| By the time he ran away from his apprenticeship
to a Missouri saddler at age 17 and joined a wagon train on the Santa Fe
Trail, Christopher (Kit) Carson had learned a lot of things that weren't
in books. Born in Kentucky in 1809, he grew up on a backwoods farm and
remained illiterate until the last five or six years of his life. But he
knew all there was to know about trapping beaver, and for 15 years-from
1826 to 1841---he mastered the art of survival in a land of killing blizzards,
savage animals, and hostile people. He became an expert in several languages,
and he knew the sign language of the plains pepoles. His head was crammed
with knowledge of practically every river, mountain range, and trail in
the Far West.
The year 1842 turned out to be a fateful
one for 33-year-old Kit Carson. While traveling on a Missouri River steamboat,
he chanced to meet Lieatenant John C. Fremont of the U.S. Topographical
Corps. Fremont had surveyed and mapped areas along the Mississippi and
Missouri rivers and was looking for a guide for his expedition to map the
Oregon Trail from lndependence, Missouri, to the Rocky Mountains. Fremont
questioned Carson, and was so impressed by his personality and knowledge
of the West that he hired him at $100 a month. In his reports on the Oregon
Trail expedition and two others to the Pacific Northwest and California
(1843-1846), Fremont praised Carson's skill as a guide so highly that it
won him nationwide fame. Carson served with distinetion as a scout during
the Mexican War (1846-1848), then traveled by horseback all the way from
the West Coast to Washington, D.C., to report the conquest of California.
After the war Carson tried farming and
sheep ranching at his permanent home in Taos, New Mexico, and in I853 he
became agent for two groups of Utes. During the Civil War he served as
a colonel (later brigadier general) of cavalry in the Union army in the
Southwest. His job was to subdue hostile locals, and when the Navahos began
raiding settlements in the area Carson led an expedition that captured
the people in Canyon de Chelly (Arizona) in the summer of 1864. When the
war ended, Carson was given a command in Colorado, but he died soon after
at Fort Lyon, in 1868, from injuries sustained in a hunting accident. His
integrity had won him many tributes, but none more fitting than Fremont's:
"With me," wrote Fremont, "Carson and Truth mean the same thing."
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