In Washington Carson met Jessie Benton Frémont, wife of the “Pathfinder” and daughter of the arch-protector of the fur traders and of Frémont, Thomas Benton. Carson was now appointed lieutenant of the rifle corps of the United States Army; a commission which, by the way, was never ratified, although he did not know this for some months. He was sent back, four thousand miles, to bear despatches in return. He crossed the Missouri River, fought the Comanches at the Point of Rocks, got through them, pushed on west as steadily as ever, and reached the Virgin River, in the dry Southwest, before he met his next Indian fight. He and fifteen comrades here stood off three hundred Indians. In due time he reached Monterey, and after this he took service against the Mexicans on the border for a time.
So energetic a man cannot be allowed to rest, and in the spring of 1848 he is sent back once more to Washington. The physical frame of any other man except Kit Carson had been by all these journeyings too far racked to enable him to make this long and hazardous trip. The souls of most men would have failed them long ere this. Yet this hardy, tough little man, just big enough for steady riding, cheerfully undertakes his third journey across the mountains as despatch bearer for the United States Army.
This time he meets Utes and Apaches, fights them, wins through them, and goes on. He stops on this trip just for a day to see his family at Taos, averaging a visit home about once in three years. It is here that he learns that he is not a lieutenant, after all; but that does not check his loyalty to the flag. He goes east now up the Bijou, and down the Platte to the Republican Fork, in order to dodge certain Indians, who, he hears, are numerous and bad along the Arkansas.
He reaches Washington safe and sound, of course; starts back for New Mexico; and arrives there in October, 1848. Figure yourself, if you like, as chief actor in a quarter of a century of such traveling as was done by Kit Carson. His travels are given thus in detail that we may have just estimate of the man of those days, of the tremendous demands upon his courage and endurance. Only the West could produce such a man.
Now we may picture Kit Carson in the fourth stage of his career, as settler and rancher. He was at home now, but he knew no rest. He fought the Apaches, and guided Colonel Beall against that tribe and the Comanches, in an endeavor to round up all the Mexican prisoners in the hands of the Indians, who were to be returned to their own firesides. After this little expedition Carson was once more a man without an occupation. There was a lull in fighting and scouting. Having no profession except that of trapper and of guide, he cast about him and once more determined to be a ranchman. He and his friend Maxwell established a ranch fifty miles west of Taos, at what is known as Rayado or Rezado. Again he joined an expedition against the Apaches, a day and a half to the southeast, a disastrous expedition, in which he was not leader, but might better have been. At another time he helped chase some Apache thieves, and assisted in the killing of five of them, being always desired in these errands of swift punishment. Our army could never catch the Apaches, the Nez Percés, the Comanches, the Crows, the Blackfeet. Kit Carson always could and did.
This Indian fighting, however, did not bring money to his coffers; therefore in 1850 we find him and a partner taking a band of horses from New Mexico up to Fort Laramie, a journey of five hundred miles.[[32]] After this followed some more horse stealing on the part of the Indians, yet more punitive expeditions, and considerable amateur sheriffing, for which service Carson had become a necessity in the district. He was not afraid. He could read the signs of the trails. He could ride.
In 1851 Carson and Maxwell tried their hands at a bit of the Santa Fé trade themselves, although this was long after the glory of the old-time wagon trade had departed. They got a train load of goods at St. Louis, and started westward up the Arkansas, after the old-fashioned way. They met the Cheyennes, always ambitious to acquire tax title of the plains to such valuable property as this. Carson knew that the protestations of these Cheyennes were not to be believed, and told the Indians that they could neither deceive him nor frighten him; yet with diplomacy equal to his courage, he edged on and on for three doubtful days, farther and farther to the westward, and so at last came safe. Kit Carson was no blusterer and no swashbuckler, but was first and last of all a good business man. He knew that it was good judgment to keep out of a fight whenever possible, which he did.
And now comes one of the most romantic, indeed one of the most pathetic pages in the whole history of this brave man, if not in all Western history. Rebelling at the tameness of ranching and horse trading and wagon trafficking, longing once more for the freedom of the trapping trail, Kit sent word about among his old friends, the free traders of the Rockies. A party of eighteen old-time long-haired men was made up; and thus they sallied forth, with rifle and ax and pack and jingling trap chains, in the fashion of the past, making once more deep into the heart of the Rockies. They visited the Arkansas, the Green, the Grand, all the loved and lovable parks of the mountains. They came back through the Raton Mountains, bearing with them abundant fur. They said that it was their last trail; that they had seen the old streams they loved, in order that they might “shake hands with them and say good-by!” This expedition was made for sheer love of the old life, which they knew had now gone by forever. The settlement of the West was at hand, and this they knew very well. No wonder that it brought them sadness! We to-day may grieve in some measure over the dignity and glory of those days gone by.
We might believe that by this Kit Carson would have had enough traveling, and would have been content to bound his ambitions by the little mountain valleys that lay about him in New Mexico. Not so, however; for we find his next exploit to be the unusual one of a sheep drive to far-off California. He assembled a band of six thousand five hundred sheep, and following by easy stages along the old mountain trails with which he was so familiar, at length arrived with his herd, in August, 1853, at his far-off destination. He sold his sheep at the good price of five dollars and a half a head, this being the most considerable and most profitable speculation in which he had ever engaged in all his life.
He remained for a time in California and looked about him, but he found California no longer a wilderness occupied by wandering and infrequent trappers, but a land overflowing with gold, and tenanted with a restless and swiftly increasing population. He saw a San Francisco of fifty thousand souls spring up as by magic within sight of those two little hills of the Coast Range that had marked the land of salvation for Frémont and his party in their starving journey across the Sierras. He found himself a hero in this new and busy San Francisco; but he was ever unfamiliar with the art of heroing, so presently he left the town and returned again to New Mexico, traveling this time by the old trail to the copper mines, by which he had led Frémont in his first journey east from southern California.