Frontiersman Christopher “Kit” Carson—a legend in his own lifetime— was in California several times during its Mexican period, as a trapper, an explorer, a participant in revolutionary activities against Mexican authority; an express courier, and a covert messenger during the short-lived, but infamous, battle between opposing forces that occurred some thirty miles north of San Diego in 1846.
Kit Carson first forayed into California in the spring of 1830, with seasoned mountain man Ewing Young, and Young’s 40 fur trappers. Entering the Mexican-owned province via the southern route—completely without sanction—Young’s party soon ranged as far north as the Sacramento River, recklessly burning several Indian villages after a number of their horses were stolen. When enraged Mexican officials threatened them with jail, Young’s brigade escaped to the Colorado River and Kit was back home in Taos, New Mexico, before the end of 1830.
Not long thereafter, Kit was at the top of his game as a mountain man, having earned an enviable reputation in the fur trade as an expert trapper and hunter, a brigade leader, a fearless, cool-headed brawler when necessary. By 1840, however, it was clear to all these men that the fur trade was in decline and they needed to find new ways to live and make a living. In 1841, Carson took a job as a hunter at Bent’s Fort, in Colorado.
In May, 1842, on a steamer headed up the Missouri River, Kit Carson chanced to meet young, ambitious army lieutenant John Charles Frémont, who had just received a commission from the US government to survey and map the Oregon Trail as far as South Pass. Carson offered his services as a guide; Fremont hired him at $100 a month; and thus began an enduring friendship. The next year, Carson again signed on as guide for Frémont’s new, longer mission, to survey and map beyond South Pass to the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon Territory, miles north of the California border. Nevertheless, Kit would end up in California a second time, because ….
Instead of heading directly home after reaching the Oregon Coast, Fremont turned his Corps of Topographical Engineers south, exploring the Great Basin before crossing the Sierra Nevada into Mexican California in January, 1844. Frostbitten, snow-blinded, and half-starved, they reached Sutter’s Fort, a waystation in the Sacramento Valley, in early March. After resting for three weeks, they reprovisioned from John Sutter’s stores, and departed. Though no untoward incidents occurred, Mexican officials were somewhat suspicious of these interlopers led by a US Army officer, and glad to see them go.
Those suspicions re-heated when Frémont, now promoted to captain—again accompanied by Kit Carson and a detachment of the Topographical Corps—reappeared at Sutter’s Fort on December 10, 1845. Despite Frémont’s declaration that his was simply a scientific mission, by mid-February 1846, he had reunited with the rest of his splintered party; altogether some 60 tough-looking, well-armed men. After ignoring repeated warnings to stay clear of the coastal settlements, General José Castro, headquartered at Monterey, ordered him to leave the area. In direct defiance of Castro’s order, the self-described peaceful explorer, along with Kit and his entire crew, commandeered nearby Hawk’s Peak on March 5, where they built a crude log fort and insolently raised the American Flag.
Three days later, after a bloodless confrontation with Castro’s forces, Frémont and his men abandoned this aerie under cover of darkness, and traveled north into Oregon. At Klamath Lake, their camp was ambushed by Indians on May 9; three days later an enraged Kit Carson avenged the deaths of his companions by destroying a nearby Indian village.
By mid-May, Frémont and company were back in California, unaware (as was everyone else there) that the United States had officially declared war against Mexico on May 13, 1846. Actually, despite having general knowledge that a national-scale conflict might be brewing over the annexation of Texas, the American immigrants in California were far more agitated over rumors that Castro intended to force them out of the province. Although Frémont’s regiment did not participate in the Bear Flag Revolt of June 14-17, he soon swooped in to take charge, organizing his California Battalion with Kit and the rest of his band at its core— “to fight for the settlers,” as he later told an American official, but for which he had no authorization whatever— three entire days before official news of the Mexican-American War reached him. In the havoc and confusion that followed, and on Frémont’s orders, Kit Carson shot and killed three innocent, harmless Mexican citizens who happened to land their small boat in San Pablo Bay.
On July 9, American warships at Monterey confirmed the reality of the war between nations. Days later, after Commodore Robert Stockton arrived, Frémont’s Battalion merged with Stockton’s marines; together, they “captured” Mexican California. Satisfied that the conquest was complete, on September 2, 1846, Stockton ordered Kit Carson to act as an express courier to Washington DC, taking Stockton’s report to the president and secretary of war. Kit hoped to have a brief stopover in Taos to see his wife, but it was not to be. On October 6, 800 hard days out of Los Angeles, Carson and his hand-picked companions chanced upon General Stephen Watts Kearny, leading his Army of the West into California with presidential orders to conquer and annex the province.
At once, Kearny ordered Kit to hand his mission over to someone else, turnabout, and guide him into California, where—unbeknownst to both men—a counter-revolt had stalled the American takeover.
In early December, as Carson and Kearny approached San Diego, Captain Andrés Pico, with some 100 Mexican lancers, was waiting for them in a deserted Indian village. The fight that ensued is known as the Battle of San Pascual, for the village’s name. Though it only lasted some thirty minutes, many were killed or wounded; Kit Carson supervised the burial of 19 American dead. Messengers were dispatched to Commodore Stockton, and Kearny took up a defensive position on a nearby hill, where they were soon under siege … and then they learned that their messengers had been captured on the way back. At dusk on December 8, Kit Carson and two others crawled through Pico’s lines to get help. Carson removed his shoes (to eliminate noise) and walked barefoot over a landscape covered with prickly pear and rocks.
In early 1847, Carson was again sent east with more dispatches for Washington, DC.
Men who met him in California, and elsewhere, were astonished: could this short-statured, freckle-faced, man of unassuming demeanor really be the skilled mountain man, the celebrated scout, the wilderness guide expert in continental geography, the reputedly fearless fighter they had read about in government reports, newspapers, and dime novels? All agreed on his height of 5’4”, most agreed that his shoulder-length hair was light brown (although William Tecumseh Sherman said his hair had a reddish tint), and his eyes were blue—or maybe grey. Hailed as a hero for his exploits (real, or fabricated by novelists) in his lifetime, modern minds have a different worldview. In the current century, Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson’s reputation, and legacy of contributing to the westward expansion of the United States, is somewhat tarnished by his known acts of violence, especially those against Indians.