Blood and Thunder

Hampton Sides provides a truly epic portrayal of Manifest Destiny's long march to the sea.  While it's a well researched and true to life history of the westward expansion of the country in the period between roughly 1830 and the civil war, it's also written with a novelist's attention to detail and storyline that keeps it engaging.  Sides centers his story on the peripatetic life of legendary "mountain man" Kit Carson because the arc of Carson's life intersects so perfectly with the history of the period.  Carson first became famous as a symbol of the rugged freedom of the West in an era when St. Louis was the frontier city.  He traveled all over the area as a trapper, whose experience with the land and the indigenous people later made him an invaluable guide to the expeditions led by John Fremont that established the Oregon Trail.  Towards the end of his life, he served the army in the Mexican-American war, the Civil War, and the various Indian wars that marked the beginning of the reservation system.  

Carson was above all an interesting and complicated character.  He killed a lot of Indians.  He also married several (consecutively).  He became a household name as a hero of dime novels.  But he himself never learned to read.  He was constantly in demand as a famously hard-traveling guide and soldier.  Yet after the age of 30, he appeared to want nothing more than to settle down and be a family man.  These contradictions make him a great character to portray the complexity of the Westward expansion of the US.  Turns out, history is pretty complicated when you look at it with more curiosity than desire to prove your point.  So many forces are in motion at this time -- the crumbling of the Spanish empire, the rise of the North as a manufacturing area, the discovery of gold in California, the beginning of the European immigration explosion in the East, the struggles of various increasingly threatened Native tribes with  existing hispanic settlers and with one another, etc ... -- that explaining the whole works as simply the natural consequence of bloodthirsty colonists appears even more ludicrously reductive than previously imagined.   Not that the colonists weren't quite often bloodthirsty.  Just that they were many other things in addition to that.  

I think just about anybody would enjoy the book.  And I suspect it might be particularly suitable as an audiobook.  If I had one critique, it would be that it could have been shorter.  Sides is generally a good writer, but he embellishes the story with many more details than are necessary to keep things interesting.  He also occasionally gives us too much biographical backstory for characters who remain relatively minor.  I think it would be an even better read if some of its 624 pages were streamlined a little.