Editing Kit Carson (section)

=== 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>