Five feet six, with twinkling blue-gray eyes, a large and well-developed head, with hair sandy and well brushed back, Kit Carson at his best was the reverse of impressive. He was simple, peaceable and quiet in disposition, temperate and strictly moral in a time and place where these qualities made one a marked man. Yet throughout the length and breadth of the Indian country this little man was more feared, single and alone, than any other trapper or Indian fighter in all the West. He was respected as well as feared. One who knew him well said: “Carson and truth mean the same thing. He is always the same, gallant and disinterested. He is kind-hearted and averse to all quarrelsome and turbulent scenes. He is known far and wide for his sober habits, strict honor, and great regard for truth.”
One of Carson’s historians describes him as five feet nine inches in height, as weighing one hundred and sixty pounds, and as having a “dark and piercing eye.” This “dark and piercing eye” is something that, as we have noted, the average writer on Western themes and Western adventures will not willingly let die. As a matter of fact, however, we are to believe that our hero was a much smaller man than this description makes him out to be, and that, though of well-developed and compact frame, he was by no means of imposing presence.
We shall do better with his raiment, for here we take hold upon the characteristics of the West at its most romantic time. In the garb habitual with him for more than half his life, Carson was clad in a fringed buckskin shirt, with leggings of the same material, also befringed. The shirt was handsomely embroidered with quills of the porcupine, and as much might be said for the moccasins that protected his feet. His cap was of fur, sometimes of fox skin, sometimes of ’coon skin, mayhap in days of great prosperity, of otter.
His rifle was that of Boone or Crockett, improved only to a limited extent, though carrying a ball somewhat larger than that needed in the forests of Kentucky. Otherwise he might have been the typical early American rifleman of the Alleghanies. Under his right arm rested his powder horn and bullet pouch. A heavy knife for butchering hung at his belt, as well as a whetstone to keep it in good condition. At a certain time in his career Carson wore an ornamented belt, with heavy silver buckle, which supported two revolvers and a knife.
He took on in modest sort the picturesque fashions of the wilderness, and, uniting as he did the mountains and the plains in his habitat, at times showed something of the Spanish love of display in the trappings of his horse. His saddle and bridle had trace of Mexico in their gold and silver ornamentation. His horse, be sure, was a good one; for those were times when a man’s safety much depended on the fleetness and soundness of his mount, and the horse was the means of transportation for Carson and his kind.
As to the career of this Western man, if we come to follow it out as it occurred in sequence, we shall arrive at but one conclusion, to wit: that, conditions considered, Kit Carson was the greatest of all American travelers. It is almost unbelievable, the distances he traversed along with his wild fellows during those vivid years in which he forced the wild West to yield him a living. We can not do better than to trace some of his wanderings, more especially those that occurred before the day of the so-called exploration of the West.
Frémont, who knew Carson well, speaks of him as a native of Boone’s Lick County, Missouri; but Doctor Peters, his biographer, states, apparently with Carson’s authority, that Carson was born in Madison County, Kentucky, as above stated, and while but one year of age was brought to Howard County, Missouri, by his parents. The father of Carson was a good farmer, according to the lights of his time, and a good hunter, the life of Missouri during those early times being practically that known by the blockhouse farmers of Kentucky in the time of Boone. Kit grew up sturdy, quiet, self-contained, self-reliant. In his boyhood he was a steady rifle shot, and early acquired a reputation. He “hunted with the Sioux Indians,” we are told, when yet a boy; which means he must have gone north up the Missouri.
At fifteen years of age he was called “old for his age;” he was known to be plucky, prompt, and tenacious of his rights, though not in the least quarrelsome. Just as well-meaning parents tried to send Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone to school, so did the kind parents in this case undertake to instil commercial principles into the mind of Kit Carson. To his father it seemed important that he should be apprenticed to a saddler. From the saddler’s stool Kit promptly fell off. It was the out-of-doors that appealed to him; the West that spoke to him, just as it had to Boone and Crockett. He broke his heart for two years at the saddler’s bench, and that ended both his commercial and scholastic education. In 1826, while still but a boy, he was off and away across the plains, having, without his parents’ consent, joined a party bound for Santa Fé. Thus would the youth seek his fortune.
Carson reached Santa Fé in the month of November, 1826, and went thence to Fernandez de Taos, eighty miles northeast of Santa Fé, and spent the winter with an old mountaineer named Kincaid, or Kin Cade, who taught him something of the lore of the mountains. Perhaps a little homesick, in the spring of 1827 he started back for the East, without a penny in his buckskin pockets. He worked back homeward on the long journey down the Arkansas to a point about four hundred and fifty miles east of Santa Fé, and there, at the ford of the Arkansas, met another band of traders, west-bound, to whom he hired out as a teamster.
He again reached Santa Fé, still without a dollar, and went as teamster thence as far south as El Paso, returned to Santa Fé, and again to Taos. He was learning Spanish and learning New Mexico all this time. He now hired out as cook to Ewing Young, and continued in this interesting capacity until the spring of 1828. Again he started East, again failed to win farther than before, and joined another west-bound party, to reach Santa Fé a third time. Now he could do a bit in Spanish, and hence engaged as interpreter for Colonel Tramell, and wagoned it as far south as Chihuahua, in old Mexico. All this sounds full easy, yet even these few journeyings hitherto covered many, many weary, blistering miles.