Hampton Sides still loves writing about the past

New Mexico has long been home to famous authors, but when it comes to nonfiction history writing, there are few names that resonate more clearly — or widely — than Hampton Sides.

The longtime Santa Fe resident completed his eighth book last year. Titled “The Wide Wide Sea,” it documents the final voyage of Capt. James Cook, a British royal Navy officer who circumnavigated the globe three times in the late 1700s.

Sides visits Taos on Saturday to read from his most recent work for a fundraiser for SOMOS, a nonprofit literary organization based in the Town of Taos. The reading will take place at The Society of the Muse of the Southwest from 4 to 5:30 p.m.

The Journal recently caught up with Sides in a phone interview while the author hiked along the Maury River outside Lexington, Virginia. We discussed why he still loves writing about history, what he’s working on these days and the continued fascination with Kit Carson, the subject of his second book, “Blood and Thunder,” published in 2006.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you choose to write about the past, and what do you believe history can tell us about ourselves in the present?

History is fascinating to me, and I don’t mind even saying that history, when well written, is entertaining, in addition to being informative and hopefully enlightening in some way about the present. It can be and should be entertaining on the page. I always like to say that on some level I am in the entertainment business.

It’s also really wonderful to understand something about where you live. Why are places named what they are? How did it get that way? How did these people get here? What were the twists and turns and the collisions and the collaborations that led to our society, good and bad, as it is today? Mark Twain famously said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” I think that’s very true.

Does the passage of time make it easier or harder for us to tell a true story about the past?

There’s a reason why subsequent generations feel the need to revisit historical subjects that have been written about before. New facts arise, new documents are discovered and new perspectives emerge. It’s kind of like when you’re looking at a pointillist or impressionist painting — it’s usually easier to understand if you back up a little bit.

Subsequent generations definitely are able to sift the events and figure out — how important was all that? How does all that action, all that plot, all those clashing personalities, relate? What does it all mean in this grander scheme of things? I think that’s one of the things that a remove of time gives us, whether you’re writing about something that happened yesterday or something that happened 200 years ago.

Kit Carson was the central character in your 2006 book, “Blood and Thunder,” and there continues to be quite a lot of controversy surrounding his legacy in the West. What kind of person do you believe he really was?

There are true villains in history, and I suppose you can say there are absolutely true heroes in history. But most historical figures are somewhere in the middle. They don’t wear black or white hats, they wear gray hats. Certainly, I think of Carson in that light, and gray-hatted people are more interesting to me. I find that Carson was conflicted and compromised and just complex in so many ways on the big questions of his day.

He was on the right side of history in many ways. He fought for the Union when most of his brothers fought on the Confederate side. He bought a Navajo slave, who he then freed and raised as his own son in a time when that was not common. I’m talking about Juan Carson. He baptized him into the Catholic religion and raised him. By almost every account, he was loyal and true to his wife and to his family and to his friends. He was brave. He did what he said he was going to do. He was honest. He was a decent human being in almost every sense that you can conjure up.

He was also incredibly loyal to certain Indian tribes, especially the Utes and Taos Pueblo. He was most ferocious in his attack of the Navajo at a time when Taos Pueblo just hated the Navajo, absolutely hated them and feared them, because the Navajo would come down and steal their cattle and sheep and kill people and steal women. Sometimes you’ll hear the word that he was genocidal, which is just simply not true.

One of the great tragedies of his life is that he kind of systematically set in motion a lot of forces that destroyed the West that he loved, that brought him out in the West in the first place.

What are your thoughts on the Town of Taos’ plans to rename Kit Carson Park this year?

History is ugly and messy and complicated. At the same time, I also believe in democracy, and people have a perfect right in subsequent generations to decide how they want to furnish their public parks and other public spaces — as long as the process is done with some thought. If there’s a movement in the process and people vote for removing a statue or changing a name, I think that’s their right, you know?

Carson was an Indian killer. He also was married to Indians. Really, the happiest time of his life was when he was married to Singing Grass and was a member of the Arapaho tribe. He spoke multiple Native tongues. He lived more like a red man than a white man for much of his young adulthood. To me, all of that is just so interesting, and the complexity of it makes him such a rich subject for a book.

The weird thing in all of this is that I don’t think Carson would have foreseen that there would have ever been a park named after him, and he wouldn’t have liked it. He was shy. He was awkward around publicity. Unlike so many other figures on the Western stage, like Buffalo Bill Cody, he was not someone who was interested in celebrity. One of the ironies of this whole debate is that he probably just wouldn’t give a damn one way or the other, which I also admired about him. He really lived this life. He didn’t go on the stage with these Western shows, and kind of lived an artificial or choreographed western life. He actually lived the life.

Where do you think monuments and sites named for historical figures fit into the way we record and remember American history?

Historians are by nature, a little bit conservative, and by that I mean “small c” conservative. We are all about the past and tradition and conservation of places and traditions and ways of doing things. I’m politically quite liberal, but I feel like I’m conservative about this question of changing names and ripping down obelisks. You can do that, but you need to think it through.

There’s very few true heroes. You start looking into what they said and did and wrote and thought and felt, you find that almost everyone is compromised in some way. That goes all the way back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who had slaves, and yet they did some amazing things that set our course as a nation. So, if you’re looking for heroes, and they have to be lily white and pure in every sense of the word, then we’re not going to have many heroes left to name parks after.

Information has become more accessible than ever over the last 20-odd years, yet it seems harder than ever for people to agree on what’s true about the past or the present. Why do you think that is?

Maybe knowledge is considered not so precious anymore. It’s also that we have access to more disinformation — conspiracy theories and completely made up stuff — than we ever had before. And people who choose to believe this kind of crazy stuff have a more obvious path to connecting with other people who choose to believe it, too. They can create a much larger, much louder, subculture of people who just believe all sorts of wrong information. They can whip that up into a kind of an echo chamber that is way beyond anything that could have been created 20 years ago.

It saddens me that there’s so many “truths” out there now. There isn’t even hardly an attempt anymore to say this is an objective, provable and measurable truth. Instead, it’s the politicization of truth, or the weaponization of objective facts, that has really infected the whole society.

But you know, you just do the best you can. I’m old school, so I say just be as true to the facts — the known facts — as you can.

What are you working on currently?

I’m deep into a new book, which is another Western set in Colorado territory during the Civil War. It’s very much in the “Blood and Thunder” realm. It’s about something called the Sand Creek Massacre, the Cheyenne Indians and the Arapaho Indians. The creation of Denver and the Gold Rush — all of these events led up to this horrible event. I mention it very near the end of “Blood and Thunder” in a paragraph or two. Even then I was thinking, “Gosh, this is a huge event, and I may revisit this sometime.” I kind of filed that away, and I’ve been working on it for a couple years now. I’m probably going to read a little passage from some of the stuff that I’ve been writing when I’m at SOMOS in Taos.