When game was plenty, he supplied the forty mouths to be filled with ease, but when it was scarce, his task was sometimes difficult, but skill and experience enabled him to triumph over every obstacle.
It is not strange that with such long experience Carson became the most skillful of hunters, and won the name of the "Nestor of the Rocky Mountains." Among the Indians he had earned the undisputed title of "Monarch of the Prairies."
But while he killed thousands of elk, deer, and antelope, nor disdained the rabbit and the grouse, and took the wild goose on the wing, of all the game of beast or bird, he liked the best to hunt the buffalo, for there was an excitement in the chase of that noble animal which aroused his spirits to the highest pitch of excitement.
Assuredly, Christopher Carson's is "a life out of the usual routine, and checkered with adventures which have sorely tested the courage and endurance of this wonderful man." Col. St. Vrain, in the preface to Peters' Life of Carson, says,
"Entering upon his life work at the age of seventeen, choosing now to think for himself, nor follow the lead of those who would detain him in a quiet life, while he felt the restless fire 'in his bones,' that forbade his burying his energy in merely mechanical toil, he had yet been directed in his choice, by the fitness for it the pursuits of youth had given, and spurning the humdrum monotony of the shop, gave himself entirely to what would most aid him in attaining the profession he had chosen. We must admire such spirit in a youth, for it augurs well for the energy and will power of the manhood; therefore, when the biographer says of Christopher Carson, that the neighbors who knew him, predicted an uncommon life in the child with whom they hunted, and conceded to him positions, as well as privileges, that were not accorded to common men, with his life till thirty-three before us, we feel that he has fulfilled the hope of early promise, with a noble manhood."
We have followed Carson's pathway, without much of detail, to the localities where he practised the profession he had chosen, until we saw him leave it because it ceased longer to afford compensation for his toil, and during as long a period we have written of his quiet pursuit of the, to him, pleasant, but laborious life of a hunter; unless we must class the latter eight years with the former, and assume each as a part of the profession he had chosen.
In all, with perhaps the exception of a few weeks at Santa Fe, when still in his minority, we have found him ever strong to resist the thousand temptations to evil with which his pathway was beset, and which drew other men away. Strong ever in the maintenance of the integrity of his manhood, even when the convivial circle and the game had a brief fascination for him, they taught him the lesson which he needed to learn, that only by earnest resistance, can evil be overcome; and thus he was enabled to admonish others against those temptations which had once overcome even his powers of resistance; and so he learned to school himself to the idea, that good comes ever through the temptation to evil to all those who have the courage to extract it.
We have followed him up and down all the streams of our great central western wilds, and indicated the store of geographic knowledge which he had acquired by hard experience before they were known so far to any one besides; and then for eight years more we have seen that this knowledge was digested and reviewed in the social circle with other mountain trappers, and beside the lonely mountain river, and 'neath the wild, steep cliff; or on the grassy bottom, or the barren plain, and in the less sterile places where the sage hen found a covert, and up among the oak openings, and in the gigantic parks, where, as a hunter, he revisited old haunts.
In all his toilsome and adventurous enterprises, while he sought to benefit himself, he never turned away, nor failed to lend a helping hand to a needy, suffering brother, or to encourage one who needed such a lesson, to turn his youth to the most account; and if affectionate regard is a recompense for such service, he had his compensation, as he passed along the path he had marked out for himself, not from the white man alone, but from the Indian who everywhere came to look upon Kit Carson as his friend.
The Camanches, the Arapahoes, the Utahs, and the Cheyennes, besides several smaller tribes, knew him personally in the hunt, and he had sat by their camp fires, and dandled their children, and sung to them the ditty,