Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson (24 December 1809 – 23 May 1868) was an American frontiersman, fur trapper, wilderness guide, Indian agent, and US Army Brigadier-General during the American Civil War and the Plains Indian Wars. The legendary Kit Carson is the namesake of Carson City, Nevada.
Biography[]
Christopher Houston Carson was born in Richmond, Kentucky on 24 December 1809 to a family of Scots-Irish Presbyterian descent. His family later moved to rural Missouri, and he left home at age 16 to become a mountain man and trapper in the American West. In the 1830s, he accompanied Ewing Young on an expedition to California and joined fur trapping expeditions into the Rockies. Carson lived among and married into the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes, and John C. Fremont hired him as a guide during the 1840s. Carson and Fremont would travel throughout much of California, Oregon, and the Rockies, and the two participated in the uprising against Mexican rule in California at the start of the Mexican-American War. Carson served as a scout and courier for the US Army, celebrated for his rescue mission after a battle at San Pasqual in December 1846. He also made a coast-to-coast journey from California to Washington DC to deliver news of the California conflict to the US government. The government made him agent to the Ute and Jicarilla Native Americans, and he would later become the commander of a regiment of Hispanic volunteers from New Mexico during the American Civil War. Carson fought at the Battle of Valverde in 1862, and he later led these forces to suppress the Navajo, Mescalero, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes. Carson was breveted a Brigadier-General and took command of Fort Garland, Colorado, and he was there for a brief amount of time before ill health forced him to retire. Carson died at Fort Lyon, Colorado in 1868 at the age of 58, and he was buried in Taos, New Mexico.
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