Kit Carson, my relative
Christopher Houston Carson was born in Madison County Kentucky near Richmond December 24, 1809. He died in Colorado May 23, 1868 - what happened in those 58 years? Kit is usually an abbreviation of the given names Christopher, Katherine and Kathleen.
His father, a Revolutionary War veteran, moved the family to the Bluegrass State from North Carolina. After a two-year stay in the commonwealth, they again continued westward to Boone's Lick, Howard County, Missouri, when Kit was about one year old . (Boone’s Lick to Kansas City is about 2 hours nowadays)
Cornelia was getting married to Dan Weinberg, about the time Kit was born, but they did have family get togethers before he turned 15, about 1814.
Carson came from an impoverished family. After the death of his father, Carson apprenticed to become a saddler. Carson detested the work. At 15 Carson ran away from his home in Missouri to join a caravan of traders bound for Santa Fe. From experienced frontiersmen he learned fur trapping and trading, a career he pursued for 15 years.
New Mexico in 1826, he settled and married Singing Grass, a member of the Arapaho Tribe. Carson hunted and trapped in the West for the next decade. Upon the death of Singing Grass, Carson traveled to Missouri to place his daughter Adaline in the care of his family.
While travelling back from Missouri, Carson happened to meet with John C. Frémont. In 1842, Carson served as a guide for Frémont as he explored the Oregon Trail. In 1843 and 1845 he helped guide Frémont’s next two expeditions.
On his third Western expedition in 1845-46 military explorer John C. Frémont and legendary scout Kit Carson led a raid on Klamath Lake Indian village in retaliation for a night ambush that had killed three expedition members.
Frémont ‘s memoirs say 10 raiders including 4 Delaware Indians attacked the village on May 10, 1846 killing 14 Indians and burning village huts and wooden scaffolds laden with drying fish. Historians say possibly more were killed.
Later that day, Frémont saved Kit’s life.
Frémont wrote, “ … we came suddenly upon an Indian scout. He was drawing his arrow to its head … and Carson attempted to fire, but his rifle snapped, and as he swerved away the Indian was about to let his arrow go into him; I fired, … failed to kill the Indian, but [my horse] Sacramento … was not afraid of anything and I jumped him directly upon the Indian and threw him to the ground. His arrow went wild.” A Delaware clubbed him to death.
At day’s end Frémont wrote, “I had now kept the promise I made to myself and had punished these people well for their treachery.”
Carson was perhaps the most famous trapper and guide in the West. He traveled with the expeditions of John C. Fremont in the 1840s, leading Fremont through the Great Basin. Fremont’s flattering portrayal of Carson made the mountain man a hero when the reports were published and widely read in the east. Later, Carson guided Stephen Watts Kearney to New Mexico during the Mexican-American War. In the 1850s he became the Indian agent for New Mexico, a position he left in 1861 to accept a commission as lieutenant colonel in the 1st New Mexico Volunteers.
He served under Major General James Henry Carleton in his campaign to subdue the Mescalero Apache. Carson also led forces during the Indian Wars, suppressing the Navajo, Mescalero Apache, Kiowa and Comanche tribes by destroying their food sources.
Later, he was brevetted a Brigadier General and took command of Fort Garland, Colorado, until declining health forced him to retire from military Life.
After his death in 1868 from an aortic aneurysm, during the late 19th century, Kit Carson became a legendary symbol of America’s frontier experience. Who were the Kit Carson wives? They include Arapaho woman Waa-Nibe, who died three years after their marriage; Cheyenne woman Making Out Road, who divorced Carson after 14 months; and Josefa Jaramillo, the fourteen year old daughter of a prominent Taos family and mother of Carson's seven children.
The Carson family, our relatives come from Scot Irish descent.
In the 17th century the British leaders decided to settle Protestants in the Northern Ireland province of Ulster. They chose to use the Presbyterians of Lowland Scotland. This migration started about 1605. Scot-Irish are those moved on to other lands in the 1700s when they would not succumb to the "Anglican ascendancy" or mix with "papish Catholics" in Ireland.
More than 250,000 of these Scot-Irish emigrated to the American colonies between 1717 and the American Revolutionary War. These Presbyterian "Scot-Irish" were the majority of settlers who first moved over the Appalachians. Men such as Daniel Boone and Kit Carson. And they kept moving. To Kentucky. To Tennessee. To Missouri. And, eventually into Texas.
Returning to Ireland was never a thought. The Catholic and Protestant tension was just too deadly.
