Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson was born on Christmas Eve, 1809. An American frontiersman, he was a fur trapper, wilderness guide, Indian agent and U.S. Army officer who became a frontier legend. Dime store novels and news articles exaggerated his exploits, painting him a fierce Indian fighter and fearless survivor of the elements. His contemporaries, on the other hand, described an unpretentious man who did not want or understand his own celebrity.
Carson did not read or write but that did not make him an “unlearned” man. He was more at ease in Spanish than in English and he spoke French, Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfoot, Shoshone, Piute, Ute and he knew the sign language used by mountain men throughout the West. According to historian Hampton Sides, Carson was also
“…a fine hunter, an adroit horseman, an excellent shot. He was a shrewd negotiator. He knew how to select a good campsite and could set it up or strike it in minutes, taking to the trail in lightning speed. He knew what to do when a horse foundered. He could dress and cure meat and was a fair cook. He was a passable gunsmith, blacksmith, liveryman, angler, forager, farrier, wheelwright, mountain climber and a decent paddler by raft or canoe. As a tracker he was unequaled. He knew how to read watersheds, where to find grazing grass, what to do when encountering a grizzly. He could locate water in the driest arroyo and strain it into potability. He knew to open a cactus for water and how to make smoke signals. He knew how to cache food and hides in the ground to prevent theft and spoilage. How to break a mustang and how to make snowshoes. He knew all about hitches and rope knots.”
These were skills that dazzled “educated” men of the day, even as they would today.
Carson married three times. In the summer of 1836, Kit and a French trapper fought a duel over Singing Grass, or Waa-ni-beh, a lovely Arapaho girl. Carson won. They married and had one daughter, Adaline. Singing Grass died giving birth to their second child, and the child died when she was a toddler. Kit next married a Cheyenne woman, Making-Out-Road. Again, it did not last; she divorced him Cheyenne style meaning that Kit came home one day to find his belongings and Adaline outside. Finally, in 1843, he married Josefa Jaramillo, daughter of a wealthy and influential Taos, New Mexico, family. She would be the love of his life and they went on to have eight children.
At the age of 16, Kit had left his rural Missouri home. He joined a trading party headed west and arrived in Taos, New Mexico, in 1827. During the 1830s, he worked as an interpreter between the traders and the Native Americans and as a teamster driving oxen-pulled wagon loads of goods across the prairie. He met veteran mountain man Ewing Young and in 1829 joined Young’s trapping expedition. During the next five years he traveled to California and to present-day Idaho.
In the summer of 1842 Carson met explorer John C. Fremont on a steamboat on the Missouri River and they became life-long friends. Impressed with Carson, Fremont hired him as a guide for his first expedition across the Rockies. Carson served as a guide on two more Fremont expeditions covering much of California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. Fremont was Carson’s commander in the Mexican-American War when Carson made his fabled coast-to-coast ride to deliver war news to President Polk in Washington, D.C. The ride is, in fact, a fable. When the two met in Socorro, New Mexico, Brigadier General Stephen Kearney, ordered Carson to turn the dispatches over to another rider, reverse course, and guide Kearney’s Army of the West to California.
In the 1850s Carson was appointed Indian Agent for the Ute and Jicarilla Apache Indians. Carson was very successful as agent for the Utes. He sincerely tried to work for the best interests of the tribe and was constantly at odds with various government officials over the way the Native Americans were treated. Carson continued as the Ute agent until 1861.
During the Civil War, Carson served with the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Infantry and was charged with training New Mexico recruits. He took part in the 1862 Battle of Valverde between Confederate cavalry and U.S. Army regulars and Union volunteers, but he spent most of the war dealing with Native Americans. He served under Major General James H. Carleton, commander of the Army of New Mexico. Carleton was intent on ending the century-old conflict between Anglos and the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches. He ordered Carson to subdue both tribes and take them to a reservation at the Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Despite his initial reluctance to become involved, Carson carried out his responsibilities to deadly effect. The ensuing campaign remains a controversial chapter in the history of the West.
Scorched earth tactics— an ancient warfare method still in use today — left crops, livestock and homes destroyed. Native Americans who resisted were killed. Those who surrendered were abused and left destitute and starving. In the end, more than 9,000 Navajos would make “The Long Walk” (250 to 450 miles, depending on the route) from their homeland in the Four Corners region to the Bosque Redondo. Some 53 forced marches occurred between August,1864, and the end of 1866. Hundreds – and possibly thousands – died during the campaign and afterwards at the reservation.
Historians disagree on the extent of Carson’s involvement and blame. On one side of the debate, Carleton was the mastermind of the disastrous campaign. Carson’s best soldiers were back East fighting the Civil War and many of the volunteers he was given drank heavily and were disreputable. Atrocities committed against the Navajo prisoners were done against Carson’s direct orders. On the other side, Carson is regarded as an arch-villain, racist and genocidal killer of Native Americans. But there is no debate that the campaign was devastating to the Navajo people.
Carson retired from the army and moved his family to Boggsville in present-day Colorado in 1867. Carson’s family lived in a small house near the Boggs’ barn. In early 1868 he travelled to Washington D.C. to negotiate a treaty with the Ute Indians. When he returned to Boggsville in April, he was seriously ill. He moved to the quarters of Assistant U.S. Surgeon H.K. Tilden at Fort Lyon and on May 23, 1868, he died of an aneurysm. The following day a military escort took his body to Boggsville and buried him next to his beloved wife, Josefa, who had died in childbirth a month earlier. A year later, their remains were taken to Taos, New Mexico, (Josefa’s birthplace) for final burial.
Thomas Boggs was named executor of his estate. Testifying to their close friendship, Boggs and his wife Rumalda raised Carson’s five youngest children as their own. A copy of Kit Carson’s Last Will and Testament is on permanent display at the John W. Rawlings Heritage Center and Museum in Las Animas, Colorado. The Carson’s Boggsville home was destroyed in a 1921 flood.