Kit Carson and the Indians by Thomas Dunlay

This is a fascinating and disturbing nonfiction book.  It is quite scholarly and describes how Kit Carson witnessed and participated in the decimation of the American West's wildlife and Indigenous peoples.  In his time he was lionized as a great mountain man, scout and Indian fighter.  In the 1970s he began to be vilified as books like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown and movies like Little Big Man revealed the ugly truths about the conflict between Native Americans and the white people who coveted their lands.  To be fair, Kit Carson was only a man of his times; his contribution to trapping out beaver, extirpating species like bison, elk, deer, antelope, wolf, bear, coyote and cougar, and oppressing Native Americans - especially the Navajo Nation - was reprehensible but he was not as mean-spirited as the many settlers who were calling for the total eradication of any Indigenous people who stood their way.  Indeed, he often sympathized with the Indians he came to know so well, and - as an Indian agent in his waning years - did what he thought was best to preserve them from utter annihilation.  As far as the American West's wildlife and natural wonders went, it would take a new generation of men like John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot* to turn the tide of public opinion and begin the work of designating lands as National Parks and Forests.

*Served as the 1st head of the United States Forest Service