Kit Carson, America's Meanest Cowboy, Featured On PBS Special

Because he led the U.S. effort in the wholesale annihilation of the Navajo nation and its 300-mile death march known as "Long Walk," Kit Carson is remembered by some as everything bad about the country's Westward expansion.

But Carson, who had nothing to do with the myths created about him in cheap novels, was a former trapper well versed in tribal ways who was accepted by many chieftains and married an Arapaho woman. The complexities of Carson, who helped track what became the Oregon Trail, is the subject of a new "American Experience" (CPTV, 9 p.m.).

Read more at courant.com