“As the legend meets the man head on…the man can’t live up to the legend, because the myths of the West, what later would become the Hollywood stories, well, they’re not reality. Reality is what happens to Mrs. White and her baby. Kit Carson never forgives himself for his failure to rescue
Mrs. White.”— Paul A. Hutton in “Into the Wild Frontier — Kit Carson: Greatest Scout in the West”
The first series in The Frontier Partisans Podcast follows the trail of Kit Carson. There’s a good reason for that. Carson is archetypal. He came from a frontier tribe — the Scots-Irish. He was born in Kentucky and his family followed Daniel Boone’s trail to Missouri. Smitten by dreams of adventure in wild places, a teenaged Carson ran away from an apprenticeship to a saddlemaker and took the Santa Fe Trail into the New Mexico territory. For a decade, he was a Mountain Man, an elite Free Trapper, and a scrapper of epic proportions. He was elevated to great fame as guide to the exploring expeditions of John C. Fremont, and he would serve as an Indian agent and as a military commander.
Once a hero of triumphalist history, he became a villain to revisionists who saw in his campaigns against the Navajo an act of genocide. Of course, Kit Carson was not a colossus of Manifest Destiny, nor a genocidal fiend. Carson was a man — a highly capable frontiersman who, in his own estimation, simply tried to see and do the right thing. Problem was, in the complex and violent world of a frontier West that was undergoing massive, accelerated change from the 1820s through the 1860s, there was never a clear and straight path marked “The Right Thing.”
Ace historian Paul Andrew Hutton rates him as perhaps the greatest of American frontiersmen. After riding with him through a dozen books, along parts of his actual trail in Oregon, Nevada, and California, and the creation of a five-episode podcast series, I’d say he’s right.
Carson is the focus of the next episode of INSP’s Into the Wild Frontier, which drops on Thursday, March 17. The episode does justice to the remarkable man and his uneasy relationship with his own legend.
As with other episodes in this worthy series, the narrative focuses on certain inflection points in the frontiersman’s career: his seduction by tales of Mountain Man clients at the saddle shop and his run West on the Santa Fe Trail; his fortuitous encounter with Fremont; an epic exfiltration through Mexican lines during Mexican War action in California; and, most of all, his failed effort to rescue emigrant Ann White and her infant, who had been taken by Jicarilla Apaches on the Santa Fe Trail in 1849.
That failure was rendered all the more bitter when the U.S. Army rescuers found among her belongings a blood-and-thunder dime novel depicting Kit Carson. The scout felt that Mrs. White must have expected deliverance from him — and she had instead found death from a Jicarilla arrow to the back. He told the soldiers accompanying him to throw the book in the campfire.
As Hutton reflects, there could be no more stark collision of Western myth and Western reality.
Truth is, it wasn’t really Carson’s failure. He had tracked and fixed the Jicarilla raiders despite their expert efforts at escape and evasion, a remarkable feat of scouting. His only failure was failure to persuade the Dragoon commander, Captain William Grier, to attack immediately, a tactic Carson had pursued with success from his days as a Mountain Man. Nevertheless, Carson, being a man of duty above all else, felt responsible for the tragic fate of Mrs. White. Her child was never found.
The episode stops there, in 1849, and does not delve into his later career as an Indian agent and Civil War-era military commander. Just as well — Carson’s role in the Navajo campaigns and The Long Walk deserve an hour or two of their own.
Brandon Irons does a fine job capturing Carson’s self-effacing plainness — those who met him always had a hard time reconciling the mighty legend with the laconic, unimposing man. Yet, for all that, Kit Carson truly was an outstanding figure. He deserves to be remembered, not as a legend, but as a highly capable man who made his way the best he could in a rapidly changing world. I agree with the verdict passed in this worthy episode of Into the Wild Frontier:
“He deserves high acclaim, and a rich and honorable place in our history.”
— C.J. Law, Executive Director, Kit Carson Home & Museum
Matthew says
I enjoyed your podcast on Carson. I’m looking forward to the next episode of Into The Wild Frontier.
David Wrolson says
Remember, Flashman also ran into Carson as well when he escaped from Mangas Colorado’s band and he rode north with him across the future site of Denver. IIRC, some of the poetic passages in Flashman involved that ride north.