Wheeler Peak
New Mexico
July 2013
In order to hike to Wheeler Peak, the highest point in New Mexico, we must first walk in the Carson National Forest. These woodlands were named for Christopher Houston Carson, better known as “Kit Carson.”
Lisa hears Kit Carson and thinks of a PTA mom. I think Kit Carson sounds like a stripper.
Among other job titles in real life, Mr Carson was an “Indian fighter.” Curious then, isn’t it, that he wounded a rival suitor for the affections of an Arapaho babe. Her name was Singing Grass and she died just after childbirth. Carson then married a Cheyenne woman named Making-Our-Road. That marriage ended when she left him to migrate elsewhere with her tribe.
If you must know, Carson married a third time, this time to Josefa Jaramillo, a 14-year-old. They had eight children together.
Carson had quite a career in the 19th century as a courier, scout, mountain man, Indian agent, warrior and military man, all in the name of American settlement. He didn’t seem to do too badly in the romance department either.
You may wonder, what must one do, or be, to be labeled an “Indian agent?” At this time, the white settlers were inexorably moving west. Carson became sympathetic to the Native Americans when he saw the devastating effect the Western migration had on them. I don’t know, do you think that taking two of them as wives might have played into his changing attitude? Done with killing Natives, Carson now interpreted Indian attacks on the white settlements to be acts of desperation in response to the white folks attacking the Natives. To keep them from being wiped out, Carson advocated for the creation of reservations, supposedly safe places for the Natives to dwell.
Later, as a soldier, one of his duties was to relocate Navajos to reservation land, some 300 miles away. This required a brutal journey; hundreds of Navajos died on this “Long Walk.” So you could say Kit Carson had a mixed history with the Natives.