they go? it is infinite. what subject should they follow and what book should they read? hampton: so many good books.

one was mentioned in one of our earlier seminars. susan mcguffin, the diary of her trip west. i can't remember the title of it, honestly. anyone? >> "down the santa fe trail." hampton: "down the santa fe trail." a woman who came was with the army of the west. stephen carney's army. she was a young woman pregnant from kentucky, and she happened to be a brilliant writer and took all this stuff down. i quote her widely in the book. i highly recommend this book. it is an early document of the american perception of the american west. one of my favorite books of all the west american literature is stegner's "beyond the hundredth meridian." it is, you have to read it. it is an amazing book. maybe some of cormac mccarthy's

books, his novels. he is a real difficult guy. i have gotten to know him a little bit. he lived in santa fe. he is a powerful writer, and if you are going to read a novel, i think "blood meridian" is a one of the great ones of the american west. ed: when you think about -- when you were writing this book, were there any mentors or heroes or influences that you looked to when you were thinking, i would love to write this sweeping history of the west? was there anybody that you thought about, if it could turn out like their writing, it would be really good? hampton: absolutely. i grew up in memphis. the first writer i ever met was a memphis historian, a really interesting character named shelby foot. civil war historian. he had the beard, a pipe, and an

the accent. and his son huggy and i were in a rock band together. [laughter] argus. have you heard of them? [laughter] we were pretty good. we would do what we could possibly do to prevent shelby foot from finishing his trilogy of the civil war. i later got to know shelby and i understood what he was trying to do. he was a novelist who later came to writing history. he was a narrative historian. that is what i did not know i was aspiring to be. i did not even know it had a name. narrative history. but that is exactly what i have tried to do, and was very consciously trying to do with "blood and thunder." write a big, sprawling, narrative epic history that is hopefully very readable and brings in a lot of history.

but reads like a novel, if at all possible. it was also shelby who gave me a great piece of advice when i did an interview with him for a magazine. he said -- [speaking in an accent] -- he had this great accent, you should never ever talk about your work, ever. [laughter] his point was, you talk about your work, he said great work is written under pressure. like remember those old pressure cookers my grandmother cooked beans in. if you let up the pressure a little, there is no pressure and the beans do not get cooked. you go to cocktail parties, "i'm going to write this book. i will tell you about this thing i will write," and you go to dinner parties and let off the pressure, you are not going to -- it is so hard to write a book. there are a million reasons for not writing a book. i took that to heart. i really try not to talk about what i am working on.

unless i am having a real problem that i am trying to solve with another writer perhaps. and so, i think that is good advice. partly because i am superstitious. maybe i won't write the book and i will feel like an idiot at the when i see that person at the next cocktail party. but it's also an important lesson. good work is, in fact, done under pressure. keep it inside until you're ready to really show it to the world. ed: that's great. i could keep asking questions for 10 hours, but we are going to open it up to questions from the audience for a little while. i'm sure there are some questions here. we have got microphones. we are recording this. so if you wait for the microphone. >> where would you put irving

book.s you talk about john c. fremont, just as a piece of work on the west. hampton: it is a great book. isn't that a novel? it is fiction. several clicks on the dial. a lot of people will tell me, and i think they mean it as a compliment, they say, "i really enjoyed your novel," and i wince because it is not a novel. everything in my book was so hard earned and hard won, i got it from somewhere, some book, some document, and it is not a novel. it is only a few clicks away. i am aspiring to make it read like a novel in terms of pacing and structure or characters or whatever, but then there are

several clicks over this way and you get a historical fiction. it is great and it is wonderful and i read a bunch of historical novels while writing this book -- while researching this book. irving stone is certainly one of them. i grew up -- when i was young, i read a lot of -- who was the guy that wrote "ragtime"? e.l. doctorow. he was a great historical novelist. bringing in and absorbing so and spinning fiction. whenever i am reading a historical novel i am always kind of toggling back and forth in my mind between what is real and what is not real? i need to know. i feel like i am not a solid ground. you coming back to wanting to do narrative nonfiction. it has always bothered me that i work in a profession that has negative in front of it. it is very weird. it is maybe the only profession

that says, i am not this. i am something else. [laughter] shouldn't it be the other way around? shouldn't it be like truth or non-truth? shouldn't it be truth or bullshit. ed: i like that. hampton: it basically presumes that lying and making up shit is the default position of the human condition. [laughter] anyway, that is fine. i love novels, too. [laughter] but nonfiction. like derek jeter is a non-basketball player. who does that? [laughter] anyway. >> hello, my name is janie from the navajo nation. it is quite interesting. i am just picking it up. i haven't read your book yet, but i will. but the language, i have an

issue with, and how you are celebrating that it's amazing how he has killed the most people. i am part of that group that s andved the internment's long walk. it is 150 years in july that my people signed a treaty to be returned back to the homeland. i understand the complexities of humans. i just came back from germany and how they teach about hitler and the gestapo and the rise of that, and the perception. so, i am just wondering, you have not mentioned at all native people that are historians, and i am wondering -- or authors, or people from those communities that have been affected, have you been including them? where are those voices? hampton: good question. up until fairly recently, navajo history, or any native american history, was largely oral history. up until recently, there were not a whole lot of navajo accounts of what happened.

i certainly used the ones that i had to work with. i use a lot of oral history, though. i think it is -- i am not sure how many pages of my page in my book are devoted to the navajo conflict. but, many, and most of that is based on oral histories that after, duringht the great depression, during the wpa> . there were a bunch of writers who went into navajo country and other places and took oral histories from people who remembered what happened then. not what my great, great grandfather did, but what my father told me, one or two generations away. navajoterms of the nove part of my story, i say a large part of it is based on that wpa research that was taken then.

i also think it's important to understand, in terms of the navajo situation, there have been, for hundreds of years, essentially a low-grade war going on between the navajo and the spanish, then the mexicans, in which they stole each other's sheep and cattle and women and children, and killed shepherds and killed each other whenever possible. this is a war that has gone on for over 200 years at the point when the united states came west and took over this part of the world. i think it is one of the weaknesses of the navajo interpretation of these events, that the navajo never recognized that this war took place. the navajo often seem to argue that the united states just kind of came out of nowhere and visited this torturous campaign upon them for no reason, that there had not been multiple treaties violated, that there

had not been multiple attacks and massacres on both sides, that it led up to this culminating event. i don't know -- many of my navajo friends in santa fe where i live, i don't think are very honest about that. they don't look honestly at the fact that this is a war that actually had two or three, actually multiple sides. this war also extended to the comanches and many other native tribes. if you go to those tribes, and you talk about the navajo, they will talk about how the navajo were ancient enemies and attackers, and stole our women and children. this was kind of an untenable situation that was going on for a long time. unless the navajo are arguing that we should go back to that time when we steal each other's women and children and cattle and sheep and live in the sort of hobbesian world where life is

nasty, brutish, and short, i think that you have to honestly reckon with what was happening in the 1860's and this war that was proposed not by kit carson, but by a guy named james henry carlton on orders that were signed by and approved by abraham lincoln. that is when you begin to realize that kit carson is an important but actually only an executive role in this thing. this was a war that was ordered from the very highest levels of the u.s. government. it becomes a much more complicated story. >> [inaudible] hampton: it doesn't make it better or worse. in fact, i think that is a big problem people have with my book, the notion that if you are going to write about someone, that you are automatically celebrating them. that would mean you can't write about anyone who is a villain or a bad person in history.

i would challenge you to find a single book in american letters that is more vivid and depicting carson's scorched-earth campaign against the navajo in all of its brutality and all of its vivid cruelty, really. but that doesn't mean i'm celebrating kit carson. it just means i'm writing a book in which kit carson is a central character in a much bigger story. >> thank you. how do you evaluate carson compared to custer, william cody, possibly davy crockett, and daniel boone -- given the qualifications, what historically have been deemed admirable characters, we now recognize the falsehoods of all of them. how do you put them in comparison with carson? hampton: i am not an expert on those other characters, really.

most of them were showmen or people who were really good at putting themselves in the center of the story. carson was a horrible businessman. he died destitute. he was not someone who could pick the pieces of his myth and building edifice that could make money for himself. he was also not a narcissist like custer. he really wasn't. whatever you want to say about carson -- unfortunately, so many of these guys have a name that begin with a c. they get all mixed up. [laughter] carson was not anything like custer in terms of his demeanor, body language, in his sort of pseudo-chivalrous demeanor. he was just a very different

kind of cat. he is supposedly distantly related to daniel boone. when he came out of missouri, his family was distant cousins and thereforeone, sort of the baton was handed over from daniel boone in kentucky to carson and missouri, as they moved westward. it seems very skeptical, very dubious, to me. i forgot was you mentioned, david crockett. yeah, yeah. there are people who try to say this was a progression of white american folk heroes. i actually just think they are all pretty different. they came out of different times. they had different sorts of worlds that they were living in as they moved their way west. what is different really about carson is this underlying tragic aspect that was part of his

personality, which was -- and part of his life story -- which was he really participated in the destruction of the world that he loved. unwittingly, for the most part. he came west. those were his happiest days and was a 20's when he mountain man, when he was living with the cheyenne and the arapahoe, and the mountain guys, and living this free world. they nearly trapped the beaver to extinction. then he became a hunter at a place called bends forward and participated in the hunting of the buffalo, which we all know where that ended. then he participated as a scout in the topographical corps expeditions that led to this mass exodus of immigrants west on the oregon trail.

it led to the mormons coming, all these folks flooding to the west. creating, which then led to the railroads, and the railroads created this whole different west that he never really wanted to be a part of. it was clear by the end of his life that he was done with this new west. he did not understand this new west. and yet he was central to the creation of this west. fouled his own nest, he destroyed his own paradise. i think the ultimate part of the tragedy is he didn't fully realize that. he did not fully see it until the very end of his life, that he had been a central figure in the destruction of this world that he loved so much. ed: we have a few over here. >> there is an anecdote that i think might have been told in kit carson's autobiography.

he was helping the army chasing some indians who had captured a white woman. and when they finally arrived, the woman had already died. affects he found a "blood and thunder" novel about kit carson. which you talk a little bit about his reaction to that? hampton: great question. this was the moment, as far as i can tell, when kit carson first encountered his own myth, the time he first became aware of these books that were written with him as a central character. and, a woman named anne white, you can't make up these names, was on the santa fe trail when her party was attacked by apache indians and all the men were killed.

anne white and her baby daughter and a black slave were captured and kit carson sort of got the call to go find her. and, this is one of the things about kit carson, with no remuneration, with no official title, he was just great at reading signs. he was a great tracker. he lived near the santa fe trail. he went after the party in search of anne white. after something like two weeks on the trail, it deepened into the plains of the panhandle of texas. he found her. but the element of surprise had been lost. the indians scattered. he had found her in this camp with an arrow through her heart. she had been killed. her baby -- no, her baby and the

slave were never found again. but by her side, close to where she was, he found this "blood and thunder," and in that, which he could not read, but had someone else read to him, the story was about how kit carson had gotten a call to go find a woman, a white woman, who had been kidnapped by indians on the santa fe trail, and how he had succeeded miraculously in finding her and saved the day and rescued her and killed a bunch of indians. and, you know, restored her to her family back in boston. [laughter] he read this thing and he heard this story around the campfire, and then someone said, "hey, do you want this? this is your copy." you need to have this book."

and he said, "no, burn the damn thing." he felt that this book had given anne white a false hope. obviously, he had failed. it haunted him for the rest of his life. it's a true story. you talk about shifting between the truth and the bullshit, this is actually one of the true stories. it is something, a fascinating side chapter of his life. thanks for asking. ed: time for one more. read here. we have got a microphone coming. >> what about his personal life? you mentioned he was married. did he ever have children? was his marriage successful? i mean, hard to believe it would be. [laughter] hampton: what did you say? the last part? >> i said, hard to believe it would be successful, but what about his personal life, his marriage? hampton: good question. his personal life.

he had three wives. not at the same time. [laughter] his first wife was named singing grass. she was an arapahoe. one of the loves of his life. they had two children of whom , one died young and the other lived on a little bit longer, but she died in childbirth with that second child. his second wife was cheyenne. she kicked him out of her teepee in what is known as the cheyenne divorce. that one didn't work well at all. and his third and final wife was for the rest of his life with spanish. josefa from taos. i can't remember how many years they were married. she was 18 years his junior. she was taller than he was. there are at least one, maybe of her.tures

she was a beauty. she would be played by salma hayek. [laughter] she is pretty hot. people have wondered what does she see in this greasy, grizzled, smelly old mountain guy. but they were married, had eight kids. these kids were spread out all over colorado and new mexico. when i went on the book tour i did meet descendents of the carson family. they are out there. of course, there is johnny carson. [laughter] no relation. but, i mean, it was a great theme of his life, this notion like ulysses, he will get back to his wife. but he seemed to be constitutionally incapable of saying no to errands that were proposed to him by the u.s. government or other people. so he was constantly on the road. she had to raise these kids pretty much by herself.

i am sure she resented him. the family in taos has stories along those lines. but, you know, he seems to always be -- he is in oregon, he's in montana, he's back east fighting in the civil -- we did not even get to the civil war and battles he fought in the civil war. you know, it is like, when is he going to come home and be a normal guy and have his family life? i do think it was one of the biggest regrets and his life that he did not do that. but that is how he ended his life story. he had an aneurysm on his aorta. he had been diagnosed, but he wanted to go to washington, d.c. to negotiate a treaty for the ute indians, who were his closest friends, his closest tribes, which he did it successfully do. he got a secondary diagnosis that it was indeed aneurysm on

his aorta, which i have later learned is a classic sign of syphilis. but then he got on a train this time, not a horse or a mule. he got on a train and took it all the way back to denver, because he knew that josefa was pregnant with their eighth kid, and he wanted to be there in time. he got there a couple days before she gave birth to the ir final baby. she died in childbirth. he died a month later. some say of a broken heart, but really it was the aneurysm that burst. that is the end of the story. he was true to josefa. by all accounts, was a loyal and true husband, but was hardly ever there except in the very last years of his life. they are buried together in kit carson park, which may be renamed. and that is sort of the end of

the story. that is the saga of "blood and thunder" and kit carson. thank you so much for listening tonight. [applause] you are watching american history tv, 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. on twitter at c-span history for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest street news. host tuckerox news carlson discusses his book "ship of fools." >> it is about why we elected from, and i couldn't get past it. i couldn't get past the idea that the country voted for donald trump. how do you do that? it is not an attack on trump. i think trump is right in the thematic sense on a bunch of different things, but you would not electron unless you really,

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