Damn but Native Americans really got the shaft. I didn't realize until reading this book that slavery extended beyond the Emancipation Proclamation in the form of Indian chattel captured by New Mexicans (and Texans, etc.). I didn't realize that Arizona was at least partially formed because racist New Mexicans wanted New Mexico to be a slave state. I also didn't realize that the Indian Wars were fought at largely the same time as the Civil War. Madness. A good book; one that uses Kit Carson as the focal point of a look at the way Plains Indians, particularly the Navajo, were beaten into some semblance of a Christian, agricultural existence. All the while, all the "Americans", including Carson, see the transformation as an inevitability, and when the change doesn't take hold, see the extinction of the American Indian as a sort of God-ordained, unstoppable thing. Good times.