Kit Carson was a short, slight man, but his legendary exploits in the mid-1800s spanned the continent. Carson left Missouri and became a mountain man, then a hunter, in southeastern Colorado. After many battles and journeys, he led a scorched-earth campaign against the Navajos. When he died in Colorado in 1868, a Denver newspaper said his courage “came forth like lightning from a cloud.†A new book, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, tells Carson's story – and more. Author Hampton Sides talks to Dan Meyers.