Word: kit
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...KIT CARSON, THE HAPPY WARRIOR OF THE OLD WEST #151;Stanley Vestal-Hough-ton Mifflin ($3.50). Before Horace Greeley had thought of his famed suggestion, Kit Carson had made the West his own country. At 15, he was apprenticed to a saddler. He ran away after a few months to become a "mountain man." Soon he was counted among the best. He knew the habits of game animals, was well versed in customs and mental processes of the Indian. He had a reputation for absolute truthfulness and reliability, and was a crack shot. He never learned to read or write...
WRITTEN in a biographical age notable chiefly for its iconoclasm, "Kit Carson" is just the sort of book one would expect from a former Rhodes Scholar, a native of the West, and a faculty member of the University of Oklahoma. Stanley Vestal takes all that is laudable in the modern method of biography--its colloquial style, eye for the dramatic, disrespect for mythology and Thompsonesque patriotism without falling into the pitfalls typical of tabloid research and the worship of sex appeal...
...True, Kit Carson is pretty well debunked by the present writer, but this would seem to be the result of the unwise writing of his predecessors, the dime novelists, and to some extent of his contemporaries, the scenario writers. These, together with the professional bravadoes who belonged to the Wild West rather than to the Old West, have made Carson, a very simple, almost meek man, into an entirely impossible character...
...piece of history, "Kit Carson" is also important. The author shows clearly the part played by Carson in opening up the West, his invaluable aid to Colonel Freemont, his part in the Civil War. The economic changes which affected our hero are also dealt with briefly, and the author permits himself some very pungent comments on the U. S. Army and the general misconduct of Western affairs on the part of the Eastern authorities...
...mont went West with famed Kit Carson, observed buffalo, ate dog meat, charted the Continental Divide. Returning to Washington where Jessie lay in childbirth, he spread over her bed a ragged flag, said: "This flag was raised over the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains. I have brought it to you." Then, with Jessie's aid, he wrote a report of his trip which exploded the myth that the "Great American Desert" lay between Missouri and the Rockies. The public read the document avidly; the movement westward was stimulated...