Kit Carson: The Happy Warrior of the Old West
by . Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1928. 8vo. ix+297 pp. $3.50.
MR. VESTAL’S book will be the final step in securing for Kit Carson permanent claim to the renown he has always had as the ‘Hero of the Prairies,’ the most romantic and heroic figure of the Old West. Little objection can be made to this final immortality ; for once, the hazards of reputation have selected a man who was just about all he is supposed to have been. Certainly no more than three or four mountain men ever attained Kit’s mastery of the great craft, and whether one or two surpassed him in it is a matter of opinion merely — and of opinion too retrospective to be valuable. Among American trappers, Jedediah Smith was an abler captain than Kit and far more of a trail breaker, but Smith died young, before the great days were more than begun; Jim Bridger, Lucien Fontenelle, and Thomas Fitzpatrick were more successful than Kit as partisans; and Bridger and Fitzpatrick were at least his equals in all departments of the craft. A student of those roaring days might perhaps regret that Bridger and Fitzpatrick have lost the verdict of posterity, for not only were they Kit’s equals, but also they had more of the gaudy ‘maleness’ and humor of the West.
Mr. Vestal’s biography is an excellent bit of imaginative realization. More than any other book of recent years it understands and presents the Old West, those fleeting decades of unimaginable vigor and energy and almost unimaginable adventure. It will be, perhaps, more effective for the student of the West than for the uninformed reader, since it takes for granted much that can hardly be so taken, and neglects to explain much that, for the uninitiate, should be explained. It presents Kit admirably; it hardly presents his environment and the life that made his career possible; for that the interested must still go to Sabin’s Kit Parson Days or to less wellknown accounts of the fur trade.
There is just a little shock in one’s first realization that the conjectural method of biography, hitherto devoted to exalted personages, is here portraying a man of sunburn and rawhide. The shock fades, however, before Mr. Vestal’s undoubted success with his method. His narrative moves confidently, and it has in full measure the gusto that books about the West must have if they are to be true. It presents Kit as he was, a remarkable man in a remarkable place and period. It dissents a little from the pious tradition that has gathered about him (an increment from the incredibly moral penny thrillers whose reputation for immorality so amazes Mr. Pearson), but makes plain that there was nothing in Kit’s life from which any contrary tradition could have germinated. It contributes much new material to the study of Western Americana, in particular from Indian legends about Kit—a source which Mr. Vestal taps for the first time. And throughout it is instinct with the movement and delight arid violent color of the days that were, on the whole, the most adventurous of our national experiences.
BERNARD DEVOTO