The Mexican War was over. The Santa Fe Trail, that 909-mile road of commerce which had become the pathway for military invasion, was once again bustling with trade caravans. The necessity of supplying the new American military outposts in New Mexico added to this traffic. The 1848 discovery of gold in California also led to a brief flurry of emigrants attaching themselves to the caravans, even though the Gila and Old Spanish trails never became popular with the gold seekers. Still, by the summer of 1848, an army officer at Fort Mann on the Arkansas River counted 3,000 wagons, 12,000 people and 50,000 head of stock passing his little outpost during that season alone. In 1849 overland mail service began on the trail, still headquartered at Independence, Missouri, even though Kansas City was fast becoming the outfitting center for caravans heading westward.

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Opportunity beckoned. The White brothers, of Warsaw, Mo., were among those who sought their fortune in postwar New Mexico. James and Charles White had arrived in Santa Fe in mid-July 1848 to open a mercantile business similar to the general store they had operated in Missouri. Their business plan was simple but effective: “Cheap Merchants—cheaper than the cheapest” ran their advertisement in the July 24, 1848, issue of the Santa Fe Republican. After a successful summer of trade, Charles headed south to explore business prospects between Santa Fe and Chihuahua, while James returned to St. Louis to bank $58,000 in gold and silver coins. He promptly made plans to return to Santa Fe with his wife, Ann, and their young daughter. New Mexico Territory would be their new home.

Postwar New Mexico held the promise of prosperity and a return to family life for another, far more famous individual, who had left Missouri back in 1826: Christopher “Kit” Carson. He was, by 1849, one of the most celebrated Americans in the world, and the inheritor of the buckskin mantle of Boone and Crockett as the nation’s preeminent frontiersman. Taciturn and unassuming, slight of frame and well below the average in height, Carson hardly met the blood-and-thunder image of a frontier demigod to match the wild tales that celebrated his very real adventures.

Born on Christmas Eve 1809 in Madison County, Ky., Carson was raised near Boon’s Lick, Mo., where his family resettled in 1811. Apprenticed to a saddler in Old Franklin in 1824, the boy soon ran away to join a caravan bound for Santa Fe. He fell in with the trappers at Taos and by 1831 was a mountain man of the first rank, friend to Jim Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Joe Meek. Those youthful years in the Rocky Mountains were always remembered by Carson as the happiest of his life, but the death of his Arapaho wife, Waanibe, ended his life as a trapper. For a while he worked as a contract hunter at Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. A chance encounter with young Lieutenant John Charles Frémont led to a second career for Carson as a guide for that Army officer’s two expeditions of Western exploration. Frémont’s reports—ghostwritten by his beautiful and talented wife, Jessie, and printed at government expense thanks to her powerful father, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton— made “the Pathfinder” and his intrepid scout Kit Carson into national celebrities. It was with little exaggeration that a later writer would say of Carson and Frémont that upon the ashes of their campfires the great cities of the American West would rise.

In August 1845, Carson joined Frémont at Bent’s Fort for a third “exploring expedition” westward. With 60 heavily armed men, Frémont entered California, supposedly to explore mountain passes over the Sierras, but actually to seize that most valuable of territorial prizes once an “expected” war erupted between Mexico and the United States. In that war, Kit Carson emerged as the hero of the Battle of San Pascual, near San Diego, in December 1846.

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