Kit carson biography dreams

Hard to say, really. I think these are all very good points, Rob, and good clues as to what may have happened. Although I am not assuming that the tribes were all connected, or that Carson viewed them that way, or should have viewed them all the same, I think what surprises me is that he did not have more knowledge and connections with the Navajo people considering the area where he was raised and spent most of his life, in what is now New Mexico.

Then again, as I said before, the Navajo people were disjointed, they were not one tribe, but lived as independent families. I think my problem is I am putting myself into this situation. I think I would have tried to understand the situation from the perspective of the Navajo, would have made the connections between the way they lived and how the actions of the local government treated them as less than human.

I would have looked at the bigger picture and tried to mediate, rather than saying, "I'm a member of the U. Army and must do what I'm told. He was clearly a very intelligent man, but he was thinking "military strategy" instead of thinking about how to resolve a conflict between humans. To add onto what Rob said, Kit also had strong ties with the Ute's.

He was Indian agent to the Utes. The primary non-military support he had on the Navajo campaign was from Ute's. Ute's biggest enemy was Navajo. So as has been already said several times, I believe Kit made great distinction among tribes and was taking on an enemy, the Navajo, not an enemy of native americans. Another good point! Thank you, Gary!

This is such a great thread of conversation. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've learned a lot from this chat, and that's the whole point of this blog--education. Thank you to everyone! And that is not meant to bring an end to the conversation, just a thank you! Dollman I just wanted to thank you for your fine article on Kit Carson and the Navajo.

I found your discussion so interesting that I put an excerpt of it on my Blog, along with a link to your Blog, and a full endorsement of it urging my readers to click it on and read it. A man like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote "All men are created equal" and yet he never freed his slaves. Anyway, thank you again for your fine discussion! I enjoyed reading your blog and appreciate the careful way you quoted from my post.

It is indeed a puzzling situation. Kit Carson is one of those people from history who I wish I could sit down with and talk to for an hour, primarily about the Navajo. He did live a fascinating life, though. Post a Comment. Christmas dinner for a family, from a series of photos documenting Gen. John J. Pershing's Punitive Expedition into Mexico.

Unlike many other men in his profession, Carson was noted for his unassuming manner and temperate lifestyle, with one acquaintance describing him as "clean as a hound's tooth. In , Carson met explorer John C. With his many years spent in the woods, Carson was the ideal candidate to help the group make their way to the South Pass in the Rocky Mountains.

Carson also later became a popular hero in many Western novels. Carson also guided the expedition to California and Oregon. During this time, he found himself caught in the Mexican-American War. Sent to Washington, D. Kearny and his troops to California. Kearny's men clashed with Mexican forces near San Pasqual, California, but they were outmatched in the fight.

Carson slipped past the enemy to secure aid from American troops in San Diego. After the war, Carson returned to New Mexico, where he lived as a rancher. In , Carson took on a new role, agreeing to serve as a federal Indian agent for northern New Mexico, primarily working with the Utes and the Jicarilla Apaches. He saw the impact of western migration of the white settlers on the Native Americans, and he believed that attacks on white people by Native Americans were committed in desperation.

To prevent these people from becoming extinct, Carson advocated for the creation of Indian reservations. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Texts Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3.

Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape "Donate to the archive" User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. I am certain that if the Indians had been charged immediately on our arrival she would have been saved.

A soldier in the rescue party wrote: "Mrs. White was a frail, delicate, and very beautiful woman, but having undergone such usage as she suffered nothing but a wreck remained; it was literally covered with blows and scratches. Her countenance even after death indicated a hopeless creature. Over her corpse, we swore vengeance upon her persecutors.

Carson discovered a fictional book, possibly by Averill, about himself in the Apache camp. He wrote in his Memoirs : "In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds, and I have often thought that Mrs. White would read the same, and knowing that I lived near, she would pray for my appearance and that she would be saved.

He was sorry for the rest of his life that he had not rescued White; the dime-novel Carson would have saved her. In , Lt. Brewerton encouraged Carson to send him a sketch of his life, and offered to polish it into a book. Turley was engaged in late to help Carson prepare the memoir, and after a year's work sent the rough manuscript to a New York publisher.

DeWitte Clinton Peters — , a U. Army surgeon who had met Carson in Taos, acquired the manuscript and with Charles Hatch Smith — , a Brooklyn lawyer turned music teacher, sometime preacher, and author [ 74 ] rewrote it for publication. Peters for the work. A cheaper edition was published in , followed by two imitations that stole the market.

In , Charles Burdett, "a writer of no particular distinction", wrote a biography based on the Dr. Ellis, one of the stable of writers used by the firm. A popular, shorter work, it also used the Dr. Peters biography, which itself Peters revised in to bring the biography up to Carson's death. It is unknown if Carson profited from any of these publications based on his memoirs.

In , among the estate of Dr. Peter's son in Paris, was located the original Carson memoir. This was published with little comment in , [ 70 ] followed by a revised or "polished" version in , and, finally, in , a solidly annotated edition edited by Harvey Lewis Carter, who had cleared up much of the background about the manuscript. One frustrated author wrote of the Carson memoir that it "is as skinny as a hairless Chihuahua dog and as bald of details as a white egg".

During the last half of the nineteenth century, inexpensive novels and pseudo-nonfiction met the need of readers looking for entertainment. Among the major publishing firms was the house of Beadle, opened in One study, "Kit Carson and Dime Novels, the Making of a Legend" by Darlis Miller, notes some 70 dime novels about Carson were either published, re-published with new titles, or incorporated into new works over the period — When competition threatened the house of Beadle, a word-smith said they "just kill more Indians" per page to increase sales.

Skewed images of the personalities and place are exemplified by the Beadle title: Kiowa Charley, The White Mustanger; or, Rocky Mountain Kit's Last Scalp Hunt in which an older Carson is said to have "ridden into Sioux camps unattended and alone, had ridden out again, but with the scalps of their greatest warriors at his belt". By the s, the shoot-em-up gunslinger was replacing the frontiersman tales, but of those in the new generation, one critic notes, "where Kit Carson had been represented as slaying hundreds of Indians, the [new] dime novel hero slew his thousands, with one hand tied behind him.

In fiction, according to historian of literature Richard Etulain, "the small, wiry Kit Carson becomes a ring-tailed roarer, a gigantic Samson He sold his interest in the Rayado ranch and opened an office in a room of his Taos home, gratis—the office would be perpetually underfunded. The seven years as agent is probably the best documented of his life because of the correspondence, weekly and annual reports, and special filings required by the position he had a private secretary because he could not write; some believe the secretary took the dictation also for his memoir [ 62 ].

He summarized meetings with tribes - almost a daily occurrence when home - such as disputes over who stole whose cow, and the day-to-day effort to help with food, clothes and presents for tribes. He negotiated a halt of Plains tribes killing Taos Pueblo Indians desiring the traditional hunt of buffalo near Raton. Carson had the advantage of knowing at least fourteen Indian dialects as well as being a master of sign language.

One complex issue was captives. For example, captives stolen from Navajo by Ute were sold in the New Mexico settlements, or of a white child from central Texas settlements taken captive by Plains tribes then sold in New Mexico. As agent, Carson intervened. Much of Carson's work as agent has been overlooked because of the focus on his mountain-man explorer or blood-and-thunder image.

This was a significant period for him as well as the region, which experienced a large folk migration of Hispanos into Indian lands, as well as the Colorado gold rush and its impact on the tribes. By the late s, he recommended, to make way for the increasing number of white settlers, that they should give up hunting and become herders and farmers, be provided with missionaries to Christianize them, and move onto reserves in their homeland but distant from settlements with their bad influence of ardent spirits, disease, and unscrupulous Hispanos and Anglos.

Carson predicted, "If permitted to remain as they are, before many years they will be utterly extinct. In April , when the American Civil War broke out, many officers from the South in the United States Army resigned their commissions and offered their services to the Confederate States of America or their home states. Arriving in Richmond, Sibley persuaded President Jefferson Davis to appoint him a brigadier general and lead a brigade of mounted cavalry to conquer New Mexico Territory and possibly Colorado Territory, southern California and the northern parts of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua.

When Confederate forces captured southern New Mexico Territory, the Union military commander, Colonel Edward Canby, ordered the governor to call for volunteers to defend the territory. Carson resigned his position as agent to the Ute Indian Tribe and volunteered to defend the Territory. During the summer of , Carson worked to organize the regiment of approximately one thousand men, most of whom were from prominent Hispanic families, at Fort Union in northeast New Mexico Territory.

On September 21, the regiment's colonel resigned, and Carson assumed command. Canby had reservations about the fighting qualities of the volunteers and believed that his regular infantry were at a disadvantage in the vastness of New Mexico to the mounted Confederate cavalry. He decided to avoid fighting the Texans in the open field and strengthened the stone and adobe walls of his southern bastion, Fort Craig about one hundred miles north of Mesilla.

Following orders, Carson marched his First New Mexico regiment south from Albuquerque to form part of the fort's garrison. On February 19, , Carson led his regiment east across the Rio Grande to occupy high ground across from Fort Craig to protect the post from a Confederate-turning move. The next day, Canby joined Carson's regiment with the bulk of the regulars.

However, when Texan artillery fire panicked troops from the Second New Mexico Volunteers, Canby withdrew most of his force back to the fort. Carson and his regiment remained on the east bank of the Rio Grande to protect the left flank of the Union line. Two days later, the Confederate force sought to cross the Rio Grande to the west bank at the Valverde ford, about six miles north of Fort Craig.

Canby deployed regulars and Colorado volunteer units as his front line. He assigned Carson's regiment to a support position behind the regulars on the left and, later in the fight, the center of the Union line. Later in the day, Carson crossed to the east side of the river toward the Confederates. He advanced his regiment four hundred yards along the right flank of the Union line until ordered to withdraw.

After the day-long battle, the Union force retreated to Fort Craig where Carson reported one enlisted man killed, one wounded, and eleven missing. In late March, Colorado volunteers destroyed the Confederate supply trains at the Battle of Glorieta Pass , necessitating that the Texans abandon their invasion of New Mexico Territory. Canby took the regulars north from Fort Craig to harass the retreating Confederates and herd them back to Texas.

Carson and his regiment remained in Fort Craig. Although the starving Confederates passed a few miles to the west of the fort, Canby, seeing no need to risk a pitched battle with a defeated and retreating foe, did not order Carson to confront the Confederate column. Carson and his regiment remained in Fort Craig through the spring and summer of Canby held Carson's regiment in reserve at the Battle at Valverde and assigned it and other New Mexico volunteer regiments to passively garrison Fort Craig while he used regulars and Colorado volunteer troops to herd the Texans out of the territory.

He believed that the Hispanic volunteers would not stand up to the Texans in combat. Canby reported that the "people of the Territory, with few exceptions, I believe, are loyal, but they are apathetic in disposition," which explained their "tardiness" in volunteering. He contended that he could "place no reliance upon any volunteer force that can be raised, unless strongly supported by regular troops.

He co-signed a letter stating "that without the support and protection of the Regular Army of the United States they [New Mexicans] are entirely unable to protect the public property in the Territory or the lives of such officers, civil and military, as may be left among them after the withdrawal of the regular forces To confront the Texans, in , Canby had consolidated his available force by pulling in the garrisons from posts built to control the Apache and Navajo Indians.

When Canby ordered his troops to abandon Fort Stanton about eighty miles east of Fort Craig in August , about two hundred of the approximately five hundred Mescalero Apache Indians were subsisting on rations distributed to them by the army. With those supplies no longer available, some of the nine bands of Mescalero Apache Indians began raiding ranches and communities near their homeland in the Capitan Mountains.

Brigadier General James Carleton, of the First California Volunteer Cavalry, succeeded Canby as military commander of the territory in the fall of He then sent Carson and five companies of his regiment to occupy and re-build Fort Stanton. Carleton's confidential orders of October 12, to Carson, in part, read:. Carleton felt that "this severity in the long run will be the most humane course that could be pursued toward these Indians.

In Carleton's vision, the government would teach the hunting-and-gathering Mescalero bands the arts of agriculture, thereby keeping them from marauding outside the reservation. According to Major Arthur Morrison, Graydon "deceived" the Indians by offering them provisions and then shot and killed the two chiefs and nine others and wounded another twenty.

Carson's inquiry into the matter came to naught when Graydon, months later, died of a wound received in a duel. However, the shock of these killings, along with the fight between two companies of the First California Volunteer Cavalry from Fort Fillmore and a band of Apaches in Dog Canyon near Alamogordo, induced most of the surviving Mescalero chiefs to surrender to Carson.

Perhaps a hundred of the Mescalero Apache Indians, such as the band led by Santana, either fled to Mexico or joined other Apache tribes to the west. He chose the site for the Apaches and Navajos because it was far from white settlements. He also wanted the Apaches and Navajo to act as a buffer for any aggressive acts committed upon the white settlements from Kiowas and Comanches to the east of Bosque Redondo.

He thought also that the remoteness and desolation of the reservation would discourage white settlement. The Mescalero Apaches walked miles km to the reservation. By March , Apaches had settled around nearby Fort Sumner. Others had fled west to join fugitive bands of Apaches.

Kit carson biography dreams

By mid-summer, many of the people were planting crops and doing other farm work. On July 7, Carson, with little heart for the Navajo roundup, started the campaign against the tribe. His orders were almost the same as those for the Apache roundup: he was to shoot all males on sight and to take the women and children captives. No peace treaties were to be made until all Navajo were on the reservation.

Carson searched far and wide for the Navajo. He found their homes, fields, animals, and orchards, but the Navajo were experts at disappearing quickly and hiding in their vast lands. The roundup proved frustrating for Carson. He was in his fifties and tired and ill. By autumn , Carson started to burn the Navajo homes and fields and remove their animals from the area.

The Navajo would starve if the destruction continued, and surrendered and were sent to Bosque Redondo. Life at the Bosque had turned grim, and murders took place. The Apaches and Navajos fought. The water in the Pecos contained minerals that gave people cramps and stomach aches. Residents had to walk 12 miles 19 km to find firewood. Carson wanted to take a winter break from the campaign.

Major General Carleton refused and ordered him to invade the Canyon de Chelly , where many Navajos had taken refuge. The historian David Roberts writes, "Carson's sweep through the Canyon de Chelly in the winter of — would prove to be the decisive action in the Campaign. The Canyon de Chelly was a sacred place for the Navajo. They believed that it would now be their strongest sanctuary, and Navajo took refuge on the canyon rim, called Fortress Rock.

They resisted Carson's invasion by building rope ladders and bridges, lowering water pots into a stream, and keeping quiet and out of sight. The Navajo survived the invasion. Few Navajo were killed or captured. Carson's invasion, however, proved to the Navajo that the United States could invade their territory at any time. Many Navajo surrendered at Fort Defiance, Arizona.

By March , there were 3, refugees at Fort Canby, with 5, more joining later. Suffering from the intense cold and hunger, Carson asked for supplies to feed and clothe the Navajo and forced the thousands of them to walk to Bosque Redondo. Many died along the way, and those falling behind were fatally shot. In Navajo history, the horrific trek is known as Long Walk of the Navajo.

By , reports indicated that Bosque Redondo was a complete failure, Major General Carleton was fired, and Congress started investigations. In , a treaty was signed, and the Navajo were allowed to return to their homeland. Bosque Redondo was closed. Adobe Walls was an abandoned trading post that had been blown up by its inhabitants to prevent a takeover by hostile Indians.

It was one of the largest engagements fought on the Great Plains. The battle was the result of General Carleton's belief that Indians were responsible for the continuing attacks on settlers along the Santa Fe Trail. He wanted to punish them and brought in Carson to do the job. With most of the army engaged elsewhere during the American Civil War, the protection that the settlers sought was almost nonexistent.

Carson led cavalry, 75 infantry, and 72 Ute and Jicarilla Apache Army scouts. In addition, he had two mountain howitzers which were fired at the cdr [ ]. On the morning of November 25, Carson discovered and attacked a Kiowa village of lodges. After destroying the village, he moved forward to Adobe Walls. Carson found other Comanche villages in the area and realized he would face a very large force of Native Americans.

A Captain Pettis estimated that 1, to 1, Comanche and Kiowa began to assemble. That number would swell, according to some accounts, to an implausible 3, When Carson ran low on ammunition and howitzer shells, he ordered his men to retreat to a nearby Kiowa village, where they burned the village and many fine buffalo robes. His Indian scouts killed and mutilated four elderly and weak Kiowas.

First Adobe Walls, northeast of Stinnett in Hutchinson County , Texas , was Carson's last military engagement and ended inconclusively. Three of Carson's men died, and twenty-one were wounded. More than warriors lost their lives, and were wounded. The retreat to New Mexico then began with few deaths among Carson's men. General Carleton wrote to Carson: "This brilliant affair adds another green leaf to the laurel wreath which you have so nobly won in the service of your country.

Sherman wrote: "His fame was then at its height, I cannot express my surprise at beholding such a small, stoop-shouldered man, with reddish hair, freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring. He spoke but little and answered questions in monosyllables. Colonel Edward W. Wynkoop wrote: "Kit Carson was five feet five and one half-inches tall, weighed about pounds, of nervy, iron temperament, squarely built, slightly bow-legged, and those members apparently too short for his body.

But, his head and face made up for all the imperfections of the rest of his person. His head was large and well-shaped with yellow straight hair, worn long, falling on his shoulders. His face was fair and smooth as a woman's with high cheekbones, straight nose, a mouth with a firm, somewhat sad expression yet kissable lips, a keen, deep-set but beautiful, mild blue eye, which could become terrible under some circumstances, and like the warning of the rattlesnake, gave notice of attack.

Though quick-sighted, he was slow and soft of speech, and posed great natural modesty. Brewerton wrote: "The Kit Carson of my imagination was over six feet high—a sort of modern Hercules in his build—with an enormous beard, and a voice like a roused lion