Carson was now living in a West experiencing sudden and general change. The old West was nearly gone, and all its ancient ways. The government at Washington was familiar with the doings of this quiet little man of New Mexico, and it was suggested that he would make a good Indian agent for the district of New Mexico. Witness, therefore, the last stage of Kit Carson’s career, that of counselor and guide to those savage peoples whose enemy and conqueror he had been.
At this time the Utes and the Jicarilla Apaches were rebellious, and one of Carson’s first acts was to ride two hundred and fifty miles into the Ute country. He led the forces that broke up the coalition between the Utes and the Apaches. It was Carson, old Indian fighter, who was one of the first to say that the Indians must be “rounded up and taught to till the soil.” This was his belief even at the time when he acted as guide for Colonel St. Vrain and his New Mexican volunteers, in the expedition that routed the Indians at the Saugache Pass.
The Indians that had feared Carson in the past came at length to trust him, and indeed to love him. He was known as “father” by many a warlike tribe. Thus he became the friend of the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes and the Kiowas, peoples scattered over a wide range of country. Behold now, therefore, our trapper, guide and scout fairly settled in life. Remember also that he was not the guide of Frémont in that last fatal, starving expedition when, blundering foolishly once more into the wilderness of the Rockies in the winter-time, and undertaking the wild project of crossing eight feet of snow with a pack-train, that officer once more came near paying the penalty of his ignorance by his own life and the lives of all his party.
It was Bill Williams who was guide this time, a Bill Williams that had not been trapping on the Del Norte for years, and who might have been forgiven memory less keen than had been Carson’s when he saw the two little peaks, far away in the Coast Range, in that other starving march of this same leader. It was to Taos that the enfeebled survivors of Frémont’s disastrous expedition found their way in search of help. If Kit Carson reproached his former “leader” it is not on record. Never was there a leader whose follies won him greater praise.
Later in his life, leaving the United States service as Indian agent, Carson was made colonel of a regiment of New Mexican volunteers, during the War of the Rebellion. He was brevetted brigadier-general of volunteers. In the closing years of his life he was known as “the general” among his friends, just as he was always known as “father” among the Indians who dwelt about him.
Kit Carson’s death occurred at Fort Lyon, Colorado, May twenty-third, 1869, the immediate cause being an aneurism of the aorta. Eight years before, Carson had sustained a bad fall, and had been dragged for a distance by his horse. From this hurt he never fully recovered. “Were it not for this,” said he, meaning his mishap, “I might live to be one hundred years of age.” Yet, knowing that he was doomed, he lived bravely and sweetly as ever, and to the end remained as unpretentious as during his early days.
“It was wonderful,” says the chronicler who saw his last hours and who heard most of the biography of Kit Carson read in the presence of the hero himself, “it was wonderful to read of the thrilling deeds and narrow escapes of this man, and then look at the quiet, modest, retiring but dignified little man who had done so much. He was one of nature’s noblemen, a true man in all that constitutes manhood, pure, honorable, truthful and sincere, of noble impulses; a knight-errant, ever ready to defend the weak against the strong without reward other than his own conscience. His was a great contempt for noisy braggarts of every sort.”
So, surrounded by his friends, facing the impending end with his customary bravery, Kit Carson passed away. There was a struggle and a fatal hemorrhage. “Doctor—compadre,—adios!” he cried. “This is the last of the general,” said his friend. So passed one of the last of the great Westerners.
It was nearly time now for all the old mountain men to put up the rifle. The day of the plow was following hard upon them.