-Born on December 24, 1809, Christopher "Kit" Carson
-He grew up on the Missouri frontier on lands bought from the sons of frontiersman Daniel Boone
-He and his family often feared attacks on their cabin from Native Americans.
-Nietzsche said that a man can only become a man when his father dies
-When Carson's father, a farmer, died in 1818, Carson did his best to help out his mother, who had 10 children to raise on her own. He knew that he wouldn't be able to receive an education because of this. Carson never learned to read, he was actually ashamed of it.
-Carson was apprenticed to a saddlemaker in Franklin, Missouri, at age 14, but he longed for freedom and adventure. In 1826, Carson fled Franklin, breaking his contract with the saddlemaker. He headed west on the Santa Fe Trail, working as a laborer in a caravan of merchants.
-Many frontiersman taught Kit how to be a trapper and fur-trader, this would be something he would pursue for the next 15 years
-Carson started working as a mountain man when he was 20 years old. Along with well-known mountain men like Jim Bridger and Old Bill Williams, he traversed numerous regions of the American West. In Taos during the winter of 1828–1829, he worked as Ewing Young's cook.
-He went on Young's 1829 trapping excursion with him. Carson's formative years in the mountains are attributed to Young's leadership and the venture's experience.
-The group entered Apache country along the Gila River in August 1829. The assault on the expedition was Carson's first exposure to physical conflict. Young's party continued on to Alta California; they traded and trapped in California from Sacramento in the north to Los Angeles in the south; and in April 1830, after having trapped along the Colorado River, they made their way back to Taos, New Mexico.
-As a mountain guy, Carson's life was not simple. He had to keep the beavers he caught from traps for months at a time until the annual Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, which was held in remote locations around the West, such as the banks of the Green River in Wyoming. The needs of an independent life, such as fish hooks, wheat, and tobacco, were purchased with the money earned in exchange for the pelts.
-Carson had to tend to his wounds and take care of himself because there was little to no medical access in the various areas where he worked. Indians and white people occasionally fought. The deer skins that Carson wore back then were stiffened from being exposed to the elements for a while.
-After arriving in Taos, Carson joined a wagon train rescue party, and Young had the chance to see Carson's bravery and horsemanship in action even though the villains had already departed the scene of the crimes.
-In 1831, Carson joined a different expedition that was being headed by Thomas Fitzpatrick and William Levin. To the central Rocky Mountains, Fitzpatrick, Levin, and his trappers traveled north. For almost ten years, Carson would go hunting and trapping in the West. He was regarded as a dependable man and skilled combatant.
-The previous gathering took place in 1840. The fur trade started to decline at that point. Instead of beaver hats, fashionable men in London, Paris, and New York City preferred silk hats. Additionally, overexploitation was causing beaver populations in North America to decline quickly. Carson realized it was time to look for new employment. "Beaver was getting scarce, it became necessary to try our hand at something else," he wrote in his memoirs.
-After a chance meeting with the explorer John C. Frémont in 1842, Carson became involved in the imperial struggle that finally led to the expansion of the continental United States' boundaries to their current extent, which included Alaska.
-In 1842, 1843, and 1844, he worked as a guide for Frémont's government-funded explorations of the West. In 1846, at the end of the third voyage, he was in California when Frémont instigated the revolt that has come to be known as the Bear Flag Revolt. Gen. Stephen W. Kearny, who was on his way to California with orders from the president to assume control of the territory for the United States, met Carson while he was traveling to Washington, D.C. with dispatches from Frémont. Kearny pressed Carson into duty as a guide for his forces.
-From that point on until the end of the Mexican War (1846–48), Carson alternated between leading and directing troops and carrying dispatches to Washington, where his reputation for valor, patriotism, and devotion to duty earned him many allies in high office.
-Carson, who had married Arapaho and Cheyenne women, worked for the Ute as an allegedly sympathetic Indian agent in Taos in 1854. But by 1861, he had returned to the front lines and was serving the Union in the Southwest theater of the American Civil War as Colonel Carson of the 1st New Mexico Volunteers.
-He was given orders to defeat the Navajo people in 1863 as they fought for ownership of their ancestral lands. Carson directed the wholesale devastation of the tribe's homes, crops, and animals with the help of the Navajo's adversaries, notably the Ute, Hopi, and Zuni.
-After the Navajo gave up in 1864, Carson sent about 8,000 of them on what is known as the Long Walk, a 300-mile (480-km) forced march to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico Territory, a region not suitable for the agriculture the Navajo had cultivated in their native Canyon de Chelly.
-In November 1864, Carson fought his last significant engagement at Adobe Walls, a trading post in the Texas Panhandle. Before directing a withdrawal, he led a force of about 300 volunteers to a draw against thousands of Kiowa and Comanche. He was employed as Colorado Territory's superintendent of Indian affairs from January 1868 until the time of his passing.
-Carson returned to Taos to make an effort to transition into a career as a businessman and rancher following the transfer of California and New Mexico to the United States as a result of the Mexican-American War.
-Midway through 1853, Carson departed New Mexico with 7,000 churro sheep that had short legs in order to follow the California Trail across Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada to California. He was transporting them to residents in southern and northern Oregon and California. Six "Spaniards," seasoned New Mexicans from the haciendas of the Rio Abajo, were with Carson to herd the sheep.
-Cheap novels and nonfiction satisfied readers' needs for enjoyment during the second half of the nineteenth century. The House of Beadle, established in 1860, was one of the major publishing houses. In one study, "Kit Carson and Dime Novels, the Making of a Legend" by Darlis Miller, it is noted that over the years 1860–1901, about 70 dime novels about Kit were either released, re–published with new titles, or included in new works.
-Carson was made a brevet brigadier general on March 13, 1865, and given charge of Ft. Garland, Colorado, in the center of Ute country, since the Indian Wars battles were winding down at the time. Carson helped with government relations and had many Ute friends in the region.
-Carson began ranching after being mustered out of the army and settled in Boggsville, Bent County. Carson traveled to Washington, DC in 1868 at the request of Washington and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, where he escorted a number of Ute Chiefs to meet with the US President and request aid for their tribe.
-Josefa, his wife, passed away from complications shortly after giving birth to their ninth child. Carson was devastated by her passing. At the presence of Dr. Tilton and his friend Thomas Boggs, he passed away on May 23, 1868, at the age of 58, in the surgeon's quarters at Fort Lyon, Colorado. His final remarks were "Friends, farewell. Goodbye, comrades." His abdominal aortic aneurysm was the reason for his demise. Taos, New Mexico is where he is buried.