The Westward Movement

by Unknown

A little knowledge of history, coupled with even a smaller amount of historical imagination, will enable us to picture the sensation which Carson and his story caused at the Capital. Polk, Webster, Clay, and the other statesmen who met him were impressed with his quiet dignity, his candor and the absence of swagger in his demeanor. No longer could Congress listen with the old-time seriousness to the tales of the alleged Sahara barrenness of the western plains, for Frémont's story, just published in its first instalment, told of streams, of occasional tracts of timber, and of vast herds of buffalo. And here in Washington was the man who had piloted Frémont on his expeditions. From this time dates the decline of the myth of the Great American Desert, which the reports of Pike and of Long and Irving's chronicle of the overland march of the Astorians projected across the map of the second quarter of the nineteenth century from the western border of Missouri to the Sierra Nevada. With their imperialist notions, Senators Benton, Cass, and Douglas saw in Carson the advance courier of manifest destiny.

With the modesty which was one of his characteristics, Carson declined to accept himself at the appraisement which Washington gave him. As he viewed them, his achievements were merely part of his day's work, for the performance of which he deserved no special credit. Accordingly he left the Capital gladly with the despatches which Polk gave him for the military commander in California, and then, after another journey back to Washington, he returned, in 1848, to Taos, and resumed the life of a ranchman, which had been interrupted six years earlier.

Once more now, in Carson's case, we see the initiative, the versatility, and the resourcefulness which the frontier conditions of the older day demanded. In their widely different fields, Crockett, Sam Houston, and Lincoln disclosed these qualities. Appointed in 1853 Indian agent for the district of New Mexico and vicinity by President Pierce,—a post which he held till his death, except for the interlude of the Civil War, in which he rose to the rank of a brigadier-general,—he entered a sphere in which he gained a new distinction. The most formidable Indian-fighter of his age, he was equally successful as a counselor and conciliator of Indians. His administration stands guiltless of any complicity in the "century of dishonor."

As a peacemaker between red men and white and between red men and red, Carson was more effective than a regiment of cavalry. This was because he knew the Indian's nature, talked his tongue, took pains to learn his specific grievances, and could look at things from his point of view. The Indian had confidence in Carson in a larger degree than in any other agent of the older day except General William Clark, Lewis's old partner in the exploration of 1804-06, who, from Monroe's days in the Presidency to Van Buren's, was superintendent of Indian affairs, with headquarters at St. Louis. Except Clark, he was more active in treaty-making between the Government and the red man than any other agent down to his time.

Socially as well as physically Carson was a path-blazer. With the Dawes severalty act of 1887 began a revolution in our methods of dealing with the red men. Many years before that statute was dreamed of, Carson recommended that the Indians be taught to cultivate the soil, that allotments of land be given to them as they become capable of using them, that they be trained to become self-supporting, and that they be prepared to merge themselves into the mass of the country's citizenship. In a crude and general way our Indian policy for the last quarter of a century has proceeded along these lines.

More than any other Indian agent of his day or earlier, Carson exerted influence with the national authorities to induce them to listen to the appeals of the country's wards, to remove their grievances, as far as practicable, to deal with them as individuals, and to arouse in them an ambition to rise to the industrial status of their white neighbors.

Although more than forty-two years have passed since Carson's death many of his acquaintances are still living in various parts of the West. In talks which I have had with some of them in the past year or two they revealed him on a side which the historical and fiction writers never disclosed. As a youth on the plains I caught a glimpse of him in the last year of his life, and as he had always been a hero to me as a boy beyond any other frontier character, I was surprised at the absence in his appearance of everything traditionally associated with the aspect of an Indian fighter. Although he was still alert and resolute, his face had the kindly look which reminded me of Father De Smet, the head of the mission among the Flatheads on the Bitter Root River, in Montana, whom I had met shortly before that time.

"One of my most vivid recollections of Carson," says Major Rafael Chacon, of Trinidad, Colorado, who was an officer in his company of scouts in the campaign of 1855 against the Utes and Apaches, and who was a captain and later on a major in the First Regiment of New Mexican Volunteers in the Civil War, of which Carson was the colonel, "was of one day in 1862 in Albuquerque, when I saw him lying on an Indian blanket in front of his quarters, with his children gleefully crawling all over him and taking from his pockets the candy and the lumps of sugar which he had purchased for them. Their mother, his second wife, Dona Josefa Jaamillo, to whom he was ardently devoted, he called by the pet name of Chipita."

Jacob Beard, eighty-two years of age, of Monrovia, California, who became acquainted with Carson at Taos in 1847, says one of his most pleasant memories is of the day in 1852 when, while working on a ranch near San Francisco, he met Carson, who had just reached that city with a great drove of sheep which he and a few men had conducted from New Mexico, nearly a thousand miles over deserts, across swift and dangerous rivers, and through wild mountain passes, a large part of the course being infested by Indians. "Kit, on seeing you I feel homesick," he exclaimed, "and I think I ought to go back with you." Carson became sympathetic at once, and said: "Well, Jake, we have only one life to live, and in living it we should make the most of our opportunities." Beard added, in telling this to me: "That settled the matter. I returned to the ranch, adjusted my affairs there, saddled my mule, caught up with Carson's party, went back to New Mexico, and lived there for many years afterward."

Daniel L. Taylor, mayor of Trinidad, Colorado, who probably stood closer to Carson during the later years of his life than any other man now living, related recently to me an incident showing his dislike of anything which savored of flattery. One day in 1862 the great frontiersman chanced to stop at Maxwell's ranch, on the Cimmaron River, in New Mexico, a well-known point on the Santa Fé trail, when a regular army officer of high rank who was there exclaimed, exuberantly: "So this is the distinguished Kit Carson who has made so many Indians run." Carson silenced his eulogist by quietly remarking: "Yes, I made some Indians run, but much of the time they were running after me."