Kit Carson was a small, illiterate, soft-spoken trapper who couldn’t read the dime novels that made him a legend while he was still alive. Sides uses him as the thread through the whole conquest of the Southwest — the Mexican War, the taking of New Mexico and California, and then the Navajo campaign, where Carson burned the fields and orchards at Canyon de Chelly and marched thousands of Diné 300 miles to a dead camp on the Pecos. Hundreds died on the way. The book doesn’t let him off and doesn’t flatten him either. He hunted the same people he’d lived among, had Native wives, spoke the languages, and did what he was ordered to do. Diné leaders like Narbona and Manuelito are given their own weight rather than a walk-on. It flies by like a novel. Equally horrified and fascinated, I couldn’t put it down.