Meanwhile, Navajo aggression escalates, and the United States brings in a new Indian agent, James Henry Carleton. Carson joins General Edward Canby to assist the Union in ejecting the Confederates, led by Henry Hopkins Sibley, from the Southwest.
In Book 3, “Monster Slayer,” Sides turns his attention to the American Civil War and the Indian wars. Intimately tied up in all these events, Kit Carson’s celebrity grows. The great leader himself is killed in one such encounter, strengthening the pro-war factions of the Navajo. Meanwhile, efforts are being made to negotiate peace treaties between the Navajo and the United States, but cultural differences mean peace rarely lasts long, despite Narbona’s best efforts. Even after the war is over, the region remains unstable. Kearny and Carson team up to rescue Fremont and others in California and fight the Mexicans all over the Southwest, sometimes to disastrous effect. In Book 2, “The Broken Country,” the Mexican-American War intensifies. Meanwhile, Stephen Watts Kearney takes up Polk’s war against the Mexicans, leading the Army of the West across the Great Plains to engage the Mexicans. A wise and charismatic man, Narbona is increasingly fearful of what American incursion will mean for his people. The personalities and cultural forces behind the concept of Manifest Destiny, including Polk and Benton, are introduced, and the imagined upbringing of their greatest leader, Narbona, provides a crash course on Navajo. Carson joins John Fremont, son-in-law of the prime mover of American expansion, Thomas Hart Benton, to create guides and maps for American expansion west they soon become entangled in the Mexican-American conflict.
He carves out a niche as a trapper and marries his first wife, Singing Grass, but the way of the mountain men goes belly up due to economic pressures and over-hunting. Kit Carson goes and becomes a mountain man in 1826. The New Mexicans, waiting in trepidation for American troops, suffer the raids of an older and more familiar enemy: the Navajo. Polk declares war on Mexico, eager to extend the boundaries of the United States from coast to coast. Book 1, “The New Men,” covers the beginning of the Mexican-American War through the arrival of the Army of the West in Santa Fe.
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