When I asked my 12-year-old son what he knew about Kit Carson, he answered, "Who?"

During my childhood, no adolescent boy in my old neighborhood would have given that answer.

Kit, Wyatt Earp, Jim Bowie, Wild Bill Hickok and, of course, Davy Crockett, were the lead characters of both TV shows and juvenile biographies throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.

Their names have almost disappeared from network television, and books about them can be hard to find on library shelves. That's one reason to be grateful for Hampton Sides' history, subtitled "An Epic of the American West." It lives up to its billing.

		"BLOOD AND THUNDER" By Hampton Sides Doubleday ($26.95)

"Blood and Thunder" ranges far in geography and time. It covers frontier life from St. Louis to Sacramento, from the era of the Mountain Men through the end of the Civil War.

While Sides puts Carson at the center of his history, the trapper and scout is by no means the only major character. Navajo leader Narbona, Army Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny, diarist and pioneer wife Susan Magoffin and the murderous Col. John Chivington are among the dozens of others who play supporting roles.

While never ignoring his faults, Sides finds much to admire in Carson. Courageous but never foolhardy, loyal to his friends and patrons, generally respectful of both Indian and Spanish cultures, Carson, like Crockett, became a legend during his lifetime.

Born in 1809 in Kentucky -- the same year and in the same state as Abraham Lincoln -- Carson was apprenticed to a Missouri saddle maker. He lit out for the west at age 16. Over the next 25 years he traveled thousands of miles, almost all of them on foot or on muleback.

Called "the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains," he first gained fame as a guide for John C. Fremont during his expeditions through the Rocky Mountains and into Mexican territory in the 1840s.

Illiterate but fluent in a half dozen European and Indian languages, Carson became the subject of hundreds of "memoirs" and dime novels based, usually very, very loosely, on his experiences in the West. On occasion reality crashed head-on with 19th century media hype.

Sides writes of how in 1848 Carson led an effort to find a woman named Ann White, who had been taken prisoner by Apaches. Carson tracked her captors for 12 days, "reading sign" in such things as "curious gaps in the spiderwebs strung between trees."

While they found the Indians, White was killed just before she could be rescued.

In the Apache camp, the posse found a copy of "Kit Carson: The Prince of the Gold Hunters." It was one of the earliest books that turned the 5-foot, 4-inch Carson into a giant.

The story that Sides tells contains equal parts of bravery, endurance, ignorance and pure cussedness.

The Indian tribes of the Plains and Southwest were decimated both by disease and by their own inability to cooperate with each other. When Carson guided or headed military expeditions against the Navajo or the Comanche, he always had the assistance of other tribes looking to gain an advantage over traditional enemies.

Carson's most troubling role was as leader of the 1864 "ethnic cleansing" campaign that ended with about 9,000 Navajo walking into exile 400 miles from their tribal lands. About 500 died on the journey, and fully one-third perished during their four years at the beautiful but barren Bosque Redondo reservation.

In 1868, Carson and his wife, Josefa, died within days of each other at their home in Taos, N.M.

"With Carson's passing, an era had ended and a new one had begun," Sides writes. Just a few days later, Gen. William Sherman arrived to investigate the plight of the Navajo.

Sherman concluded that the government experiment to transform shepherds and hunters into farmers had failed. After brief negotiations, he approved their return to a large swath of their traditional homeland, most of which is in what is now Arizona.

In mid-June the Indians began their emotional trek west. "When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time," Sides writes, "the Navajos fell to their knees and wept."