| Kit Carson stares out of a photograph in my office. Looking stiff and uncomfortable in his colonel's uniform, hair unkempt and a definite frown suggesting his demeanor, Kit was not the most photogenic of frontier figures. In fact, he sometimes had to be cajoled into getting his portrait taken. Much more bothersome to Kit than the camera's unforgiving lens, though, was the role of mythic western hero that had been squarely thrust upon him before the age of fortya distorted image of himself that had quickly taken on a life of its own. Nurturing that image along, of course, was an adoring public with a seemingly endless fascination with the famous frontiersman and his exploits, both real and imagined. To a certain extent, that fascination persists to this day, over 125 years after Carson's death, although the adulation so common in the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth is conspicuously absent. Indeed, the man frozen in my photo has become an entirely different personage to many Americans. Instead of Kit Carson, the "celebrated mountaineer," he is now Kit Carson, the "pint-size, illiterate Indian-killer."1 |
| Born Christopher Houston Carson in 1809, Kit's first encounter with notoriety came when he ran away from a dull apprenticeship with a saddler, David Workman, in Franklin, Missouri, in 1826. Workman placed a notice in the local paper, offering a ludicrous one-cent reward for the return of the boy, described as "small of his age but thick-set, [with] light hair."2But Kit probably never saw the now-famous notice, which undoubtedly cost more than the reward offered, for he had joined up with a Santa Fe Trail caravan to see the exotic Far West. For the next three years, he led a transient's life on the plains and mountains, working variously as a teamster, cook, and interpreter, before beginning a long and productive career as a beaver trapper, better known today as a mountain man. |
|
