There is very little good one can say about this dime-story quality novel disguised as an authentic accounting of the “conquest of the American West.†The author is far too confident in his interpretation of history, especially when one considers the fact that he relies primarily on secondary sources. It’s nothing more than a long book report with antiquated and questionable...
more There is very little good one can say about this dime-story quality novel disguised as an authentic accounting of the “conquest of the American West.†The author is far too confident in his interpretation of history, especially when one considers the fact that he relies primarily on secondary sources. It’s nothing more than a long book report with antiquated and questionable anthropological sources favored over recent scholarship in Navajo studies and studies on the American West. I was thoroughly surprised that such shoddy scholarship could pass with such high praises. He favors particularly Kluckhohn, Underhill and McNitt.
Aside from his questionable sources, Sides writes as though he is compiling a screenplay rather than commenting on an important part of US history. Ultimately I think he secretly hopes this will become a film as he construes his time line to fit a standard, Hollywood dramatic arc. Meaning huge gaps of time between his hero (Kit Carson) and development in his antagonist (the Navajo) are oddly juxtaposed, at times skipping back-and-forth in time. If this is supposed to be history, it’s an odd approach—maybe this should be considered in discourse on postmodernism, haha.
The worst feature of this book, however, is his apologetics for Kit Carson, who is a cheap war criminal used to expand US domination over the continent. If a similar approach was take toward the German expansion over Eastern Europe, the author of such a work would be immediately chastised, but in the American West notions of moral rights and wrongs are excluded from consideration. Kit Carson was an uneducated and aggressive killer used by the US to expand (illegally) territorial claims over the American West. He committed some atrocious acts that in the contemporary lexicon of international law would have branded him a war criminal—but out vanity and possibly a deluded nostalgia for the American West of cheap, dime-store novels, he paints Mr. Carson as a reluctant conqueror. It might not be accident in fact that Sides chose the title of a cheap 19th Century adventure novel for the title of his own book.
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