The Public Library announces an upcoming author event with David Remley. The program will be held at the Silver City Public Library on Saturday, November 5 at 11:00 am.
David Remley was raised on a family farm in Indiana; he graduated from Wabash College (1953), and then received an AMT from Harvard (1954). After Army service and after teaching high school, he returned to Indiana University for the Ph.D. in English. While in graduate school at Bloomington, he wrote historical articles for the Sunday newspaper. Afterward he taught at UNM for twenty years in English and American Studies specializing in the literature and history of the West.
His books include Crooked Road: the Story of the Alaska Highway, which appeared in 1976 in McGraw-Hill's American Trail Series, edited by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Since I left UNM, the following have appeared Bell Ranch: Cattle Ranching in the Southwest: 1846-1947 (1993), Adios Nuevo Mexico: the Santa Fe Journal of John Watts in 1859 (1999); and Kit Carson: the Life of an American Border Man (2011). Bell Ranch and Crooked Road have since been reprinted in Paperback.
Remley's latest book is Kit Carson: the Life of an American Border Man. Largely because of his fame as a hunter and guide on the first three of Fremont's expeditions, Kit was victimized by the fictioneers (dime novelists), who characterized him as the "Great White Hero leading Civilization across the West and Slaughtering the Savage Indian." This was Carson of the Heroic Myth. Largely because of his action in the Navajo Long Walk under orders of is commanding officer, General James H. Carleton, historians and the general public have more recently viewed Carson as a very bad man, an outlaw. He has been called a "terrorist" and accused of having been "genocidal." This bad rap is at the other extreme. It is a type of the Negative Myth.
Remley's new biographical essay on Carson views him as a man of his culture, his time, and his place, a figure whose life had both its violent and its peaceful aspects. He presents him as a "real" man rather than a mythical one.