Writing Kit Carson - by Susan Lee Johnson

About the Book

"In this critical biography, Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tales of two white women who, in the 1960s, wrote books about the fabled frontiersman Christopher 'Kit' Carson: Quantrille McClung, a Denver librarian who compiled the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy, and Kansas-born but Washington, D.C.- and Chicago-based Bernice Blackwelder, a singer on stage and radio, a CIA employee, and the author of Great Westerner: The Story of Kit Carson. In the 1970s, as once-celebrated figures like Carson were falling headlong from grace, these two amateur historians kept weaving stories of western white men, including those who married American Indian and Spanish Mexican women, just as Carson had wed Singing Grass, Making Out Road, and Josefa Jaramillo"--

Book Synopsis

In this critical biography, Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tales of two white women who, in the 1960s, wrote books about the fabled frontiersman Christopher "Kit" Carson: Quantrille McClung, a Denver librarian who compiled the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy, and Kansas-born but Washington, D.C.- and Chicago-based Bernice Blackwelder, a singer on stage and radio, a CIA employee, and the author of Great Westerner: The Story of Kit Carson. In the 1970s, as once-celebrated figures like Carson were falling headlong from grace, these two amateur historians kept weaving stories of western white men, including those who married American Indian and Spanish Mexican women, just as Carson had wed Singing Grass, Making Out Road, and Josefa Jaramillo.

Johnson's multilayered biography reveals the nature of relationships between women historians and male historical subjects and between history buffs and professional historians. It explores the practice of history in the context of everyday life, the seductions of gender in the context of racialized power, and the strange contours of twentieth-century relationships predicated on nineteenth-century pasts. On the surface, it tells a story of lives tangled across generation and geography. Underneath run probing questions about how we know about the past and how that knowledge is shaped by the conditions of our knowing.

Review Quotes

"A capacious and unruly book. It sweeps across more than a century. As it spins its yarn across lives and decades, it moves backward and forward in time. In glorious prose it defies the borders between author and subject, between past and present, and lures the reader into caring about the tangled lives of two women . . . staking their own claim to significance, in part, by their work on Kit Carson. . . . Richly complex."--Missouri Historical Review

"For readers who wish to know more about how history is written, its influencers, their writings, and how figures such as Carson fall from grace. An excellent addition for women's studies collections."--Library Journal

"In this sometimes ruminative, sometimes gripping volume, Johnson shows how women's history does not simply add to, but transforms our broader understanding of history. . . . [Writing Kit Carson is] a novel work of scholarship and lyrical narrative, enriched and enlivened with memoir, loaded with impressive research, careful citation, historiography, and bibliography."--Reviews in American History

About the Author

Susan Lee Johnson is the Harry Reid Endowed Chair for the History of the Intermountain West at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.