Kit Carson Answer to Name This Famous Person Game - January 2015 by Mike McLeod

It is difficult to live up to your own legend—particularly if the dime novels exaggerate your true adventures with fictional stories of fighting off dozens of Indians all by yourself—but Kit Carson came pretty close. Born in Kentucky, Carson’s family moved to Missouri when he was very young. His father was killed by a falling tree branch, leaving his mother and 14 children to fend for themselves. Being needed to farm and feed the family with no time for school, Carson grew up illiterate. Even so, during his lifetime he learned to speak Spanish, French, Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Arapaho, Paiute, Apache, and Cheyenne and communicate the sign language of the Plains Indians. He often served as a translator.

Kit Carson was a mountain man. While a teenage, he moved on his own to New Mexico, and from there he explored, trapped and hunted into California and north into the Rocky Mountains. I imagine his life as a mountain man was much like the movie Jeremiah Johnson, except during his life, Carson married two Indian women, one Cheyenne and one Arapaho, to Johnson’s one. Also, Carson chose to marry them (the second after the first died) and was not forced into marriage like Johnson.

A side note, the Jeremiah Johnson in the movie was based on a real person, Liver-Eating Johnston, who was a mountain man. His Indian wife really was killed by Crow Indians, but not for Johnston’s crossing sacred land, as portrayed in the movie. Liver-Eating Johnson did track down the Crow Indians who killed his wife, and that resulted in a blood feud between him and the Crow Tribe. However, Liver-Eating did not always fight alone; he enlisted help sometimes from other characters portrayed in the movie who were also based on real people.

 Carson did not have a vendetta against Indians, but he did lead the military campaign against the Navajos who were waging war against white settlers and the other Indian Tribes in their area. He employed a scorched earth policy against them, and the Navajos surrendered. Carson left military service before 8,000 Navajos were forced on the Long Walk of 300 miles to Fort Sumner, N.M. in 1864. Many died on the way, and more died after arriving there because the military was not prepared to feed the number that arrived. The Navajos were allowed to return home in 1868.

Kit Carson in 1868.

Kit Carson when a young man.