The 1970 publication of Dee Brown's best-selling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, opened the eyes of the reading public to the tragic history of Native Americans and the role of Kit Carson in the Navajo wars did not look good. Over the last fifty years, echoing Brown, other writers, fiction and nonfiction, have split the mythic tale from Henry Nash Smith's Kit Carson as symbol of America's heroic narrative of opening the West to create that of Kit Carson as symbol for how the Nation mistreated its indigenous peoples.