CHRISTOPHER CARSON AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
_Christopher Carson._
[Sidenote: 1826]
Down in the blue-grass region of Kentucky; down in the land of the
cotton, the corn and the banjo; where the tiny feathered warblers
carol their sweetest roundelays; where perennial flowers unceasingly
bloom, and the trees are early at their blossomings; where silvery
streamlets are kissed by the moonlight, and linger in the embraces of
the warm southern suns; in that land, the home of lovely women,
splendid men and fine horses; that has sent out its great generals,
polished orators and renowned statesmen--two children were born,
nearby, in the very memorable year of 1809. Abraham Lincoln grew to an
uncrowned kingship. Christopher Carson won the highest place in the
hearts of the empire builders of this wonderful West; and their names
will never die. Lincoln was splitting rails by day, studying by the
light of a log fire by night, and climbing hand over hand to his bed
on the floor of the loft, by means of pegs driven in the logs of the
cabin, as later he went hand over hand straight into the confidence
and hearts of his countrymen.
Carson, the father, had apprenticed Kit, the son, to a saddler, as was
the custom of those times. He rose before the break of dawn, made
saddles and bridles all day and far into the night and was paid with
poor food, a comfortless bed, and cheap and scanty clothing. Such was
to be the lot of this unhappy boy until he was twenty-one. But he
rebelled. Out into the blackness of the night, and to the light of
freedom, crept the friendless youth, without a penny in his pocket or
a bundle under his arm! And to such freedom! The limitless West with
its stirring scenes beckoned him and he sped away, ahead of the
advertisement that called him back, and in which the munificent reward
of one cent for his return was offered by the man who had the legal
right to call himself the master. At Franklin, where he lived, he had
absorbed the spirit of the widening West that was calling him thither,
and he quickly became an important factor in its upbuilding. Along
that memorable Santa Fe trail, he crossed and re-crossed the
southeastern part of Colorado.
Kit Carson became noted as a fearless hunter, trapper, miner,
stockman, farmer, scout, guide, Indian fighter, Indian pacificator,
treaty maker, Indian agent--all culminating in his Brigadier-generalship
in the Civil War. In every capacity, he was faithful, persevering,
energetic and capable. He learned the languages of the different tribes
with painstaking study. He grew to understand the Indians as
individuals, their ways, and their thoughts; he became their advisor
and counselor, settled differences between tribes, and between the
tribes and the Government; was the Government's advisor in treaty
making, and was the first man to urge the attempt to domesticate the
Indians. He knew the Spanish language as well as the Mexican and Indian
patois; and he aided the Government in the solution of its troubles
with the Indians as well as with the Mexicans and Spaniards. His
influence for good stretched across a country, beginning with the
Missouri River on the East and ending where the restless waves of
civilization listened to the beating of the surges on the shores of the
Pacific. He was a Lincoln sort of man with malice toward none. He had
few enemies, and many friends. He was for peace, when peace was
possible, but how he could fight when nothing else would do! Abbott,
who does not realize that the towering peaks, the murmuring streams and
the boundless plains, develop high ideals through the silent language
that is all their own, says of Carson, "It is strange that the
wilderness could have formed so estimable a character."
In Christopher Carson I see a serious man, modest and retiring, soft
spoken, with quiet manners, medium in height, blue eyes and broad
shouldered. I see a priestly looking man, with thoughtful mien, with
face clean shaven; high, broad forehead, with receding hair flowing
toward his shoulders, long and wavy; thin, firmly compressed lips; in
all, very like the strong, splendid face of the world-famed artist,
Liszt. I see a domestic man, adoring his amiable Spanish wife. I see
him lying on his buffalo robe, with his children playing over him, and
hunting the sugar lumps out of pockets that were never empty. I see
him standing, gazing into the eyes of the Indian whose hand he clasps,
vieing with each other in erectness, while at their feet lie the idle
guns and cartridges, the broken bows and arrows, and the pruning hooks
into which their swords have been beaten. I see him dying, two score
and three years ago, with his honest homely face illuminated, as he
smiles his "adios" to all about him and sinks gently into his last,
long, dreamless sleep.
_Richens Wooten._
[Sidenote: 1838]
Seventy-five years have come and gone since Richens Wooten joined a
wagon train at Independence, Missouri, and came out over the Santa Fe
trail. Until 1859 he felt that he was temporarily in the West; that he
would go back to his old Missouri home and end his days in the midst
of the peaceful scenes of boyhood joys, the memory of which had clung
to him through all the exciting years of his frontier life. Then when
he had achieved success; had money and property; had loaded his
belongings on his wagons; had turned the heads of the horses to the
East; looked into the faces of the friends who had surrounded him all
the years, at the plains he knew and loved, at the magnificent
mountains, silent, majestic, eternal, at the rivers murmuring to him
as they went by--his courage faltered! He awoke from the dream he had
dreamed for years, unhitched his horses, unloaded his wagons, and
lived and died in the country from which his heart-strings could not
be severed.
[Illustration: Pioneers and a Conestogal Wagon or Prairie Schooner.]
Like those of his day, he was everything he should be. He hunted and
trapped; he was a Government scout; he raised stock; he farmed;
everyone knew him as "Uncle Dick," and they knew him wherever a trail
was laid. He lived at the junction of the Huerfano River with the
Arkansas River about twenty miles East of Pueblo. He farmed there by a
process of simple irrigation, as far back as 1854, which made him the
Pioneer farmer of Colorado. He had a mill that was built by his own
hands, that was run by water power in a sleepy sort of way. He would
empty a couple of sacks of grain into the hopper at night and the
flour would be ready for breakfast in the morning. He trapped mostly
along the streams of Colorado and New Mexico. By handling his furs
himself, at St. Louis, he realized as high as Fifteen Dollars for a
beaver skin. He says "robes" were the cause of the disappearance of
the vast buffalo herds; that those killed for meat by the whites and
Indians would have made no appreciable inroad on the numbers that
inhabited the Great Western Plains, but desire for hides caused their
ruthless slaughter by the tens of thousands; that while they were
gentle at first and had to be driven out of the way of the emigrant
trains, they were hunted so much that later they became savage and
would fight. He started a buffalo farm in 1840 where Pueblo is
located, and sold the young to menageries. Wooten hated the Indians
with exceeding great hate. There was a reason. He had chased them many
and many a time; shot at them, hit them, had seen them fall, and their
riderless ponies flee over the prairies, while a form lay silent
beneath the sun and beneath the stars. But sometimes the tables were
turned, and sometimes the chaser was chased! Ah! There's the rub, for
Wooten could never look defeat in the face and be happy.
The Indians, he says, had a system of long distance communication,
carried on among themselves by means of fire and smoke signals from
the mountain tops. A puff of smoke was like a telephone message, and
as easily understood; a second puff had its own peculiar meaning, and
a blaze carried its special message to distant tribes. The whole
country could be aroused in a day and night--the signals being taken
up and repeated from mountain top to mountain top. The Indians spread
themselves out to sleep in their tents, on buffalo robes or willow
mattresses, with their feet towards a common fire in the center. They
would place their dead in trees, or on a platform built on the top of
four poles planted in the ground. The dead would be placed in a
blanket, a buffalo robe wrapped around it, and then all bound together
with strips of hide; the dead would thus lie for years. It was
gruesome to happen upon these graveyard scenes at night, with the
uncanny owls hooting in the treetops, and the wolves howling their
warning notes. The Indians rode bareback with a rope for a bridle that
would be fastened around the under jaw of the pony, which was trained
to obey the slightest pressure of the knees or swaying of the body.
One of the feats of which Wooten was proud, and with good reason, was
taking a great drove of sheep through to California. To do this
successfully in the face of possible depredations from the Indians, to
whom the sheep is a savory morsel; to escape the bands of thousands of
aggressive grey wolves; to swim unbridged rivers when sheep so dislike
to swim; to follow narrow mountain paths where overcrowding would
precipitate the herd into the chasms below; to get by the crops of the
Mormons who were all the time hunting for trouble; to reach his
destination with every sheep fatter than when he started--that, says
Uncle Dick, was the work of an artist.
Wooten came to Denver in 1858, where a few cabins had been built, and
where a handful of people had centered. He started a store and built a
two-story log house, the first pretentious building ever erected in
Denver. Later, he built a frame residence when the saw mill came, a
mill that had been stolen in the East and brought to this
out-of-the-way country, where it was thought it could never be
traced--in which, however, the plunderers were disappointed.
But Uncle Dick felt crowded. He could not breathe. He was elbowed by
the people who were settling here. The wilds called to him. He wanted
to get out alone, under the quiet stars; to have the glories of the
setting sun all to himself; to see the wonderful moonlight shadows in
the rivers; to feel the great orb creeping up in the morning, as he
had seen it out on the broad plains and from the mountain tops nearly
all the years of his life. So he went away; off to New Mexico, upon
whose mountains he got a Government Charter for building a toll road
by the abysses and along the over shadowing crags to shorten the
trail. And there, with the years creeping on, he set himself down by
the side of his toll gate, which was never shut down for the Indians,
for they could not understand that in all this great free world, a
road was not as free as sunshine or air. But is not this all told by
Richens Wooten himself, in his very own book, in the picturesque and
forceful style of a picturesque and forceful pioneer?
And finally, the toll that is taken from all mankind was collected
from him, and he passed out alone by the road that every one must
travel, and over which no one has ever traveled twice.
_Oliver P. Wiggins._
[Sidenote: 1838]
Straight as an arrow, towering six feet and three inches, stands
Oliver P. Wiggins, the oldest living pioneer of all the "winners of
the West." Eighty-nine years have brought a dimness to the eyes and a
slowness to the steps, but they have not touched the keen intellect,
trained by such experiences as no other living man will ever acquire.
He remembers distinctly every event that has occurred during all the
years of his life on the plains. He talks slowly and impressively, and
you feel as you leave his presence that you have been in touch with
another age and another race of people. He will tell you his story as
he told it to me.
"I was born on the Niagara River; that is, on an Island just above
Niagara Falls, where my father had taken up some land. His father had
selected his own land near by the American side of the Falls, and it
became later on very valuable. Boylike, I wanted to fight Indians, and
I dreamed about scouts and tomahawks, and the war dance, for I was a
reader of the blood-curdling cheap Indian novels of that day. So I
left home when I was fifteen and went by sailboat from Buffalo to
Detroit, where I found some French emigrants just starting to
Kankakee, Illinois, where they were going to take up land. I went with
them as far as Ft. Dearborn, which afterwards became Chicago; it had
but about three hundred people then and as many soldiers; there was
one short street just South of the Chicago River, and among the houses
was one they called a hotel that had nine rooms. A squaw man, that is,
a white man with an Indian wife, was sent from the Fort with a paper
to St. Louis, that had something to do with paying the Indians their
annuities by the Government. I went along in the canoe down the
Illinois River, and the Indians, knowing what we were going for, kept
joining us in their canoes, until there must have been two thousand
following us when we reached St. Louis. There was not a single house
all the way from Chicago to St. Louis, which was not known as St.
Louis then. Later my uncle settled there, and had the Wiggins Ferry,
and four acres of land on what was known then as 'Bloody Island.' He
sold it recently for Three Million Dollars. The Indians had some
flour, bacon and blankets apportioned to them, and they traded a good
deal of it off for whiskey, and many of them got drunk and had an
awful time.
"The following Spring, which was 1838, I went by steamer up to
Independence, Missouri, which is just above where Kansas City was
located later. It was the Eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail, while
eight hundred miles away, Santa Fe was the Western terminus. At
Independence, all the outfitting was done for the great overland
freighting business, which at that early period had assumed important
proportions. I joined a train, consisting of one hundred wagons and
one hundred and twenty men. There were five yoke of oxen to each
wagon, which made one thousand oxen; then there were a large number of
extra oxen along to rest those that got sick or sore footed. By
following close after each other, our wagon train stretched out about
three miles. I was still on behind driving the cavy-yard, which was
the name given to the sore-footed oxen. When we got to the Arkansas
River where the trail crossed, which was very swift, we made boats out
of two of the prairie schooners; calked them so they wouldn't leak,
and loaded into these two boats all the loads that were on the rest of
the wagons. A prairie schooner is a long deep wagon bed with flaring
sides, about eight feet high and twenty feet long. The oxen swam
across; then we chained all the empty wagons together, one behind the
other, and hitched the oxen to a chain that reached back across the
river to the wagons, pulled the wagons into the stream and on to the
other side, where, as fast as one reached the bank, it was unchained
from the rest, run up on the dry land, and the work of reloading
began. It took four days to get all our outfit across. Our wagons were
loaded mostly with merchandise for the stores to sell to the Mexicans,
and with mining machinery. The wagons would carry on an average about
seventy-five hundred pounds and the price of freight for the eight
hundred miles from Independence to Santa Fe was generally eight
dollars per hundred-weight, so the cost to the shippers of that
trainload of freight run into the thousands. It would take from ten to
sixteen weeks to cross the plains, owing to storms and the condition
of the roads. We would shoe our own oxen and some of them had to be
shod every morning. We would rope them and throw them for that
purpose. It was not like a horseshoe, for the hoof of the ox is split
and it requires a piece for each half of the hoof. We would make from
fifteen to twenty miles a day. The dust was so great, that we traveled
in a cloud of it all the time and the teams and drivers would change
off; those who were ahead to-day, were behind to-morrow, all but me; I
never got to go ahead with my cavy-yard, and I have never forgotten
those weeks of frightful dust. They wouldn't let me stay back far, for
fear the Indians would pick me off and run the cattle away.
"About a day and a half after we left Big Bend, we met a friendly
Indian, who was much excited when he saw us. He said we must not try
to go on, for we would all be killed, as the Kiowas were on the war
path. Be we couldn't stop, so we kept right on, knowing that Kit
Carson was coming with an escort to meet us. We brought up the rear
half of the wagon train, however, and put two abreast, thus shortening
the train to about a mile and a half. Pretty soon Carson met us with
forty-six men, who were all well armed and mounted on good horses and
then we felt easy once more. When we reached the Kiowa country, where
we were most likely to be attacked, Carson and his men all got inside
the covered wagons and led their horses behind. After awhile we saw
the Indians coming charging down upon us, yelling and shooting with
their bows and arrows; all the drivers in the meantime having gotten
on the other side of their wagons. Carson kept his men quiet until the
Indians were close enough, when every man shot from the wagons, and
about forty-six Indians tumbled off their ponies dead or wounded at
the first shot. Then Carson's men mounted their horses and there was a
great fight. About two hundred of the three hundred Indians were
killed. Not one of Carson's men or of our party were killed. 'Did we
bury the Indians?' No, we left them where they were; they made good
coyote beef.
"When we got opposite where Carson lived, which was at Taos above
Santa Fe, he left the train, for there was no further danger and I
went with him to his home about twenty miles off the trail, losing my
pay because I did not go through with the party, this being a rule of
freighting. I stayed with Carson two years. I became a guide and
Government Scout and got eighty dollars a month. I was with General
Fremont on his first and second trips. He wasn't liked by any of the
men. He was very dictatorial and it didn't seem to us that he knew
much. He had a German Scientist along whom all liked, and who knew his
business. When we were with Fremont on his second trip, it was so late
in the season when we reached the eastern foot of the Sierras, that
twelve of us refused to go with him for we felt it was certain death.
The snow falls in those mountains seventy feet deep at times, and it
was the season for snows. Carson was along and had to go on because he
had signed an agreement to go through, and he went, knowing he was
taking his life in his hands. We were arrested for mutiny and put in
charge of a sergeant, but soon got out of his reach, made a detour of
several miles through the mountains, got on the back track and reached
a place of safety after several days, thoroughly chilled from sleeping
in that high cold country with no blankets, but glad to escape with
any sacrifice. Fremont's party then consisted of fifteen, and they had
a terrible time. They froze, and starved, and suffered, so that three
men lost their minds and never recovered. Carson finally went on
ahead, so weak he could hardly walk or crawl, and sent help back just
in time to save the party.
"The first gold discovered in Colorado, was in August or September,
1858, by Green Russell. He had stopped here on his way to California
where he was going to mine. He came from Georgia and knew about gold
mining there, and said there must be gold in Cherry Creek. He found it
up at the head of that Creek at a place called "Frankstown" where the
trail from Ft. Bent on the Arkansas River crossed over to Ft. Lupton.
Russell and Gregory and others came together, and Russell stayed here
a year and located Russell Gulch at Central City, which became a great
paying property. I did a great deal of hunting and trapping in those
early days and made money until 1858, when the fur business died down,
as silk had taken the place of fur. I was the first white man to visit
Trappers Lake, which is about thirty miles north of Glenwood Springs
and was considered inaccessible, because of the density of the fallen
timber. We brought out in one season about two thousand dollars worth
of furs and hides. The elk covered that country and was comparatively
tame as they had not been hunted. We took Indians along for guides,
and their squaws to tan the hides. This they did by boiling the brains
of the animals we killed and rubbing the soft brain powder into the
pores of the skin, folding the hides together, and in a week they were
cured and were soft and pliable. The brains were used because of
certain properties they possessed, and because of their pliant nature.
To catch the beaver we would set our steel traps in the water about
seven inches below the surface so the young could swim over them and
not get caught. Then just above where the trap was set, we would
fasten a branch from the limb of a tree into the bank, the bark of
which the beaver lives on. We would rub beaver oil into the bark of
the limb, so the beaver would think others of his kind had been there
ahead and found no harm; they are a very suspicious little animal. The
trap would have a spring that would close on the hind legs of the
beaver, as they would swim above it.
"Until 1857, the trappers recognized the claim of the Indians, that
one-half of all game and hides belonged to them. It was changed in
that year by Government Treaty. In dividing with them they were very
insistent, and they usually got the biggest half of the meat and the
largest hides. We used to take hot mud baths at Glenwood Springs which
is a very pleasant sensation. I fought the Indians and fought them
hard, but had many friends among them and I did them many good turns
which they appreciated. I have had an eventful life, had many
thrilling experiences, saw life held very cheaply, and have seen such
developments as I never dreamed I should witness."