Kit Carson – A Forgotten American Legend

Do you know anything about Kit Carson? Have you ever seen a movie about him? Read a book about him? Heard anything about him?

Your answer is probably, “no”. But don’t feel alone in that. You have lots of company.

Kit Carson was one of the early western heroes, and he does have a city, a county, a lake and a river named after him, but very few people know much about him anymore. Well, I’m going to tell you about him.

Kit Carson was born in Kentucky, but grew up in Boone’s Lick, Missouri. Like most kids in the early 1800’s he didn’t have a formal education, and he started his westward movement early in life, joining a wagon train on the Santa Fe Trail. That wasn’t too difficult for him, since the Santa Fe Trail began in Independence Missouri, about a hundred miles from Boone’s Lick.

Kit took to trail riding so well that he became a good guide and tracker. He eventually joined up with John Fremont as a guide, and he acquitted himself well enough that Fremont made him a national hero in his writings about exploring the west.

One of Carson’s many exploits was that he carried messages and dispatches to President James K. Polk, but this was before the famed Pony Express or the stagecoach routes. He rode three round-trips on horseback across the continent by himself, quite a feat in that untamed territory.

Another of his accomplishments took place in Arizona, where he was the leader of a volunteer group of the Union Army that dealt with renegade Navajo Indians in Canyon de Chelly. The troops didn’t slaughter Indians like some others did, (Custer’s 7th Cavalry, for instance) but they burned their crops and starved them into submission, eventually forcing them onto reservations in Oklahoma.

Kit Carson did fight in the Mexican War and again in the Civil War, and he even achieved the rank of Brigadier General in 1865. He moved to Colorado to command Fort Garland in 1866, and he died in 1868 at the age of 58. You might say that he died young, but the average life span in those days was 40 years, so he did pretty well for a man who took such great risks.

The capital of Nevada is named for Kit Carson, as are the Carson Sink (lake) and the Carson River, also in Nevada. But the place I first came across his name was in Colorado, where there is a town named Kit Carson.

So now you know. He was no Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett or Bat Masterson, but Kit Carson had more influence on the western expansion than many of the better-known heroes and gunfighters of the Old West.

One other fact: While Kit Carson County, Colorado is named for Kit Carson, the Carson County in the panhandle of Texas is named for Samuel Price Carson, a different person and no relation to Kit Carson.