Looping Across Kit Carson’s Southwest
Celebrating his 200th birthday by going full circle from Taos, New Mexico.
By: Johnny D. Boggs 11/03/2009
A banner whips in the wind over the main drag as I drive into Taos, New Mexico, and I figure that Kit Carson is getting his due. I should have known better.
Kit Carson? Who’s that? This is Taos, which has always played by its own rules.
In 2009, Taos was celebrating the 40th anniversary of Easy Rider with the “Taos Summer of Love.” Now I’ve been called a hippie; I can rock out to Steppenwolf, and I give Dennis Hopper a lot of credit for creating one of the most influential movies of the 1960s (it was shot partially in Taos). But Taos wouldn’t have had any hippie communes if not for Kit Carson, and this is his 200th birthday.
Born on December 24, 1809, in Madison County, Kentucky, Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson grew up on a farm near Boone’s Lick, Missouri. As a mountain man, explorer, guide, trapper, soldier, hunter, Indian agent and rancher, he left his mark across the West. Yet he has also been criticized, maligned, debunked and downright despised—I’m a little conflicted about him myself—so you can’t blame Taos for saluting peace, love and art in what became Carson’s hometown.
Over at the Kit Carson Home & Museum, interpreter Teresita Mascarenas hears criticism about Carson practically every day. For years, a Tewa Indian woman named Clara has blasted Mascarenas with verbal assaults such as, “You work for that criminal, Kit Carson!” And she is one of Mascarenas’s best friends.
Kit’s Legacy
Apprenticed to a saddlemaker after his father’s accidental death, Carson ran away from Missouri in 1826 and joined a wagon train bound for Santa Fe, New Mexico. He settled in Taos, although he was seldom home, making his name as a trapper, hunter and guide, marrying two Indian women (one died, one divorced him) before marrying Josefa Jaramillo of Taos in 1843. He was 34. She was 14. Their three-room home (now five rooms) was probably built in 1825 and was a wedding gift from Carson’s in-laws. They hated him, but Josefa loved him.
Carson earned a national reputation after he hooked up with John C. Frémont in a steamboat on the Missouri River. Carson guided Frémont’s group to South Pass, Wyoming, in 1842, and led another exploration in 1843-44 that covered much of Utah, Oregon and California. Buffalo Bill Cody named his son after Carson. “His reputation is not tainted with the moral stains that cloud the names of so many Western men who marched in the van of civilization,” Cody wrote of his hero.
He’d get a lot of argument today.
For a hero—even for a contemptible villain—Carson wasn’t much to look at.
“I was very anxious to see a man who had achieved such feats of daring among the wild animals of the Rocky Mountains, and still wilder Indians of the Plains...,” recalled William T. Sherman in his memoirs. “I cannot express my surprise at beholding a small, stoop-shouldered man, with reddish hair, freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring. He spoke but little, and answered questions in monosyllables.”
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