Kit Carson’s Rescue Ride

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Everyone now sought him out, but they were invariably surprised to meet the great man himself. “His fame was then at its height, from the publication of Frémont’s book,” noted Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman upon being introduced to Carson at military headquarters in Monterey, Calif., in the fall of 1847, “and I was very anxious to see a man who had achieved such feats of daring among the wild animals of the Rocky Mountains, and still wilder Indians of the Plains. I cannot express my surprise at beholding a small stoop-shouldered man, with reddish hair, freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring.”

Sherman’s response was typical. Carson had once driven a mule herd from Taos to Fort Laramie to sell the animals to emigrants bound for California and Oregon. When folks heard that Kit Carson was at the post, they all wanted to meet him. His old trapper pals were always delighted to point out their shy compadre to the flatlanders. In one celebrated incident an emigrant approached Carson and asked, “I say, stranger, are you Kit Carson?” When Kit nodded in the affirmative, the emigrant studied him a moment and then replied: “Look’e here, stranger, you can’t come that over me. You ain’t the kind of Kit Carson I’m a’lookin’ for.”

By 1849 Carson did not much care about whatever kind of hero folks expected him to be. In February 1843 he had married Josefa Jaramillo in Taos. “Her style of beauty was of the naughty, heart-breaking kind,” noted a visitor to their home, “such as would lead a man with the glance of the eye, to risk his life for a smile.” Her family, while not wealthy, was well-connected in New Mexican social circles, with her sister married to New Mexico’s first territorial governor, Charles Bent. Carson, devoted to his young wife, was disturbed when his government service kept him away from Taos in April 1847 and his brother-in-law Governor Bent was murdered while protecting Josefa and her sister from a rebellious mob. That tragedy made Carson all the more anxious to stay home. “We had been leading a roving life long enough and now was the time, if ever, to make a home for ourselves and children,” Carson later recalled. “We were getting old and could not expect to remain any length of time able to gain a livelihood as we had.”

Determined to settle down, Carson invested much of the $2,000 he had earned over the years as a government scout, soldier and transcontinental courier (he carried the news to Washington, D.C., of the gold strike in California) in a ranching and farming enterprise with his old friend Lucien Maxwell. Through marriage, Maxwell had inherited an enormous Mexican land grant along the Cimarron River and was determined to develop it. They purchased stock and seeds and hired workers to erect buildings on Rayado Creek, some 50 miles southeast of Taos. Although south of the Sangre de Cristos and thus exposed to Plains Indian raiders, this new settlement was favorably located along the mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail. Rayado quickly attracted settlers to build along the tributaries of the Canadian River. Maxwell moved his family there in the spring of 1849 and was soon joined by another old frontiersman, Robert Fisher. Carson hesitated to bring his family over the mountains since Josefa had just given birth to their first child that May. The boy, named Charles in memory of the slain Charles Bent, was premature and sickly, dying before reaching his first birthday. Carson was particularly worried about Indian raids on Rayado, for by the spring of 1849 no part of the Santa Fe Trail was safe.

Indian affairs in New Mexico had deteriorated rapidly following the American conquest. The Llaneros (Plains) band of the Jicarilla Apaches had reached a balance of power with the New Mexicans over the last generation, but it had quickly broken down once the American troops arrived. Roving east of the upper Rio Grande southeast to the Canadian River, the Jicarillas now made life miserable for settler and traveler alike. “They are not considered a numerous band,” declared John Calhoun from his Indian agency in Santa Fe, “but they are bold, daring and adventurous spirits; and they say, they have never encountered the face of a white foe, who did not quail, and attempt to fly from them.” Their hostility was fueled by their northern friends the Utes, who provided a ready market for their plunder, and by the rivalry between old Chacon and young Lobo Blanco for tribal supremacy.

Tags: Historical Figures, Wild West

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