The Epic Story of Mountain Man Kit Carson: Agent of “Manifest Destiny

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Take it away, Roger. The mountain men were responsible for blazing nearly every trail to the Pacific Coast, for discovering the natural wonders of the trans-Mississippi West, and for providing the muscle that fueled the fur trade. Yet few gained national recognition. An outstanding exception is Kit Carson, who becomes the most famous mountain man of them all. Kit Carson is portrayed heroically in books and articles and as a character in movies. He is also the subject of a television series.

He is one of those figures who made us proud to be an American and whetted the youthful appetite for grand adventures. Carson is present at the creation, it seems. He has witnessed the dawn of the trans-Mississippi American West in all its vividness and brutality. Place names throughout the West recall Kit Carson. There's Carson Pass and the Carson River in the Sierras. In Nevada, there's Carson Valley and Carson City, the capital of Nevada. There's the military post Fort Carson and the town, Kit Carson, in Colorado. One of Colorado's highest mountains is Kit Carson Peak in the Sangre de Cristo range. And in Taos, New Mexico, there's Kit Carson Park. Christopher Euston Carson is born in a log cabin on Christmas Eve, 1809, in Madison County, Kentucky, the same year in the same state in which Abraham Lincoln is born.

The 11th, in a line of 15 siblings, is nicknamed Kit while still an infant, and the name sticks. When he is two, his Scotch-Irish family picks up and migrates westward to a farm near Boones Lick, Missouri, home of the Daniel Boone clan. Here's Memphis native Hampton Sides, author of the national bestseller, Blood and Thunder, the epic story of Kit Carson and the conquest of the American West. His family was good friends with the Boone family.

They intermarried. These were backwoodsmen. They were rough and ready folks who were in search of opportunity. For their own safety, the Carson's and other pioneers at Boones Lick dwell in a state of perpetual vigilance. They live in sturdy cabins built near forts and well-armed sentries patrol constantly.

All cabins are designed with rifle loopholes or firing ports in case of an Indian attack. Everyone knew a family whose child or mother had been carried off by Indians. Kit's sister, Mary, recalls, We would carry bits of red cloth with us to drop if we were captured by Indians so our people could trace us. Despite all this, the young Kit Carson plays with Indian children whose parents come to Boones Lick to trade goods. From an early age, Kit learns that Indians are not monolithic, that tribes could differ substantially and violently from one another, and that each group must be dealt with separately on its own terms. Kit is not quite nine when his father is killed while felling a tree and the large Carson family is left in desperate straits. Kit drops out of school to work full time on the family farm and hunts in his spare time to help put meat on the table. At 14 years old, Kit is apprenticed at a saddlery.

The teenager hates both the work and the confinement in the saddle shop, but it proves to be a blessing in disguise. Many of the shop's customers are trappers, traders, teamsters, or scouts on the Santa Fe Trail. Their stirring tales of the way west and what lay over the far horizon sets the boys' imagination afire. Here's the executive director of the Western History Association, Paul Hutton.

The west offers boundless opportunity, the freedom from all the restraints of family, all the restraints of a shopkeeper's life, and, of course, the promise of adventure, of danger, of excitement. And so he runs away. He does a Huck Finn and lights out for the territories. At 16 in August 1826, Kit turns a boy's adventure into a man's livelihood when he crosses the Missouri border and heads west with a merchant caravan on the newly opened Santa Fe Trail. After 900 miles on the trail, Carson settles in Taos, New Mexico, where he develops fluency in Spanish, French, and a half dozen Indian tongues. And he also masters the universal sign language used by western tribes. And yet, for all his facility with language, Kit Carson is illiterate.

Taos is the capital of the southwestern fur trade, teeming with trappers, Americans, Frenchmen, Canadians, all of them scruffy and sunburned after months spent trapping in the Rockies. Carson wanted to be a part of this fraternity of men, these greasy, grizzled, hairy, often drunk international cast of characters who knew the rivers of the west and had been to all these amazing places. He wanted to be one of these guys as quickly as they'd have them. And you've been listening to Roger McGrath tell the story of Kit Carson when we come back. The story of Kit Carson continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.

But we truly can't do this show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.

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Let's pick up where we last left off. In 1829, and not yet 20 years old, Carson joins a fur trapping brigade of 40 mountain men who venture into Arizona, most of which is still untouched by fur trappers. There probably was not a more dangerous profession in America at that time than being a mountain man. There was the danger of grizzly bears, hypothermia, starvation. These men went into trackless wilderness for months at a time, all in pursuit of beaver pelts. But the greatest reason why so few mountain men have ventured into Arizona territory are the Apache.

The Apache delight in torturing and killing their enemies, especially the nearby Pima and Papago Indians. In this world, the trapper's best chance at survival is for himself to adapt completely and entirely to the wilderness and to know intimately the Indians and their habits and their warfare. If the mountain men could do that, they survived.

If not, they died. The West is where races intersect, cultures intersect, sometimes violently, more often not. Kit Carson moves easily in that world. He's not opposed to confronting people straight on and engaging in combat, taking a scalp, if need be, to make a point. But that doesn't mean he couldn't sit down and break bread the very next week. He understood what was expected of him by native peoples that he came in contact with, in terms of peaceful relationships and trade relationships, but also in terms of conflict.

And he understood that retribution must follow crime and follow it immediately and harshly if one was to survive. in this environment. Every summer, the McPher companies organize what was known as the Mountain Man Rendezvous. And this was held high in the beaver country.

It could be in Utah or Idaho or Wyoming. As always happens at these gatherings, various bands of Indians come to trade, gamble, and drink with the mountain men. And it's not uncommon for trappers to take squads for their wives during this month-long festival.

One of the most popular women attending the rendezvous of 1835 is a young Arapaho beauty named Singing Grass. She catches Carson's eye, but another man is equally smitten. He's a very large, swaggering, blustering French-Canadian trapper known as the bully of the mountains.

He's also an expert shot. Singing Grass chooses Carson and rejects the Frenchman. Over the next several days, Frenchman goes on a bender and begins to menace anyone who crosses his path. After being ignored by other mountain men, he strolls over to Carson's camp and announces how he particularly enjoys thrashing Americans. Carson springs to his feet and exclaims, I'll rip your damn guts. Frenchman says nothing but mounts his horse and rides out in front of camp daring Carson to fight him. Carson quickly jumps on a horse and gallops up to the Frenchman.

They stop so close to each other that their horses' heads touch. Both men draw guns and fire at precisely the same moment. The Frenchman's bullet creases Carson's head, taking scalp and hair with it. Carson's bullet goes through the Frenchman's right hand and blows away his thumb, causing him to drop his gun. Carson draws a second pistol and prepares to deliver the coup de grace. Gingerly holding his maimed appendage, the Frenchman begs for his life. Satisfied that he has humiliated him, Carson turns and rides away, says Carson.

We won't have any more problems with this bully Frenchman anymore, will we? Singing grass and Carson marry after Carson offers her father a bride price of five blankets, three mules and a gun. Carson is 25 years old. Like many of the trappers, Carson settled down with an American Indian woman. He found that this marriage was certainly a marriage of convenience in the sense that he had someone on the trail with him who helped do all the thousand and one tasks that had to be done. But it was the first love of his life. He was devoted to her. After giving birth to their second daughter in 1840, singing grass dies of complications.

And then shortly later, in an accident, the baby dies. Adding to Kit's pain, America is experiencing intense growing pains. The era of the mountain man is coming to an end. Decades of trapping has destroyed the beaver population. And the once fashionable beaver hat is now being replaced with one made of silk. Every summer throughout the 1840s, there were fewer and fewer beaver pelts.

And this was a consequence of just how amazingly good these guys were at what they did. Here's Kit Carson from his autobiography. We trapped down the river but found no beaver.

The country was barren. It became necessary to try our hand at something else. The beaver market collapses and Carson finds himself out of work, widowed, and shouldering the burdens of parenthood alone. He is 29. With his pockets empty and his future uncertain, Kit brings his daughter Adeline east and leaves her with family in Missouri to make sure she receives the education he never had and to protect her from the struggle that lies ahead. But as he boards a whistling steamboat in St. Louis for a trip up the Missouri, his prospects change when he strikes up a conversation with a passenger. John C. Fremont is an American military lieutenant and an explorer who's about to embark on an expedition to survey and map the American West.

And he has yet to hire a guide. Although Fremont has his doubts, he hires Carson on the spot. Fremont and Carson blaze an overland route to the Pacific. By May of 1846, the soon-to-be-called Oregon Trail is completed.

Here's Sherry Monahan, president of the Western Writers of America. They were the first people to figure out where they could ford rivers, what was the safest route where you didn't have to climb mountains, and they were the ones that led all of the pioneers out to populate and tame the wild west. Dubbed the Pathfinder, Fremont's name reaches Lewis and Clark's status and Carson's heroics become American legend. And you've been listening to Roger McGrath tell one heck of a story about Carson. It's interesting that the culture and race intersected often, but not always as violently as depicted in movies. Often not, as is the case with Carson marrying an Indian woman singing grass and losing her early and one of his daughters.

Integrated marriage early on and all throughout mountain men culture. And then comes the drop and the end of the popularity of beaver hats when Kit Carson is in trouble financially. And then he bumps into John C. Fremont randomly and starts up a conversation. And the legend is made, the two blaze an overland route to the Pacific, which would become known as the Oregon Trail, and thus elevating Carson and Fremont to Lewis and Clark-like status.

The story of Kit Carson continues here on Our American Story. Let's be honest, most of us have a love-hate relationship with wired bras. We love the lift, but hate the digging.

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Your best skin awaits. And we continue with our American stories and the story of Kit Carson. Telling it is Roger McGrath, and leading us off is Executive Director of the Western History Association, Paul Hutton. One of the things that Carson did during one of the expeditions with Fremont was they encountered some Hispanic wayfarers who had had their horses stolen from them. The New Mexicans have been attacked by Indians, and the kind of mindset of the frontiersmen was that you didn't allow this kind of behavior to go on, that you had to make a statement. Rather spontaneously, Carson decides to pursue these Indian horse thieves. The Indians were a large group, but nevertheless Carson and his companion snuck up on the band, killed several of them, brought back the horses and several Indian scalps to Fremont's camp. This really impressed Fremont, Carson risking his life for a complete stranger. In August 1844, Fremont has his expedition reports bound and published on nearly every page.

He lavishes praise upon his fearless scout. Carson became a great romantic figure as an explorer, as a guide, as a frontiersman, as an Indian fighter. In these books that were supposed to be reports, they were actually grand adventure tales. These books were bestsellers in their day, and were used as handbooks by hundreds of thousands of people going west. Here's American West historian Sally Denton. Immigrants would be in their wagons holding that, and it would say this is where you're going to find fresh water.

This is where there's going to be grass where you can graze your cattle. It was really the first map of its kind in America. But following the unlikely pattern of his life, Carson's mission to map the western territories is about to take on even greater significance. An unexpected dispatch arrives from the White House. President Polk is determined to push America's western border all the way to the Pacific. Carson and Fremont's exploratory expedition has just become a military mission. President Polk had a vision of what America should look like. He wanted all of it, and he vowed that he would get it all, either by purchasing or by war, within one term.

This is the execution of Thomas Jefferson's vision for continent-wide expansion, and the term Manifest Destiny is coined 42 years after Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803. On April 25, 1846, Mexican cavalry attacks a group of U.S. soldiers. Eighteen days later, college declares war in Mexico. It's the beginning of the Mexican War.

Navy warships close in on the California coast, and Army troops advance from the east. Fremont and Carson arrive in California, and there in Northern California, they support the Bear Flikers in the Bear Flikers' capture of Sonoma. As a reward for his valuable service, Carson rides to Washington, D.C. with a thick packet of sealed letters to deliver the good news to President Polk.

But on his way, a greater duty redirects his path. Here's American frontier historian Durwood Ball. Kit Carson ran into Stephen Watts Kearney, leading First United States Dragoon's overland from Santa Fe to help finish the conquest of California. Kearney ordered me to join him as his guide.

I'd done so. It made me believe he had the right to order me. Kit now leads General Stephen Kearney and 300 of his cavalry troopers to California, and one of those cavalry troopers happens to be the son of the famous Sacajawea. Kearney also has a direct connection to the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

He is married to the daughter of William Clark. Now before they get to California, they discover from some Mexicans they captured near the Arizona-California border that there's a revolt going on in California against American rule. In December of 1846, Kearney orders an attack at Mule Hill in San Pascual, some 35 miles north of San Diego. But his weary men and exhausted mules that they're riding are outnumbered by well-trained Mexican lancers on fine horses. Americans are trapped on Mule Hill with no cover and dwindling supplies.

Here's historian David Eisenbach. It's a desperate situation. They've run out of food. The only thing they have to eat are the mules, and the only reinforcements are about 30 miles away in San Diego. Despite all this, in the finest tradition of the U.S. Cavalry, Kearney orders a charge, and Carson is in the thick of it from beginning to end. By the end of the second day, Kearney has lost 18 men and a dozen others, including Kearney himself, have been wounded. Kearney's last hope is to send a messenger on foot through enemy lines to get help from Marines and sailors in San Diego. Without hesitation, Kit Carson follows orders once again. When darkness falls, Carson, an Indian scout, and a Lieutenant Edward Beale begin their journey. Just before dawn, the three split up to avoid detection.

Here's Kit Carson from his autobiography. Had to crawl about two miles. And having had the misfortune to lose our shoes, we had to travel barefooted in a country covered with prickly pear and rocks. And then, they split up and take three different routes, about 30 miles each, to San Diego. Within hours, Commodore Stockton sends a force of 200 Marines and sailors to San Pascual, and the Mexican Army, seeing them come, gallops away.

Kit stays behind, unable to walk for a week because of the condition of his feet. A year later, the U.S. concludes the Mexican War, and through the Mexican Cession, acquires another 500,000 square miles of territory, adding some 20-25% more territory to the United States. And now the United States truly does stretch from sea to shining sea, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Manifest destiny is now a reality.

And you've been listening to Roger McGrath tell the story of Kit Carson. And my goodness, he comes off well in Fremont's reports, and it would turn into an immigrant's guide, a travel guide map, with details like water sources and trails. And this, of course, collided with President Polk's vision. Polk had a vision for America, what it would look like, this idea of manifest destiny four decades after Jefferson acquired so much territory in the Louisiana Purchase. And there was Kit Carson again in the Mexican-American War, and when that war got won, and Carson played his part heroically, Polk's vision had become a reality. 500,000 square miles, 25% more territory added to the country. And finally, America stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from sea to shining sea. Manifest destiny, thanks to Kit Carson and so many others, had become a reality.

When we come back, more of the story of Kit Carson here on Our American Stories. Let's be honest. Most of us have a love-hate relationship with wired bras. We love the lift, but hate the digging.

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But he's also one of the major instruments that brings about that change. Carson is once again dispatched to Washington, D.C. He rides to St. Louis and then catches a train to deliver Fremont's field reports to President Polk in May of 1847, some three months after his departure.

Off the trail, Kit is a shy, unassuming man, content to keep to himself. But in Washington, his celebrity is overwhelming, thanks to his real-life heroics and some 70 Kit Carson dime novels that are consumed by Americans from coast to coast. Everyone wants to meet Kit Carson, and that's because Kit Carson is the very living, breathing symbol of the American frontier and of our expansion westward.

And, of course, everyone wants to hear from his lips what the opportunities are for America and the West. The runaway apprentice has come a long ways. Carson's married three times and father's 10 children. His first two wives are Indian squaws, but his third wife is a beautiful, slender 14-year-old Mexican girl named Josefa. She is 18 years his junior. Carson converts to Catholicism, and the two are married in 1843 in the Taos Parish Church. Carson thinks he might spend his remaining years as a peaceful family man.

No such luck. A wave of migration continues to surge west. Clashes between settlers and Indians escalate into what becomes known as the Indian Wars. Duty calls Kit Carson once again. A Missouri trader named James White is headed west on the Santa Fe Trail with his wife, Ann, an infant daughter.

When their party is attacked by Apache Indians, James is killed, and the infant and the wife, Ann, are taken captive. Carson is illiterate, but if there's a story to be read on the ground, there's no better man to do it. The formative experience for Kit Carson was when he worked as a mountain man.

His ability to track animals then became a very important asset in his ability to track human beings. Finally, late on the 12th day, Carson sees plumes of smoke curling skyward in the distance. When Carson discovers the Apache camp, he finds Ann White dead, lying on her back with a steel-tipped arrowhead, dobbed with rattlesnake blood, struck through her heart. She has been horribly abused, covered with bruises and lacerations, and she's also been gang raped day after day by her Apache captors. Carson finds something else. Here's a quote from his autobiography. We found a book in camp in which I was represented as a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundred.

Mrs. White must have read it, knowing that I lived nearby, must have prayed for my appearance in order that she might be saved. Ann White's infant is never found, and the incident haunts Carson until the day he dies. But the Whites are just a drop in the ocean among the tidal wave of travelers rolling westward, a wave that can be traced back to the discovery of gold in California, news of which Kit Carson carried on one of his courier missions back east. In 1849 alone, some hundred thousand Americans have set out for California, and the numbers will only increase. Carson was so effective in fighting the Indians, and in making peace with them, that by 1853, he's appointed Indian agent to the Utes, a banned New Mexican officials brand, the most difficult to manage in the territory. The Utes were a very special tribe to Kit Carson. He absolutely loved them. He rode with them. He hunted with them.

He knew them quite well. When the Civil War erupts in 1861, Carson resigns as an Indian agent and joins the union as a colonel of the New Mexico volunteers. He commands two battalions at the Battle of Valverde in 1862, which slows the Confederates from an advance up the Rio Grande Valley. Now the Apache and Navajo take advantage of the Civil War and renew their raids in New Mexico. Over the previous year alone, more than 30,000 sheep have been stolen, and some 300 people killed by the Indians. Carson leads expeditions against both tribes. Carson lived in New Mexico his entire adult life, and public enemy number one was the Navajo. Everybody in New Mexico, every Hispanic person, had some friend or family member who had been killed by the Navajo, or had been stolen by the Navajo. And I think he thought a reservation on the Pecos was as good as any that had been put forward as to how to end this cycle of violence. The campaign against the Navajo ends with the removal of 9,000 tribe members to a reservation in New Mexico. The Navajo call the removal the long walk, and about 200 of them die on the journey. The 53-year-old Carson rides in the vanguard, along with some of his favorite Ute warriors, who are long-time bitter enemies of the Navajo.

Carson doesn't like clearing out the Navajo, but the alternative is to ignore their raids in the midst of the Civil War. Here's Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian novelist N. Scott Momaday. He knew the Indians. He had known them from an early time as a mountain man. He probably knew Indians better than any other white man of his time. He knew what they would stand and how they could be brought to terms with the Army.

And, you know, he didn't hesitate to act on the basis of his knowledge. Before the Civil War ends, Carson is promoted to Brigadier General. Following the war, Carson returns to his family, but duty keeps calling. In 1868, with chest pain so bad he could hardly breathe, Carson brings a delegation of Ute chiefs to Washington to negotiate a treaty, establishing a permanent reservation on the very ground the tribe claims as its own. Here he is, this Indian fighter, known for his various campaigns, and yet he was also a peacemaker and a diplomat. I think the trick to understanding Carson is to go back to that idea that, for him, there was no such thing as the American Indian.

He sided with certain groups, and other groups were his enemy throughout his life. Shortly after Carson returns home, his wife, Waseefa, gives birth to their eighth child, but complications set in, and within two weeks his wife dies, and he's holding her in his arms. Then, just one month later, on the afternoon of May 23rd, 1868, Carson's aortic aneurysm ruptures, calls out suddenly from his pallet of buffalo robes on the floor, Doc, adios. Kit Carson passes from life into legend.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Engler, and a special thanks to Roger McGrath, the frequent contributor here on this show, and we're grateful for his expertise and his compelling voice on all things American West and so much more. And what a complicated life Kit Carson led. He joined the Union Army in the Civil War, and in the end, which played a part as not just a fighter in the range wars that occurred and the Indian wars that occurred, but as a peacemaker wherever he could. A friend of the Utes and an enemy of the Navajos. And the Utes and Navajos were enemies themselves. The idea that there were all Indian peacemakers and all white fighters, and just a reductionist view of American life. The story of Kit Carson, here on Our American Stories. The featured adults-only all-inclusive package to seekers, resorts, and spas.

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