Editing Kit Carson (section)

== Books and dime novels (1847–1859) ==
Carson's fame spread throughout the United States with government reports, dime novels, newspaper accounts, and word of mouth. The first accounts published for popular audiences were extracts from Frémont's explorations reports as reprinted in period newspapers. Frémont's journals, modified by Jesse Benton Frémont into romantic accounts of the uncharted West, appeared in the early 1840s.<ref name="Slotkin">{{cite book |last1=Slotkin |first1=Richard |title=The Fatal Environment, the Myth of the Frontier om the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 |date=1985 |publisher=Wesleyan University Press |location=Middletown, Connecticut |isbn=0-8195-6183-5 |pages=198–202}}</ref> Newspapers throughout the US and England reprinted excerpts about wild tales of buffalo hunts, vast new landscapes, and indigenous peoples.<ref>{{cite journal |title=A Real Buffalo Hunt |journal=Democrat Standard |date=October 10, 1843}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |title=A Real Buffalo Hunt |journal=London Guardian |date=March 7, 1846}}</ref> Carson's heroics enlivened the pages. In June 1847, Jesse Benton Frémont helped Carson prepare a brief autobiography, the first, published as an interview in the Washington, D.C. Union, and reprinted by newspapers across the country.<ref>{{cite journal |title=Kit Carson of the West |journal=Washington Union |date=June 15, 1847}}</ref><ref name="DearOldKit">{{cite book |last1=Carter |first1=Harvey |title=Dear Old Kit, the Historical Christopher Carson |date=1968 |publisher=University of Oklahoma Press |location=Norman, Oklahoma |isbn=0-8061-2253-6 |pages=222–230}}</ref>

Charles E. Averill (1830–1852), "the youthful novelist", published a magazine article for ''Holden's Dollar Magazine'' in April 1848<ref>{{cite journal |title=An Adventure of Kit Carson, A Tale of the Sacramento |journal=Holden's Dollar Magazine |date=April 1848 |volume=1 |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044021482724&view=1up&seq=219&q1=%22Kit%20Carson%22 |access-date=September 10, 2020}}</ref> that he expanded into a novel advertised as ''Kit Carson, the Prince of the Gold Hunters; or the Adventures of the Sacramento; a Tale of the New Eldorado, Founded on Actual Facts'', an even more fantastic tale exploiting Carson's rising fame.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Averill |first1=Charles |title=Kit Carson, The Prince of the Gold Hunters |date=1849 |publisher=Samuel French |location=New York City, New York |url=https://archive.org/details/kitcarsonprinceo00averrich/page/n5/mode/2up?q=%221%2C000%22 |access-date=September 10, 2020}}</ref> It arrived on bookstore shelves by May 1849, in time for the [[California Gold Rush]] demand for narratives (fictional or not) on the trail to California. Averill's pioneers were in awe of Carson: "Kit Carson!...the famous hunter and adventurer of the Great West, the hardy explorer of the trackless wilderness...the prince of backwoodsmen" arrives to guide them. When later asked about the book, Carson said "every statement made [by Averill] is false."<ref>{{cite news |title=Washington Union |date=August 29, 1857}}</ref>

Similarly, [[Emerson Bennett]] (1822–1905), a prolific novelist of sensational romances, wrote an overland trail account where a fictional Carson joins a California bound wagon train. Arriving in bookstores in January 1849, his ''The Prairie Flower, or Adventures in the Far West'' exploited the Carson myth, and, like Averill, quickly followed with a sequel.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bennett |first1=Emerson |title=Prairie Flower; or Adventures in the Far West |date=1850 |publisher=U. P. James |location=Cincinnati |edition=2nd |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t00z71447&view=1up&seq=11 |access-date=September 10, 2020}}</ref> In each novel, the Westering immigrants are in awe of the famous Carson. Both novelists sensationalized the fictional Carson as an "Indian fighter", with gruesome trashy accounts as "red-skins" "bite the dust" (Averill, ''Gold Hunter''). For example, of one victim, Averill wrote, "blood gushed in a copious stream from his nostrils"; while Bennett wrote "Kit Carson, like an embodied spirit of battle, thundered past me on his powerful charger, and bending forward in his saddle, with a motion quick as lightning itself, seized the scalp lock of my antagonist in one hand, and with the other completely severed his head from his body, which he bore triumphantly away" (Bennett, ''Prairie Flower'', p.&nbsp;64). The novelists' gruesome, gory and sensationalized woolly West descriptions would keep readers turning the pages, and buying more buckets-of-blood fictional accounts of Carson, especially during the coming age of dime novels.<ref name="Slotkin" /><ref name="DearOldKit" />

=== Indian captive Ann White ===
{{Main|White Massacre}}
Carson's reaction to his depiction in these first novels is suggested by the account of events around the fate of Ann White. In 1849, as he moved to civilian life at Taos and Rayado, Carson was asked to guide soldiers on the trail of White, her baby daughter, and "negro servant", who had been captured by [[Jicarilla Apache]]s and [[Ute people|Utes]].<ref>Duffus, R.L. ''The Santa Fe Trail'' University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1975, 1930, 1975 edition p. 231</ref> The commanding officer, [[Captain (land)|Captain]] William Grier of the [[1st Cavalry Regiment (United States)|1st Cavalry Regiment]], ignored Carson's advice about an immediate rescue attempt after catching the Jicarillas unaware, but after a shot was fired the order was given to attack, and the Jicarillas had started to flee. As Carson describes it in his autobiography, "In about 200 yards, pursuing the Indians, the body of Mrs. White was found, perfectly warm, had not been killed more than five minutes - shot through the heart by an arrow.... I am certain that if the Indians had been charged immediately on our arrival she would have been saved."<ref>Carson, Kit, edited by Milo Milton Quaife, University of Nebraska Press, 1966 reprint of 1935 edition pp. 132–133</ref> Her child and servant were taken away by the fleeing Jicarillas and killed shortly after the attack, according to an 1850 report by [[James S. Calhoun]], the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico.<ref>Calhoun, James S., collected and edited by Annie Heloise Abel, "The Official Correspondence of James S Calhoun While Indian Agent at Santa Fé and Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico," 1915 Washington Government Printing Office, pp. 168–170</ref>

A soldier in the rescue party wrote: "Mrs. White was a frail, delicate, and very beautiful woman, but having undergone such usage as she suffered nothing but a wreck remained; it was literally covered with blows and scratches. Her countenance even after death indicated a hopeless creature. Over her corpse, we swore vengeance upon her persecutors."{{citation needed|date=September 2024}}

Carson discovered a fictional book, possibly by Averill, about himself in the Apache camp. He wrote in his ''Memoirs'': "In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds, and I have often thought that Mrs. White would read the same, and knowing that I lived near, she would pray for my appearance and that she would be saved."<ref name="Kit Carson's Story of His Own Life">{{cite book |last1=Grant |first1=Blanche |title=Kit Carson's Story of His Own Life |date=1926 |publisher=Blanche Grant |location=Taos, New Mexico |pages=95–96 |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106000650785&view=1up&seq=9 |access-date=September 10, 2020}}</ref> The real Carson had met the fictional Carson and was deeply upset at his inability to have saved White, for he had failed to live up to the growing myth around himself. He was sorry for the rest of his life that he had not rescued White; the dime-novel Carson would have saved her.<ref>Sides 258–259</ref>

=== Memoirs ===
In 1854, Lt. Brewerton encouraged Carson to send him a sketch of his life, and offered to polish it into a book.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Sabin |first1=Edwin |title=Kit Carson Days, 1809–1868 |date=1935 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |location=Lincoln |isbn=0-8032-9237-6 |pages=775–776}}</ref> Carson dictated a "memoir" of some 33,000 words over the next few years, but moved on to another collaborator.<ref name="DearOldKit" /> Friend Jesse B. Turley was engaged in late 1856 to help Carson prepare the memoir, and after a year's work sent the rough manuscript to a New York publisher.<ref>{{cite news |title=Santa Fe Weekly Gazette |date=March 27, 1858}}</ref> In 1858, Dr. DeWitte Clinton Peters (1829–1876), a U. S. Army surgeon who had met Carson in Taos, acquired the manuscript and with Charles Hatch Smith (1829–1882), a Brooklyn lawyer turned music teacher, sometime preacher, and author<ref>{{Cite journal |date=April 7, 1882 |title=Obituary |journal=[[Brooklyn Daily Eagle]]}}</ref> rewrote it for publication. The biography was titled ''Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself''.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Peters |first1=DeWitte |title=Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains |series=American pioneers and patriots |date=1858 |publisher=W R C Clark & Co |location=New York City, New York |isbn=9781425537340 |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.abe2513.0001.001&view=1up&seq=263 |access-date=September 10, 2020}}</ref> When the book was read to Carson, he said, "Peters laid it on a leetle too thick."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Roberts |first1=David |title=A Newer World, Kit Carson, John C. Fremont, and the Claiming of the American West |date=2000 |publisher=Simon & Schuster |location=New York City, New York |isbn=0-684-83482-0 |page=253}}</ref> Originally offered by subscription by Smith's publisher, W. R. C. Clark & Co., New York City, it quickly earned rave reviews, not for its prose but its subject matter.<ref>{{cite news |title=New York Tribune |date=January 15, 1859}}</ref> The first run, a pricey $2.50 gilt edition or $4 antiqued copy, included a note signed (maybe) by Carson authenticating the story and the authorization given to Dr. Peters for the work.<ref>{{cite news |title=New York Daily Herald |date=October 27, 1858}}</ref> The Peters (with the help of Smith) biography had expanded the slim memoirs by five times (to 534 pages), with much edited-in filler, moralizing, and tedium. A cheaper edition was published in 1859, followed by two imitations that stole the market. In 1860, Charles Burdett, "a writer of no particular distinction", wrote a biography based on the Dr. Peters work, published as ''The Life of Kit Carson, the Great Western Hunter''. The great house of inexpensive novels and questionable nonfiction, [[Beadle]]'s Dime Library, in 1861, brought out ''The Life and Times of Kit Carson, the Rocky Mountain Scout and Guide'' by Edward S. Ellis, one of the stable of writers used by the firm. A popular, shorter work, it also used the Dr. Peters biography, which itself Peters revised in 1874 to bring the biography up to Carson's 1868 death. It is unknown if Carson profited from any of these publications based on his memoirs.<ref name="DearOldKit" />

In 1905, among the estate of Dr. Peter's son in Paris, was located the original Carson memoir. This was published with little comment in 1926,<ref name="Kit Carson's Story of His Own Life"/> followed by a revised or "polished" version in 1935, and, finally, in 1968, a solidly annotated edition edited by Harvey Lewis Carter, who had cleared up much of the background about the manuscript.<ref name="DearOldKit" /> Carson's memoir is the most important source about his life, to 1858, but as Carter notes, Carson was too brief, had lapses in memory, and his chronology was fallible. One frustrated author wrote of the Carson memoir that it "is as skinny as a hairless Chihuahua dog and as bald of details as a white egg".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Sabin |first1=Edwin |title=Kit Carson Days, 1809–1868 |date=1935 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |location=Lincoln, Nebraska |isbn=0-8032-9238-4 |pages=780}}</ref>

=== Dime novels ===
[[File:Fighting Trapper, or Kit Carson to the Rescue.jpg|thumb|upright=1|alt=dime novel with Carson's picture|An 1874 dime novel with a depiction of Carson on the cover, stabbing two Indians simultaneously, one through the chest, and one in the back.]]

During the last half of the nineteenth century, inexpensive novels and pseudo-nonfiction met the need of readers looking for entertainment. Among the major publishing firms was the house of Beadle, opened in 1860. One study, "Kit Carson and Dime Novels, the Making of a Legend" by Darlis Miller, notes some 70 [[dime novel]]s about Carson were either published, re-published with new titles, or incorporated into new works over the period 1860–1901.<ref>{{cite book |editor1-last=Gordon-McCutchan |editor1-first=R |title=Kit Carson, Indian Fighter or Indian Killer |date=1996 |publisher=University Press of Colorado |location=Niwot, Colorado |isbn=0-87081-393-5 |pages=1–19}}</ref> The usual blood-and-thunder tales exploited Carson's name to sell copies. When competition threatened the house of Beadle, a word-smith said they "just kill more Indians" per page to increase sales.  Skewed images of the personalities and place are exemplified by the Beadle title: ''Kiowa Charley, The White Mustanger; or, Rocky Mountain Kit's Last Scalp Hunt'' (1879) in which an older Carson is said to have "ridden into Sioux camps unattended and alone, had ridden out again, but with the scalps of their greatest warriors at his belt".<ref>Roberts 52, 79</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Kiowa Charlie |url=https://dimenovels.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/dimenovels%3A130833#page/1/mode/1up |website=Nickels and Dimes |access-date=September 10, 2020}}</ref> Edward Ellis, biographer of Carson, wrote under the pseudonym of J. F. C. Adams ''The Fighting Trapper or Kit Carson to the Rescue'' (1879), another lurid work without any hint of reality.<ref>{{cite web |title=The Fighting Trapper or Kit Carson to the Rescue |url=https://dimenovels.lib.niu.edu/islandora/search/%22Kit%20Carson%22?type=dismax |website=Nickels and Dimes |access-date=September 10, 2020}}</ref>

By the 1880s, the shoot-em-up gunslinger was replacing the frontiersman tales, but of those in the new generation, one critic notes, "where Kit Carson had been represented as slaying hundreds of Indians, the [new] [[dime novel]] hero slew his thousands, with one hand tied behind him."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Smith |first1=Henry |title=Virgin Land, The American West as Symbol and Myth |date=1950 |publisher=Harvard University Press |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |oclc=2414717 |page=103}}</ref> The dime novel's impact was the blurring of the real Carson by creating a mythic character. In fiction, according to historian of literature Richard Etulain, "the small, wiry Kit Carson becomes a ring-tailed roarer, a gigantic Samson...a strong-armed demigod [who] could be victorious and thus pave the way for western settlement."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Etulain |first1=Richard |title=Beyond the Missouri, the Story of the American West |date=2006 |publisher=University of New Mexico Press |location=Albuquerque, New Mexico |isbn=0-8263-4033-4 |page=275}}</ref>