At Taos, Carson met Captain Lee of the United States Army, a partner of that Bent who founded Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas. Captain Lee had a cargo of goods that he wished to take to the rendezvous of the trapping bands for that year. Kit joined him for the time, and in October of 1832 they pushed on, traveling part of the time on the old Spanish trail to California. They reached the White River, the Green River, the “Windy” River, and here, as though by special plan, they met their band of trappers, erected their skin lodges, and passed the winter. Kit joined the Fitzpatrick party for a time in the next spring, but after his own restless fashion broke away again, with only three companions.
In the summer of 1833 we find the four on the Laramie River, doing independent trapping and taking their chances as to Indians. It was about this time that Kit had his historic adventure with two bears, which chased him up a tree, and which he repelled by beating them over the noses with a branch broken from the tree. The ever-wise biographer Abbott, who gravely informs us that Crockett killed “voracious grizzly bears” in the cane-brakes of Tennessee, with equal accuracy advises us that the “grizzly bear can climb a tree as well as a man.” Herein we find some mystery about Carson’s bear adventure. Carson as a hunter would have been the first to know that a grizzly bear can not climb a tree unless it be a horizontal one. There is no doubt, however, that some such adventure took place with some sort of bears, and that Carson saved his leggings if not his life by a knowledge of the tenderness of a bear’s nose.
All this time our Westerner, our trapper, is fitting himself for his work in the West as guide for “explorers.” We find him with fifty men, pushing up quite to the headwaters of the Missouri River, and later he and some companions turn up along the historic Yellowstone River, a country then well known in the organized fur trade of St. Louis. We do not discover that he ever went into the regular employ of any of the fur traders. No engagé or ordinary “pork eater” he, but a companion nearly always of these independent fur traders, the individual gentry of the wilderness. We find him now becoming acquainted with the Big Horn. He knows also the three forks of the Missouri; and he visits the “Big Snake” River and the Humboldt River, then called Mary’s River, since scientists still were scarce in the Rockies.
He wanders continually back and forth across the upper Rockies. Brown’s Hole, Jackson’s Hole, Henry Lake, the Black Hills, all the upper waters of the great rivers, the Columbia, the Snake, the Green, the Colorado, the Platte, the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Arkansas,—you shall hardly name any well-known Western region, any remote mountain park, any accurately mapped Western stream which you shall not, providing you have faithfully followed the wanderings of Kit Carson, discover to have been familiar to this man even before geographies were dreamed of west of the Missouri River.
It would be but wearying to go on with the monotonous chronicle of repeated journeys back and forth, of hardships, of toils and dangers, of the round of the trapper’s employment, of the wild life at those wild, strange annual markets of the mountains, the trappers’ rendezvous. It will suffice us and serve us to remember that Carson practically closed his life as a trapper in 1834,[[28]] this date marking the end of eight years steadily employed by him in trapping and trading and in learning the West. In 1834 he and such companions as Bill Williams, William New, Mitchell, Frederick, and scores of others of his old-time friends, found themselves practically without a calling. When, after one long expedition west of the range, they readied Fort Roubidoux, it was only to discover that furs had gone very low in price.
The advent of the silk hat had caused terror in St. Louis, and gloom throughout the Rockies. The day of the beaver trade was at an end. That animal, of so monstrous an importance in the history of the American continent, was now to assume a place far lower in estimation. Our bold, befringed mountaineers learned that it would no longer pay to pursue it into the remote fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains. Yet the beaver had served its purpose. Following its tooth-marks on the trees, there had pressed on to the head of every Western river a man qualifying for office as guide of the west-bound civilization beyond the Missouri. Kit Carson, type of the graduated trapper and adventurer, had had his schooling.
Yet a man must live, and if there be no price for beaver peltry he must turn his hand to something else for occupation. For eight years Kit Carson served as hunter for the post, well-known as Bent’s Fort, on the Arkansas River. There he fed forty men on the wild meat of the plains, and during his eight years of hunting killed thousands of buffalo, elk, and deer. He saw the plains in all their ancient undimmed splendor, and whether he most loved the mountains or the plains he himself never could tell. Carson at an earlier time had married an Indian girl, and during his engagement at Fort Bent he sent his one child, a daughter, to St. Louis for the purpose of acquiring an education. There the daughter married, went to California, and apparently passes from the scene. Carson’s later marriage was with a Mexican woman very much younger than himself.[[29]]
If in the year 1834 Carson terminated the first term of his Wanderschaft, in 1842, when he closed his first engagement as hunter for Bent’s Fort, he completed the second season of his Western life and was ready for the third. In that year he joined a wagon train bound eastward, having determined to revisit his old home in Missouri, which he had not seen for sixteen years. The visit was sad and cheerless enough. He returned to find his parents dead and forgotten, the old homestead in ruins, and not a friend left to take him by the hand.
He hastened thence to St. Louis, but ten days of even the capital of the fur trade proved sufficient for him. Soon afterward, as is stated by his most reliable biographer, he by mere chance met young Frémont, then bound West to “explore” the Rocky Mountains, more especially that part of the Rockies in the vicinity of the South Pass. Frémont’s guide did not materialize at the time, and Carson’s modestly proffered services were engaged by the army officer, who needed a guide across country, which to many a Western man was as familiar as his own dooryard.[[30]]
During his first expedition Carson does not seem to have been much valued by Frémont. Basil Lajeunesse was the favorite, and it was always Basil Lajeunesse here, there, and everywhere; Carson, a man of much greater experience and reliability, having not as yet come into his own as a guide, though forsooth there was small need of guiding on this journey. Frémont engaged Carson at one hundred dollars a month, and he was the twenty-eighth man in the party, which also included two boys, young relatives, who after all were not in so very dangerous an enterprise.