How does this guy get to all these places?'Įven today, some of those places still bear his name: cities and towns across the West, not to mention rivers, mountains, a national forest, and a major army base. I tried to cover as many of those miles as I could, in my truck,' Sides said. 'He covered something like 20,000 miles, almost all of it on the back of a mule. He spoke seven Native American languages, and twice he took Indian women as his bride.Ĭarson said he just wanted to settle down as a rancher, but his nation's call to duty kept him always on the move.

He gained renown as a mountain man and was soon recruited to guide government expeditions into Oregon and California. He ran away from home at age 14 and joined a wagon train leaving Missouri for New Mexico on the Santa Fe trail.

And the final irony of those 'Blood and Thunder' books is that as much as he hated them, he couldn't read them, because he was illiterate.'īut Carson was industrious and his story does read like a novel. Which was considered a good thing or something. And they said things like, you know, that he would kill two Indians before breakfast. He hadn't made any money off these books whatsoever. 'They never got his consent to use his name.

'He hated those 'Blood and Thunder' books - absolutely hated them because they were fictions,' Sides said. Back East, publishers made him the star of an entire genre of pulp novels known as 'Blood And Thunder,' the inspiration behind the title of Sides' book.

Blood and thunder kit carson