For his honesty and courage in exposing an official who was defrauding the Government in 1864-65 he was removed by one of his political superiors from the command at Fort Union to Fort Garland, in Colorado, but he never complained, and the cause of the removal, which was eminently creditable to him, was divulged by others, and not by himself.
"In Kit Carson Park, which I have given to the city of Trinidad," said Mayor Taylor to me, "we shall soon erect a monument to Carson, and we shall try to make the affair interesting to the entire West. In many ways he was the most wonderful man that I ever knew."
Even to his old neighbors and associates Carson was a hero during his lifetime. Merit meets no severer test than this.
An old friend of Carson's told me that his dying exclamation to the physician who was with him, was "Doctor, compadre, adios." The date was May 23, 1868. As this last of the great trail-makers was dying, the Union Pacific, pushing westward, and the Central Pacific, moving eastward, were about to meet at Promontory, Utah, and the continent was crossed by rail. The heroic age of western expansion had closed.
THE MACMONNIES PIONEER MONUMENT FOR DENVER
An Embodiment of the Western Spirit
See [Frontispiece.]
The pioneer monument of which the equestrian statue of Kit Carson is the crowning figure consists of a granite shaft decorated with buffalo skulls and oak garlands, rising from basins decorated with bronze sculpture groups typifying the prospector, the hunter and the pioneer mother and child. The fountain, the ground-plan of which is hexagonal, will be raised on five granite steps. Water will spout into basins from mountain-lion and trout heads. At the base, the shaft will be decorated with the arms of Denver, and horns of plenty overflowing with fruit, grain, corn and gold and silver money—all being the produce of Colorado.