Six years earlier than this, on the banks of the Missouri, and a
hundred miles east of Franklin, died Daniel Boone. In the retrospect,
Carson's name naturally associates itself with Boone's. On a broader
field, in the face of obstacles and perils equally formidable, with
a greater variety of resources, and with a far readier adaptability
to rapidly changing conditions, Carson continued the rôle of
empire-builder which Boone had begun.
[Illustration: Kit Carson.]
In 1826, the only States west of the Mississippi were Missouri and
Louisiana, and these, with the Territory of Arkansas, contained not
much more than a third as many inhabitants as a single city of that
region, St. Louis, has in 1910. Our present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
Utah, Nevada and California, with parts of Colorado and Wyoming,
belonged to Mexico, and, with Mexico, had just broken away from Spain.
Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with large portions of Wyoming and
Montana, were in controversy between the United States and England,
and were to remain in that condition for twenty years longer. West and
southwest of the Missouri, and on its upper waters for hundreds of
miles east of that river, roamed some of the most warlike and powerful
Indian tribes of North America. Except that, in the interval, the
capital of the southwest territory had swung from Madrid, Spain, to
Mexico, no perceptible change had taken place on the western frontier
since the days, twenty years earlier, when Lewis and Clark explored the
region from the mouth of the Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia;
or since Captain Zebulon M. Pike, seeking the sources of the Red
River, entered Spanish territory unawares, in the southern part of
the present Colorado, and was carried a prisoner before Charles IV's
governor-general at Santa Fé. In no age or land did adventure ever
offer a more attractive field to daring and enterprise than that which
spread itself out before young Carson at the moment when, fleeing from
the little saddler's shop, he plunged into the current of the stirring
life off to the westward.
First as a teamster on the Santa Fé Trail, of which Franklin was then
the eastern terminus, then as a worker at the copper mines on the Gila,
and afterward as a hunter, trapper, and guide across the West's wide
spaces, Carson traversed a large part of the region from the Missouri
to the Sacramento, from the Gulf of California to the upper reaches
of the Columbia, and, as exigencies demanded, alternately fighting,
fleeing from, or affiliating with Comanches, Apaches, Sioux, Pawnees,
and Blackfeet. Thus he was thrown into active association with St.
Vrain, the Bents, Ewing Young, Fitzpatrick, Bill Williams, Jim Bridger,
the Sublettes, and other well-known plainsmen and mountaineers of
the middle third of the nineteenth century, and won a reputation for
initiative, versatility, and daring which made him a marked figure
among the frontier leaders of his day. Moreover, in the midst of his
exciting activities he found time to marry, to establish a home, and
to practise the civic virtues which, refusing to lend themselves to
picturesque treatment, have eluded the writers of romance.
At this time, May, 1842, Lieutenant John C. Frémont, on his way up the
Mississippi with the first of his exploration parties, fell in with
Carson and induced him to enter the government service as the official
guide of the expedition. He afterward wrote:
On the boat I met Kit Carson. He was returning from putting his
little daughter in a convent school in St. Louis. I was pleased with
him and his manner of address at this first meeting. He was a man
of medium height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a clear,
steady blue eye and frank speech and manner--quiet and unassuming.
Carson, then a little less than thirty-three years of age, was already
a national character. The association which began at that time lasted
to the end of the Mexican War.
Washington, a city which saw many strange spectacles, had a novel
sight on the June day of 1847 when Kit Carson entered it with letters
from Frémont. In various phrase, this is the substance of what the
newspapers of Washington, New York, and Boston said: Here is the man
who has blazed paths for the Pathfinder from the mouth of the Missouri
to the Golden Gate; who, in 1846, guided General Stephen W. Kearny's
column of the Army of the West through New Mexico to the Pacific;
who, when Kearny was surrounded and besieged by the Mexicans, brought
Commodore Stockton's forces to the rescue; and who has just ridden from
Los Angeles, nearly 4,000 miles, with a military escort for the first
1200 miles of the way, eluding or fighting Mexicans and Indians, as
circumstances dictated, carrying to President Polk and to War Secretary
Marcy the story of the conquest of California and of the raising of the
Stars and Stripes along the Pacific coast.
A little knowledge of history, coupled with even a smaller amount of
historical imagination, will enable us to picture the sensation which
Carson and his story caused at the Capital. Polk, Webster, Clay, and
the other statesmen who met him were impressed with his quiet dignity,
his candor and the absence of swagger in his demeanor. No longer could
Congress listen with the old-time seriousness to the tales of the
alleged Sahara barrenness of the western plains, for Frémont's story,
just published in its first instalment, told of streams, of occasional
tracts of timber, and of vast herds of buffalo. And here in Washington
was the man who had piloted Frémont on his expeditions. From this time
dates the decline of the myth of the Great American Desert, which the
reports of Pike and of Long and Irving's chronicle of the overland
march of the Astorians projected across the map of the second quarter
of the nineteenth century from the western border of Missouri to the
Sierra Nevada. With their imperialist notions, Senators Benton, Cass,
and Douglas saw in Carson the advance courier of manifest destiny.
With the modesty which was one of his characteristics, Carson declined
to accept himself at the appraisement which Washington gave him. As he
viewed them, his achievements were merely part of his day's work, for
the performance of which he deserved no special credit. Accordingly he
left the Capital gladly with the despatches which Polk gave him for the
military commander in California, and then, after another journey back
to Washington, he returned, in 1848, to Taos, and resumed the life of a
ranchman, which had been interrupted six years earlier.
Once more now, in Carson's case, we see the initiative, the
versatility, and the resourcefulness which the frontier conditions of
the older day demanded. In their widely different fields, Crockett,
Sam Houston, and Lincoln disclosed these qualities. Appointed in
1853 Indian agent for the district of New Mexico and vicinity by
President Pierce,--a post which he held till his death, except for
the interlude of the Civil War, in which he rose to the rank of a
brigadier-general,--he entered a sphere in which he gained a new
distinction. The most formidable Indian-fighter of his age, he was
equally successful as a counselor and conciliator of Indians. His
administration stands guiltless of any complicity in the "century of
dishonor."
As a peacemaker between red men and white and between red men and red,
Carson was more effective than a regiment of cavalry. This was because
he knew the Indian's nature, talked his tongue, took pains to learn
his specific grievances, and could look at things from his point of
view. The Indian had confidence in Carson in a larger degree than in
any other agent of the older day except General William Clark, Lewis's
old partner in the exploration of 1804-06, who, from Monroe's days in
the Presidency to Van Buren's, was superintendent of Indian affairs,
with headquarters at St. Louis. Except Clark, he was more active in
treaty-making between the Government and the red man than any other
agent down to his time.
Socially as well as physically Carson was a path-blazer. With the Dawes
severalty act of 1887 began a revolution in our methods of dealing
with the red men. Many years before that statute was dreamed of,
Carson recommended that the Indians be taught to cultivate the soil,
that allotments of land be given to them as they become capable of
using them, that they be trained to become self-supporting, and that
they be prepared to merge themselves into the mass of the country's
citizenship. In a crude and general way our Indian policy for the last
quarter of a century has proceeded along these lines.
More than any other Indian agent of his day or earlier, Carson exerted
influence with the national authorities to induce them to listen to the
appeals of the country's wards, to remove their grievances, as far as
practicable, to deal with them as individuals, and to arouse in them an
ambition to rise to the industrial status of their white neighbors.
Although more than forty-two years have passed since Carson's death
many of his acquaintances are still living in various parts of the
West. In talks which I have had with some of them in the past year
or two they revealed him on a side which the historical and fiction
writers never disclosed. As a youth on the plains I caught a glimpse
of him in the last year of his life, and as he had always been a hero
to me as a boy beyond any other frontier character, I was surprised at
the absence in his appearance of everything traditionally associated
with the aspect of an Indian fighter. Although he was still alert and
resolute, his face had the kindly look which reminded me of Father De
Smet, the head of the mission among the Flatheads on the Bitter Root
River, in Montana, whom I had met shortly before that time.
"One of my most vivid recollections of Carson," says Major Rafael
Chacon, of Trinidad, Colorado, who was an officer in his company of
scouts in the campaign of 1855 against the Utes and Apaches, and who
was a captain and later on a major in the First Regiment of New Mexican
Volunteers in the Civil War, of which Carson was the colonel, "was
of one day in 1862 in Albuquerque, when I saw him lying on an Indian
blanket in front of his quarters, with his children gleefully crawling
all over him and taking from his pockets the candy and the lumps of
sugar which he had purchased for them. Their mother, his second wife,
Dona Josefa Jaamillo, to whom he was ardently devoted, he called by the
pet name of Chipita."
Jacob Beard, eighty-two years of age, of Monrovia, California, who
became acquainted with Carson at Taos in 1847, says one of his most
pleasant memories is of the day in 1852 when, while working on a ranch
near San Francisco, he met Carson, who had just reached that city
with a great drove of sheep which he and a few men had conducted from
New Mexico, nearly a thousand miles over deserts, across swift and
dangerous rivers, and through wild mountain passes, a large part of the
course being infested by Indians. "Kit, on seeing you I feel homesick,"
he exclaimed, "and I think I ought to go back with you." Carson became
sympathetic at once, and said: "Well, Jake, we have only one life to
live, and in living it we should make the most of our opportunities."
Beard added, in telling this to me: "That settled the matter. I
returned to the ranch, adjusted my affairs there, saddled my mule,
caught up with Carson's party, went back to New Mexico, and lived there
for many years afterward."
Daniel L. Taylor, mayor of Trinidad, Colorado, who probably stood
closer to Carson during the later years of his life than any other man
now living, related recently to me an incident showing his dislike
of anything which savored of flattery. One day in 1862 the great
frontiersman chanced to stop at Maxwell's ranch, on the Cimmaron River,
in New Mexico, a well-known point on the Santa Fé trail, when a regular
army officer of high rank who was there exclaimed, exuberantly: "So
this is the distinguished Kit Carson who has made so many Indians run."
Carson silenced his eulogist by quietly remarking: "Yes, I made some
Indians run, but much of the time they were running after me."
For his honesty and courage in exposing an official who was defrauding
the Government in 1864-65 he was removed by one of his political
superiors from the command at Fort Union to Fort Garland, in Colorado,
but he never complained, and the cause of the removal, which was
eminently creditable to him, was divulged by others, and not by himself.
"In Kit Carson Park, which I have given to the city of Trinidad," said
Mayor Taylor to me, "we shall soon erect a monument to Carson, and we
shall try to make the affair interesting to the entire West. In many
ways he was the most wonderful man that I ever knew."
Even to his old neighbors and associates Carson was a hero during his
lifetime. Merit meets no severer test than this.
An old friend of Carson's told me that his dying exclamation to the
physician who was with him, was "_Doctor, compadre, adios_." The date
was May 23, 1868. As this last of the great trail-makers was dying,
the Union Pacific, pushing westward, and the Central Pacific, moving
eastward, were about to meet at Promontory, Utah, and the continent was
crossed by rail. The heroic age of western expansion had closed.