Kit Carson

Christopher Houston Carson was born December 24, 1809, near Richmond, Kentucky, the son of a one-armed Indian-wars veteran who died when a falling tree limb struck him in 1818. The family had already moved on to Missouri's frontier edge, and at sixteen Carson ran from a saddlery apprenticeship in Franklin rather than finish it, joining a wagon train down the Santa Fe Trail. He spent his twenties trapping beaver with Ewing Young and Jim Bridger, learning Spanish and roughly a dozen Native languages along the way. He never learned to read or write beyond his own signature. Standing five foot five, with reddish hair and a soft voice, he did not resemble the giant the dime novels would later invent.

Carson's fame was built as a guide: John C. Fremont hired him in 1842 for the first of three government expeditions that mapped the Oregon Trail and the Great Basin, and Fremont's published reports, describing Carson's competence in prose readers devoured, made him a celebrity before he sought it. He scouted through the Mexican-American War, survived a barefoot desert crossing to bring reinforcements to a besieged General Kearny, and in the 1850s served seven years as federal Indian agent to the Ute and Jicarilla Apache. Then came the darker chapter: as a Union colonel in 1863 and 1864 he led the scorched-earth campaign against the Navajo, burning fields and orchards and killing livestock until starvation forced roughly eight thousand people onto the three-hundred-mile Long Walk to a prison camp at Bosque Redondo, where hundreds died of disease and exposure.

The contradiction sits inside the documented record, not outside it. Witnesses described Carson weeping over parts of the Navajo campaign he called necessary, and in the memoir he dictated because he could not write it himself, he called the 1846 killing of over a hundred Wintu people at Sacramento River "a perfect butchery." He married three times, twice to Native women under tribal custom, and his third wife, Josefa Jaramillo, converted him to Catholicism; her death after childbirth in 1868 broke him within weeks. Historians disagree sharply on how to weigh a man capable of denouncing one massacre in his own words while directing another as official policy, and Navajo oral history remembers the Long Walk, Hweeldi, as a defining catastrophe the frontier legend has never had to answer to.

Carson died of an aortic aneurysm on May 23, 1868, at Fort Lyon, Colorado, a month after Josefa; witnesses recorded his last words as "Goodbye, friends, adios, compadres." Roughly seventy dime novels had already turned him into a fictional superman years before his actual death, a myth he found embarrassing enough to correct in interviews. Carson City, Nevada, a national forest, a Colorado county, and dozens of streets still carry his name. Since the 1970s, Native American activists and historians have pushed back hard against the statues and the sanitized legend, and several towns have since renamed schools that bore his name while others kept them, leaving Carson one of the frontier era's most openly contested figures.

Kit Carson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fremont's Second Expedition mission
  Guided the survey of the Oregon Trail and Great Basin; the published report drew thousands of settlers west 1843
• Ute and Jicarilla Apache Indian Agency other
  Served seven years as federal Indian agent based in Taos 1854
• Navajo campaign and the Long Walk mission
  Led the scorched-earth campaign that forced roughly 8,000 Navajo to Bosque Redondo 1863
• First Battle of Adobe Walls mission
  Commanded roughly 400 troops and scouts against a much larger Kiowa and Comanche force 1864
• Dictated autobiography book
  Illiterate, he dictated his life story to army officer DeWitt Peters; not published complete until 1926 1856

• December 24, 1809 aged 0 Born near Richmond, Kentucky
• 1826 aged ~17 Runs from a saddlery apprenticeship and heads down the Santa Fe Trail He was sixteen.
• 1842 aged ~33 Hired as guide for Fremont's first Western expedition
• February 6, 1843 aged 33 Marries Josefa Jaramillo in Taos Converted to Catholicism for the marriage.
• April 5, 1846 aged 36 Sacramento River killings during the California campaign Carson later called it "a perfect butchery" in his own dictated memoir.
• 1854 aged ~45 Appointed federal Indian agent for the Ute and Jicarilla Apache
• 1863 aged ~54 Leads the scorched-earth campaign that produces the Navajo Long Walk Roughly 8,000 Navajo were forced to Bosque Redondo, where hundreds died.
• November 25, 1864 aged 54 Commands Union forces at the First Battle of Adobe Walls
• May 23, 1868 aged 58 Dies of an aortic aneurysm at Fort Lyon, Colorado A month after his wife Josefa's death.

• John C. Frémont 1813–1890
  Explorer and military officer whose five expeditions mapped much of the American West. guided
• Jim Bridger 1804–1881
  Mountain man and guide who explored the Rocky Mountains and founded Fort Bridger. fellow mountain man
• James K. Polk 1795–1849
  Eleventh president whose expansionist policies added the Southwest and Oregon to the United States. served under the administration of
• Zebulon Pike 1779–1813
  Army officer who led expeditions to the Southwest and after whom Pikes Peak is named. predecessor explorer of the West