major charles, an attorney from wall street, the germans surrounding .hem from the hills here the men take cover near what they call the mill. meanwhile, the rest of the division cannot reach them. >> watch of american history tv this weekend on c-span3. next, and american history tv, author of blood and thunder, the epic story of kit carson and the conquest of the american west. he describes the american frontiersmen as a controversial often described as a hero or a cruel killer. it hastitute organize

thinks some viewers might find offensive. >> thank you so much, it's great to be here. i joke around and say when i started the podcast, i thought i would hit the big time if i could get to people to listen. the idea that people would ask me to come and speak with one of my favorite authors is a dream come true. everybody here is very familiar with hampton sides. for the purposes tonight, we will be talking about "blood and thunder," one of his very well-known books. that is just a very small percentage of what he has written and i have read it all. he has an amazing talent for distilling loads in lowe's and years and years of research and serious history into

user-friendly, fun, exciting books. obviously you should all read "blood and thunder," but i'd encourage you to check out his others as well. he has another coming out in october. hampton is a tennessee native, i'm a north carolina native, it is likely that our southern accents will ramp up and no one will understand it. but i am so excited a chat with him. we are going to get right into it. the best way to go about this is to establish some of the major

players in "blood and thunder," and from there we can dig into the details. first we should talk about the novel how -- the navajo. >> no, we should talk about barbecue. >> this could turn into a brawl. [laughter] >> we digress. >> that's not a good way to start. >> so let's talk about the navajo. there's a line in your book

where you say there's the most -- could you explain what that means and talk about the navajo and their geographic location. >> absolutely. i live in santa fe, and the navajo presence in new mexico is huge, and yet i think all the westerns we are familiar with, it is usually the sioux or comanche that is depicted. people don't really know that much about -- who are the navajo, this people that came down the spine of the rockies and adopted the lifestyle of anyone they met? it seems like they were the expert inhalers of other cultures. of course they met the spanish

and adopted their sheet, which became the foundation of their amazing skill of making rugs and incredible textiles which they are famous for. they adopted the horse, which accelerated their culture, it allowed them to move over vast areas of what we now call navajo country, tending to their herds. but they weren't just a sheep people, horse people. they were also agriculturalist. they grew corn. they were seminomadic. they learned a lot from the pueblo tribe, adopted many of their cultures and ideas. i call them the most american of the american indians, because they seem to have this unique talent for ushering in new blood, new ideas, new concepts wherever they roamed over the southwest, and they were by far the most successful tribe in the southwest at that point. they were growing by leaps and

bounds in this internal conflict between the spanish and the mexicans along the rio grande. the navajo were winning that conflict. they were more successful in their ways, they were flourishing quite beautifully when, in 1846, the united states of america, these anglo-americans, started marching 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 cloaked in mythology and that is hard to dig down to exactly who he was. i thought of him as a cowboy trotting around on a stallion. that couldn't be further from the truth. [laughter] >> unassuming, awkward around the ladies, he had a certain mischievous charisma or so many people said. he was someone will always put other people at the center of the story, not himself. this is an age of windbags and glory hounds. 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. i mean, like real loyalty, both ways. you don't throw your friends under a bus. 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. it became really difficult for me as i got into the story to reconcile these two personalities. the sweet kit carson, the folk hero, with a very violent guy.

he lives in an era of incredible violence, an era where there were not really outlaws yet because there were no laws to live outside of. just a really interesting cat. i get brushing up against these two different viewpoints. that he was a genocidal maniac and a folk hero. routinely, people did say that about carson. the truth is somewhere in the middle. he was a great indian hater which was not an indian hater at all. his first wife was arapajo. he spoke seven different indian languages. he looked more like an indian than a white guy for most of his life. the truth is much more complicated and interesting. i realize this was a great character, iconic character, to use as the narrative line for understanding bigger forces that were out there. 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, mapping, describing of the west that took place during this one lifetime. it is hard to overstate what emotions kit carson brings out. ed: 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 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. hampton: try going to navajo country. i have done a lot of talks and navajo country. we southerners are famous for our hospitality. it is so embracing and wonderful. i had a great time everywhere i went and navajo country. i give a talk in shiprock, this woman set 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. she said it with a smile. she is a wonderful lady. i don't know what happened but that is the point, this guy is viewed like we southerners view sherman. destroyed every water source, every cow, every sheep, cornfield, and let this district of campaign against the people that is still in their psyches. this morning in one of the sessions, the novel molly gloss was speaking at she was talking about how in the american west there was this vacuum, we did not have king arthur or the beowulf. the 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 demand for a myth in kit carson that worked. the myth latched on him because we americans, humans, need to have that. hampton: a little bit of both. carson was not like the most charismatic guy when you first met him.

people would meet him on the trail and they would hear about him or read about him, they would meet him, this five foot four awkward guy, they would say, you're not that kit carson i am looking for. he is supposed to be six foot eight and blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful, always gets the girl and always wins the day. because that is the hero of these early books. it often featured kit carson as a hero. they were pretty important kind of books in their day. it was one of the first mass pieces of literature in american publishing. people north and south and east and west. but carson was often at the center of these books. carson hated these books. he absolutely hated them. 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 old 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 to indians before breakfast. it was presumably a good thing back then. he did not understand that. he had to reckon with the celebrity for his entire life starting around 1846 when carney's army was coming was. even before because of john c fremont and his topographical books. it is actually a big theme of the book. he tries to reckon with his own celebrity and does not understand where it is coming

from. i think there is an element -- people back east, not only government people but the writers, novelist, 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 the native americans, was not 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. it also helped that his name was kit carson. it is easy to remember. it obtained 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. it was made much more difficult by the fact that kit carson was illiterate. he could not read the books even though they were not great tones or anything. i do you to read some of these "blood and thunder" books. 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. he wrote and dictated a biography, autobiography, which is a very frustrating document by the way, when you read it, it

is the bare-bones. he had this expression, he would say, i concluded to charge the indians. done so. [laughter] he was like, your action is greater than words. which in the essence of his personality, concluded to do the dishes i will tell my wife, done so. as a writer, someone trying to understand his inner life and emotional life, what did he really think about american indians? you don't get that in his autobiography. 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 he was very tight with john fremont. i don't think you can have two more polar opposite personalities. fremont was a glory hound, center of attention, he was a mega maniac 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 of his reputation on everybody else's work. how you reconcile those two relationships? it's really interesting. hampton: 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, 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. he was the most intelligent man in the room but the first to admit it. all those kind of things. then you have carson who is completely the opposite. i guess sort of modern addiction counselor tech 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 looking for a father figure perhaps.

he knew there was this world back east of well educated intelligent literate people. the society that he could never be a part of. and here comes fremont, he meets him on a steamship near st. louis. he gets a job to be a scout to go explore the american west. fremont just won him over. carson, once you became his friend and he became your friend, it was impossible to de-friend him. he believed in loyalty. he expected you to be loyal to him and him to you. 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. he was very differential throughout his life. to anyone who was better educated, and fact that he was illiterate, it played a role in some of his insecurities. but he also needed someone, most men who are married understand this, when he to be told what to do so we can go out and do it. done so. he was one of those guys. when you gave him a punch list, he went out and did it. sometimes he was incredibly violent and hard to reconcile with other aspects of his is nobody. to understand carson unit to understand these other guys in his life, fremont and james henry carlton, for some

ultimately and ordered him to go on to the navajo campaign. ed: when you're faking about loyalty, i feel like that is the common descriptor that comes -- talking about loyalty, 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 receivables that is friends won't pay him, he's got on paper not a dollar to his thing but in his pocket, basically nothing. as an american hero, that everybody has put on a pedestal forever, dies alone with no money. he was that loyal to people but the people that he trusted in the financial matters did not repay him. what does that say about the blood loyalty, i guess? hampton: 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 coming up with navajo rugs, lightning whiskey, by the time he died, the railroad was coming west and money culture was taking over the west. it is interesting to think about carson is 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 i do not think that is true at all. he ran away from missouri to the new mexico territory. it was mexican territory. he was trying to get away from america. happiest years of his life were

the years that he spent as a mountain man, living with the arapahoe. 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 motivation of his life, it was not about being a patriot, it was about loyalty, coming back to this idea. tribal loyalty. this is how you survived when you were a mountain man. this is the code we talked about yesterday in the seminars 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. other tribes were your enemy. that was by the time he was 30 years old, that was so hard -- 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, what he did was very bad. but if you look at it through the lens of his people and his time, it is a different story. it reminded me of another character from one of your books, the captain. how he had this idea to go on this exploration to find basically the seat in the middle of the polar ice cap. if you could find the secret passage can get to this warm topical sea. now looking back at that, you think that is the craziest thing. can you talk a little bit about the importance of judging these characters whether it is kit

carson or theodore roosevelt, looking at them in their time period. hampton: this notion of presentism that you judge has characters based on present values, towards race or equal rights, or whatever. you really have to scrape away everything that we know and think and feel. if you 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 made as a culture, as a people, and as a democracy. you have to get back to where they were then. that is why i tried to do "blood and thunder." i don't know if i succeeded. a lot have criticized the book. other people have criticized the

book for not being broke it 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. the truth is somewhere in the middle. like i say, this book is really -- i'm curious, how many of you read "blood and thunder?" it is 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 and 50's and 60's. he is the guy. he was everywhere.

he did all this travel -- in oregon, he was in mexico, washington, dc. i did it in a volkswagen jetta. it's got really good mileage. diesel. just a span of this man's life and where he went, the fact that he was a literate also created some really profound challenges because historians love documents. he did not really have any. i lived 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 up, 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] 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 massage, we had a bunch of seances. with carson himself. that is what the book is about. direct communication. [laughter] unfortunately, or fortunately, even though he was illiterate, he was written about a lot. there are tons of accounts all over the place.

you have to go to places like the library at yale or the huntington library in pasadena to relate to the story and sift through what is false and what is fiction and what is real. but you can find it. ed: 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. hampton: from a technical historian research aspect, how did you do that? hampton: kit carson is like a

jack-in-the-box. he pops up everywhere. people will come he is a think kit carson was in our backyard, there is a true carved into it. probably not. since he was illiterate. [laughter] kay's the he supposedly lived in. caves that he supposedly lived in. whatever. he could've been anywhere.

of course, every county, every carson city, nevada, every kit carson park, carson national forest, everything is named after the sky. it creates this kind of illusion that he must've been everywhere. and he was almost everywhere. ed: how did you sift through? hampton: it is hard. there's all kinds of lore. that he was in a fight with the comanches and he was outnumbered by a hundred to one. he was a himself. he reached around and slit the throat of his mule, and the mule created the barricades so he could fight the comanches. but the smell of the mule scared the horses and therefore they would not come close. this is in numerous books 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. you have to sift through it all. it is usually bullshit. but the real story is more interesting because he did do amazing things. it seems that whenever there was that she was in the heat of action, he was the guy to save the day. he was the coolest under pressure. he killed the most people and got the message to washington. he was also a transcontinental carrier and brought these messages to washington, including possibly in one of the saddleback's, news that they

discovered old in california. i don't know, i'm a little skeptical on that one. he hated washington, by the way. they treated him like tarzan. [laughter] like he just came out of the wild. he did not have use a fork, stuff like that. ed: you briefly alluded to this, kit carson park. hampton: sacred house. it is a great example of some of modern-day society's attempts to fix some of these wrongs from the old days. mount mckinley and alaska, that is not been renamed to denali officially. ed: do you climb? hampton: i don't know about climb. i threw up my way up. there is all this discussion about washington redskins constantly, there was this part in -- we used to call him the foreskin living in washington. but we digress. the kit carson park. ed: tell the story about what happened. hampton: 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 town, a center where people meet and it is the central park. it is called that mainly because he is buried there, he and his wife. it is spread on kit carson avenue right up against kit carson national forest. it is part of the history of this town. but i understand that native americans hate this guy. 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. there was a movement to change the name of kit carson park to something else. unfortunately, the town leaders kind of just had a spasm and did not have a good answer and said we will call it red willow park. but they never insulted the people of the red willow. the indians were not asked what

he think so they pitched a fit and we are back in square one. it is still called kit carson park. 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 renter, a scout and a soldier, ultimately a brigadier general, but he was an indian fighter against the navajo and the apache, several apache tribes. so they hate him. and, what do i really think about it? i don't know. there is education behind it and it is not a knee-jerk reaction, i am fine with it. he is buried there, however. what you do with that great, too? 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, what to do with the statute, 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 honor these dead white guys. we need to -- the biggest corrective to this problem is to build more statues.

[laughter] 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 what to do with the statute, is not to tear them down 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. [laughter] ed: aside from building more statues, what would you say, and i know you're not a politician, but from a practical standpoint, how do you see us getting past this divisiveness? because it seems that the rhetoric on both sides, people are only retreating more and more into their corners.

maybe they are just the loud people. maybe the people in the middle that are reading and thinking it through. how do you see us getting past this? because it just seems to be getting more and more hyped up almost on a weekly basis now in the media. hampton: i don't know, 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't 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. there were desperate times there where people weren't able really -- democrats and republicans, to be able to talk to each other. we do seem 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've got 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 to make a professional life's work the study and understanding of the american west. i have just written one book. ed: think how i feel. i've got a laptop and a microphone. hampton: i have made the west my home, and i have written one book, but i'm not a scholar 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 for us to get a conversation going that will lead to something positive. ed: one of the things i loved

about your book was i 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, it is a jumping off point to go 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 thunder," where should they go? it is infinite. where should they go? 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. incidents? anyone? >> [indiscernible]

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 kind of an early document of the american perception of the american west. one of my favorite books of all the western literature is stegner's "beyond the hundredth radiant." you have to read it. -- meridian." 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 lives in santa fe. he is a powerful writer, and if you are going to read a novel, i think "blood meridian" is a great one.

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 look 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. a civil war historian. he had the beard, a pipe, and an accent. and his son huggy and i were in a rock band together. argus. have you heard of them? [laughter] we would do what we could possibly do to prevent shelby

foot from finishing his trilogy of the civil war. but 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 was 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, two -- to 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.

[laughter] ever. his point was you talk about your work, he said great work is written under pressure. remember those old pressure cookers? my grandmother cooked beans in it. 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. 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 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 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 microphones. we are recording this. if you wait for the microphone. >> where would you put irving stone's book in the context of -- 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 some book or 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. which 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

"ragtime"? e.l. doctorow. he was a great historical novelist. you know, bringing so much research and spending fiction. -- 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 kind of feel like i am not a solid ground. i keep 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. [laughter] ed: who does that? here is one right here. we will come to you next. >> hi my name is janie from the , navajo nation. it is quite interesting. i'm just picking it up, i haven't read your book yet, but i will. language, i have an issue with, and how you are celebrating that it's amazing how he has killed the most people. i am a part of that group that survived those internment and 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 lord 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. many.

most of that is based on oral histories that were taken during the great depression, during the wpa, there were a bunch of writers who went into navajo country and a lot of other places and took these 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. in terms of the number hope 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, is that the navajo never recognized that this war took place. they often argued the united states just kind of came out of nowhere and visited this scorched-earth 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 i'm 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 actually extended to utes and the comanche and many other tribes. if you go to those tribes, and you talk about the navajo, they will talk about how the navajo were our 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 where we steal each other's women and children and cattle and sheep and live in this sort of 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. and it becomes a much more complicated story. >> [inaudible] hampton: it doesn't make it better or worse. 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 in depicting carson's scorched-earth campaign against the navajo in all of its brutality, all of its vivid cruelty, really.

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 an 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.' i get them all mixed up. [laughter] carson was not anything like custer in terms of his demeanor, and his body language, and his sort of pseudo-chivalrous demeanor. he was just a very different kind of cat. he was supposedly distantly related to daniel boone. when he came out of missouri his , family was distant cousins with boone, and sort of the baton was handed over from daniel boone in kentucky to

carson and missouri as they moved westward. it seems very skeptical and dubious to me. i have forgotten who else you mentioned to davy crockett. there are people who try to say this was a progression of white american folk heroes. i actually think that they are all pretty different and 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 -- that 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 in his 20's when he was a mountain man, he was living with the cheyenne and the arapahoe, and the mountain guys, and living this kind of free world. they nearly trapped the beaver to extinction. then he became a hunter at a place called bends fort and participated in the hunting of the buffalo, and we all know where that ended. then he participated as a scout in the topographical core of -- topographical core expeditions that led to this mass exodus of immigrants west on the oregon trail. it led to the mormons coming, and all these folks flooding to the west. that 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. yet he was central to the creation of this west. he 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. when they finally arrived, the woman had already died. among her affects he found a

"blood and thunder" pulp novel about kit carson. would you talk a little bit about his reaction to that? hampton: great question. this was the moment, as far as i could tell, that 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. a woman named anne white, you can't invent these names, was on the santa fe trail on her party was attacked by apache and all the men were killed. white and her baby daughter and a black slave were captured and kit carson sort of got the call to go find her. this is one of the things about kit carson, with no remuneration, with no official

title, he was just great at reading signs and was a great tracker. he lived near the santa fe trail, he went after the party apache 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 hickorias had scattered. he had found her in this camp with an arrow through her heart. she had been killed and 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 the story around the campfire, and then someone said, "hey, do you want this? this is your copy." and he said, "no, burn the damn thing." he was so fed up with this book. he did not understand it and he felt it given anne white a false hope. obviously, he had failed. it haunted him for the rest of his life. it's a true story. sifting between the truth and

the bullshit, this is actually one of the true stories. it is something that it is a fascinating side chapter of his life. thanks for asking. ed: time for one more. right here. we've got a microphone coming. >> what about his personal life? you mentioned he was married. did he ever have children? was his marriage successful? hard to believe it would be. [laughter] hampton: what did you say? >> 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, one of whom 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. his third and final wife was spanish, for the rest of his life. josefa jaramio 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 was one, maybe two pictures of her, 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, they had eight kids. they were spread out all over colorado and new mexico.

when i went on the book tour and -- i did meet descendents of the carson family. they are out there. of course, there is johnny carson. [laughter] no relation. it was a great theme of his life was 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. he was constantly on the road. she had raised these kids pretty much by herself. i am sure she resented him. the family in taos has stories along those lines. 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.

battles he fought in the civil war. it is like when is he going to , come home and be a normal guy and have a family life? i do think it was one of the great 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, which were his closest friends, his closest tribes. which he did successfully do this, and got a secondary diagnosis that it was indeed aneurysm on his aorta, which i have later learned is a classic sign of syphilis. but 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 child.

he wanted to be there in time. he got there, a couple days before she gave birth to the final baby, and 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. that is sort of the end of the story. that is the saga of "blood and thunder" and kit carson. thanks so much for listening tonight. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> the administration and course curriculum. how catholic priests led by bishop mark j. hurley joined the student's inort to settle the strike 1969. >> it is my pleasure to our speaker today. bi