The Reading Room

Kit Carson in 1846: The Scout as Instrument of Conquest

There are two Kit Carsons, and they do not get along. One is the dime-novel hero, the buckskin saint who rescues white captives from villainy and reads the wilderness like a book. The other is the man who was actually there in 1846, guiding John C. Frémont north into Klamath country and then back down through the conquest of California. The first Carson was invented in print and sold by the steamboat-load. The second left a record, and the record is harder to love.

The mountain man before the myth

Carson came to Frémont already shaped by twenty years in the trade that first opened the interior West. He was born in Kentucky in 1809 and raised on the Missouri frontier, apprenticed young to a saddler in a town at the head of the Santa Fe Trail. He ran off as a teenager, attached himself to a merchant caravan bound for New Mexico, and made his way to Taos, which became the closest thing he had to a home for the rest of his life. From there he went into the mountains as a trapper, working the Rockies and the Great Basin through the 1820s and 1830s, learning the country and the peoples who lived in it the only way a trapper could, by moving through their land season after season.

That world was ending as Carson reached middle age. The beaver hat had built the fur trade, and when fashion turned to silk the trade fell apart and the mountain men had to find other work. Carson took a hunter's job supplying meat at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas. In 1842, aboard a Missouri River steamboat, he fell into conversation with a young Army topographer named Frémont, who was assembling his first expedition and needed a guide. Carson offered himself, and the two men found in each other what each one needed. Frémont got a guide who could read terrain, find water, and speak with the nations whose country he meant to cross. Carson got a place at the center of the government's grand project of mapping and claiming the West. He guided the first expedition, then the second, and by the time the third expedition set out in 1845 the partnership was settled and the scout had become indispensable.

How the legend was manufactured

It helps to remember how the legend got made. Carson did not write himself into fame. Frémont's expedition reports did that, and Frémont's reports were largely composed by his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, daughter of the powerful Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. She took her husband's field notes and turned them into the kind of prose newspapers wanted to reprint, and in those pages Carson became the indispensable guide, cool under fire, fluent in every danger of the West. By 1848 a Baltimore hatter was selling a "Kit Carson Cap" and a steamboat carried his name. When the dime novelists arrived a year later, casting him as "the prince of backwoodsmen," the brand already existed. Charles Averill's 1849 potboiler set the template. Carson, who could not read it, is said to have remarked of such books that "every statement made is false."

Two things gave the printed Carson his authority. The first was the source. Frémont's reports came stamped with the government's own weight, because Congress ordered them printed and distributed, which put the tale of the daring guide under the seal of the state. Emigrants read them as practical guides to the overland trails, and in reading them absorbed the scout as a settled fact of the West. The second was timing. The reports landed just as a cheap fiction industry was learning to sell excitement by the thousand, and Carson made perfect raw material. The novelists took the outline the reports had drawn and filled it with rescues, duels, and last-minute escapes, most of them invented, all of them fixed to a real name.

The distance between the two Carsons can be measured in his own flat dismissal of the books. He understood better than his readers that the figure on the page was a product, assembled from his reputation and sold back to a public that wanted a frontier hero. The documented scout kept doing the work of the expeditions while the printed scout grew larger every year, and the two drifted so far apart that the acts of 1846 could be dropped from the legend without anyone missing them.

Kit Carson and Frémont's 1846 expedition to Klamath Lake

The documented Carson of Kit Carson 1846 begins with Frémont's third expedition, a column of roughly sixty well-armed men that the War Department officially called scientific and unmilitary. The men did not behave like surveyors. In April, before any of the violence around Klamath Lake, the expedition fell on a Wintu village near the Sacramento River, an unprovoked attack that left a great many people dead. Carson's own later description of it was four words: "a perfect butchery." That phrase deserves to sit next to the cap and the steamboat. The famous scout was a participant in a massacre months before the events that would, in the legend, make him a hero.

Then came Klamath Lake. Frémont had pushed north to the lake when a messenger, Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, caught up with him carrying word from Washington and from Senator Benton. The party turned back south, and on the night of May 9, 1846, men who had followed Gillespie attacked the camp in the dark. Two or three of Frémont's men were killed. Carson was woken, by one account, by the sound of an axe striking a sleeping man's head. The grief in camp was real, and the response was indiscriminate. Frémont's own account has Carson taking an axe to a dead attacker and knocking "his head to pieces."

What followed was not pursuit of the guilty. A few days later the expedition attacked and burned a Klamath village on the Williamson River, killing at least fourteen people, with no evidence that this village had any part in the night raid. The men who died at the camp were avenged on whoever was nearest. This is the heart of the matter, and it is the subject of its own piece in this Reading Room, Frémont at Klamath Lake. Carson did not order the expedition north or write the dispatches that turned it around. He was the instrument by which its anger found a target.

The pattern in these weeks is worth naming plainly. At the Wintu village, at the night camp, and on the Williamson River, the expedition answered a shock or a fear with force turned on whoever was in reach, and in each case Carson was present and took part. He followed the course that Frémont set, and that was his use. The value of a guide like Carson to a commander like Frémont lay in exactly this, that he would do hard and bloody work competently and without complaint, and then ride on. That is what an instrument is. The reprisal on the Williamson River, falling on people with no shown connection to the night raid, is the clearest case, and it belongs to the same hands that would later carry a wounded command's plea across the desert.

Kit Carson, California, and the conquest of 1846

Back in California, the expedition slid from exploration into war. Kit Carson California in the summer of 1846 means the Bear Flag Revolt, the settler uprising that Frémont's armed presence emboldened. Here the record turns ugly in a specific, personal way. During the revolt Frémont ordered the killing of three unarmed Californios, José de los Reyes Berreyesa and his two young relatives, to keep word of the rising from reaching the Mexican authorities. By more than one account the man Frémont told to carry out the order was Carson. There is no version of that episode that fits a dime novel.

That killing has a name and a place. It happened at San Rafael, on the north side of the bay, when the three men came across the water and were seized as they landed. Frémont meant to keep the rising quiet and to leave no prisoners behind, and the order to shoot the three down was carried out on the spot. It is one of the ugliest single acts of the California conquest, and it has its own piece in this Reading Room, San Rafael, 1846. That the man most often named as the one who fired is also the celebrated scout of the reports and the dime novels is the whole difficulty of Carson gathered into one figure.

The autumn brought the United States Army into the picture and Carson into his most famous role, the courier. He was carrying dispatches east across the continent when he met General Stephen Watts Kearny's column near Socorro in October and reported that the U.S. Navy under Commodore Stockton had largely taken California already. On the strength of that report Kearny sent most of his dragoons back and pressed on with about a hundred men, with a reluctant Carson turned around to guide them. The decision led straight to the Fremont conquest's bloodiest day for the Army.

On December 6, 1846, at San Pasqual near San Diego, Californio lancers under Andrés Pico met Kearny's exhausted, rain-soaked command and cut it badly. With the survivors pinned and surrounded, Kearny sent Carson and the naval lieutenant Edward Beale ahead for help. The two crossed roughly twenty-five miles of desert on foot, by night, through cactus and rock, and lost their shoes doing it. Carson's own summary of the ordeal was characteristic: "Finally got through, but had the misfortune to lose our shoes." Stockton sent a relief column and the siege broke. This is the Carson the legend likes, the man who walks barefoot through the dark to save the trapped command, and it is true. It is just not the whole man, and the legend keeps the night march while losing the Wintu village and the Williamson River.

San Pasqual is the moment the legend chose. A barefoot night march to save trapped men is a clean story, easy to admire and easy to reprint, and it asks nothing uncomfortable of the reader. It carried its own weight into the newspapers and then into the books, and it did honest work in building the courier's fame. The trouble is only what it crowded out. The same year that produced the march produced the Wintu village, the Williamson River, and the shore at San Rafael, and the country kept the march and let the rest fall out of the frame.

Reading the scout against the legend

None of this makes Carson a cartoon villain, which would be its own kind of lie. He spoke Native languages, lived among the Arapaho and the Cheyenne, and married into both. He was, by the standards of the men around him, neither cruel for sport nor especially boastful. When the worst chapter of his life arrived years later, the 1863 to 1864 campaign that starved the Navajo into surrender and sent them on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, he carried it out under Army orders and there is evidence he found parts of it bitter. He was a competent, capable man who did what the conquest required and let other people make him famous for it.

The Navajo campaign is where the instrument reached its full length. By then Carson was an officer, and the order to burn the fields and orchards and drive a people off their land came down through the Army chain he served. The work starved the Navajo into surrender and set them on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, and it is of a piece with the smaller reprisals of 1846, the same competence turned to the same purpose on a larger scale. Whatever private bitterness he carried, he carried the order out. A man who is very good at the empire's work will be handed the empire's worst work, and the record of Carson is the proof.

The skilled hand and the renegade

This is the ground where Carson meets the concerns of Enos. The West of 1846 ran on skilled frontier operators, men who could guide, translate, track, and fight, and who made themselves useful to whatever power was moving through their country. Carson was the celebrated version of that man. Enos was another version of it, a guide who did the expedition's work in the same years and the same country, and who was hanged at Port Orford, with no hat and no steamboat carrying his name. The difference between those two fates is a fact about who the story was written to flatter, and it says little about the two men themselves. One became the emblem of the frontier. The other became a renegade. Both did the work the empire required.

That is exactly why he matters to the story of 1846. The frontier hero of the cap and the dime novel was real enough to walk barefoot to San Diego and real enough to burn a village that had done nothing. Both belong to the same person, and the country chose to remember one and forget the other. Frémont, whose ambition drove the whole northern arc and who would later answer for his conduct, is the subject of his own court-martial. Carson was the hand; the head was Frémont. He is the figure the novel Enos keeps in the corner of the eye in that year of 1846, the celebrated scout seen from the wrong side, the side that did not get a hat named after it. For who is doing the watching, see Who was Enos?

Sources & further reading

• Kit Carson — Wikipedia (overview of the 1846 expedition, Klamath and Wintu attacks, San Pasqual, and the later Navajo campaign, with sourced quotations from Carson's memoir).
• Frémont and Kit Carson at Upper Klamath Lake — Oregon History Project (Oregon Historical Society), by Stephen Most.
• Kit Carson — PBS, The West (Ken Burns / New Perspectives on the West).
• Kit Carson — American Battlefield Trust biography (Bear Flag Revolt, dispatch rides, San Pasqual).
• Battle of San Pasqual — Wikipedia (Kearny, Pico, and the December 1846 engagement near San Diego).