by David Fisher
As the trappers cheered him, Carson walked off with Singing Grass.
Christopher Carson was born in Madison County, Kentucky, on Christmas Eve 1809, the eleventh of fifteen children. It was the same year Abraham Lincoln was born, the year in which James Madison succeeded Thomas Jefferson as president of the seventeen newly United States. His father was a celebrated hunter and farmer who had fought in the Revolution. Within a year of Kit’s birth, his father moved his family to the frontier settlement of Cooper’s Fort in Boonslick Country, Missouri. This was considered the edge of the civilized nation. Most of the land stretching from there all the way to the Pacific Ocean was wilderness, with occasional settlements inhabited by the native peoples who were fighting to protect their territory, their food sources, and their way of life. It took great skill and daunting courage to survive in these dangerous lands. Those who took the risk were the mountain men, the trappers, the explorers, and the soldiers who went into the unknown in search of adventure. As the author Henry Howe wrote in his classic volume The Great West more than one hundred fifty years ago, “From the Mississippi to the mouth of the Colorado, from the frozen regions of the North to Gila in Mexico, the beaver trapper has set his traps in every stream. Most of this country, but for their daring enterprise, would be, even now, a terra incognita to geographers…. These alone are the hardy pioneers who braved the way for the settlement of the western country.”
Carson was loosely related to the legendary frontiersman and trailblazer Daniel Boone—Boone’s daughter was married to Carson’s uncle—and there is no doubt that Boone served as young Kit Carson’s role model. Missouri had been part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase—bought for about four cents an acre—and quickly became the jumping-off place for expeditions going west, where life was a constant battle for survival against nature—and the native tribes. Carson became a man in that wilderness, learning how to track and shoot and, when necessary, fight Indians.
Carson’s father died when Kit was only nine years old; some histories report that he was killed by Indians, while others claim that a large branch from a burning tree fell on him. His mother remarried, but Kit never got along with his stepfather. When he was fourteen years old, his stepfather apprenticed him to a harness and saddle maker named David Workman, during which time Kit heard the exciting stories told by mountain men returning from the West, stories that captured his imagination. After his second year, he couldn’t wait any longer. “[B]eing anxious to travel for the purpose of seeing different countries,” he ran away, joining a wagon-train expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Workman placed a notice in the newspaper, offering a one-cent reward for the return of his apprentice.
During the next years, Carson tasted adventure, working as a cook for trapper and fur trader Ewing Young, as a teamster in the copper mines near Rio Gila, and as an interpreter along the Chihuahua Trail into Mexico. He’d dropped out of school before learning to read or write, but he learned to speak Spanish and eight Indian languages from a mountaineer named Kincard. He trapped beaver, traded furs, and, when it became necessary, fought Indians.
His first recorded battle with Indians came in 1829, when one of Ewing Young’s trading parties was attacked by Navajos. Young was determined to get vengeance and organized his own raiding party, which trailed the Indians to the head of the Salt River and waited. When the Navajos spotted a small band of trappers, they attacked—and rode into Young’s ambush. His men—young Kit Carson among them—opened fire and killed fifteen Indians.
A rendezvous near Green River, Oregon, about 1835
Eventually Carson would become one of history’s most renowned Indian fighters, but he acquired this reputation only out of necessity. The mountain men lived by a warrior’s code that required an eye for an eye, a scalp for a scalp. When one member of your tribe was killed, that score had to be settled. A warrior who showed great courage in battle, who got close enough to physically touch his enemy, was said to be “counting coup,” and this was the highest honor he could achieve. Carson recounted one story in which he was awakened by a Blackfoot brave counting coup—literally prodding him with a knife. The band of Indians had snuck into camp to steal horses. Carson kicked him away, scrambled to his feet while grabbing his own knife, and fatally stabbed his attacker.
In 1839, Carson led a party of forty-three mountaineers in an attack on the Blackfeet who had been raiding their camp. They charged into the Blackfeet village, quickly killing ten warriors. The battle raged for more than three hours. During the action, a mountaineer named Cotton was trapped beneath his horse after it was shot from underneath him. Six warriors raced forward to take his scalp. Carson leaped from his saddle, steadied his hand, and shot the leader through his heart. Three more Indians were shot down by other shooters before they could reach cover, enabling Cotton to get loose and make his way to safety.
Kit Carson believed totally in the warrior’s code—but he also spent many years living peacefully among the tribes. After his encounter with Chouinard, he took Singing Grass as his wife and settled in her village. When Singing Grass died giving birth to their second child, he married a Cheyenne maiden named Making-Out-Road. He was considered an honored guest in the lodges of the Arapahos, Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches. Even his favorite horse was proudly named Apache. He lived so easily among the tribes that he once remembered, “For many consecutive years I never slept under the roof of a house or gazed upon the face of a white woman…. My rifle furnished nearly every particle of food on which I lived.”
Carson had earned a fine reputation as a hunter and trapper, becoming known as “the Monarch of the Prairies” and “the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains,” Nestor being a mythical Greek king known for his bravery. His word was said to be “as sure as the sun comin’up,” and his skills enabled him to hire on in the 1840s as “hunter to the fort,” meaning he was responsible for supplying all the food for the forty-man garrison at Bent’s Fort, the only trading post on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and Mexico. Ultimately, though, Carson and his fellow trappers proved so proficient at their trade that by the time of the last rendezvous in 1840, the beaver had been hunted almost to extinction.
Yet during his years on the frontier, as Charles Burdett wrote in his Life of Kit Carson, “his curiosity, as well as care to preserve the knowledge for future use, led him to note in memory every feature of the wild landscape, its mountain chains, its desert prairies …” and prepared him to play a very special role in the settling of the West.
The concept of Manifest Destiny, the dream of a nation that stretched across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was beginning to take hold. At his inauguration in 1845, President James K. Polk prophesized, “It is confidently believed that our system may be safely extended to the utmost bounds of our territorial limits, and that as it shall be extended the bonds of our union, so far from being weakened, will become stronger …”
Kit Carson proved to be extraordinarily important in the fulfillment of that dream. In 1842, after sixteen years on the frontier, he brought his four-year-old daughter, Adaline, to live with his sister in St. Louis, where she could receive the proper education he never had. From St. Louis he boarded the first steamboat at work on the great Missouri River, intending to return to his family homestead. Also on that boat was Lieutenant John C. Frémont of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, who coincidentally was looking to hire an experienced guide to lead him to Wyoming, where he was to survey the South Pass, the most popular route across the Continental Divide, and measure the height of the mountains. After introducing himself to Frémont, Carson explained, “I have been some time in the mountains and I think I can guide you to any point there you wish to reach.” After making inquiries, Frémont hired Carson to guide the expedition at a salary of one hundred dollars a month.
Kit Carson (left) and John Frémont came from completely different backgrounds, but their adventures introduced America to the possibilities of the great West.
The two men hardly
could have been more different. While the rough-hewn Carson had never learned to read or write, Frémont was a polished, ambitious mathematics teacher who was married to the daughter of powerful United States senator Thomas Hart Benton. Senator Benton, the political champion of Manifest Destiny, apparently had helped his son-in-law get his army commission, then convinced Congress to support his explorations.
The twenty-eight-man party that would eventually make both Frémont and Carson national heroes departed St. Louis on June 10, 1842. Several of Carson’s closest friends had joined the expedition, mountain men he respected and trusted, men he wanted to have by his side in a fight. When they reached Fort Laramie, Wyoming, they learned that almost a thousand Sioux had attacked a party of trappers and Snake Indians and were still in the region. The expedition was advised to turn back or risk being massacred. Frémont refused, replying that his government had directed him to perform a certain duty and he intended to do so. If he perished in the effort, he was confident his government would avenge his death. Carson admired the Southerner’s fortitude and courage, and that helped cement their friendship.
Carson and Frémont would save each other’s lives as they fought Indians, outlaws, Mexicans, and the elements to survey the western wilderness.
The expedition accomplished each of its objectives, and Frémont’s beautifully written reports, which were reprinted in newspapers throughout the country, thrilled Americans with their vivid descriptions of a magnificent landscape and vast regions waiting for settlement. Frémont was celebrated as “the Pathfinder,” and Kit Carson was credited as his trusted scout. While Frémont returned to Washington to lay plans for a second expedition, Kit Carson married for the third time—his second wife having left him to join the migration of her tribe—this time to a Mexican, Senora Josefa Jaramilla, with whom he would have three children. To appease her family he agreed to convert to Catholicism.
Frémont and Carson’s second expedition, intended to map the remainder of the Oregon Trail, began in the summer of 1843 and eventually brought them in sight of the magnificent Cascade Range. During their return journey, they became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and faced starvation. Food was so scarce that their half-starved mules “ate one another’s tails and the leather of the pack saddles,” and Frémont gave his men permission to eat their dogs. Somehow Carson managed to scrounge enough food for them to survive. During the trek through the deep snow, Frémont and Carson left their party to scout for a path over a raging, icy river. As Frémont wrote, “Carson sprang over, clear across a place where the stream was compressed …” but when Frémont tried to follow, his moccasins slipped on an icy rock and he fell into the river. “It was some few seconds before I could recover myself in the current, and Carson, thinking me hurt, jumped in after me, and we both had an icy bath.”
Josefa Jaramilla-Carson with Kit Carson Jr.
After spending the winter at Sutter’s Fort in California, the expedition set out for home. To get there, they had to go through the Mojave Desert. In addition to heat and thirst, they had to endure several Indian attacks. After Indians stampeded their livestock, Carson took off after them. As Frémont later described it, “Carson may be considered among the boldest…. Two men, in a savage desert, pursue day and night an unknown body of Indians into the defiles of an unknown mountain—attack them on sight, without counting numbers, and defeat them in an instant.”
As they made their way out of the Mojave, they encountered a Mexican man and boy, survivors of an Indian attack. They had been ambushed by an estimated thirty Indians, they said; two men had been killed in the attack, their two female cooks had been captured, and twenty horses had been stolen. Carson and his friend Richard Godey volunteered to go after the captured women. The two men tracked the Indians for two nights and found them at dawn. They silently crawled into the camp, hiding among the stolen horses. When the horses stirred, alerting the Indians, Carson and Godey had no choice but to attack. They raced into the camp. Carson raised his rifle and shot the leader dead. Godey’s first shot missed, but his second shot killed his target. The Indians hesitated to respond, believing the two men must be the point of a much larger group waiting in ambush.
Carson and Godey recovered fifteen horses and then began searching for the captured women. Instead, they found the bodies of the two Mexican men who had been killed, staked to the ground and mutilated. In response they “took the hair” of the Indians they had shot, honoring the counting-coup tradition.
Frémont’s reports transformed Kit Carson into a frontier legend, the brave tracker who saved the expedition in the snowbound mountains, then practically single-handedly attacked and defeated thirty wild Indians. While the true story was amazing enough, reporters and dime novelists exaggerated it even further, attributing to Kit Carson all the ideal traits—humility, loyalty, and bravery—characteristic of this new country. The first of these “blood and thunders,” as these books were known, Kit Carson: Prince of the Gold Hunters, told the fictional story of Carson rescuing a kidnapped young girl from the Indians. Carson, who didn’t know how to read, had to have these stories read to him.
Frémont’s third expedition left St. Louis in the summer of 1845, initially intending to map the source of the Arkansas River. But when the expedition accomplished this objective, he continued on to California, which was still Mexican territory, to support the growing number of American settlers there who wanted to join the United States. The superior number of Mexican troops forced Frémont to go north, making camp at Klamath Lake, Oregon. One night in May 1846, as the party slept, Indians crept into camp and killed Carson’s friend Basil Lajeunesse with a single hatchet blow to his head. In the ensuing battle, two more of Frémont’s men were killed. Several attackers also died and, as Frémont later reported, the enraged Carson continued to pummel the body of one of them, beating his face into pulp. That wasn’t enough to satisfy him, though; to avenge Lajeunesse’s death, he led an attack on a Klamath tribe fishing village where 150 braves lived. When Carson’s rifle misfired during the battle, a Klamath warrior took aim at him with a poisoned arrow. Frémont acted instantly to save his life—“he plunged the rowels of his spurs deep into his horse” and trampled the enemy warrior. By the end of the day, in what became known as the Klamath Lake Massacre, most of the Indians had been killed and their village had been burned to the ground. Only later was it discovered that this tribe probably was not involved in the initial attack.
For more than a century, The Youth’s Companion was one of the country’s most popular magazines for children. This heroic illustration was published in about 1922.
Coincidentally, on the day of the massacre, President Polk called on Congress to declare war on Mexico. Frémont’s mapping party was almost instantly transformed into a fighting force called the California Battalion. Carson was given the rank of lieutenant. Returning to California, Frémont led a successful insurrection and declared himself military governor of the new American territory. Carson was dispatched to Washington, D.C., to inform President Polk of the victory, a cross-country journey he promised to make in sixty days. His planned route would take him through Taos, where he hoped to spend at least a brief time with his wife, whom he hadn’t seen in more than a year. But when he was only days from home, he encountered General Stephen Kearny and his Army of the West, which had successfully seized New Mexico for the United States, and was en route to California. Kearny ordered Carson to turn around and guide him to San Diego and to send Frémont’s dispatches to President Polk with another rider. Although he was only one long ride from his wife, he responded, “As the General thinks best,” and joined his troops.
By the time Kearny’s one hundred dragoons got to California, the situation there had changed drastically. The Mexicans had counterattacked, and Frémont was besieged by Californios, Mexican troops carrying eight-foot-long lances. Kearny clearly underestimated the Mexican troops when he launched an attack on the village of San Pasqual. By the end of the second day of fighting, almost
fifty of Kearny’s vastly outnumbered Americans had been killed or wounded, and the survivors were trapped on a hilltop without sufficient food, water, or ammunition. If they were not quickly reinforced, they would face annihilation. During the night, Kit Carson and Navy Lieutenant Beale removed their shoes and silently slipped through enemy lines, coming so close to being caught that Carson later claimed that “he could distinctly hear Lt. Beale’s heart pulsate.” Knowing they could not risk using the trails, the two men ran, walked, and crawled almost thirty miles barefoot through the sagebrush and cactus of the rocky terrain, the prickly pears digging into their bare feet. They raced through two nights without food or water until they finally reached American lines in San Diego. Carson had chosen the more difficult terrain to cover so arrived after Lieutenant Beale. Kearny’s troops were preparing to make a final, desperate attempt to break out when the two hundred American reinforcements sent by Carson and Beale reached them. The Mexican army withdrew and the remnant of Kearny’s battalion was saved. It took Lieutenant Beale more than a year to recover fully from this experience.
When General S. W. Kearny’s troops were surrounded and greatly outnumbered by Mexican forces, Carson and Navy Lieutenant Beale crawled through enemy lines, then ran almost thirty miles barefoot to save the besieged soldiers.
When the war ended, Commodore Stockton, who had been involved in the American revolt, declared Frémont governor of California. Six weeks later, General Kearny, claiming to be acting on government orders, charged Frémont with insubordination, a serious military offense, and named himself acting governor. Frémont immediately dispatched Carson to Washington to plead his case before President Polk. While in the capital, Carson stayed in Frémont’s home, choosing to sleep outside on the porch rather than in a stuffy bedroom. Frontiersman Kit Carson was a sensation in Washington, though there was little about his physical appearance that reflected his exploits. The blood-and-thunder books had depicted him as a giant, America’s first action hero, so people were greatly surprised that in the flesh this living legend actually was a small, stoop-shouldered, bowlegged, and freckled man, and that he responded to questions with simple, often one-word answers and spoke in a voice “as soft and gentle as a woman’s.” His appearance was so different from expectations that one man who had traveled a long distance to meet the great Indian fighter looked him up and down and said, “You ain’t the kind of Kit Carson I am looking for.” In fact, Carson’s fame was so great across the country that there was a lively business in Kit Carson imposters.
