"HE SHOWED THE WAY"

"He Showed the Way" The Story of Kit Carson

A TALL granite shaft in old Santa Fe is that simple state. ment. It could apply to only one person connected with Southwestern history, and it is scarcely necessary to walk around the monument and read: "KIT CARSON, Born 1809, Died 1868." Arizona might well erect such a monument also, for while Carson never actually established a home within the boundaries he had very, very much to do with the early history and welfare of Arizona.

Back in Madison County, Kentucky, on Christmas Day, 1809, a small red-headed baby boy was born. His appearance made very little ripple in the quiet of the fam ily life since he was only one more added to the other nine children. But he needed some sort of a name and so they called him Christopher Carson. From Kentucky to Missouri the baby was moved before he was a year old, and from then on his face was always turned westward.Carson, Senior, descendant of seagoing Danish forefathers, was a born wanderer. No sooner had he felled the timbers and hewn them into logs for a house to shelter his evergrowing brood than far horizons beckoned and the patient wife and mother loaded her ten children, her home woven coverlids, her pieced quilts, and the few iron pots she owned, and moved with her lord and master. We wonder if sometimes she did not look back regretfully at the clearing made only a few seasons before.

Somewhere along the trail Father Carson traveled he conceived the idea of having his son Kit become a lawyer, perhaps such as Andrew Jackson, whose fame was at its height just then. Death of the older Carson saved Kit from that fate.

When Kit's mother, an unlearned pioPoor woman, found herself a widow with ten children to care for there was little she could do except bind them out to whoever was willing to work them for their keep. She apprenticed young Kit to a saddle maker. Restless and eager as the young hound pups with which he had grown up, Kit moped and pined at the saddler's bench where he worked on pack saddles and head stalls, stitched leather sheaths for hunting knives and tapped tacks into the soles of heavy boots. Lots of mountain men, trappers and hunters came into the shop and their talk of far places fell on fertile soil.

"NOTICE: To Whom It May Concern: That Christopher Carson, a boy about sixteen years old, small for his age, butthickset, light reddish hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin, Howard County, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler's trade, on or about the first of September, last. He is supposed to have made his way to the upper part of the state. All persons are notified not to harbor, support, or subsist said boy under penalty of the law. One Cent (not a very high value set on our Kit!) reward will be paid to any person who will bring back the said boy.

(Signed) "DAVID WORKMAN. "Franklin, Mo., October 6, 1826."

Some twenty-five or thirty miles west of Franklin, the clumsy wagons belonging to the caravan of Charles Bent, the trader, had stopped for the night. Just inside the circle of firelight and keeping away from the sentries a hungry, footsore boy lay flat on his belly studying the scene. It is to be presumed he was pleased with what he saw since he curled up into as tight a ball as possible and slept until dawn.

"Thar's a boy lookin' for you, Capt'n," said a teamster at the elbow of Charles Bent.

The boy was staring with bright penetrating eyes at Captain Bent. Captain Bent stared in return and quickly sup pressed a smile as he saw the stern set of the lad's mouth. It was a strange looking sight. A small red-headed boy stood straight as an arrow, clutching an old flint lock rifle a head taller than he was. The stock of the gun was well notched. Around the waist of his ragged coat was belted a huge skinning knife.

"Well, what do you want with me, Son?"

"I want to go to Santa Fe with your wagons. I can shoot this gun. I can ride a hoss. I can stand watch at night and do it bettern'n your men. They never saw me last night but I saw everything here!"

"What's your name?"

"Kit, Kit Carson."

So came Kit Carson to the West, which from that day on was his consuming passion. And to this day no one has claimed the penny reward for his return to the saddler's bench.

We of Arizona think that Kit Carson was the man who did most to rid Arizona of the Navajo scourge. How many realize that before he went Navajo hunting he had met and fought and killed and scalped his share of Apaches both on the Gila River and in the Salt River Valley? When he was seventeen he drove brassheaded tacks into the notches of the old gun, each tack accounting for an Apache.

That old gun, his constant companion for a lifetime, can be seen in Santa Fe. Before his death Kit Carson bequeathed it to the Masonic Lodge of that city. He was an honored member of the lodge and the Masons give perpetual care to his grave at Taos.

Back and forth across Arizona, Carson shuttled, bearing messages from Washington to California and back again. He could not read nor write but he picked up a dozen Indian languages and with the universal sign language of Indians he talked himself and companions out of many a tight spot.

The name of Kit Carson was never associated with defeat. When he aimed his rifle at an Indian there was no missing. And it was an understood fact that any expedition of which he was a member took their orders from him when Indian trouble developed. He could not afford by a single defeat to give the Indians a chance to think they could escape punishment for their lawlessness.

Wherever there was trouble from hostile Indians Carson was found there sooner or later and the trouble stopped. Expeditions were sent out from Santa Fe time after time to punish the Navajos, who refused to stay punished. The papers of that day were blistering in their editorial remarks. On July 27, 1848, The Santa Fe Re(Continued on Page 28)