Writing Kit Carson

Fallen Heroes in a Changing West

Susan Lee Johnson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469658841
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this critical biography, Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tales of two white women who, in the 1960s, wrote books about the fabled frontiersman Christopher "Kit" Carson: Quantrille McClung, a Denver librarian who compiled the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy, and Kansas-born but Washington, D.C.- and Chicago-based Bernice Blackwelder, a singer on stage and radio, a CIA employee, and the author of Great Westerner: The Story of Kit Carson. In the 1970s, as once-celebrated figures like Carson were falling headlong from grace, these two amateur historians kept weaving stories of western white men, including those who married American Indian and Spanish Mexican women, just as Carson had wed Singing Grass, Making Out Road, and Josefa Jaramillo. Johnson's multilayered biography reveals the nature of relationships between women historians and male historical subjects and between history buffs and professional historians. It explores the practice of history in the context of everyday life, the seductions of gender in the context of racialized power, and the strange contours of twentieth-century relationships predicated on nineteenth-century pasts. On the surface, it tells a story of lives tangled across generation and geography. Underneath run probing questions about how we know about the past and how that knowledge is shaped by the conditions of our knowing.

Part One

Crafting Kit Carson, 1950s–1960s

THE WEST IS A HAPPY VECTOR

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

—JOY HARJO, “She Had Some Horses”

Some Guys on Some Horses

In the years before I was born, on the first television my family owned, a buckskin-clad Kit Carson galloped across the West and through the decade of the 1880s. He rode with his Mexican pal El Toro, dueling with desperadoes. The black-and-white syndicated program, The Adventures of Kit Carson, aired in the early 1950s. My older sister and brother do not recall watching this particular TV Western in the ranch-style house my parents had built for their growing family in Wisconsin in 1952. But my brother reminds me that The Adventures of Some-Guy-on-a-Horse shows were a dime a dozen in those days. My lover and life partner, on the other hand, distinctly remembered the fringe on Carson’s shirt and his jaunty stride. She watched the program with her brothers in northern New Mexico, in country that the real Carson once called home.¹

The Adventures of Kit Carson must have irritated Bernice Blackwelder and Quantrille McClung as much as it captivated youngsters in the 1950s. It would have annoyed any viewer conversant with the actual history of western North America. It would have outraged most Diné, whose ancestors were the target of Col. Kit Carson’s 1860s Navajo campaign, but only Diné city dwellers saw it, since reservation-based Navajos did not have access to television in the 1950s.² The show would have annoyed western history buffs because Kit Carson died in 1868, leaving little substance to fill a saddle two decades later. And El Toro never lived. Kit’s closest Mexican companion was his wife Josefa Jaramillo. She was moldering in the grave by the end of 1868 as well. Had the couple been resurrected to ride again in the 1880s? After all, Kit had been born on Christmas Eve, and perhaps like Jesus he rose from the dead. And maybe, since the moral economy of the Western dictated that men rode with men, Josefa got a makeover, rolled back the stone, and charged out as El Toro, the bull.³

It was a bother, the West of the Western. When McClung saw another inaccurate portrayal of Carson, in a cameo appearance on the TV show Death Valley Days, she was peeved. She quickly telephoned Blackwelder and found her friend “in the same state and for the same reason.” Then McClung wrote a letter of protest to the television network, CBS. Finally, she dashed off a note to Marion Estergreen, a Carson devotee in New Mexico, suggesting that Estergreen enlist the aid of the man who ran the Kit Carson Home and Museum in Taos. “I consider it unpardonable to present programs that so distort history,” McClung declared.⁴

For Quantrille McClung and Bernice Blackwelder, the moment to set the record straight came in 1962. They had spent years working in libraries across the United States, and they had exchanged hundreds of letters with Carson descendants, Carson enthusiasts, and each other. The West of the Western and the West of history were due for a showdown. Blackwelder and McClung took aim and then fired. Early that year, an Idaho-based publishing house, Caxton Press, released Blackwelder’s biography, Great Westerner: The Story of Kit Carson.⁵ A few months later, the Denver Public Library published McClung’s precisely titled Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy: Line of William Carson, Ancestor of “Kit” Carson, Famous Scout and Pioneer of the Rocky Mountain Area, with the Western Branches of the Bent and Boggs Families, with Whom “Kit” Was Associated, and the Line of Samuel Carson, Supposed to be a Brother of William Carson.⁶ Yet even as the gun smoke cleared, another shot rang out, seemingly from the same end of the dusty street. Marion Estergreen, it turned out, was packing, too. Much to Blackwelder’s dismay (she did not appreciate the competition), Estergreen published a rival biography before the end of 1962 called Kit Carson: A Portrait in Courage.⁷ Whatever the differences in these women’s work, they all pledged allegiance to an actual past. The West of history was winning.

But the West of history was also changing. So was the West of the Western. So was the wider national landscape in which western history enthusiasts as well as producers of film and television Westerns did their work. It was a landscape in which civil rights struggles, the Cold War, and the shifting contours of city life loomed large. McClung and Blackwelder lived this changing landscape. It touched everything from the tables where they typed their books to the paths their letters traced across the miles to the way they made sense of Kit Carson and the western past.

The year 1962 represents a particular moment in the lives of Bernice Blackwelder and Quantrille McClung, of western history as a field of inquiry, of the Western as a form of popular culture, and of the nation itself. Not only did McClung and Blackwelder publish their books that year, but academics and amateurs joined forces to establish the Western History Association, the first professional organization devoted to the West and its history. The founding of this association marked the beginning of the end of the reign of western history buffs—amateurs like Blackwelder and McClung—in the field. Meanwhile, film and television Westerns had barely begun to fade from their glory days, when they had dominated both big and little screens, providing a visual feast of western men and western landscapes to viewers nestled in theater seats and living room sofas across the country and around the world.⁸

In 1962, national events and trends pulled in different directions. On the one hand, the Cuban Missile Crisis evoked an older Cold War United States, in which frontier heroes like Carson were celebrated and “the family” was enshrined as a truly natural human collectivity that could be opposed to the unnatural collectivism promoted by communists. On the other hand, social movements evoked a nation on the edge of racial, gender, and sexual change, creating an atmosphere in which frontier heroes—and nuclear families—would fall from grace. At the same time, suburbanization was accelerating, stirring cities and their suburbs into a bubbling cauldron of political economy that left some metropolitan residents longing not just for a rural past but a past of unexplored frontiers and undetermined futures: in a word, for the West.⁹

In 1962, Quantrille McClung, who was seventy-two, lived a secure if spartan retirement from librarianship, dwelling in a downtown Denver apartment and working as an independent genealogist. Bernice Blackwelder, at sixty, lived a more insecure and inconstant—but, for now, comfortable—existence in suburban Washington, D.C., even owning a home there. She helped her husband, Harold, in his business ventures but carved out as much time as she could for her work as an independent historian. McClung and Blackwelder—and I, as a child of six—lived in a world that still mostly revered the Wild West, though storm clouds threatened those sunny skies. Out of that world, McClung and Blackwelder produced novel visions of Carson, visions based on hard historical research, to be sure, but also on their experiences as differently situated white women in a Cold War United States that vaunted “the family” and “the West” as ramparts against changing times. They remade Carson from a lone pioneer who helped win the frontier for white America to a family man, the head of an expansive household who, despite his small stature, threw a protective arm around kinfolk of color. In the process, they created a vision of the nation that served Cold War culture, itself a locus of contradiction, conflict, and change. As for me, I was no special fan of Westerns in childhood, but I nonetheless imbibed the same intoxicating cultural brew, endured the same soft visual blows, ending up punch-drunk on the Rifleman, television’s tallest, leanest, most home-loving rancher, a widower on a horse in an impossibly white New Mexico, raising a winsome son and brandishing a Winchester in defense of that son, who called him “Pa,” and of all that was fair and just on a nineteenth-century frontier that somehow faced the same dilemmas as the ones folks met day by day in the twentieth-century metropolitan United States.

Come, then, to the late 1950s and early ’60s, when McClung and Blackwelder plied their craft on behalf of a different man on a different horse in a different West. Meet these late-middle-aged women as I met them, through their published work and the letters they exchanged as they did that work, having introduced themselves by mail in 1956 when a fellow Carson buff told them of each other, and I having stumbled across their correspondence decades later. Encounter them first through the biography Blackwelder wrote and the genealogy McClung compiled. The Kit Carson who appeared on the pages of those books was something of a new man. He was, predictably, the “Great Westerner” of Blackwelder’s title. And he was, in McClung’s rendering, the “Famous Scout and Pioneer of the Rocky Mountain Area.” But he was also, less predictably, a man intimately connected to a host of people with whom he had seemed more loosely associated in the past: New Mexican hispanos, Indigenous peoples of the plains and mountains, and, especially, women of many descriptions. McClung drew these connections in the stark, outline form of the genealogist, creating two hundred pages of charts that traced the “begats”: the parents and the parents’ parents, the children and the children’s children, the cousins, the aunts, and the uncles of Kit Carson, Josefa Jaramillo, and scores of others related by birth and marriage. Blackwelder, in surprisingly stirring prose for a first-time author whose life had been filled with other pursuits, drew the connections through well-researched, if sometimes embellished, stories of meeting and parting, romance and estrangement, birth and death. Encounter these women through the man they crafted, a nineteenth-century fellow nonetheless caught up in twentieth-century concerns about “the family” at a moment of racial change.

Begotten, and Made

First, the begats: Quantrille McClung’s Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy opens with a Carson family record that she received from one of Kit Carson and Josefa Jaramillo’s grandsons. That record starts with an entry for William Carson, Kit’s paternal grandfather, an eighteenth-century Scots Irish migrant to Pennsylvania and then the western Piedmont region of North Carolina. The rest of the volume is filled with the results of McClung’s own genealogical research. But those results begin exactly where the family record began: with William Carson.¹⁰ They follow fathers and their wives and children down through the decades and also across space, as the Carsons migrated from North Carolina to Kentucky to Missouri, and finally to the Mexican North in the heyday of the fur trade and the Santa Fe trade. Tracing male lines of descent more thoroughly than female lines was a habit among genealogists, following broader cultural and legal practices that identified men as heads of families and by which women routinely took their husbands’ names at marriage. It would be much later, after years of feminist ferment, that some published guides started to focus explicitly on strategies for researching female lineages, or, as one genealogist put it, the “hidden half of the family.”¹¹ Such resources did not exist when McClung was doing genealogical work, and she did it, for the most part, the old-fashioned way.¹² She was also doing it the old-fashioned way simply by being both a woman and a genealogist, since genealogy had not professionalized the way the discipline of history had—and the way the subfield of western history soon would—and thus provided an intellectual home for women with historical interests.¹³

As the title suggests, the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy was not limited to the Carson family. McClung, back when she worked as a librarian, had helped to develop the Genealogy Division of the Denver Public Library, and her interest in Carson began, she recalled, when “a lady in North Carolina wrote asking my help in relating her Carson line to that of the ‘Kit’ Carson family.” Realizing that no full genealogical record existed for Carson and his kin, McClung decided to compile one herself.¹⁴ Over time, she found Carson’s life had been so intertwined with the lives of the Bent brothers, especially Charles and William, and of Thomas Boggs that it would be useful to include their family lines in the genealogy, too.¹⁵ The Bents, along with Céran St. Vrain, were the proprietors of Bent’s Fort along the Santa Fe Trail, which, through the exchange of Mexican silver and mules for U.S. textiles and hardware, increasingly tied the northern territories of Mexico to the western territories of the United States starting in the 1820s and culminating in the U.S. conquest of the 1840s. Indeed, Charles Bent became the first American governor of New Mexico in 1846. Thomas Boggs was younger and came later to New Mexico, but like Carson and the Bents, he helped tighten the bonds that were slowly creating a U.S. Southwest.

What McClung’s genealogy revealed more clearly than any earlier work, though, was that Carson, Boggs, and the Bents shared more than Missouri origins and adult lives spent on the borderlands of commerce and war between the United States and Mexico, a borderland overwhelmingly occupied by Indigenous peoples. McClung showed that each of these men had intimate relationships with either American Indian women or Spanish Mexican women or both during the years of the fur trade and Santa Fe trade; that the women with whom the men intermingled were often related to one another; and that these relationships produced a large number of mixed-race and ultimately bicultural children who lived out their lives all over the West but especially in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico.¹⁶

Or at least that is what I most noticed when I first scanned the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy in the 1990s. When Bernice Blackwelder anticipated her friend’s book in the 1950s, however, she wrote simply, “I am eager to see the completed work and know it will be a real contribution to information about a truly American pioneer family.”¹⁷ Unlike Blackwelder, McClung was not given to such verbal flourishes. Indeed, she eschewed narrative prose altogether in the published genealogy. For example, when McClung decided to include a brief sketch of “Kit Carson and Family” in her book, she asked Blackwelder to write it.¹⁸ Although it was Blackwelder who called the subjects of McClung’s forthcoming genealogy “a truly American pioneer family,” given the two women’s close collaboration, it may not be too much of a stretch to assume that McClung shared her friend’s estimation of this group of people.

In what sense, then, might McClung and Blackwelder have seen the Carson, Bent, and Boggs kin network as “truly American”? The people who populate the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy constitute a striking mix: Arapahos, Cheyennes, other Indigenous peoples, Spanish Mexicans (people of Spanish and often American Indian and even African descent, many of whom downplayed or even denied their non-European ancestry), Anglo Americans (here, mostly people of English and Scots Irish descent), as well as various and sundry human amalgamations. If this group of people was not just American but hyper-American, by what processes did they achieve their Americanness? With McClung’s genealogy as guide, we might conclude that they gained this identity by meeting, by recognizing one another as different but also useful and desirable, by engaging with one another intimately and economically and making mutual accom...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue. Grandmothers’ Eyes
• Part I. Crafting Kit Carson, 1950s–1960s. The West is a Happy Vector
• Part II. Crafting Kit Carson, 1960s–1970s. Down on Wounded Knee
• Part III. Creating Craftswomen, 1890s–1940s. The Past is Another Place
• Epilogue. Where Our Fathers Died
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index