What he ended up with was less than 100 pages of adventure and excitement. It was generally unembellished, although it did leave a few things out – like his Arapaho and Cheyenne wives and his many Indian children he never stayed around to raise.  Kit delivered the manuscript to Taos businessman, Jesse B. Turley, who hired Army surgeon, and friend of Carson, Dewitt Clinton Peters, to turn the memoirs into a saleable, literary biography.  Peters’ biography ran to more than 400 pages – inflated by purple-prose, and from stretching things a bit (some things a good bit). The success of Peter’s biography led Charles Averill to write an even more sensational pulp biography, Kit Carson(1849) which sold for 25 cents, and sold briskly.  Averill’s more popular, and less truthful book described the 5’4” Carson as a man “of powerful proportions and Herculean stature,” and told tale after tale of the daring rescues Carson made, saving whites (usually beautiful young women) from western “savages”.

            In Northwest New Mexico, in late 1849, Kit Carson was trailing a group of Apaches who had taken a beautiful young white woman, Ann White, captive. After enduring three weeks of brutality, she was killed by the Apaches and left behind. Carson and his party reached her still-warm corpse moments after the Apaches killed her and had been forced to flee their camp.  Rummaging through the possessions Ann White had with her, Carson found a copy of Charles Averill’s book.  Throughout her ordeal, Ann White had held on to Kit Carson’s biography, and the hope of rescue it promised.  He felt gut-shot.   He wasn’t the source of the lies in the book. He hadn’t authorized, or profited by their telling. Yet the notion that Mrs. White suffered those three weeks, expecting his rescue, haunted him. “I have often thought that as Mrs. White read the (book), and knowing that I lived nearby she often prayed for my appearance and that she would be saved” he confessed.  When Kit Carson was officially offered a gift copy of Averill’s biography he said it should be burned.

            When I read the story above in a review of Hampton Side’s new biography of Kit Carson, Blood and Thunder (reviewed in the New Yorker, October 9, 2006; pp 76-80), it was a body blow. What would it have been like to have arrived just minutes too late to save a life – and then to know that your larger-than-life doppelganger had somehow played a role in this awful event?  What would it have been like to have been Ann White – believing in someone you’ve never met, you’ve only read about – having faith in this man as you last and only hope?

            There is so much here to think about.

            There is the way none of us live up to our own hype. Kit told his story and polished it up a bit, smoothed out the rough spots.  That was taken and magnified again and again by others – and people began to believe, and make decisions based upon, a falsehood.  How easily do we make a few excuses, leave out a few details, and begin to believe the lies we tell ourselves (and others) about ourselves – our past, our deeds, our motives. How can a person repent who can’t be honest with himself? How can one be saved apart from repentance (Luke 13.3-5, Acts 2.38)?

            Then there is Ann White, believing in a lie - believing in a man who is close-by, but who never comes. He can’t come because he doesn’t exist. Did she and her husband come West (at least in part) because of their faith in the portrait Averill painted of the West, and of Carson?  What decisions do we make because we believe lies?  We often feel superior to the ancient idolaters because of their faith in ones who did not exist – but how often are we guilty of the same?

            Kit Carson was haunted by Ann White’s prayers.  If she did pray (and like Kit, I am certain she did), the One to whom she prayed was notabsent. Kit might have been a few moments too late, but God was never gone.  We are not (nor was she) like Vladimir and Estragon – waiting for God(ot) who never shows. Even in “the valley of the shadow of death you are with me, and your rod and staff comfort me” (Psalm 23.4). The truth about God is truth, not hype. I don’t know anything about the young woman the Apaches took from a wagon train in New Mexico in 1849, but I do know that she was not alone. I know that if she prayed she was not without comfort. And I know that if she belonged to Jesus she was not without a Savior.