Kit Carson: The One-Cent Runaway Who Led the Navajo Long Walk Campaign

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Christopher "Kit" Carson grew up on the Missouri frontier; his father was killed by a falling tree limb when Kit was about eight, and he was later apprenticed to saddle maker David Workman. In 1826, at 16, he ran away with a Santa Fe Trail caravan, and Workman offered one cent for his return. Based in Taos, he worked as a trapper from 1829, selling pelts at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, until silk hats and overtrapping ended the beaver trade around 1840. He then met John C. Frémont of the Topographical Engineers, who hired him as a guide for $100 a month, and Frémont's reports made Carson a national hero.

The expeditions included violence that the reports left out: in 1846 Frémont's party attacked a Wintu village on the Sacramento River, killing an estimated 120 to 300 people, then destroyed a Klamath village. Carson, illiterate but fluent in many languages, became a federal Indian agent in 1854. Under General James Carleton during the Civil War he forced the surrender of the Mescalero Apache and, in the winter of 1863 to 1864, waged a scorched earth campaign through Canyon de Chelly that drove the Navajo into the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. He died in 1868 at 58, a month after his wife Josefa Jaramillo.

• In 1834 two grizzly bears chased him up a tree, and one shook it to knock him down.
• In 1849 a rescue of Ann White failed after an officer ignored his advice to attack at once; a dime novel about Carson was found in the camp.
• His wives were Singing Grass, an Arapaho woman, a Cheyenne woman and Josefa Jaramillo of Taos.
• He fought his last major battle at Adobe Walls in 1864, covering his retreat with mountain howitzers.
• William Tecumseh Sherman met him in Monterey in 1847 and found a soft-spoken man of about five foot five.