Description:
Unlike, in many ways, but forever joined, the figures of Kit Carson, frontier scout and soldier, and John Frémont, politician and bureaucrat, loom large in the history of the American West. Carson is remembered today as something of a dime-novel hero or as a villain responsible for the deaths of innocent women and children during the Long Walk of the Navajo. For his part, Frémont, famed in the mid-19th century, is all but forgotten. Frémont was a complicated, flamboyant, and scandal-ridden figure whose quest for fame proved to be his undoing. David Roberts, the author of several popular histories of the West, describes Frémont's undeniable contributions to the growth of the American nation in A Newer World, a narrative account of the explorer's career in the West from the early 1840s to the advent of the Civil War. "Frémont's expeditions," Roberts writes, "were significant not so much for crossing land never before seen by Americans as for thrusting the Great West into the awareness of a nation hungry to expand. He was the classic example of the right man in the right place at the right time." So, too, was Kit Carson, the taciturn frontiersman who guided Frémont and saved his life on more than one occasion. Roberts's sympathetic but not uncritical tale of their crossed destinies puts human faces on two men lost to legend. --Gregory McNamee
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