Kit Carson, America's Meanest Cowboy!

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.).

Kit Carson was, for the record, 5-foot-5. He never went on such killing sprees. He was a scout, trapper, hunter. A solitary mountain man at home in the wilds as much as the rough social polyglot of Taos, N.M., where he lived from the late 1820s on. This was the life he had in mind when he escaped the confines of Missouri, alone, at 16.Kit Carson the man was lost well over a century ago in the jaws of our hero machine, so it is fascinating to see him properly placed in the broad flow of American history, where he looms large. "Kit Carson," which airs tonight on Channel 2 on "American Experience," does this job well, although what is good at 90 minutes would have been great at 60.

Carson was nothing less than the agent for change that opened the American West to whites. He was the incarnation of Manifest Destiny, an idea with which he had no truck. (Manifest Destiny was the expansionist belief that the United States should span the continent.) He simply did the jobs asked of him. There were many, from scout to Indian agent to leader of an army campaign against the Navajo.