Kit Carson’s War And Peace

For scholars and students of Western American history, the decades of the 1840s and 1850s are typically covered with lessons on the Oregon Territory, Texas, the Mexican War, the Gold Rush and the growing Constitutional crisis over slavery and states’ rights. At the conclusion of the James K. Polk presidency in March 1849, thousands of former Mexican citizens and scores of Native tribes with long-established networks of trade, cultural homelands, alliances and enmities were now living under th