For one of his most devoted fans, Kit Carson came to the rescue five minutes too late. Carson found the slain young woman, Ann White, kidnapped and then killed by Indians. Later, he discovered a pulp novel among her possessions – starring the heroic "Kit Carson: Prince of the Gold Hunters".

"He imagined her reading it while enduring her miserable captivity," writes Hampton Sides."In [the] story, Kit Carson finds the kidnapped girl and saves the day, fulfilling his vow to her distraught parents...But in this instance the real Kit Carson had failed to avert a disaster; he feared [the] fiction may have given Ann White a false hope."

In his extraordinary new book, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, Hampton Sides brings the conquest of the West to vivid life. At the center of the narrative stands the legendary Kit Carson – the trapper, scout, and soldier who embodied all of the contradictions and complexities of the American experience in the West. Brave and clever, beloved by his contemporaries, Carson was an illiterate mountain man who twice married Indian women, and understood and respected the tribes better than any other American alive – and yet was also a cold-blooded killer, who willingly followed orders tantamount to massacre. Carson’s astonishing exploits made him a household name when they were turned into "blood-and-thunders", the pulp novels from which Sides draws his title, but his name also became a bitter curse for the Navajo, who cannot forget his role in the travails of their ancestors.

Hampton Sides
Hampton Sides is the author of threebooks, including the international bestseller Ghost Soldiers, recipient of the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction. He is also the editor-at-large of Outside magazine. His feature writing has twice been nominated for National Magazine Awards.