0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Christopher Carson, Familiarly Known as Kit Carson," John S. C. Abbott offers a richly detailed narrative that explores the life of one of America's most fascinating frontiersmen. Written in a style imbued with 19th-century romanticism, Abbott's biographical account captures the bravery and exploits of Kit Carson against the backdrop of westward expansion. Through vivid descriptions and engaging storytelling, readers are transported to the untamed landscapes of the American West, emphasizing themes of adventure, survival, and the complex relationship between man and nature. Abbott's work reflects the era's fascination with the rugged individualism that defined the American frontier spirit. John S. C. Abbott, a notable American historian, and biographer, was deeply influenced by the expansionist narratives of his time, which often celebrated the lives of pioneers and explorers. His background in education and his passion for American history fueled his desire to document figures like Kit Carson, who embodied the quintessential explorer of the American West. Abbott's scholarly approach balances historical fact with a vivid narrative style that appeals to both contemporary and modern audiences. For readers interested in American history, adventure, and the lure of the frontier, Abbott's biographical work on Kit Carson serves as both an informative and thrilling read. It not only explores the personal achievements of Carson but also situates him within the larger context of American expansionism, making it a valuable addition to the collections of history enthusiasts and scholars alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Christopher Carson, Familiarly Known as Kit Carson
Table of Contents
Introduction
This biography turns a frontier life into a prism for the promises and perils of American expansion. It invites readers to consider how an individual’s endurance, resourcefulness, and hard choices became entangled with a nation’s ambitions. Rather than offering a dry chronicle, the book shapes its subject into a moral and cultural symbol, asking what courage costs and whom it serves. The portrait that emerges suggests a life lived at the moving edge of settlements, weather, and war. From the outset, it signals that the story of the West is also a story about storytelling itself and the legacies that follow.
Christopher Carson, Familiarly Known as Kit Carson by John S. C. Abbott is a nineteenth-century American popular biography set largely across the frontier regions of the United States. Published in the late nineteenth century, it belongs to a period when readers sought vivid life stories that blended history with accessible narrative. The setting ranges through mountains, plains, and river corridors central to the early- and mid-nineteenth-century West. Within that context, Abbott presents a sustained account of a figure whose reputation traveled far beyond the communities he served. The book’s historical frame situates personal action within broader movements of migration and state-building.
The premise is straightforward: follow Kit Carson through the formative arenas of the fur trade, guiding, and military service as they intersect with exploration and settlement. Abbott’s narrative offers an experience pitched between biography and adventure history, emphasizing episodes of travel, survival, and decision under pressure. The voice is confident and direct, guiding readers through landscapes and crises with an eye for action. Without revealing specific turns, the book signals that ordeals of endurance and command will test its subject. For readers, the experience balances brisk pacing with reflective asides that seek meaning in moments of risk and resolve.
Stylistically, the book reflects the conventions of its era: clear, moralizing prose; vivid scene-setting; and a tendency to extract lessons from hardship. Abbott writes to be both instructive and entertaining, framing events to underscore character while maintaining a steady narrative march. The mood is earnest and often laudatory, yet it is attentive to the ordeal of frontier life. Descriptions foreground movement—across rivers, ridges, and deserts—so that geography becomes a secondary protagonist. The result is a sustained rhythm of journey, encounter, and aftermath, designed to hold attention while presenting a coherent image of the person at the story’s center.
Key themes include perseverance under duress, the attraction and cost of daring, and the forging of identity at the margins of mapped space. The book also grapples—implicitly and explicitly—with the making of national myth, tracing how public reputation coalesces around a life of service and risk. Cultural encounter and conflict are woven through the narrative, reflecting the entanglements that accompanied westward movement. Duty, loyalty, and leadership receive particular emphasis, as do questions of prudence and mercy in dangerous circumstances. Abbott positions these themes so that character and country illuminate one another, encouraging readers to interpret personal choices alongside historical currents.
Modern readers may find the work valuable as both story and artifact of its time. Its depictions of the American West and of Indigenous peoples reflect nineteenth-century perspectives and priorities, making it a window into how that era framed honor, threat, and destiny. The book rewards a thoughtful, critical approach that recognizes its narrative power while asking how language, selection of events, and emphasis shape memory. It also offers insight into popular historical writing before professional academic history dominated public understanding. Read in this light, it becomes a case study in the cultural construction of heroism and the narratives nations choose to elevate.
Approached today, the book offers two intertwined experiences: an energetic life story and a record of how the nineteenth century narrated the frontier. Readers interested in biography, the history of the American West, or the evolution of popular history will find a compact, accessible entry point. Those seeking a fuller understanding can treat it as a starting source, comparing its tone and emphases with other accounts and contemporary research. As a portrait crafted for its own time, it asks us to balance empathy with scrutiny. In doing so, it invites reflection on endurance, reputation, and the responsibilities of remembrance.
Synopsis
The book by John S. C. Abbott presents a chronological biography of Christopher “Kit” Carson, tracing his life from frontier childhood to national renown. Abbott blends adventure narrative with biographical detail, drawing on travel accounts, military reports, and reminiscences to situate Carson within the expansion of the United States across the continent. The narrative emphasizes landscapes, routes, and the practical demands of survival, while noting the public events that intersected with Carson’s career. Without extensive digression, the author follows a clear sequence of episodes that illustrate how Carson became known as a hunter, trapper, guide, soldier, and public figure of the American West. The prose underscores hardships and logistics as much as individual exploits.
Abbott opens with Carson’s birth in 1809 and upbringing on the edge of settlement, first in Kentucky and then in Missouri, where limited schooling and demanding farm work shaped his early habits. Apprenticed as a saddler in Franklin, he soon joined a caravan on the Santa Fe Trail, preferring the hazards of the road to shop work. The book details the organization of the trade, the perils of arid crossings and ambush, and the learning Carson gained under experienced hands. Arriving in New Mexico, he began acquiring languages, regional knowledge, and connections that would anchor his subsequent career in the Southwest.
Carson’s transition to the fur trade occupies a substantial section. Abbott describes the mobile camps, annual rendezvous, and wintering grounds that defined the mountain man economy, highlighting Carson’s reliability as hunter and scout. Encounters with varied tribes, negotiations for safe passage, and the ever-present threat of scarcity or conflict form recurring episodes. Bent’s Fort and Taos appear as hubs of exchange and information. The narrative includes Carson’s early domestic arrangements and alliances, as well as feats of tracking and endurance that first spread his name among trappers. These chapters sketch a craft-based education in wilderness travel, mapping, and leadership.
Abbott introduces John C. Frémont as the figure who carried Carson from regional reputation to national notice. Hired as guide for Frémont’s 1842 expedition, Carson led parties through the Missouri frontier to South Pass and the Wind River range, contributing to surveys that clarified routes to the Rockies. A second expedition in 1843–44 extended the reconnaissance to the Oregon country and then south and west across the Great Basin. The book recounts difficult crossings, sketching the geography and logistics of moving men and instruments through unmapped terrain. Carson’s steadiness under duress is presented as essential to the expeditions’ success.
A third expedition in 1845 intersected with rising tensions in California. Abbott traces a sequence of scouting missions, contested encounters near Klamath Lake, and the rapid shift from exploration to wartime duties as the Mexican-American War began. Carson’s roles included carrying dispatches, guiding troops under Commodores Stockton and Generals Kearny and Frémont, and enduring close engagements such as the action at San Pasqual. The narrative emphasizes his long-distance rides for relief and communication, the coordination among dispersed American commands, and the consolidation of U.S. control in the province. These chapters link personal endurance with broader military objectives.
After the war, the book follows Carson back to New Mexico, where he served as an Indian agent based in Taos while maintaining a household and ranch. Abbott portrays his administrative work—issuing rations, arranging councils, reporting conditions—as an attempt to balance federal directives with local realities. Episodes of robbery or reprisal punctuate efforts at negotiation, sending Carson periodically into the field to recover stock, rescue captives, or escort envoys. His marriage to Josefa Jaramillo anchors a quieter domestic thread, even as continued unrest among Apache, Ute, and Navajo communities draws him into further patrols and peace parleys.
With the Civil War, Abbott recounts Carson’s organization of New Mexico volunteers to secure the territory against Confederate incursions and to police frontier lines. Subsequent chapters describe campaigns against Plains and Southwest tribes, including a hard-fought engagement on the Canadian River plains and expeditions through canyon country aimed at compelling submission. The book details marches, supply problems, and the tactics of cutting crops and herds to force surrenders, culminating in the relocation of defeated groups under military oversight. Carson appears alternately as field commander and emissary, executing orders while maintaining the practical focus on movement, provisioning, and discipline.
Abbott’s final sections summarize Carson’s declining health after years of exertion, periodic journeys to military posts and the national capital, and the honors accorded by officials and peers. Domestic passages note family additions and losses, culminating in the closely timed deaths of Josefa and Carson in 1868. The author provides simple closing scenes: bedside conversations, orderly disposition of papers, and burial among friends. A brief account of memorials and public notices follows. The tone remains narrative rather than analytical, presenting the end of a practical life defined by service, travel, and adherence to duty amid the changes overtaking the West.
Throughout, the book frames Carson as a representative frontiersman whose skills—marksmanship, horsemanship, language facility, and route-finding—served both private enterprise and national expansion. Abbott’s organizing principle is movement: caravans, expeditions, marches, and messages carried across distances. Major turning points align with broader events—the opening of trails, exploration surveys, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War—so that personal episodes illuminate public transitions. The central message is commemorative and instructional, presenting perseverance, restraint, and readiness as frontier virtues. Within its concise scenes and travel-centered chapters, the biography offers a connected account of how an individual career intersected with the era’s territorial consolidation.
Historical Context
John S. C. Abbott’s biography of Kit Carson unfolds across the North American borderlands from the 1820s through the 1860s, when sovereignty, commerce, and culture were in rapid transition. The narrative moves from the Missouri frontier and the Santa Fe Trail to the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, New Mexico, California, and the Southern Plains. Mexican independence in 1821 opened legal trade to Santa Fe; U.S. expansion and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848) then redrew borders. Indigenous nations—Navajo (Diné), Ute, Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa—held power across these spaces. Sparse garrisons, cosmopolitan trading enclaves like Taos and Bent’s Fort, and emerging U.S. military authority created a volatile, multilingual, and contested setting.
The Santa Fe Trail, inaugurated in 1821 between Franklin, Missouri, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, frames Carson’s departure from the settled East to the Southwest. Caravan trade linked Midwestern merchants to New Mexican markets, with key waypoints such as Council Grove and the Arkansas River. Bent, St. Vrain & Company established Bent’s Fort (near today’s La Junta, Colorado) in the 1830s as a diplomatic and commercial hub among U.S. traders, Hispano settlers, and Plains tribes. Carson, born in 1809 in Kentucky and raised near Boon’s Lick, Missouri, left a saddler’s apprenticeship in 1826 to join a caravan west. Abbott aligns Carson’s apprenticeship in trailcraft with the maturation of U.S.–Mexican overland commerce.
The Rocky Mountain fur trade (c. 1825–1840) and the rendezvous system structured the early mountain-man world that formed Carson’s skills. Annual gatherings in the Green River country exchanged pelts for trade goods, while firms like the Rocky Mountain Fur Company competed with the American Fur Company. Declining beaver prices in the 1830s and changing fashions undermined the trade by the early 1840s, pushing trappers toward guiding and military work. Carson trapped in the San Juan and Green River ranges, hunted for Bent’s Fort, and navigated relations with Arapaho, Ute, and Apache bands; his marriage ties in Taos (notably to Josefa Jaramillo in 1843) exemplify the book’s portrayal of intercultural alliances on a turbulent frontier.
John C. Frémont’s expeditions (1842; 1843–1844; 1845–1846) were pivotal national projects of mapping and science, and they made Carson a public figure. In 1842, Frémont, with Carson as guide, confirmed routes to South Pass and surveyed the Wind River Range. The 1843–1844 journey crossed the Columbia Plateau and Great Basin, culminating in a winter traverse of the Sierra Nevada via what Frémont named Carson Pass and the Carson River. The 1845–1846 expedition probed the Great Basin and California’s approaches amid mounting U.S.–Mexican tensions. Abbott links Carson’s logistical acumen, crisis leadership, and long-distance courier work to the federal cartographic enterprise that underwrote migration and military strategy.
The Mexican–American War reconfigured the Southwest. Colonel Stephen W. Kearny’s Army of the West occupied Santa Fe on 18 August 1846, then moved toward California. Carson, carrying dispatches from California, guided Kearny to the Pacific. At San Pasqual (6 December 1846), U.S. forces suffered heavy losses against Californio lancers; Carson and two others slipped through the lines to summon help from Commodore Robert F. Stockton at San Diego. Joint operations won the Battles of the Río San Gabriel (8 January 1847) and La Mesa (9 January 1847), leading to the Capitulation of Cahuenga (13 January 1847). Abbott situates Carson at the hinge of conquest, couriering intelligence that stabilized U.S. control ahead of the 1848 peace.
The 1847 Taos Revolt and the consolidation of U.S. territorial governance exposed the fragility of occupation. On 19 January 1847, insurgents killed Governor Charles Bent at Taos; U.S. forces suppressed the revolt at Cañada (24 January), Embudo Pass (29 January), and Taos (4–5 February). Later, as Indian agent (1854–1861) for the Ute and Jicarilla Apache, Carson negotiated annuities and attempted to mediate raids and reprisals under strained federal resources. Abbott presents these episodes to illustrate borderland governance, where Hispano elites, U.S. officers, and Indigenous leaders contested authority. The book’s close attention to Taos and agency work reveals the administrative, legal, and cultural frictions preceding the Civil War.
The Navajo campaign under Brigadier General James H. Carleton (1863–1864) and the ensuing Long Walk dominate the latter conflict years. As colonel of the 1st New Mexico Volunteers, Carson enforced Carleton’s scorched-earth orders—destroying crops and orchards in Canyon de Chelly (January 1864) to induce surrender. Between spring 1864 and 1866, roughly 8,000 Navajos were forced to Bosque Redondo (Fort Sumner) along the Pecos River, a 300-plus-mile ordeal marked by starvation and disease. The reservation suffered crop failures and poor water; the 1868 Treaty, negotiated by federal commissioners including William T. Sherman, permitted the Diné to return to a reduced homeland. Abbott anchors Carson within this policy nexus, foregrounding military obedience amid humanitarian catastrophe.
Civil War pressures and Plains warfare extended Carson’s service. In the 1862 New Mexico Campaign, Confederate Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley triumphed at Valverde (21 February), but Union volunteers and Colorado troops wrecked his logistics at Glorieta Pass (26–28 March), ending the invasion. On 25 November 1864, at Adobe Walls on the Canadian River, Carson—commanding New Mexico volunteers with Ute and Jicarilla scouts and mountain howitzers—engaged a large Kiowa and Comanche force, burning encampments before withdrawing. Earlier (1854–1861) as Indian agent and later at Fort Garland (1866–1867), he navigated the emerging reservation regime. Abbott’s narrative uses these episodes to mirror the militarization of policy and the contested imposition of U.S. order on the Southern Plains.
As a social and political critique, the biography—though celebratory—repeatedly exposes the costs and contradictions of U.S. expansion. By detailing supply failures, jurisdictional disputes, and the Taos Revolt, it reveals the tenuous legitimacy of conquest and the limits of military rule. The account of Bosque Redondo, anchored in dates, numbers, and administrative intent, underscores federal overreach and the human toll of coerced relocation. Carson’s marriages across cultural lines and his work as agent show how frontier governance relied on intermediaries amid class and ethnic hierarchies. The book’s emphasis on couriered intelligence, cartography, and coercion ultimately illuminates Manifest Destiny’s dependence on both science and suffering.
