Starter Kit: PBS' American Experience chronicles the first famous Carson
02/18/08 11:16 AM
By ED BARK
Johnny Carson pretty much shunned the media both during and after The Tonight Show. Not doing interviews clearly didn't hurt him.
Christopher "Kit" Carson never learned to read and was mostly unaware of what the media of his day had done to him. A series of popular bestsellers portrayed him as a fearless adventurer who relished killing Indians. "Blood and Thunders" the books were called. And at 25 cents a copy, they sold at a brisk rate.
PBS' remedial Kit Carson, an American Experience film premiering Monday (9 p.m. on KERA in Dallas), depicts its storied subject as a heroic yet flawed frontiersman whose biggest fault was blindly following orders.
In 1862, toward the end of his life, this meant waging a brutal campaign against the untamed Navajos. By any means necessary, the Army wanted them relocated to a far-off reservation in eastern New Mexico. Carson got the job done, although supposedly with a heavy heart. His men starved out the Navajos by destroying their crops, orchards and livestock. Carson then returned to his beloved Taos as a conquering hero, essentially washing his hands of a resultant deadly "Long March" that claimed thousands of Navajo lives.
PBS' intriguing 90-minute biography, to be followed next Monday by a treatise on Buffalo Bill, makes the case for a full-blooded, multi-faceted Carson. His first wife, an Arapaho named Singing Grass, died after giving birth to their second daughter. By then his early years as a fur-trapping mountain man had transformed him into a "white Indian" who mostly moved easily among the many western tribes.
Historians say that Carson pursued and killed warring Indians while also making peace whenever possible. He wasn't a wanton exterminator. Nor was he a placating pacifist.
Carson's most famous partner, Army lieutenant John C. Fremont, enlisted him as a guide on an expedition to map much of the uncharted West. Their collaboration resulted in the famed overland route known as The Oregon Trail. But in publishing his accounts, Fremont also lionized Carson as an unequaled and indispensable troubleshooter and protector. Eventually the hack novelists took over, turning Carson into a "national obsession" in what for the most part amounted to pulp fiction.
Acclaimed documentarian Stephen Ives (New Orleans, Seabiscut) tells this story well but not majestically. His film is more nuts-and-bolts than riveting, although much can be learned by simply paying attention.
In one of the more resonant passages, historians tell of Carson pursuing an Indian tribe that had taken a white woman captive. She was killed just before he and his men could ride to the rescue. And in her final hours, she supposedly had been reading a dime store novel celebrating Carson's heroic rescue of a woman in the same straits. This supposedly haunted him the rest of his days.
Kit Carson was instrumental in paving the way toward a New West that never would have suited him, viewers are told. He died on May 23, 1868 after suffering from chronic and debilitating chest pains. As legend -- or fact -- would have it, Carson cried out, "Doctor. Compadre. Adios."
In this case, print the legend.
Grade: B+
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