When Kit Carson and his rescue party finally caught up with the band of Jicarilla Apache and Ute warriors who had kidnapped Ann White, he was too late. White had been shot through the heart with an arrow no more than five minutes before the posse arrived. As Carson later wrote, if the men had charged immediately upon reaching the camp, she would have been saved. The commanding officer had ignored his advice, and that delay cost a woman her life.
But it was what Carson found while moving through the abandoned camp that haunted him on a different level: a dime novel about himself, a story of a legendary frontier savior who slaughtered Indians by the hundreds. The bitter irony was not lost on him. Ann White may have read that book, he reflected, and believed that Kit Carson would come and rescue her. The real Kit Carson could not save her.
That moment captured the contradiction at the heart of Carson’s life. He was the American frontiersman whose exploits inspired thousands of settlers to follow him west, a man whose name became synonymous with the adventurous spirit of westward expansion. But his legend was written in blood, and the line between hero and villain was often impossible to draw. Few men embodied that blurred line more completely.
Born on Christmas Eve in 1809 near Richmond, Kentucky, Christopher Kit Houston Carson was one of 15 children in a sprawling, blended family. His father, Lindsey Carson, was a Scots-Irish Presbyterian farmer, cabin builder, and veteran of early American conflicts against the Mexicans and Native Americans. He had lost two fingers fighting the Fox and Sauk peoples. When Kit was still a child, the family moved to Missouri, settling on land that had once belonged to Daniel Boone’s sons.
The Carsons and Boones became close, intermarrying, and Kit developed a childhood friendship with his cousin, Adeline Boone. Missouri in those days sat on the edge of westward expansion, and danger was never far away. As Carson later recalled, settlers had to keep men stationed at the edges of the fields to protect those who were laboring. But the greatest threat came from nature itself.
In 1818, a falling tree limb crushed Lindsey Carson, killing him instantly. Penniless and alone, Kit’s mother held the family together until she remarried four years later. Kit, filled with teenage resentment toward his new stepfather, was sent off to Franklin, Missouri at age 14 to apprentice with a saddler named David Workman. Workman treated him kindly, but the saddlery did not suit him.
Franklin sat at the eastern gateway of the Santa Fe Trail, buzzing with excitement about the wild, untamed west. At 16, against his mother’s wishes, Carson slipped away with a caravan of trappers in August 1826 and entered the unknown. Workman responded to the boy’s departure with a wry joke: he placed a notice in the newspaper offering a one-cent reward for Carson’s return. The ad described Carson as a boy about 16 years old, small of his age but thick set, light hair.
It was Carson’s first brush with fame. His legend had already begun. Carson settled in Taos and became determined to master life on the frontier. He paired up with seasoned trapper Matthew Kincaid, who had served with Carson’s older brothers, and learned trapping skills and trade languages.
Carson never learned to read or write English, but he became fluent in Spanish, multiple native tongues, and indigenous sign language. Between 1827 and 1829, he did whatever survival required: cooking, translating, driving wagons, and even laboring at a copper mine near the Gila River. It was hard schooling, but it hardened him for the unforgiving margins of the Southwest. By age 19, he was ready for more.
In the late summer of 1829, while working as a cook for trapper and trader Ewing Young, Carson joined an expedition into Apache territory. The party was attacked, giving the teenage Carson his first taste of frontier violence. Records are scarce, but many suggest it was the first time he claimed a Native American scalp. There would be many more.
A January 1833 incident captured both his grit and his brutality. After Crow warriors took nine horses from his camp, Carson pursued them relentlessly. He recovered the horses and, as he later recalled, sent many a red skin to his long home. The frontier rewarded such vengeance.
Carson had many run-ins with the Blackfoot over the years. His last fight with them came in 1838, while traveling with Jim Bridger and nearly a hundred mountain men. After encountering a village devastated by smallpox, the party hunted down the rest of the Blackfoot and engaged them in battle. Carson later called it the prettiest fight I ever saw.
Nature itself was just as deadly. In 1834, while hunting alone, Carson crossed paths with two grizzlies and barely escaped by scrambling up a tree. One bear tried shaking him loose before losing interest. Carson, by then a hardened mountain man, later admitted he had never been so scared in his life.
In 1836, at the Green River rendezvous of frontiersmen, Carson won the hand of an Arapaho woman named Wanabey, or Singing Grass, in a dramatic horseback duel with another trapper. His opponent’s bullet came so close that it whipped right by his hair. The couple welcomed a daughter, Adeline, but tragedy followed quickly. After giving birth to a second daughter, Wanabey died, and their second child later fell into boiling soap tallow and succumbed to her injuries.
The frontier was telling him it was time to move on. By 1840, the fur trade was collapsing as beaver hats fell out of fashion and beaver populations were decimated. As Carson put it, beaver was getting scarce, and it became necessary to try our hand at something else. Or perhaps, someone else.
In 1841, he married a woman known as Making Out Road, who ended the marriage abruptly by placing his belongings and his daughter outside the tent. No paperwork, no lawyers, just divorce. That same year, Carson found work at Bent’s Fort, the largest settlement on the Santa Fe Trail, hunting buffalo, antelope, and deer for the post. He took Adeline to relatives in Missouri.
On his way home, aboard a Missouri River steamboat, he met US Army officer and explorer John C. Fremont. Fremont was immediately impressed: he described Carson as a man of medium height, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with a clear, steady blue eye, and frank speech. He hired Carson almost on the spot, offering him $100 a month, effectively tripling his salary, to serve as his guide.
Fremont had special orders from Washington to map the frontier and encourage westward expansion. With his skills and knowledge, Carson was the perfect fit. Their partnership sparked a westward craze. Starting in 1842, Carson guided Fremont on the Oregon Trail to South Pass, Wyoming.
When Fremont published his reports, he made Kit Carson a household name. That same year, Carson met Josefa Jaramillo, who was just 14 years old, in keeping with the marrying age of the era. Her father was reluctant, since Carson wasn’t Catholic and couldn’t read. Carson converted to Catholicism in January 1843 and married her a few weeks later.
Domestic life did not keep him grounded for long. In 1843, he joined Fremont’s second expedition, guiding the party to the Columbia River and exploring the Great Salt Lake aboard a fragile rubber raft. On that expedition, he encountered a boy and a Mexican man who told him their party had been brutally ambushed, with 30 horses stolen. Carson tracked those responsible, charged their camp, and reclaimed the horses, along with two scalps.
His violence escalated. In the spring of 1846, rumors spread through the Sacramento Valley that settlers faced an imminent Native assault. Acting on those claims, Fremont’s party, with Carson’s guidance, approached a Wintu village and launched an attack later known as the Sacramento River Massacre. Between 120 and 300 men, women, and children were cut down in what Carson himself described as a perfect butchery.
Revenge went both ways. Weeks later, Fremont’s camp suffered a nighttime strike that killed two or three men. Carson took out his frustration on the body of a fallen enemy, knocking his head to pieces with an axe, as Fremont later wrote. Days later, Carson and Fremont’s men descended on a Klamath settlement along the Williamson River.
Fourteen natives were killed and the village burned to the ground. Worst of all, there was no evidence anyone at that village had been involved in the previous attack. That summer, Carson’s brutality turned against the Mexicans. Joining Fremont in the Bear Flag Revolt against Mexican rule in California, Carson carried out dark orders.
Fremont instructed him to kill Jose de la Rey Berreyesa and his two nephews to prevent word from reaching Mexico. Carson obeyed. The consequences followed. In January 1847, rebellion erupted against US occupation in New Mexico.
Governor Charles Bent was attacked in his own home and scalped in front of his family. Carson’s wife was staying with them at the time and narrowly escaped with her life. Just weeks earlier, during the Mexican-American conflict, Carson had followed orders from General Stephen Watts Kearny to guide his troops from New Mexico to California. Mexican forces struck Kearny’s column, leaving the Americans battered and stranded deep in hostile territory.
Fearing another attack, Carson, Edward Fitzgerald Beale, and a Native American scout slipped away under cover of darkness to seek reinforcements in San Diego, 25 miles away. To avoid detection, they traveled barefoot over country covered with prickly pear and rocks. From 1846 to 1848, Carson served as a long-distance courier, racing messages between California and Washington D. C.
One of those messages was official confirmation that gold had been discovered in California. The gold rush ensued. He had helped spark one of the biggest rushes in American history. His final great failure came in 1849, when he joined the pursuit to recover Ann White, her infant daughter, and her servant, who had been captured during an attack near Point of Rocks, New Mexico.
Carson urged the party to act swiftly, but the commanding officer ignored his advice. They caught up with the Jicarilla Apaches and Utes, but failed to seize their advantage. White was found, perfectly warm, shot through the heart by an arrow no more than five minutes earlier. Carson was certain that an immediate charge would have saved her.
And then, moving through the Apache camp, he found the dime novel about himself. A story of a legendary frontier savior, slaying Indians by the hundreds. He reflected bitterly that Ann White may have read that book, hoping that Kit Carson would come and save her.
The legend could not match the man.
