This week's guest on "Report from Santa Fe" is author Hampton Sides, whose book "Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West" is considered the definitive and authoritative study of Kit Carson. Sides discusses the controversial renaming of Kit Carson Memorial Park by the Taos City Council and observes that this move meant to reconcile the different cultures in Taos has instead provoked a hostile debate over Taos history and Kit Carson's role in the conquest of the West.

Hampton Sides speaks of this controversy saying, “So Taos has decided to change the name of its park. 'Kit Carson' is too touchy, too hot to handle, too incorrect. Now it will be called 'Red Willow Park.' What is going on here? History, real history, is messy and fraught with contradictions. Even some of our greatest historical figures were flawed characters. George Washington, as a young man, fought and killed Native Americans. He, like Jefferson and many other of our founders, owned slaves. Lincoln, probably our greatest president, personally signed the orders approving the Navajo war that Kit Carson reluctantly led during the 1860s.”

Author Sides continues, “In my book 'Blood and Thunder,' I pull no punches in describing the absolute devastation of the scorched-earth campaign that Carson conducted. But one needs to remember that it was indeed a war. It was a war that had its genesis in centuries of brutal raiding and kidnapping between the Navajos and the Spanish, a cycle of violence that the U.S. Army was seeking, in its own wrong-headed way, to end.”

Looking at revisionist history and the whitewashing of unpopular historical events such as the Chinese scrubbing of the Tiananmen Square records, Sides notes that “People who criticize Carson tend to be 'presentists.' That is, they judge the past by the standards and expectations of today. They forget that Carson lived in a very different era. The violence was grinding and omnipresent... During Carson’s day, you couldn’t go five miles outside the town limits of Santa Fe or Taos without serious risk of being ambushed, kidnapped, or killed by marauders. So to call him “a murderer,” as some of his critics do, shows an ignorance of the time in which he lived. There were no outlaws in this Wild West. In so many of the places he roamed, there was no law to be outside of.”

Discussing Carson's relationship to Taos Pueblo, Sides notes, “Certainly he was no Indian hater. Carson loved Taos and was a friend of Taos Pueblo. So far as my own research could discover, he was a friend to all the pueblos. His first wife was Arapaho, and though he was illiterate, he was fluent in many Indian tongues. Late in life, he successfully negotiated the creation of a reservation for the Utes and became an eloquent and insightful critic of U.S. Indian policy."