As part of his narrative approach to history, Sides uses real historical figures to embody major themes in Blood and Thunder. Stephen Watts Kearny represents the levelheaded peacemaker. John Fremont represents a privileged class of easterners whose ambitions outstripped their talent. Most importantly of all, Sides uses the life of frontiersman Kit Carson to trace the lifecycle of the American West. The story of the West unfolds with Carson as a guide: its halcyon wilderness beginnings, its bloody middle, and finally, its death rattle with the subjugation of the Native Americans. The phases of Carson’s life eerily mirrored those of the West itself. Carson is uniquely positioned to tell this story, Sides argues: He is the man who both made the West and destroyed it.

Carson grew up the early 1800s in Missouri, then the border between civilization and frontier. At 16, he became independent just as Mexico opened its borders to American trade in the 1820s, with the Santa Fe Trail serving as a transcontinental artery. For the first time, Americans could enter the West. Carson was borne on this first wave of trappers, where he was among the earliest Anglo-Americans to visit the “American Canaan, a wilderness, pure and mythic, stretching out for hundreds of miles” (271).