The Epic Story Of Mountain Man Kit Carson: Agent of “Manifest Destiny”

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Kit Carson is one of the most complex characters in American history.

The good and the bad.

That came with the Great Conquest of the American West were summed up in this one man’s unimaginable life. Here to tell the story of Kit Carson is frequent contributor Roger McGrath, a former UCLA history professor, author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes, and a former U.S. Marine.

Take it away, Roger.

The mountain men were responsible for blazing nearly every trail to the Pacific Coast, for discovering the natural wonders of the trans-Mississippi West, and for providing the muscle that fueled the fur trade. Yet few gained national recognition. An outstanding exception is Kit Carson, who becomes the most famous mountain man of them all. Kit Carson is portrayed heroically in books and articles, and as a character in movies. He is also the subject of a television series. He is one of those figures who made us proud to be an American and whetted the youthful appetite for grand adventures. Carson is present at the creation. It seems he has witnessed the dawn of the trans-Mississippi American West in all its vividness and brutality. Place names throughout the West recall Kit Carson. There’s Carson Pass and the Carson River in the Sierra Nevada. In Nevada, there’s Carson Valley. In Carson City, the capital of Nevada. There’s the military post Fort Carson in the town Kit Carson. In Colorado, one of Colorado’s highest mountains is Kit Carson Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Range, and in Taos, New Mexico, there’s Kit Carson Park. Christopher Houston Carson is born in a log cabin on Christmas Eve 1809 in Madison County, Kentucky, the same year, in the same state in which Abraham Lincoln is born. The eleventh in a line of fifteen siblings, he is nicknamed Kit while still an infant, and the name sticks when he is two. His Scotch-Irish family picks up and migrates westward to a farm near Boone’s Lick, Missouri.

Home of the Daniel Boone clan.

Here’s Memphis native Hampton Sides, author of the national bestseller, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West.

His family was good friends with the Boone family. They intermarried. These were backwoodsmen. They were rough and ready folks who were in search of opportunity.

For their own safety, the Carsons and other pioneers at Boone’s Lick dwell in a state of perpetual vigilance. They live in sturdy cabins built near forts, and well-armed sentries patrol constantly. All cabins are designed with rifle loopholes or fireports in case of an Indian attack. Everyone knew a family whose child or mother had been carried off by Indians. Kit’s sister, Murray, recalls, “We would carry bits of red cloth with us to drop if we were captured by Indians, so our people could trace us.” Despite all this, the young Kit Carson plays with Indian children whose parents come to Boone’s Lick to trade goods. From an early age, Kit learns that Indians are not monolithic, that tribes could differ substantially and violently from one another, and that each group must be dealt with separately on its own terms. Kit is not quite nine when his father is killed while felling a tree, and the large Carson family is left in desperate straits. Kit drops out of school to work full-time on the family farm and hunts in his spare time to help put meat on the table. At fourteen years old, Kit is apprenticed at a saddlery. The teenager hates the work and the confinement in the saddle shop, but it proves to be a blessing in disguise. Many of the shop’s customers are trappers, traders, teamsters, or scouts on the Santa Fe Trail. Their stirring tales of the way West and what lay over the far horizon set the boy’s imagination afire. Here’s the executive director of the Western History Association, Paul Hutton.

The West offers boundless opportunity: the freedom from all the restraints of family, all the restraints of a shopkeeper’s life, and of course the promise of adventure, of danger, of excitement. And so he runs away. He does a Huckleberry Finn and lights out for the territories.

In August 1826, Kit turns a boy’s adventure into a man’s livelihood when he crosses the Missouri border and heads west with a merchant caravan on the newly opened Santa Fe Trail. After nine hundred miles on the trail, Carson settles in Taos, New Mexico, where he develops fluency in Spanish, French, and a half-dozen Indian tongues. And he also masters the universal sign language used by Western tribes. And yet, for all his facility with language, Kit Carson is illiterate. Taos is the capital of the Southwestern fur trade, teeming with trappers—Americans, Frenchmen, Canadians—all of them scruffy, sunburned after months spent trapping in the Rockies.

Carson wanted to be a part of this fraternity of men, and these greasy, grizzled, hairy, often drunk, international cast of characters who knew the rivers of the West and had been to all these amazing places. He wanted to be one of these guys as quickly as they’d have him.

And you’ve been listening to Roger McGrath tell the story of Kit Carson. When we come back, the story of Kit Carson continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Roger McGrath telling the story of Kit Carson.

Picking up the story is.

Also Hampton Sides, who wrote the national bestseller, Blood and Thunder, and also the executive director of the Western History Association, Paul Hutton.

Let’s pick up where we last left off.

In 1829, and not yet twenty years old, Carson joins a fur trapping brigade of forty mountain men who venture into Arizona, most of which is still untouched by fur trappers.

There probably was not a more dangerous profession in America at that time than being a mountain man. There was the danger of grizzly bears, hypothermia, starvation. These men went into trackless wilderness for months at a time, all in pursuit of beaver pelts.

But the greatest reason why so few mountain men have ventured into Arizona territory is the Apache. The Apache delight in torturing and killing their enemies, especially the nearby Pima and Papago Indians. In this world, the trapper’s best chance at survival is for himself to adapt completely and entirely to the wilderness and to know intimately the Indians, in their habits and their warfare. If the mountain men could do that, they survived.

If not, they…

The West is where races intersect, cultures intersect, sometimes violently, more…

Often not.

Kit Carson moves easily in that world. He’s not opposed to confronting people straight-on and engaging in combat, taking a scalp if need be to make a point. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t sit down and break bread the very next week. He understood what was expected of him by native people he came in contact with in terms of peaceful relationships and trade relationships, but also in terms of conflict, and he understood that retribution must follow crime, and follow it immediately and harshly.

Every summer, major fur companies organized what was known as the Mountain Man Rendezvous, and this was held high in the beaver country. It could be in Utah, Idaho, or Wyoming. As always happens at these gatherings, various bands of Indians come to trade, gamble, and drink with the mountain men, and it is not uncommon for trappers to take squaws for their wives during the month-long festival. One of the most popular women attending the rendezvous of 1835 is a young Arapaho beauty named Singing Grass. She catches Carson’s eye, but another man is equally smitten. He’s a very large, swaggering, blustering French-Canadian trapper known as the Bully of the Mountains. He’s also an expert shot. Singing Grass chooses Carson and rejects the Frenchman. Over the next several days, the Frenchman goes on a bender and begins to menace anyone who crosses his path. After being ignored by other mountain men, he strolls over to Carson’s camp and announces how he particularly enjoys thrashing Americans. Carson springs to his feet and exclaims:

“I’ll rip your damn guts!”

The Frenchman says nothing, but mounts his horse and rides out in front of camp, daring Carson.

To fight him.

Carson quickly jumps on a horse and gallops up to the Frenchman. They stop so close to each other that their horses’ heads touch. Both men draw guns and fire precisely at…

The same moment.

The Frenchman’s bullet creases Carson’s head, taking scalp and hair with it. Carson’s bullet goes through the Frenchman’s right hand and blows away his thumb, causing him to drop his gun. Carson draws a second pistol and prepares to deliver the coup de grâce. Gingerly holding his maimed appendage, the Frenchman begs for his life. Satisfied that he has humiliated him, Carson turns and rides away. Says Carson,

“We won’t have any more problems with the Bully Frenchman, anymore, will we?”

Singing Grass and Carson marry after Carson offers her father a bride price of five blankets, three mules, and a gun. Carson is twenty-five years old.

Like many of the trappers, Carson settled down with the American Indian woman. He found that this marriage was certainly a marriage of convenience in the sense that he had someone on the trail with him who helped do all the thousand and one tasks that had to be done, but it was the first love of his life. He was devoted to her.

After giving birth to their second daughter in 1840, Singing Grass dies of complications, and then shortly later, in an accident, the baby dies, adding to Kit’s pain. America’s experience in intense growing pains. The era of the mountain man is coming to an end. Decades of trapping have destroyed the beaver population, and the once fashionable beaver hat is now being replaced with one made of silk.

Every summer throughout the 1840s, there were fewer and fewer beaver pelts, and this was a consequence of just how amazingly good these guys were and what they did.

Here’s Kit Carson from his autobiography.

“We trapped down the river but found no beaver. The country was barren. It became necessary to try her hand at something else.”

The beaver market collapses, and Carson finds himself out of work, widowed and shouldering the burdens of parenthood alone. He is twenty-nine, with his pockets empty and his future uncertain. Kit brings his daughter Adeline east and leaves her with family in Missouri to make sure she receives the education he never had and to protect her from the struggle that lies ahead. But as he boards a whistling steamboat in St. Louis for a trip up the Missouri, his prospects change when he strikes up a conversation with the passenger.

John C.

Fremont is an American military lieutenant and an explorer who’s about to embark on an expedition to survey the American West, and he has yet to hire a guide. Although Fremont has his doubts, he hires Carson on the spot. Fremont and Carson blaze an overland route to the Pacific. By May 1846, the soon-to-be-called Oregon Trail is completed. Here’s Sherry Monaghan, president of the Western Writers of America.

They were the first people to figure out where they could ford rivers, what was the safest route where you didn’t have to climb mountains. And they were the ones that led all the pioneers out to populate and tame the Wild West.

Dubbed the Pathfinder, Fremont’s name reaches Lewis and Clark’s status, and Carson’s heroics become American legend.

And listening to Roger McGrath tell one heck of a story.

About Kit Carson, it’s interesting that the culture and race intersected often, but not always as violently as depicted in movies. Often not, as is the case with Carson marrying an Indian woman, Singing Grass, and losing her early, and one of his daughters—integrated marriage early on and all throughout mountain men culture.

The two blaze an overland route to…

The Pacific, which will become known as the Oregon Trail, and thus elevating Carson and Fremont to Lewis and Clark-like status. The story of Kit Carson continues here on Our American Stories.

Kit Carson, Kit Carson, mountain man, and buckskin helped keep this country free. And we continue with Our American Stories, and the story of Kit Carson. Telling it is Roger McGrath, and leading us off was executive director of the Western History Association.

Paul Hutton.

One of the things that Carson did during one of the expeditions with Fremont was they encountered some Hispanic wayfarers who had had their horses stolen from them.

The New Mexicans had been attacked by Indians, and the kind of mindset of the frontiersman was that you didn’t allow this kind of behavior to go on, that you had to make a statement.

Rather spontaneously, Carson decides to pursue these Indian horse thieves.

The Indians were a large group, but nevertheless, Carson and his companion snuck up on the band, killed several of them, brought back the horses and several Indian scalps to Fremont’s camp.

This really impressed Fremont: Carson risking his life for a complete stranger.

In August 1844, Fremont has his expedition reports bound and published.

Carson became a great romantic figure as an explorer, as a guide, as a frontiersman, as an Indian fighter. In these books that were supposed to be reports, there were actually grand adventure tales. These books were bestsellers in their day and were used as handbooks by hundreds of thousands of people going West.

Here’s American West historian Sally Detton.

“Immigrants would be in their wagons holding that, and it would say, ‘This is where you’re going to find fresh water; this is where there’s going to be grass, where you can…’”

“…graze your cattle.”

“It was really the first map of its kind in America.”

But following the unlikely pattern of his life, Carson’s mission to map the Western territories is about to take on even greater significance. An unexpected dispatch arrives from the White House. President Polk is determined to push America’s western border all the way to the Pacific.

President Polk had a vision of what America should look like. He wanted all of it, and he vowed that he would get it all either by purchasing or by war within one term.

This is the execution of Thomas Jefferson’s vision for continent-wide expansion, and the term Manifest Destiny is coined forty-two years after Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803. On April 25th, 1846, Mexican cavalry attacks a group of U.S. soldiers. Eighteen days later comes a declaration of war in Mexico. It’s the beginning of the Mexican War. Navy warships close in on the California Coast, and Army troops advanced from the east. Fremont and Carson arrive in California, and there in northern California, they support the Bear Flaggers in the Bear Flaggers’ capture of Sonoma. As a reward for his valuable service, Carson rides to Washington, D.C. with a thick packet of sealed letters to deliver the good news to President Polk. But on his way, a greater duty redirects his path. Here’s American frontier historian Durwood Ball.

“Kit…”

“Kearny ordered me to join him as his guide. I’d done so. Made me believe he had the right to order me.”

Kit now leads General Stephen Kearny and three hundred of his cavalry troopers to California. And one of those cavalry troopers happens to be the son of the famous Sa…