The Nevada state capital is Carson City located 30 miles south of Reno. Carson City is named after the frontier man Kit Carson and he was quite a character.

Lauded as a hero for his courageous contributions to his country, the rugged outdoorsman also had a darker side. Perhaps more than anyone, Kit Carson witnessed the dawn of the American West.

The unassuming man of small stature was not only at hand for the most important moments in the early days of the West, he played a pivotal role in its assimilation into the United States.

The West hinged on his deeds, and swung the way of America because of his competence.

Carson spent his youth haunting the rugged watersheds of the untamed nineteenth-century West as a fur trapper. He led expeditions over remote mountain passes into fugitive lands teeming with grizzly bears, venomous snakes, hostile natives and murderous bandits.

He befriended Native American tribes, marrying into them while assimilating their skillful and integrative approach to the feral land. But he fought the natives, too, at times ruthlessly, burning villages of the Navajo before marching them to a paltry reservation.

Carson personified the ambivalence we have toward the early West - on the one hand embodying freedom, courage, resourcefulness and self-reliance but also the racial animosity, brutality and wanton violence.

He wasn’t the gunslinger of Hollywood dreams, but he was a crack marksman with a rifle or a pistol. He wasn’t an outlaw, because he roamed the West before there were any laws to be followed.



The West knew no shortage of whiskey-swilling, prostitute-chasing pioneers, but Carson rarely drank or chased women. “Clean as a hound’s tooth” was how he was described by associates.

Carson stood about 5 feet 4 inches with a surprising reserve of sinewy strength, a decisive man of action whose favorite phrase was “done so.” He was fiercely loyal and reliable in a pinch, though too humble to boast of accomplishments.

Carson’s personality had an underside, however. He had a quick temper, which could turn violent abruptly, and he wasn’t above brutality. Carson was of Scotch Irish descent and he harbored his people’s legendary propensity to nurse a grudge.

But there was no more consummate outdoorsman of his day. Carson could break a wild horse or cure a hobbled mule. He knew how to orient a camp against raids and could be on his horse and at the ready with a gun in no time. He was a prodigious hunter, an adept fisherman and could smith a gun part or forge pieces of equipment as required.

His skill as a tracker was peerless. He knew watersheds with the feel of a modern hydrologist and he maintained a mapmaker’s eye for landscape, serving him well in days as a scout.

For Carson, topography revealed its secret watering holes in the swerve of its swales and the bend of its hills. Carson knew the way to cross a desert and stave off thirst by extracting water from cactus roots.

During his time as a young fur trapper, he acquired fluency in French and Spanish. He grew to know enough native languages - including Navajo, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Blackfeet and Ute - to become a crafty negotiator with various tribes, brokering both trades and ceasefires.

But he was also illiterate, a fact that caused him no little grief.

The inferiority complex he harbored as a result made him comfortable playing deferential roles to men like John C. Fremont, the politician, soldier and explorer.

The 11th of 14 sons, Christopher “Kit” Carson was born in Kentucky on Christmas Eve in 1809 - the same state and year as Abraham Lincoln. When Carson was a year old, his family headed west to Missouri.

Carson earned his nickname almost immediately, being smaller than his brothers. But his family soon learned to respect the boy’s burgeoning moxy and the courage he casually displayed running around the family farm in Boone’s Lick, Missouri.

In 1818, Carson’s father was killed by a falling limb, forcing the young man to abandon his schooling at age 14 to help earn money. His lack of schooling would weigh heavily on his self worth for the rest of his life.

“I jumped to my rifle and threw down my spelling book, and thar it lies,” Carson said at the end of his life while dictating his memoirs.

Soon after his father’s demise, Carson was apprenticed to a saddle repairman named David Workman in Franklin, Missouri, situated at the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail.

In Franklin, Carson was exposed to the adventurous tales of fur traders headed west into the territory of New Mexico. Soon Carson abandoned the saddle repair enterprise, which he considered laborious, and set out on the trail in August 1826.

For the next two decades Carson roamed the hinterlands of the continent, venturing as far as the Pacific Northwest. Learning from legendary trappers like Jim Bridger, Carson spent years hunting beaver across the rugged West, acquiring comprehensive knowledge of the varied landscape of Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.



He befriended many Native Americans, and made enemies too. He learned the natives’ sign language, their usage of smoke signals and acquired their skillful integration with the Western landscape.

The surest sign of Carson’s connection with the indigenous culture of the American West came in 1835 at an annual gathering of fur trappers and native tribes held on the banks of the Green River in Wyoming - where the wild men and women of the West gathered to drink, gamble and carouse.

There, Carson courted a great Arapaho beauty who went by the name of Singing Grass. But he had to fight to win her hand.

He was in direct competition for her charms with Joseph Chouinard - a large French-Canadian man referred to as “The Bully of the Mountains.”

Carson harbored a lifetime hatred of bullies and relished any opportunity to set them right. In the case of Chouinard, the two men got into a heated argument over Singing Grass before discharging their guns at close range. While Chouinard’s bullet grazed Carson just under his ear, earning him a scar he would wear the rest of his days, Carson’s bullet struck Chouinard in the hand, tearing off his thumb.

His defeat of Chouinard left Carson free to pursue and eventually marry Singing Grass, who went on to bear Carson two daughters. Singing Grass died of fever shortly after giving birth to the second child.

While Carson’s marriage to Singing Grass exhibited his respect of Native Americans and their way of life, the mountain man also spent much of his youth in open hostility with natives of the West.

Carson hated the Blackfeet tribe in particular after catching an arrow in the shoulder during a battle in the early 1830s. From then on, he bore a grudge against the tribe and never passed an opportunity to confront its members.



But by 1840, the Blackfeet were the least of his concerns, as Carson was left contemplating his future as the fur trapping industry declined due to shifting fashions and a depleted beaver population.

Carson and John C. Fremont lead group to explore California’s expansive and diverse geography. During this journey, one incident in particular contributed to the increasing profile of Carson in the national imagination.

As Fremont’s men navigated the Mojave desert, they came upon two straggling travelers, an older Mexican man and a boy, in poor condition. The pair divulged they had been traveling with a large party that included two more men and two women when they were ambushed by natives, who killed the two men and staked the women to the ground, sexually mutilated and killed them, and stole the party’s 30 horses.

After hearing the tale, Carson set off immediately with his friend Alexis Godey in the direction the culprits had fled. It took days of hard riding through pitiless desert, but the two men finally located the raiders. Despite their meager numbers, Carson and Godey rushed the camp, killing two of the thieves while scattering the rest. They scalped the dead and made off with all 30 of the stolen horses. The mounts were restored to the Mexican man and the boy in short order.

The feat stunned Fremont, who thought Carson would surely perish in the endeavor.

“Two men, in a savage desert, pursue day and night an unknown body of Indians into the defiles of an unknown mountain - attack them on sight, without counting numbers - and defeat them in an instant,” he wrote in his report.

Fremont said that episode more than any other demonstrated that Carson “trained to western enterprise from early life.”



After Fremont published his report, the episode became a central anecdote in the dime novels printed about Carson, who was lauded throughout the nation as a true Western hero.

Carson played an unofficial but crucial role in the Mexican-American War and the American conquest of California.

Following the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846, an event that’s credited with starting the Mexican-American War, John C. Fremont installed himself as the military leader of California. Soon after, Fremont entrusted Carson with documents to deliver to President Polk.

Carson was making haste to the nation’s capital with the documents when he was intercepted by U.S. General Stephen Kearny, who was operating in New Mexico under the orders of the president. Polk wanted Kearny to chase the Mexican residents out of New Mexico and meet up with forces newly landed in California.

Kearny told Carson he needed a guide to San Diego. Soon after Carson was requisitioned as a guide, Kearny blundered into a battle near the village of San Pasqual, California. During the battle, the Mexicans used long lances and swords to injure and kill the American soldiers who were unfamiliar with the terrain and style of fight. A good part of Kearny’s forces were destroyed or badly injured and the general himself suffered serious wounds.

During the fight, Carson - despite never being an official member of the U.S. military - performed better than most of his fellow soldiers, recognizing the superiority of the Mexicans’ weapons for close fighting. Instead of rushing into the fray, Carson took cover in the brush and, using his trusty rifle, began picking off rival soldiers with a cold efficiency.

By many accounts, Carson factored largest in ensuring the American army wasn’t entirely routed that day. But Kearny’s army was hurt and outnumbered and taking shelter on a nearby hill.

With water and food running thin, it was up to Carson to save the day. Using the cover of darkness, Carson and two other soldiers removed their boots to sneak past the line of expectant Mexican sentinels. The only problem was the men lost those boots during their escape, meaning Carson was forced to walk 25 miles barefoot across the desert to alert reinforcements about the grave state of Kearny’s army.

“Finally got through, but had the misfortune to lose our shoes,” Carson recounted in his memoirs. “Had to travel over a country covered with prickly pear and rocks, barefoot.” Carson reached San Diego and alerted the reinforcements, who swiftly rode to Kearny’s rescue just as the general had forsaken hope of salvation.

Thus Carson played one of the most instrumental roles in the war that would lead to the incorporation of New Mexico and California while displaying an uncanny knack for putting his stamp on the major events at the dawn of the West.

In 1861, Carson began his official military career when the Civil War broke out, joining the Union Army. Carson led the First Regiment of the New Mexico Volunteers - the mountain man turned soldier rallied the regiment to help repel the Confederate forces, forcing them to flee to Texas in August.

Kit Carson died at age 58 on May 23, 1868. According to H.R. Hilton, the doctor who tended to Carson in his death throes, the frontiersman’s last words were “Compadre, adios.”



Carson’s courage, resourcefulness, abilities as an outdoorsman and skills as a soldier are not exaggerations. He was the genuine article present for the glory at the birth of the West.