A NEWER WORLD

            A vigorous narrative of the intersecting lives of two of the most outsized figures in the American West:  the trapper, guide, and Indian fighter Kit Carson, and the ebullient, grandstanding officer John Frémont.

            Roberts (Once They Moved Like the Wind:  Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars, 1993, etc.) has focused on four revealing events in the lives of these two figures:  the 1842 Frémont expedition, which reached as far as Wyoming; the conquest of California in 1845-46, which often verged on slapstick; a disastrous surveying expedition led by Frémont in 1848 during which almost a third of his men died; and Carson’s 1863 campaign to round up and relocate the Mescalero Apache and the Navajo.  Largely unknown before Frémont hired him to guide his 1842 expedition, the taciturn Carson was already an extraordinary outdoorsman, having spent more than a decade wandering thousands of square miles of the still largely unknown West.  Though the mountain man was modest about his remarkable travels, and Frémont was a dashing self-promoter, they were both tough, courageous figures.  Carson served with Frémont on three expeditions, mapping an astonishing amount of Western territory under conditions of often extreme hardship.  Their collaboration concluded with Frémont’s ill-planned, ramshackle, yet ultimately successful attempt to expel Mexican forces from California.  His improbable triumph propelled Frémont into a long, bumpy political career.  Carson, looking back on his role in the defeat and confinement of the Apache and Navajo on a destitute reservation, where many died of disease or starvation, became an unlikely spokesman for Indian rights.  Roberts, who has researched these events with exemplary thoroughness, writes with vigor and clarity, and makes a careful argument for viewing these men, and the events he chronicles, as emblematic of the exploration and settling of the West.

            A thoughtful, engaging, and useful addition to the shelf of recent revisionist works on the American West.  (8 pages photos)