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Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man, by David Remley, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2011, $24.95
“Ask people who Kit Carson was,” David Remley posits in the preface to this new biography. “Most suspect that he was not the great white hero of dime novels, but a real border man of some sort—a trapper, a guide, a hunter, a mountain man, a frontiersman. Some think that he was good and that he was larger than life, others that he was just a killer, even genocidal.” Dime novelists in the 19th century saddled Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson with the nicknames “Nestor of the Plains” and “Terror of the Plains,” among other hyperbolic handles. Modern-day revisionists have termed him “trigger happy” and a “natural born killer.” Remley has thoughtfully sifted through the existing scholarship on Carson to find neither myth nor monster but a man more nuanced than either extreme. “My hope,” says the author, “is to stimulate more careful and balanced thought, speech and writing about Kit.”
Born in Kentucky on Christmas Eve 1809 and raised in Missouri, Carson ran away from a saddlery apprenticeship at age 16 and never let the dust settle long on his feet after that. For the next four decades he roamed the United States from coast to coast as a fur trapper, guide, dispatch rider and Army scout. He was married twice to Indian women and, finally, to lifelong love Josefa Jaramillo, the daughter of a prominent Mexican family in Taos. Kit shared campfires with explorers Ewing Young and John Frémont, served in the Indian wars and Civil War under noted officers Stephen Kearny and Edward Canby and rubbed elbows, albeit anxiously, with presidents and statesmen. Such professional associations brought the plainspoken Carson uneasy fame.
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of early detection. Screening exams such as mammograms are encouraged and the goal is to find cancers before they start to spread. Breast cancers that are found because they can be felt tend to be larger and are more likely to have spread beyond the breast. The size of a breast cancer and how far it has spread are important factors in predicting the prognosis for this disease.
The following is a guest post by Jack Willis, author of Saving Jack: A Man’s Struggle with Breast Cancer, who discovered that breast cancer is not just a woman’s disease. Here Willis, a retired adjunct journalism professor at the University of Oklahoma, shares his thoughts on inspirational people he has met during his cancer experience and the lessons he has learned along the way.
I’m a retired journalism instructor and a five-year breast cancer survivor. I know. Guys aren’t supposed to get breast cancer, but about one percent do.
You may have read the novel The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. The book made me think of inspirational people I met during my cancer experience and the lessons they taught me.
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Today, we welcome a guest post from George Henderson, author of the recently published Race and the University: A Memoir. In this stirring book, Henderson recounts his formative years at the University of Oklahoma, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He describes in graphic detail the obstacles that he and other African Americans faced within the university community, a place of “white privilege, black separatism, and campus-wide indifference to bigotry.”
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For nearly two years, news pundits have soundly criticized President Barack Obama for not initiating a national dialogue focusing on race and racial reconciliation. I was even more demanding. I wanted him to assume the role of race relations leader-in-chief, declare war on racial bigotry, and mount a public relations campaign to discredit and defeat bigots. But he opted to not heed those impassioned requests. Instead, he challenged each of us to be compassionate teachers during situations of racial conflict—euphemistically referred to as “teachable moments.” There are numerous hazards in assuming the role of conflict resolution teachers, especially if the would-be teacher has not gotten himself or herself together, so to speak.
In 1967, George Henderson, the son of uneducated Alabama sharecroppers, accepted a full-time professorship at the University of Oklahoma, despite his mentor’s warning to avoid the “redneck school in a backward state.”
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