HRSON ! !l!!i!!i !;i Native Sons Have Kit Carson Trail Marker Ready for Placing The landmarks committee of the Grand Parlor of the Native Sons of the Golden West has prepared a bronze tablet which is to mark the spot where stood the Kit Carson tree Mn the summit of Kit Carson j Pass, elevation 8600 feet. Some time this summer, after the snow melts and the road is opened, the tablet is to be carried up into the Sierras and permanently placed. Past Grand President Joseph R. Knowland of Oakland is the chair- man of the committee having this matter in charge. Grant P. Merrill of Woodfords, Alpine county, state highway superintendent, is co- I operating with the Native Sons and i will prepare the base for the tablet, which bears this inscription: On this spot, which marks the summit of Kit Carson Pass stood what was known as the Kit Car- eon tree on which the famous scout, Kit Carson, inscribed his name in 1844 when he guided the then Colonel John C. Fremont, head of a government exploring expedition, over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Above is a replica of the original inscription, cut from the tree hi 1899 and now in Suttcr Fort, Sacramento. The inscription was used by the Fremont expedition as a trail mark- er. The rotting trunk and stump of the old tree is still to be seen in the summit of the pass on the Ama- dor-Alpine route. "We have not yet determined," says Grant P. Merrill, "just how the tablet shal] be placed. I thought it would be a good idea to erect a j monument of cement and cobble- stones and set the tablet in it or, we could set the tablet into the face of the granite wall which rises by the road side. We might place an iron rail fance around the old stump and, by use of cement, preserve it for some years to come." It is possible that a day will be 3et for the unveiling OT the. tablet and due ceremonies held. If so, many Stocktonians who make annual pil- grimages into the Silver Lake, Kit Carson Spur country, will doubtless motor up to attend the affair. KIT CARSON DAYS COLONEL (BREVET BRIGADIER GENERAL) CHRISTOPHER CARSON, U. S. V. COPY OF CRAYON PORTRAIT IN THE HOME OF MRS. WILLIAM CARSON, WIDOW OF CARSON'S ELDEST SON, ALAMOSA, COLO. (Photograph by O. T. Dams) KIT CARSON DAYS (1809-1868) BY . EDWIN C. SABIN Illustrated by more than one hundred half-tones, mostly from old and rare sources CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1914 Copyright A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1914 Published June, 1914 91. JL $all Printing u. c. kDEMY OF IFIC COAST MSTORY Bancroft To My Father HENRY SABIN OF IOWA A Lover of History -Z^ 2. Bancroft Libraiy PREFACE For text and picture in Kit Carson Days I have drawn liberally upon chronicles long out of date, thus essaying to get back close to the sources of our knowledge. Perhaps occasional excerpts may strike the modern reader, and par- ticularly the historian, as exaggerated; but it seems to me that the men who participated in the times herein treated, who wrote while yet the events were fresh, must furnish us with a perspective not only interesting, but valuable. If I have erred upon the side of local color, if the viewpoint of romance may be charged to have distorted in places the viewpoint of accuracy, if fancy may have intruded upon sober fact and figure, I make only the defense that I have written con amore, and have emphasized also the side of sympathy. So, in making mention of the numerous excerpts, I would suggest that the notes to the chapters be not neglected. These notes are not always essential to the text. Indeed, frequently they may lead from the text, inciting to a wide reading which may prove delightful and profitable. For modern authorities I am chiefly obliged to General H. M. Chittenden's The History of the American Fur Trade of the Far West, an exhaustive, fascinating compila- tion, upon which must be based all succeeding histories of beaver days. At the head of the long line of individuals who are co-authors with me would I place Walter B. Douglas of St. Louis, to whose generosity every writer upon western history is, I imagine, deeply indebted. Ken- neth M. Chapman, of the Museum of American Archae- ology at Santa Fe, stepped aside from his special duties to assist in this, the work of a stranger. J. M. Guinn of Los vii viii PREFACE Angeles is another kindly partner. Mrs. Teresina Bent Scheurich, who was born into the very thick of American- Mexican events, has been most patient with my queries upon those persons and times still near and dear to her. Charles C. Harvey, journalist, of St. Louis, has been a constant encourager. Captain Smith H. Simpson of Taos, and Major Rafael Chacon of Trinidad, Colorado, comrade veterans of the same glowing days in southwest history, have given me facts which only a very few persons now alive can recall. To the great assistance of Major Oliver P. Wiggins I have paid especial tribute elsewhere in this narrative. In Valentine Mott Porter of Santa Barbara, California, I found a ready advisor. The Senora Petra Beaubien Abre'u, through her son, Don Jesus L. Abre'u, of Rayado, New Mexico; Mrs. A. L. Slaughter of Kansas City; Mrs. Mary St. Vrain Sopris of Denver; General Asa B. Carey of Orlando, Florida; Colonel John A. Hannay of La Jolla, California; Aloys Scheurich, now with Kit Carson, but late of Taos; Captain George H. Pettis, who also has crossed the Divide, but late of Providence, Rhode Island; Mayor Daniel L. Taylor of Trinidad, Colorado; Sergeant Luke Cahill of Las Animas, Colorado; Ferd Meyer of Costilla, New Mexico ; Robert C. Lowry of New York City ; George H. Carson of Fayette, Missouri ; Albert H. Pf eiffer, Jr., of Del Norte, Colorado; Judge John S. Hough of Lake City, Colorado; Judge Hiram D. Bennet of Denver: pioneers, soldiers, scouts, and traders of brave days, they have willingly enriched with the gold of their memories these printed pages which otherwise would have been poor indeed. To many readers their names may mean little, but they will at least indicate how far and wide the lines of research have led. To F. J. Francis of Denver and O. T. Davis of Alamosa, Colorado, for photographs, and to Messrs. Tishler & Langer, who copied with much skill and care the yellowed, PREFACE ix difficult lithographs and engravings from the brittle pages, I am deeply grateful. The Missouri Historical Society, the Colorado Historical Society, the Historical Society of Southern California and the Iredell County (North Caro- lina) Historical Society have rendered me much aid; and I have applied with satisfaction to the historical societies of Oregon, Nebraska, Montana, and New Mexico. It is unnec- essary, but none the less pleasant, to state that every com- munication addressed to the Bureau of American Ethnology at Washington received full attention. Through Senator George C. Perkins of California, the Smithsonian Institu- tion provided me with data of value. The Adjutant Gen- eral's office and the Bureau of Engineering, of the War Department, have answered my queries with military com- pleteness. The splendid shelves of the Iowa State Library and the Iowa State Historical Library at Des Moines proved a treasure-trove of enlightenment. Amidst the mass of dates and incidents will be found errors, for the writer is but human. Of these errors he doubtless will soon be made aware. In his narrative he has aimed to transcribe boldly, preferring to err rather than to slight. And now, out of data confused and tenuous, and hereto- fore based mainly upon one biography written before the Civil War, and that so frail that the Carson family, even to the hero's father and mother, have been suffered to remain in darkness; out of some six years' work covering by correspondence and interview the country from Los Angeles to New York, from Oregon to Florida, behold Kit Carson Days as it has been evolved. EDWIN L. SABIN. San Diego, California. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I THE CARSON FAMILY i II IN OLD MISSOURI 18101826 5 III THE ROAD TO SANTA FE 1826 13 IV NEW MEXICO AND NEW MEXICANS .... 25 V As FARED THE RUNAWAY 1826-1829 . . 31 "VI THE TRAPPER'S TRAIL 1829 37 VII To THE GRAND CANYON, AND ON .... 44 "'VIII AMERICAN TRAPPERS IN CALIFORNIA . . . 54 IX THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 1830 ... 66 X ADVENTURES OF KIT CARSON 1831-1832 . 80 XI THE FIGHT FOR FUR 91 XII DRAMATIS PERSONAE no XIII ADVENTURES OF KIT CARSON 1832-1834 . 123 XIV THE AMERICAN WEDGE IN OREGON .... 137 XV ADVENTURES OF KIT CARSON 1834-1835 . 157 XVI ADVENTURES OF KIT CARSON 1835-1838 . 168 XVII THE FORKING OF THE TRAIL 179 XVIII BENT'S FORT OF THE PLAINS 186 XIX ADVENTURES OF KIT CARSON 1838-1842 . 195 XX ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 1842 . . 206 XXI ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 1843-1844. 218 XXII ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 1845 2 37 XXIII THE YEAR '46 246 XXIV THE MEXICAN WAR CARSON UNDER KEARNY 268 XXV THE MEXICAN WAR CARSON AT SAN PAS- QUAL 280 XXVI THE RE-CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA .... 295 XXVII CARSON ACROSS THE CONTINENT 1847 . . 301 XXVIII " A RIDE WITH KIT CARSON " 1848 ... 316 xi Xll CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XXIX THE RANCH AT THE RAYADO 1849-1853 . 338 XXX CARSON AND THE INDIAN 1853-1861. . . 358 XXXI CAMPAIGNS OF THE FIFTIES 375 XXXII THE CIVIL WAR CARSON AT VALVERDE, 1862 XXXIII CORRALLING THE APACHE 1862-1863 . XXXIV THE NEMESIS OF THE NAVAJO 1863-1864 XXXV THE BATTLE OF ADOBE WALLS 1864 . XXXVI PLAINS AND MOUNTAIN SERVICE 1865- 1867 467 CARSON AT WASHINGTON 1868 485 LAST DAYS OF " THE GENERAL " 1868 . . 493 394 409 418 440 XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX KIT CARSON 503 APPENDIX i 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 CARSON PERSONAL LETTERS TO PFEIFFER . 617 10 MERCHANT BEUTHNER TO CAMP NICHOLS 619 11 THE CARSON WILL 621 NOTES 623 INDEX 657 CAPTAIN JEDEDIAH STRONG SMITH . . .511 CARSON REPORTS AS INDIAN AGENT . . .518 THE BATTLE OF VALVERDE 533 CARLETON DISPATCHES TO CARSON . . . 538 THE NAVAJO CAMPAIGN 561 THE KiowA-CoMANCHE EXPEDITION . . 604 KIT CARSON ON THE INDIAN 610 MAJOR ALBERT H. PFEIFFER'S ADVENTURE . 614-- ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Colonel Carson Frontispiece Santa Fe caravan on the march 22 Santa Fe in sight 22 The Copper mines where Kit Carson worked .... 23 The pueblo of Los Angeles 58 Old Fort Union 58 A Carson letter 59 Independence Rock ^ . . 76 Devil's Gate 76 Old arms of plains and mountains 77 The West in 1835 (map) 90 The West in 1850 (map) 91 William Wolf skill no Joseph Robidoux no Joseph L. Meek no "Old" Jim Baker no Jim Beckwourth . . , . . .in Rev. Jason Lee 136 Rev. Samuel L. Parker 136 Rev. Henry H. Spalding 136 Myra Fairbanks Eells 136 Mary Richardson Walker 137 Rev. Francis N. Blanchet 137 Rev. Peter J. De Smet 137 Ceran St. Vrain 137 Dr. John McLoughlin 162 "Old" Jim Bridger 162 Captain Nathaniel J. Wyeth . . : 162 xiii KIT CARSON DAYS CHAPTER I THE CARSON FAMILY '"THAT "blood will tell" never has been better exempli- * fied than in the case of the Carson family in America; and when he took the danger-trail, youthful Kit Carson swung as true to his instincts as swings the needle to the pole. The head of the house of Carson in America seems to have been William Carson, of Scotch-Irish strain, who emi- grated from England, possibly Scotland, in the first half of the eighteenth century, to Pennsylvania. Thence moving southward, joining in that impulse which transfused into the Carolinas and Tennessee so much of Scotch-Irish Protestant blood, he laid claim to 692 acres on both sides of Third Creek, in the Loray District of Iredell County, North Caro- lina. The Carson grant to this tract, from Lord Granville, bears date of December i, 1761. Of this William Carson the First the records run in brief that he was a farmer ; that he married Miss Eleanor McDuff (McDorf?), and that imprudently drinking from a cold spring on a hot day, before the Revolution, he died, leaving a wife and five children Robert, Lindsay (head of the Carson family in Missouri), Andrew, possibly an Alexan- der, Eleanor, and Sarah. The Carson family, now established in America, pro- ceeded to scatter like quail. An Alexander Carson migrated 1 2 KIT CARSON DAYS to Mississippi ; Robert Carson to Kentucky, where he lived until he died; Lindsay and Andrew to the Hunting Creek settlement in the north of Iredell County. Here Andrew, at twenty, and Lindsay, at twenty-two, proved the Carson metal in the fire of the Revolution. Andrew became a captain in the command of Marion the Swampf ox ; and while Lord Cornwallis was harrying South Carolina he carried dispatches between Marion and Greene. He was in the battle of Camden, and tradition states that he bore out in his arms, from under fire, the fatally wounded Baron DeKalb, stricken while crossing a creek, October 16, 1780. Of Lindsay Carson's exploits in the Revolution less comes down to us; but so sturdy an Indian fighter must have graven deep his signature. After the war he removed to South Carolina, and married Miss Bradley, to raise another wilderness brood, the flight of which was to reach from Kentucky to the Pacific. This, the first of his two marriages, added to his race William, b. 1786, who by union with Millie Boone of the Kentucky Boones, perpetuated around Fayette, Missouri, the Carson name; Sarah, b. 1788, m. Peyton and lived to an advanced age; Andrew, b. 1790; Moses Bradley, b. 1792. The mother did not long survive this last child, but died soon after reaching the new home in Madison County, Kentucky, whither, 1792, the restless Lindsay moved on. Here, in Madison County, Kentucky, in 1797, he took unto himself a second wife, Rebecca Robinson, of Green- briar County, Virginia, and so resumed the interrupted sequence; for those were wholesome days of large fam- ilies. Six more boys and four more girls arrived, with regularity: i, Elizabeth, m. Robert Cooper of the Missouri (and Kentucky) Coopers; 2, Nancy, m. Briggs; 3, Robert; 4, Hamilton; 5, Christopher; 6, Hampton; 7, Mathilda, m. Adams; 8, Mary, m. Ruby; 9, Sarshel; 10, Lindsay THE CARSON FAMILY 3 Second. But this, his namesake, the father never saw, for the birth occurred after the fatality of September, 1818, when Lindsay First died, aged sixty- four, crushed by a falling limb. Tradition in the Young family, of the Hunting Creek district, North Carolina, asserts that not in Kentucky but in Iredell County the famous Kit was born, while Lindsay and wife were upon a visit to his brother Andrew. Be that as it may, Iredell County of North Carolina has another claim, in the report, reasonably authentic, that Kit Carson's full given name was Christopher Houston, given out of respect to the Christopher Houston who was prominent in Iredell County during the Revolution. Of this brave family of fourteen, born to Lindsay Carson by juncture with the Bradley and the Robinson clans, all lived to manhood or womanhood. And this in itself is remarkable, for the wanderlust was in the veins. The girls, of course, married; but of the sons it is written, by a son of William, the eldest : " Every one, without a single excep- tion, went west in search of the Indian and the buffalo ; now that the Indian is guarded on the reservations and the buf- falo is nearly extinct, I am at a loss to know what their descendants will do for a pastime." When the first Carson entered the Far West, is not known, but an Alexander Carson (possibly son of that Alexander who was son of the first William) was encountered as a trapper upon the upper Missouri by the Wilson Hunt party of Astorians, in the spring of 1811. And he and his com- panion turned, with the party of Astorians, for the still farther West. Already he had been two years in the beaver wilderness. Then with the advent in Missouri of the Lindsay tribe, the Carson family entered into the thick of pioneer affairs. The father and Moses served, with the home guard, against the Indians, in the War of 1812; Moses was in several 4 KIT CARSON DAYS up-river expeditions of the fur trade; a Carson (very likely Andrew, Moses' senior) was with the Ezekiel Williams adventurers who fared into the Southwest, 1811, and were gone two years; William, the eldest of all, was held back in Kentucky by Indian disturbances, until the war was over. William, Andrew, Moses, Robert, Hamilton, and Chris- topher certainly rode the Santa Fe Trail; Lindsay Second is said to have been with Fremont on that heroic but futile fourth expedition to the Rockies in the winter of 1848-49; of Sarshel and Hampton I have no record. CHAPTER II IN OLD MISSOURI 1810-1826 THE story of Kit Carson days is the story of beaver and of Indians; of mountain, canon, valley, desert, and stream ransacked through and through by the fur hunter ; of white blood and red blood meeting, striving, and mingling mingling sometimes in friendly union but far of tener in the struggle of mutual hate; of lonely camp and of boister- ous rendezvous; of thirst, starvation and rude plenty; of the trapper followed close by the trader, of both followed by the explorer, of the explorer followed by the emigrant colonist, gold seeker, settler; of Santa Fe Trail and Oregon Trail and California Trail; of a Bent's Fort, a Fort Laramie, a Fort Bridger and of trader and Indian march- ing out, the army marching in ; of Black Robe and of mis- sionary carrying Christianity from St. Louis and Boston overland to the mouth of the Columbia; of Ute, Apache and Navajo in the Southwest subdued by the bullet; of a Great Britain on the north, and a Mexico on the south, once touch- ing beyond the Rockies, then cleaved a thousand miles asunder by a westward pressing flag; of a Texas, a Califor- nia, a New Mexico, and an Oregon acquired, and of a " Great American Desert " fertilized; of a vast and savage West awakened and with astounding swiftness made amen- able to the purposes of civilization ; of an unknown country tw r o thousand miles wide becoming known; of the United States expanding in three directions until it had reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf and the Rio Grande and the mouth of the Colorado to Canada and Puget Sound. 5 6 KIT CARSON DAYS Kit Carson traveled from Kentucky to Santa Fe by ox team and wagon. Before he died he had traveled from Washington City to the Wyoming Rockies by rail ; another year, and he could have journeyed from coast to coast in similar fashion. Daniel Boone, in 1797, at the age of sixty-five, had moved across the Missouri. Reports from him and his sons fil- tered back. Then in the spring of 1811, the head of the Lindsay Carson house emigrated from Madison County of Kentucky to this new Boone's Lick district of the even newer American territory of Louisiana. The youngest child (as yet) was Kit, born December 25, 1809. The Carsons and their southern party settled in what is now Howard County, along the Missouri River, about 200 miles west of St. Louis. Other men and women of the South were here; more arrived; and soon there arose those doughty stockades celebrated in Mississippi Valley his- tory Forts Hempstead, Cooper, and Kincaid. The name of Linsey (Lindsay) Carson appears upon the roll of old Fort Hempstead, and he is claimed likewise by the descend- ants of the old Fort Cooper garrison. This was the extreme frontier of the United States; beyond was the " Indian Country," so to be designated, with but slight variation, for thirty years. The population of the Territory of Louisiana, which comprised that section of the old province north of the Territory of Orleans, or the pres- ent state of Louisiana, dwindled speedily as one proceeded northward from the lower Arkansas and westward from the mouth of the Missouri. St. Louis, with its 1800 people, was the metropolis. Encouraged by the government which was essaying to absorb a continent, the fur trade (the only trade, to date, of this the new West) had increased rapidly. Through many years St. Louis, under domination of the French, had been the headquarters of a fur trade operated mainly by IN OLD MISSOURI 1 private individuals, or at most by partners; for St. Louis was French, and from the very outset it was the French who in the new continent sought out the pelt of forest, prairie, and stream. But now, at the time of the Carsons' arrival in the Boone's Lick district, the Missouri Fur Company of St. Louis was organized with good backing, and the energetic John Jacob Astor of New York was pushing his American Fur Company. His ship the Tonquin was en route for the mouth of the Columbia, and up the Missouri River trail from St. Louis had hastened the supporting overland party of Hunt. In this Louisiana, soon to be rechristened Missouri Ter- ritory, Lindsay Carson continued his Kentucky and Carolina career. He led in many skirmishes with the savages; he and his third son, Moses, were enrolled in the home guards during the War of 1812. In 1814 some fingers of his left hand were shot off during a scrimmage with Indians. In September, 1818, he died by the fall of a limb from a burned tree while he was cutting timber in the forest near home. He left a thriving family, and a rifle of large bore, with the stock (like the fingers of his hand) smashed by an enemy's bullet. Kit, no longer the youngest in the family, was now almost nine years of age. Two and one-half of these years had been spent under the stockade protection of Fort Hemp- stead ; all had been spent in the shadow of peril by wilder- ness. He had run absolutely unrestrained except for the spasmodic efforts of a tired mother with many other nest- lings. He was thoroughly a settler's child. When he reached fifteen years his mother apprenticed him to a saddler in Franklin, then the chief Missouri frontier settlement. During the fourteen years since the Carsons had crossed the Mississippi, government, fur trader, and adventurer had repeatedly assaulted the Indian country. Making a rift in an entirely new spot of the bulwarks of the Northwest, in 8 KIT CARSON DAYS 1820 Major Stephen Long, of the army, ascended the Mis- souri, past Franklin, in the first steamboat successfully to plough that stream, and from the present site of Omaha proceeded by horse and mule up along the Platte (name already well-known by mouth of voyageur and trapper) to the Rocky Mountains. Then swinging south, he skirted the eastern base of the foothills, passing the present site of the cities of Denver and Colorado Springs, and returned by way of the Arkansas. The Missouri Fur Company was constantly establishing more posts in that upper Missouri country, and there were half a dozen other companies in the field. William Ashley of St. Louis, first lieutenant governor of the new state, gen- eral in the militia and Missouri's leading citizen, had taken up the fur trade as another vocation, to pursue it so indus- triously that within six years he made his fortune. In 1822 he had escorted up the river his first party, under Major Andrew Henry, who in service of the Missouri Fur Com- pany, a dozen years back, had built the first American fur- trading post on the Pacific side of the Stony Mountains, by the Henry Fork of the Snake River in extreme eastern Idaho at the Wyoming line. General Ashley followed his 1822 expedition with others, accompanying some of them himself. To young Kit Carson these Ashley expeditions should have been of especial interest, for they at once num- bered upon their rolls Henry Vanderburgh, the ill-fated; Thomas Fitzpatrick, Carson's first mountain employer ; Jim Bridger, discoverer of the great Salt Lake; Jedediah S. Smith, the " knight in buckskin," whose Bible was as close a companion to him as his rifle, and whose trail across the desert into California, Carson would encounter on his initial trip as a trapper; Jim Beckwourth, the mulatto Crow chief; the Sublettes of whom William was the best captain of trappers in the West ; and others whose names figure largely in plains and mountain history, and with whom, in a few IN OLD MISSOURI 9 more years, Kit Carson, now a boy, mingled as a man, a fellow trapper and an equal. Moreover, up the river, in the summer of 1823, had passed a punitive expedition sent by government and fur people combined against the fierce Arikaras, who were forcibly obstructing traffic. In the fighting, this " Missouri Legion/' as it was styled, had been moderately successful. The way was opened. So much, briefly, as regards the Northwest. But the Southwest likewise was being exploited. Objective points in the Northwest were the Three Forks country of the sources of the Missouri River, and the Columbia and Oregon region, on the other side of the mountains. The Southwest spelled Santa Fe that far Mexican metropolis of the " Spanish Settlements." Pike had reported upon it; in 1806 he had found there one James Purcell (or Pursley), an American from Kentucky already domiciled. At present Santa Fe and the Spanish Settlements were in everybody's mouth, for trade in that direction promised an attractive outlet to those Missourians who were not engaged in the fur business of the North. In June, 1813, Ezekiel Williams had returned to Boone's Lick of Missouri, after a long experience on the upper Arkansas, and had brought back much word of Santa Fe. 1 The next year he went out again and his adventures were reported widely. In 1821 John McKnight passed through Franklin upon quest of his brother Robert who for nine years had not been heard from. He found Robert imprisoned in Chihuahua, but he found also that rumors were true, and that Mexico was free from Spanish rule, unfriendly to Americans, so he was enabled to bring Robert back with him. The return in the summer of 1822 was chronicled in the Missouri Intelligencer of Franklin. Meanwhile Captain William Becknell of Franklin adver- 10 KIT CARSON DAYS tised in the Intelligencer of June 10, 1821, for "seventy men to go westward " on a trading project. He assembled his party at the house of Ezekiel Williams (who doubtless could aid with much information about the country), and succeeded in penetrating safely into Santa Fe and in emerg- ing safely therefrom. The following January he arrived in Franklin again, enthusiastic over his profits. In the spring of 1822 Captain Becknell led another com- pany, with three wagons, and made a new and shorter trail across the Cimarron desert. The Santa Fe trade was fairly started, and the Missouri Intelligencer was constantly printing items upon it. So when Kit Carson was put out at saddlery service in Franklin in 1825, it was locking the cat in with the cream. Northwest and Southwest were thrilling with deeds and adventures, the accounts of which focused in Franklin Franklin, still keenly mindful of the great reception ten- dered to Major James and General Atkinson, when in 1819 they had stopped off from their steamboat, en route to the Yellowstone. Ashley was reaping fame and furs. And Santa Fe had come into being. Thus Kit Carson found Franklin an eddy where two trails joined. Down the river, and up the river to the uttermost sources in the unknown, passed the men of the fur trade; by steamboat, by keel boat, ashore and even afoot, bringing their pelts, their squaws, their scars, and their tales. And here the Santa Fe Trail met the Missouri River Trail. Out of the south of west they came, into the dim south of west they went, those dusty pack trains laden tight with mer- chandise and escorting not only trader, but broadcloth merchant and health-seeking adventurer. Theirs were tales of desert rather than of mountains; of Kiowa, Pawnee, Comanche, and Arapaho; of the cibolero, or Mexican buffalo hunter; of thirst amidst burning sands; and of a romantic, ancient city, 800 miles away, by horse and mule, across IN OLD MISSOURI 11 the hazy " Indian Country " < Santa Fe of Neuva Mejico, where American goods and labor sold at great profit, and where American visitors were welcomed by the merry fandango. As against all this, the saddler's craft must have seemed dull indeed to Kit Carson. In a year he had had enough of it; and the following advertisement, which appeared in the columns of the Missouri Intelligencer of Franklin, indi- cates how he left it : Notice: To whom it may concern: That Christopher Car- son, a boy about sixteen years old, small of his age, but thick- set, light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Frank- lin, Howard Co., Mo., to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler's trade, on or about the first day of September last. He is supposed to have made his way toward the upper part of the state. All persons are notified not to harbor, support, or subsist said boy under penalty of the law. One cent reward will be given to any person who will bring back the said boy. (Signed) DAVID WORKMAN. Franklin, Oct. 6, 1826. Shrewdly enough might it be suspected that he had set face to the north, in the line of the fur trade. This was the easier travel and there were countless invitations for a lad to proceed onward with trader, trapper, or Indian plenty of whom, we may be certain, Kit Carson knew. Anybody who could handle a rifle was free to join any of a hundred wandering bands, white or red; and Moses Carson, and no doubt others of Kit's brothers, already had traversed the upper Missouri trail. But the chances for profit were greater on the Santa Fe Trail, and the romance of it was more appealing. So Kit Carson joined a Santa Fe caravan, and, by the irony of events, at the very first opportunity, the next spring, David Workman, saddler, did the same. 12 KIT CARSON DAYS Kit never again saw his home, and according to report, he saw few of his kinsfolk for almost two decades. Not until the spring of 1842 did he return to the Missouri fron- tier, and the sixteen years of spectacular progress had wiped out, as would a landslide, both places and people. CHAPTER III THE ROAD TO SANTA FE 1826 OUT pulled the caravan, one of several dispatched this year from Franklin, for the Santa Fe trade was increasing. It was composed in the main of wagons and other vehicles; the year 1826 marked the passing, on the trail, of pack animals, and the employment of wheels entirely, although individuals with pack animals continued to attach themselves to caravans. In this year, 1826, all that vast West of today, from Missouri and Iowa to the Pacific Ocean, bore scarcely a name save here and there the title of Indian tribe, of lake, stream, peak and range, and desert; and, principally along the Missouri River and upper tributaries, of trading post or fur company's " fort." One army post had been estab- lished, at Council Bluffs Fort Atkinson. The heart of this country, comprising what are now fertile Kansas, Nebraska, and the Colorado plains, was labeled " Great American Desert." It was presumed to be worthless except for buffalo and uninhabitable by civilized man. Thus had Major Long, in 1820, reported it. He had pronounced it a providential barrier against the westward spread of humanity, and a bulwark, equally providential, against aggression by other nations from that direction. The geog- raphies of a generation ago were still clinging stanchly to this black-shaded patch the " Great American Desert/' There was not a settlement between New Mexico and the mouth of the Columbia in Oregon. Indians, more or less hostile, buffalo, antelope, wild horses, elk, deer, bear, wolves, beaver, the eagle, hawk, buzzard, other birds and quadru- 13 14 KIT CARSON DAYS peds, and many reptiles, made up the citizenship, aside from the trappers and traders. Fur, feather, buckskin, and painted nakedness was the garb in vogue. The boundary of that territory acquired as the Louisiana Province, from France, was yet rather obscure to the people at large, and even to the authorities. The United States extended to the indefinite Rocky Mountains, on the west; on the south to the Red River, and at the undefined line of the looth meridian of longitude, in present Kansas, only to the Arkansas. Below, all w r as Mexico and uneasy Texas which also was Mexican territory. Across the Rockies then known as the " Shining Mountains " and the " Stony Mountains," and toward their southern extremity as the " Anahuac " all was Mexico, generalized as Cali- fornia, up to the northern line of the present Utah. North of Utah everything was Oregon, shared temporarily by the United States and Great Britain, whose representative was the Hudson Bay Company. Kit Carson's entrance into this unplotted West which he soon would help map was not, we may be certain, heroic. He arrived, beyond any reasonable doubt, at the tail of the horse herd or " cavvy," as many another character promi- nent in western history has done. Herding this " cavvy " is the boy's and the new hand's job in the West, and always has been. Chroniclers have given Kit Carson a place from the out- set as official hunter for the caravan his duty being to supply the camp with meat. But he was just a boy of six- teen, undersized, of the gritty but nondescript Scotch-Irish type sandy-haired, sandy-complexioned, tanned and freckled, with full forehead and wide-set, blue-gray eyes. He was a good shot, self-reliant, wise in woodcraft and pioneer expedients, but these were not exceptional qualities, and regularly appointed " hunters " were not the rule in these early caravans. THE ROAD TO SANTA FE 15 The caravan itself is recorded very clearly by Captain Gregg and by Thomas J. Farnham of the same era. The course to Santa Fe lay not as one traveled road, but as a number of chance selected trails, for the most part only dis- cernible to the keenest eyes. The country was, as a rule, flat and bare, and travelers kept a general direction from water to water, from camping spot to camping spot. Like any other long trail, the Santa Fe was merely a succession of convenient or necessary stages. Vehicles traversing it usually took a formation of four abreast, but sometimes they stretched out in single file for a mile and more. How- ever, the column of fours, and later of twos, was imperative in the Indian country, where compactness was a condition of defense. The journey out usually occupied fifty or sixty days ; the journey back, when the wagons, traveled lighter, could be made in forty days. The distance was about 780 miles, and a well-laden wagon traveled on an average fifteen miles a day. But in 1826, the time of Kit Carson's first trip, the travel was less systematized, more haphazard, and therefore less expeditious. From Franklin the Kit Carson caravan would strike away from the muddy river, and leaving Missouri through the green prairie of the then friendly Osage Indians, now aiming for the Arkansas River would cross into the Kansas of today. In addition to the great, heavy, flaring-topped Conestoga wagons, of Pittsburg pattern, each drawn by eight mules, there were a few stylish Dearborn carriages, the conveyances of city merchants and of invalids ; for both wealth and health were to be found upon the old Santa Fe Trail. Outriders were before and upon either flank of the column. In the dust of the rear followed the " cavvy," and on his mule, Kit Carson. As the caravan proceeded, exchanging the green prairies of western Missouri for the arid plains of Kansas, discipline 16 KIT CARSON DAYS would become stricter, for the Pawnees frequently raided here, and just ahead were the grounds of the fierce Kiowas and the equally dangerous Comanches. The horsemen would look to their arms and at night the wagons would be parked, or joined into a hollow square, the front wheels of one vehicle lapping the rear wheels of another. An opening was left, through which the animals might be driven in case of alarm. Early in the morning, after the rude but hearty breakfast, the captain of the caravan would sign to his lieutenant ; the lieutenant would call, " Catch up ! " Taking up the cry, the wagoners would briskly harness their teams. Presently from first one and then another wagoner would come the announcement : " All 's set." The teamsters were ready. " Stretch out, then." A noble sight those teams were, forty-odd in number, their immense wagons still unmoved, forming an oval breastwork of wealth, girded by an impatient mass of near 400 mules, harnessed and ready to move again along their solitary way. But the interest of the scene was much increased when, at the call of the commander, the two lines, team after team, straightened themselves into the trail, and rolled majestic- ally away over the undulating plain. 2 The journey, especially to the greenhorn and the boy, and also to every person who loved nature, could not have been monotonous. There was the constant outlook for sus- picious figures which might be Indians. And the plains, today so lifeless except as new life has been introduced, in caravan times teemed with their wild animals. The buf- falo led in importance, but was subject to seasonal and hunters' influences. Besides the buffalo there was the antelope. Of that singular animal the antelope we saw great numbers; and in the fall, once or twice, many hundreds in a THE ROAD TO SANTA FE 17 gang, which, all of one accord, would dash hither and thither with wonderful swiftness, looking at a distance, like the shadow of a moving cloud. There was a remarkable species of hare, nearly twice the size of the eastern; the fleetest of the prai- rie animals, though in tall grass they were easily caught. I had a nearly tame one, which fed on rushes, which would disappear in its mouth as if pushed through a hole. Badgers were common; and prairie foxes of light and elegant pro- portions. We met with many prairie dog " villages" ; whole acres of their burrows, with entrances in a small mound. Of wolves, there were thousands, of all kinds and sizes, except the large black wood wolf; never an hour of a night passed without the accompaniment of their howls; even by day they were to be seen around. One dark night, being officer of the guard, I advanced some two hundred paces to a spot where there was an excavation and a small mound of earth, and where garbage had been thrown; from the mound, I saw perhaps a dozen snarling over their unclean food; sword in hand, I sprang down among them; they scattered, but I did not stay long to see how far. Rattlesnakes were very numerous, and dangerous; we lost several horses by their bites. Wild horses we saw frequently, but not many. A horse which we lost August 3, was recovered from a gang a month or two afterwards. Buffalo, wolves, rattlesnakes, and grasshoppers, seemed to fill up the country. 3 Pauses would be made at noon for lunch and respite, and halts at night for camp. There were perils aside from that of Indians. Accidents often happened. Rain and hail and sand storms of terrific violence would sweep athwart the route. Animals would stampede. They and wagons would be struck. The attack of the elements was appalling; and the caravan, out upon the vast pampa, like a ship in the midst of the ocean, was exposed to the ship's perils without the ship's mobility. The Santa Feans, when on the march through these plains, are in constant expectation of these tornadoes. Accordingly when the sky at night indicates their approach, they chain the wheels of adjacent wagons strongly together to prevent 18 KIT CARSON DAYS them from being up-set an accident that had often hap- pened, when this precaution was not taken. 4 On the other hand, miscalculation as to water would result in dreadful suffering or even death from thirst. The Arkansas River was a great blessing. But away from the Arkansas, bewildered by the sameness of the landscape and by the " deep paths made by the buffalo, as if a thousand generations of them had, in single file, followed their lead- ers from point to point through the plains," the caravan might easily lose its way. Of the caravan with which Carson traveled only one mischance is recorded. A teamster accidentally shot him- self through the arm shortly before the caravan reached the Arkansas River. He refused to have the arm amputated, but by the time the caravan reached the river along which it would proceed the flesh had gangrened and amputation became necessary. There was no surgeon in the camp. Three men volunteered to perform the operation, among them being Kit Carson. It is quite unlikely, how- ever, that, as early biographers have affirmed, he was the operating surgeon. He probably held the improvised instru- ments for the rought but, as turned out, successful cutting and searing. 5 About fifteen miles on, or another day's march, the cara- van would arrive at Pawnee Rock. This landmark has practically disappeared today, not alone from sight, but even also from memory. However, when Kit Carson went out upon the trail it was a bold sandstone promontory beside the trail, jutting up thirty and forty feet, its face carved with the symbols of travelers both white and red. The Indians long had used the rock as a signboard, and the caravans speedily adopted the scheme. Thus, as in the case of Independence Rock upon the northern Oregon Trail, and of Inscription Rock, westward upon the trail taken by the THE ROAD TO SANTA FE 19 old Spanish conquistadors across the Arizona desert, Paw- nee Rock indicated that so and so had passed that way. Now the caravan was in dangerous country and strict watch and ward would have to be maintained. As sug- gested by the name, this was hostile Indian territory; the vicinity of the rock w r as a favorite resort of Pawnee and Kiowa war parties, always alert, upon the slightest provoca- tion, to rob a foreign company. It was also the heart of the southern buffalo range, and Indian hunting parties Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Sioux, Arapaho, even the far northern Crow and Blackfeet were liable to be encoun- tered, following the slowly drifting, shaggy herds. But at this time the Ishmaelite bandits of the plains had not yet fully risen to attacking an organized caravan of eighty or one hundred men, their animals and wagons. According to the table prepared by Captain Josiah Gregg in Commerce of the Prairies, not until 1828, or two years later, did a caravan report loss of life to its members. Nevertheless, smaller expeditions were constantly being raided; this very year four overland traders had been deprived by the Arapahos of 500 horses and mules ; and the cavvy of a caravan was a prize bound soon or late, and at any moment, to draw down upon camp or march a yelling horde. So it may be seen that even the humble post of wrangler or herder had its spice of peril. Far western romance tells of Kit's caravan of 1826 hav- ing an Indian scare at Pawnee Rock, wherein young Kit shoots his mule instead of a Pawnee. But this incident is claimed by Jim Bridger, at an earlier time, for himself ; and, in fact, is a current joke ascribed to various individuals, and was perennial with the early trappers and adventurers. I would agree with Captain Chittenden's footnote in his History of the American Fur Trade, that it did not happen to Kit Carson, here and now. Nor is there any reference in Gregg or other contemporary authorities to any bloody 20 KIT CARSON DAYS battle with the Pawnees when any caravan of 1826 had proceeded a short distance beyond the rock. On the con- trary, according to the Peters biography of Carson (which misses no legitimate opportunities) the march of the car- avan was uneventful after the Broadus affair. So we must leave Kit his mule, and must defer for a time his taking his first scalp. 6 Some two hundred miles beyond the rock the caravan of this early date would ford the Arkansas. The looth meridian had long been passed, and when the river was crossed the advance would all be in Mexican territory. Later caravans forded lower down; but for some years there was no one fording spot. To ford the Arkansas was somewhat risky on account of the quicksands. Teams were strengthened and the wagons were snaked through in double time. On the far- ther shore all the water which could be stowed away must be stored up ; five gallons to the wagon was none too much ; and it was found advisable to cook bread and meat sufficient for a two-days' journey. Immediately ahead was a " water scrape," or a dry march: the arid waste of the Cimarron desert in southwestern Kansas, between the Arkansas and the sources of the Cimarron River. It was the favorite haunt of the bold-riding Comanches. The Cimarron, below its sources, was only a dry, sandy bed. Herbage was scarce. Mirages lured, gigantic hailstones fell, the surface of the ground was so hard that wagons made no tracks, and the way was easily lost. The Cimarron " water scrape " grew to be the most dreaded stage of the overland trail to Santa Fe. It was at its worst in the fall, for water was then most scant. But when that was over when, having strained through the heavy sandhills that bordered the Arkansas, and across the firm, bare plain of the interior, the wagons, with team- sters and all peering nervously before out of bloodshot eyes, THE ROAD TO SANTA FE 21 toiled gladly into the valley of the Cimarron and reached the first spring then there was comparatively clear sailing. And hereabouts would first be met, if not met previously, a cibolero, or Mexican buffalo hunter. Gregg has described him well. Wild as the Comanche, the cibolero ranged through the desert like any Arab, clad in trousers and short jacket of goatskin leather, and wearing a flat straw hat. Slung athwart his shoulder he bore bow and quiver; and he had a long lance, suspended beside him in a gaily tasseled case and waving above his head. His pride would be his fusil, or smoothbore musket of huge caliber, its muzzle care- fully stoppered with a great wooden plug, also tasseled. His stirrup hoods, or tapaderas, swept the ground, and his enormous saddle covered all his pony. It was considered a good stroke to encounter a cibolero; news of the market in Santa Fe could be obtained, and possibly a supply of dried buffalo flesh from his camp, where he, his companions, and their families, would be con- gregated, all engaged in securing wild meat. By the landmark of the Rabbit Ear mounds, about where now the panhandle of Oklahoma joins New Mexico, the caravan would know that it was upon the straight course. The country would wax rougher, mountains would be dis- cernible, as hazy outlines, to the northwest. Beyond them lay that prominent Mexican settlement of Fernandez de Taos, which now was awaiting Kit Carson and was to be his home town for forty years. A trail, branching off, led to it and had been recommended by the United States survey party the year before. Anybody for Taos was at liberty to take it; but traders in a hurry pressed on for Santa Fe. The oldest trail, the " mountain division " of the Santa Fe Trail, did not cross the Arkansas until having followed its north bank clear to the Rockies ; thence it turned to the south and headed for Santa Fe city. But it is likely that a fall caravan of 1826 would have sought 22 KIT CARSON DAYS what it considered the shortest route, and would have cut across the desert of the Cimarron to avoid the mountain snows, the sooner to reach its destination, and to be enabled to start back before midwinter. When Santa Fe was only some 200 miles away it was the custom of the caravans to dispatch an advance party of couriers, as " runners " to announce the approach and to stir up the market. By this time the caravans would show signs of wear. The exceeding dry atmosphere had shrunk and warped the wheels of the vehicles, the roughness of the road was shaking loose tires and spokes, so at every halt much tinkering must be done. Strips of buffalo hide were tied about, and wedges of thin hoop iron were driven in. At the Rio de las Gallinas, or Turkey River, the first real token of civilization, or semi-civilization, would be passed : a rude adobe rancho, at the foot of a cliff. It had been established before Gregg's time, 1831, and he says that here he was treated to a refreshing draught of goat's milk and a supply of dirty curd. After a long and unvaried diet of bacon, poor bread, coffee, and buffalo flesh, such an innova- tion would be welcome. Without doubt the rancho was there when the Kit Carson caravan traveled through. Rural New Mexico was a land of few changes. Twenty more miles and the first settlement, San Miguel del Vado, would be reached: an unprepossessing collection of mud huts squatted upon the bank of the rippling Pecos River. On would plod the caravan. The region was becoming more settled ; and Kit Carson must have kept his eyes anx- iously looking for the famous old city to loom into view. Then, finally, on an early November day, as the first wagons mounted a rocky ridge, he heard from the advance a great cheering. The word passed along the column : " Santa Fe ! Santy Fee ! There she is ! " And as he also attained the crest he saw in the distance to the northwest, before and below him, a valley dotted by trees, lined in green by ditches, SANTA FE CARAVAN ON THE MARCH (From Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies) SANTA FE IN SIGHT! (From Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies) o 5 u i? Q S M P5 9 d pci a < 5? CO THE ROAD TO SANTA FE 23 cultivated to patches of corn and grain, and blotched with a splash of low, dun, sprawling structures that, according to Gregg, in 1831, resembled brick kilns, and according to Pike, a quarter-century previous, reminded one of a fleet of flatboats moored against the hill. It must be borne in mind that Santa Fe was strictly of Spanish architecture, as adapted to the country : adobe mud buildings, as a rule not even whitewashed ; flat-roofed, one- storied. Like the majority of visitors from the states, Kit Carson must have been disappointed. He had anticipated something far grander in a city that was the goal of eight hundred miles. However, the aspect appeared to please all of the more experienced. When within touch with Santa Fe, caravans usually halted to rub up. Clothing was changed to the best at hand, faces were washed, hair was slicked ; each teamster removed the old cracker from his whiplash and tied on a new one. These preparations having been consummated to the best of the wayfarers' ability, on down the slope, across the short plain at the foot of the ridge, and in amidst the squatty buildings would rumble and clatter the train. Gal- lantly would crack the long-lashed whips, the poor jaded mules, plucking spirit, would try to gambol, merrily would shout the men. All the population of Santa Fe seemed to be gathered there on the outskirts of the town. Loud and shrill pealed the cries of swarthy men and women: " Los Americanos! " " Los carros! " [The wagons.] " La entrada de la caravana! " [Arrival of the caravan.] More and more extravagantly, then, the proud wagoners of this November, 1826, travel-worn caravan swung their whips, snapping the new crackers and showing off before the black-eyed senoritas. The merchant proprietors sat stiffly their horses. Trappers grinned; recovered invalids stared. While at the very rear, pointed to and smiled upon 24 KIT CARSON DAYS as Muchacho! Muchacho Americano! Mire! [Boy! American boy! Behold!], confused by the celebration, but as much excited as anybody, rode Kit Carson on his dusty mule, driving his caballada. The arrival of a caravan was a stupendous event for old Santa Fe. It was a visit from another planet. In 1826 very many Mexicans of even the northern territory had never seen an American, nor had they any clear conception of the United States; and for more than twenty years there- after the Caucasian white skin was a constant marvel. So that night, and for a succession of nights and days, the men of the Kit Carson caravan were entertained, like sailors from a foreign port, with a series of fandangos and other entertainments. As willing as anyone to be amused was the tanned boy Kit; paid off with his wage of five dol- lars a month, accrued from seven or eight weeks of labor, he probably saw the sights not omitting the palace with its rumored festoons of dried Indian ears ! CHAPTER IV NEW MEXICO AND NEW MEXICANS AT THIS time Santa Fe and its environs were accred- ited with a population of about 5,000, in which prob- ably not more than a dozen of the permanent residents were Americans traders. There was not an American woman in the country. By American here is meant a gringo or foreigner, for all aliens of light skin were deemed Ameri- can. The term " white " has ever been accepted as a reproach by the native Mexican, who considers himself as white as the Anglo-Saxon, and thus applies the adjective to himself in distinction from the Indian. However, " white blood " in New Mexico long indicated Spanish blood, so bringing to mind the fact that the early Castilian was light- haired and blue-eyed. From the first the American, or gringo, was admired by the women and hated by the men, while both sexes agreed that he was uncouth and exceedingly impolite. The brusque, straightforward mien of the backwoodsman and the rather coarse-fibered trapper shocked the ceremonious, Spanish- trained populace, the worst of whom would stab the stranger in the name of God, and would not even light a cigarette without a polite " Con m licencia, senor " " with your permission, sir." Of course, as the aggressions between Mexico and the United States waxed more irritating to both sides particularly after the Texas affair the feel- ing against the American became excessive. From his dis- regard for conventionalities (which today, as then, is apt to seem his characteristic to other peoples), he was viewed as a monster. So that Lieutenant Ruxton, the English 26 KIT CARSON DAYS traveler, relates that one night in 1846, when he would have stopped over with a Pueblo family in Ohuaqui, the patrona, or mistress, was cautious until she discovered that he was an Englishman. Then " Gratias a Dios" she exclaimed. " A Christian will sleep with us tonight, and not an American." 7 Santa Fe, at Kit Carson's first visit, was a place of great pretensions, but of little beauty. The houses and business buildings were uniformly of one story; of mud bricks smeared with a thin plaster of more mud, and in rare cases whitewashed with tierra blanca, or white earth. The mud roofs were flat, windows were protected by wooden shut- ters, iron bars, or, here and there, with sheets of thin, lam- inated gypsum in lieu of glass. Mud front joined with mud front, around the central plaza, in monotonous line, until at irregular intervals a winding lane, for a street, cut through. Dirt and squalor, refuse, dogs, and beggars pre- dominated; nevertheless there was much to interest the visitor from the Missouri frontier. The blanket-enveloped Mexican, smiling in the Ameri- can's face and scowling at his back, indolent, graceful, eter- nally smoking his cornhusk cigarette, and ever a cdballero, or gentleman ; the shawled Mexican woman, her face stained crimson with the juice of the alegria plant, or coated with a paste of chalk, to preserve her complexion for the fan- dango ; the burros, piled high with enormous loads of corn- shuck for fodder, or with wood from the mountains, or with parcels of melons, or balanced with casks of that whiskey termed " Taos lightning " ; supplies of chili Colo- rado and chili verde, vegetables, baked pifion nuts, peaches from the orchards of the Pueblos and Navajos, native tobacco or punche, grapes, bunches of ho fa or husk for the rolling of cigarettes, and other products strange or appeal- ing or, to a newly arrived caravan, both ; the constant gambling, principally at el monte, with Mexican cards, by NEW MEXICO AND NEW MEXICANS 27 high and low, rich and poor, alike, in open room and upon the street; the religious processions, at which everybody must uncover; aye, there was much to see. So we may picture the lad Kit Carson, discharged and with money in his pocket, wandering, gazing and spending. As soon as the customs duties had been paid the caravan would pursue its business of barter and sale. It would split into its component units. Detachments, after refresh- ment, would push on for the markets of El Paso del Norte, down the river, and for Chihuahua and Sonora, of the Old Mexico of today. The Yankee trader never has been con- tent with the near when there was a far which he might hazard ; and the merchants from the States already were penetrating on and on, into the interior of their new con- nections. Usually it required three or four weeks to settle caravan business in Santa Fe, when, a return caravan having been loaded with the proceeds of the venture, the start back to Missouri was made, conveying the gold dust and the silver bullion, buffalo robes and furs, wool and coarse blankets, and live stock. Having in mind the return caravan, the favorite season for the outward trip to Santa Fe was the spring, that the reverse trip might be made before winter. Those merchants in the Kit Carson caravan who contem- plated return to Missouri with wagons would have hurried their business ; already it was November ; winter soon would threaten desert and plains. Intending, as he evidently did, to remain there, Kit Carson had entered the far West at an unfortunate season. If his consequent course demonstrated that he was deter- mined to be a mountain man and trapper, this was natural, for the romance of such a life would appeal to him then, as it has always appealed to a boy. But Santa Fe was not trappers' headquarters. Furthermore, through the winter employment would be slack ; not much of a caravan would 28 KIT CARSON DAYS be returning to the States, so late as this in the fall, and the stop-over teamsters, adventurers, and all would glut the little town with wage seekers. So if Kit Carson had thought of remaining long in Santa Fe he was rebuffed. If, his money dwindling, he had tried to proceed still farther southward, with Chihuahua or El Paso parties, because he did not speak Spanish he would have been nosed out by applicants who did. So he turned into the north, for Fernandez de Taos, New Mexico, and arrived there in December. What measures, if any, his brothers attempted for him, at this end of the trail, I may not allege; but it is probable that the runaway had no notion yet of going home. There was still much to be seen ; and Taos, or " Touse," moun- tain men's resort, traders' resort, already somewhat infused with American blood, was as famous a name in Missouri as Santa Fe. For anybody who wanted to be in close touch, in the far West, with the trappers, this was the spot. But when anybody engaged himself to a Santa Fe caravan, he was paid off at the journey's end, in Santa Fe. Taos lies seventy-five or eighty miles north and slightly eastward of Santa Fe. The trail between, like Taos itself, is still without a railroad ; but even in Kit Carson's first days it was well traveled. A goal of the earliest caravans, which took the mountain route to the " Spanish settlements," and a point of departure and arrival for miscellaneous traffic, Taos was a place of rank second only to Santa Fe, the capital. The lad Kit found Fernandez, set near the head of the fertile Taos Valley, cl Valle de Taos, with the sparkling Taos creek flowing through and the sacred Taos moun- tain, now snow-capped, and yellow-plashed with the frosted aspens, standing sentinel over the terraced twin buildings of the Taos Pueblos, to be a settlement of some 500 people and the outpost of northern New Mexico. Being upon the NEW MEXICO AND NEW MEXICANS 29 border rather, the inhabited border, for the actual border was still two hundred miles northeast, at the Arkansas River it was a custom-place. And being the northern border town, close to the southern extremity of those Rockies whose eastern base was United States territory, and being also connected by caravans with Santa Fe and St. Louis, from the day of the first gringo wanderer to those parts until the Civil War, it was the great trappers' stronghold of the Southwest. To old Taos journeyed, annually or semiannually, through many years, by their trails from the Platte River of Wyoming and northern Colorado, from the hill depths of the upper Arkansas, from the Green River country across the range, the shaggy mountain men, to dispose of their furs and to indulge in the wild relaxations of that easy semicivilization. To old Taos came by caravan or independent party, English traveler, army officer, adven- turer all the flotsam and jetsam of the broad frontier; came General Kearny, Fremont, the Bents, the St. Vrains, the Vigils, Fitzpatrick, Bridger, Jim Beckwourth, Pegleg Smith. Out of old Taos sallied many and many a punitive expedition of mountain man and dragoon against the Apache, the Navajo and the Ute. Kit Carson arrived there in December, 1826, little realiz- ing, of course, that he had selected his home for forty years. The principal industry of Taos, above the barter of trapper goods, was the manufacture from wheat of a strong aguardiente, or " Taos lightning," together with smuggling, and agriculture enough to tide the indolent ranchero through the winter and spring stringencies. The natives were of the regulation rural class, ruled by a priest- hood not in advance, but rather behind, the times. Taos, as seen by Lieutenant Brewerton, of the United States Army, who was a guest of Carson in later years, was then, as earlier, but little different from other New Mexican 30 KIT CARSON DAYS towns. The houses were of adobe, with walls of great thickness, the living rooms provided along the sides with rolls of scrapes, or blankets divans by day, and when unrolled, beds by night. Sacred relics, rosaries, and images and pictures of the Savior or the Virgin Mary were the chief ornaments, with other prints and paintings of religious tone. Some of these pictures of Scripture scenes strike the gringo as singular and impair his sense of reverence. Brew- erton was called upon by a rico, or wealthy Mexican, to inspect what was considered by the anxious owner as a masterpiece. After the dust had been brushed away, the subject was discovered to be the sacrifice of Isaac. But Abraham who stands upward of six feet in a yellow uniform coat and blue striped pantaloons, with cavalry boots, spurs, and moustaches to match is about putting an end to Isaac (whose dress, with the exception of the mous- taches, is gotten up in nearly the same military style as that of the patriarch) by blowing out his brains with an old- fashioned blunderbuss, the muzzle of which is close to Isaac's right ear. The Angel, however, has arrived just in the very nick of time; for as Abraham, with averted head, is pulling trigger, the celestial visitor discharges a torrent of water from a huge squirt directly into the priming of the gun, thereby saving the brains of the intended victim. 8 To the uneducated, practically unenlightened, Mexican of that day, this modern version of the ancient story would be the more realistic and effective. It was amidst such a people, and their free and easy life in the little town of San Fernandez, that Kit Carson entered now, fresh from Missouri, presently to pass his seventeenth birthday, a boy, ragged and worn, strange to the customs, unable to speak the language, fascinated with frontier life, and as susceptible as any boy of his experience and age. CHAPTER V AS FARED THE RUNAWAY 1826-1829 SO IN old Taos, for that is the name used more generally than the rightful appellation, San Fernandez, Carson found society good, bad, and indifferent. Carlos Beaubien, a French Canadian of cultured blood, destined to be appointed by General Kearny one of the first three circuit judges of New Mexico, already was a resident there; also Antoine Robidoux (Don Antonio, forsooth), who, already contemplating a post or two beyond the mountains, was as energetic in the Indian trade as his brother Joseph, pro- genitor of St. Joe City, Missouri. 9 There were several families of high Spanish breeding into one of which Don Carlos was about to marry. The Bents (William, the trader, and Charles, who would be the first governor of the territory, under American rule), and the St. Vrains (Ceran, leader in state and war, and his trader brother, Marcellin) were soon to arrive from St. Louis; and Milton Sublette was to drift in, forming a trapper partnership with Ewing Young. Of forceful breed, he; his brother was that Wil- liam Sublette who had ascended the Missouri with the first Ashley command, and he himself was equally a rover, serv- ing in the North and in the South, and succeeding to a part- nership in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Taos, of course, had its round quota of real mountain men, American and French and nondescript, now settled there for the winter with their Mexican or Indian wives. Among them was Ewing Young, one of the earliest trap- pers and traders of that country, and Kincaid, another pioneer. 31 32 KIT CARSON DAYS No " white man " of any nationality could come to Taos, where the natives were many and the aliens few, and not be given hospitality by the small contingent there, if only for the honor of his kind. The mountain trapper is nothing if not generous ; and the boy Kit was housed with Kincaid. Contemporary with forts Cooper and Hempstead, of the Carsons' first years in Missouri, was Fort Kincaid; so it is fair to presume that this Kincaid was from old Howard County, or at least was of the family for whom the fort had been christened. With Kincaid, Carson, the newcomer, spent the winter of 1826-27. The time of his arrival was unfortunate. Trappers were leaving, rather than entering, the moun- tains; for the fall hunt was over and no more fur expe- ditions would be on the tapis until spring. In Taos, even less than in Santa Fe, was there chance of work. Peon labor was cheap; in winter, only the distilleries would be run- ning, and they were small affairs. However, for Kit the winter was not wasted; he was enabled to pick up a good smattering of colloquial Spanish. He appears to have been a natural linguist, learning by ear entirely (for he could not read). To speak Spanish as used in Mexico was abso- lutely necessary, if he stayed, and he probably had realized this. It was the language universally employed, and was a medium even among the Indian tribes of the north. The lad's career through the two years following is some- what hard to understand, when one thinks of his career thereafter, and considered also that his brothers were in and out of Taos and Santa Fe. Although he was now at Amer- ican headquarters, and under the tutelage of Kincaid, he was not immediately enlisted with trappers or traders, but served as teamster, interpreter, or cook pursuing the unattractive fortunes of the usual runaway. One explanation of this is, that by size and means he had nothing to recommend him. He himself told General AS FARED THE RUNAWAY 33 Rusling, many years later, that when he first entered the mountain West he " was too small to set a trap." 10 In type he was ordinary ; in appearance he was undistinguished all his life. Few persons, not knowing Kit Carson by repu- tation, would have picked him out for what he really was. Certainly, the mountain men in old Taos would have hesi- tated about burdening themselves with a slight greenhorn youth who probably did not look even his years. He would further be deterred from joining any squad because he had no money, supplies, or weapons. A trap cost twelve dollars in St. Louis, and if he had brought a rifle out with him he must have sold it in a pinch. Taos had nobody who would advance an inexperienced small boy an outfit, on speculation, or be responsible for him ; for all we know, Kincaid was poor, himself trapping, perhaps, no longer. His name seems not to appear anywhere among the fur hunts of that period. In the spring the native population would be dispersing into the fields but the rancher os would tender no living wage to a gringo. And what other opportunities would Taos present, with no industries except a distillery or two on the outskirts, with all the winter's money concentrated by spring in the hands of the saloons and gambling houses, and with traders from the States now squeezing the country still drier? Going down to Santa Fe again, when it was approaching caravan time, having seen the world to the end of his rope, young Kit could do naught but join a caravan leaving on a spring trip to Missouri. Willynilly, he was homeward bound. But at the ford of the Arkansas, a little over half way, they met a Franklin spring caravan, outward headed for Santa Fe. To this caravan Carson transferred his alle- giance and turned back with it, to Santa Fe once more. He was tiding himself along; whatever mirage of romance and golden hope had lured him from home was 34 KIT CARSON DAYS now vanished, and there remained only the desperate desire to scratch out a living. Back again in Santa Fe, Kit Carson's sole ambition was not scalp nor pelt, but the simple neces- sity of a woolen shirt. The means for this he earned, at last, by engaging as a teamster with an outfit out of Santa Fe for El Paso del Norte. Traders from Missouri, as has been said, frequently extended their operations south of Santa Fe, down the Rio Grande and clear to Chihuahua of Old Mexico. Old El Paso, today of Texas, was in 1827 the gateway to the Department of Chihuahua. It was known familiarly among traders as " the Pass " the name being attributed to the ford here (Ruxton), to the course of the river between two high points (Gregg), or to the retreat of refugees from the north southward, after the Pueblo revolt of 1680 (Gregg). In the boy Carson's time El Paso was noted chiefly for its grape products " Pass brandy " and " Pass wine." A bottle of either seems to have been a valued concomitant of a Mexican meal. Gregg compares the wine to Malaga, and another traveler compares it to Burgundy. The caravan trail to El Paso was 320 miles of the trail to Chihuahua, which was still 230 miles onward. It was a trail not without excitement, frequented by bandits and hovered over by the Apaches, for the last two hundred miles of its course totally unsettled, and divided into such delightful stages as the Jornada del Muerto (Day's Journey of the Dead), the forbidding Laguna del Muerto (Dead Man's Lake), a gloomy canon wherein the avid Apache loved to lurk, and the Ojo del Muerto (Dead Man's Spring) at the farther end of it. Having made the El Paso trip, in the fall Kit Carson sought Taos again, as the place to spend the winter. But no mention is made of his old friend, the mountain man Kincaid, who may have " gone under," or have changed his location. The haven this second winter, 1827-28, for AS FARED THE RUNAWAY 35 the wanderer, was the quarters of Ewing Young, trader and captain of trappers. Here Carson, eighteen years of age, cooked for his board. In the spring of 1828 the luckless Kit was again foot- loose. It is strange that if his abilities as a hunter and woodsman were already pronounced, in promise of his later eminence, he was not enrolled under Captain Young, who was (as we know) now actively in the trading and fur business. But instead, deserted, as in the spring before, by his gods, lad Kit once more turned his face to the east and to Missouri, with an annual caravan. And as in the spring before, meeting an opposite caravan at the ford of the Arkansas, with it he retraced his course to Santa Fe. By this time he was fluent in Spanish as it was spoken throughout Mexico. As interpreter for Colonel Tramell, a trader (whose name I have not again encountered), he enlisted for the long journey of 550 miles to Chihuahua; first south to El Paso del Norte, thence inclining into the west, and occupying forty days. I can fancy that Kit Carson was glad of the chance to visit Chihuahua, the capital of that department, with a reputation as a city far superior to that of Santa Fe, and now practically the farthest point to which American traders as yet penetrated. Here in Chihuahua, so remote from Mis- souri and yet more closely connected with it through trade than is the case today, young Carson, the wanderer, encoun- tered an old acquaintance (by hearsay if not by person), that Robert McKnight whose return to Missouri, by way of Franklin, in 1822, after nine years' imprisonment in the Chihuahua calabozo, had been chronicled in the Intelli- gencer. His brother John, who had rescued him, had since been killed, and Robert himself was back in Chihuahua and vicinity, the first American after Pike to exploit the region. He was at this time endeavoring to recoup from his initial hard experience, by trading and by mining in the 36 KIT CARSON DAYS ancient copper prospects near the Rio Gila, to the north. The mines being worked by McKnight were in that old Santa Rita del Cobre (Saint Rita of the Copper) district in southwestern New Mexico. From them McKnight was planning to make a fortune; the gold in the ore paid the expenses of getting it out, and hauling it and refining it, so that the copper was clear gain. It was mined, with pick and shovel only, in great masses of red oxide. But the country was thoroughly Apache, and before McKnight had made his fortune he was working with as much ease as if he had been in a den of rattlesnakes. Trading and mining together, McKnight had wagons and pack trains continually shuttling between his outpost and the Chihuahua settlements. Following his incarcera- tion through those nine years, the pendulum must have swung well to the opposite end of the arc; to mine or to trade with the Indians, in Mexico, and particularly in this portion, was, for an American, hedged about with much favor and declaration, and with many open palms. To Robert McKnight Kit Carson hired out as teamster on the copper mines road ; worked thus through the fall of 1828, passed his nineteenth birthday probably in Chihuahua, where Christmas would be celebrated by strange native plays, and spent the main part of the winter 1828-29 at the mines. McKnight had not been the only American at the copper mines. The Patties, of Kentucky and Missouri, had made the place headquarters between trips farther westward after fur. Other " investors," also, had taken their turn at these mines; so that here had grown up quite a village of low adobe huts for the peons and officials. Later a fort was erected, triangular in shape, with angle bastions. The ruins of fort and huts were noted when in 1846, through this very spot pushed General Kearny's overland column to California. CHAPTER VI THE TRAPPER'S TRAIL 1829 HOWEVER, Kit Carson had nearly reached another crossroads in his career, and the trail was about to broaden. In this interior of Mexico, before foreign blood and foreign methods had invigorated it, the Anglo-Saxon was swallowed; he could only adopt the life as it was; his very name became Spanish; and he became Mexican. In Don Santiago Querque, who of the North would recognize Jim Kirker, Scotch trapper? Yet Don Santiago Querque it was, thus incorporated with the citizenship, who led relentless expeditions from Sonora against the savages. Had Kit Carson stayed among the dons and the peons, as laborer and later as employer of cheap labor, he might eventually have vanished from history, as did Robert McKnight; he could have lived easily, by the customs of the country, and have died rich, but quickly to be forgotten. What impelled him, like a homing bird, toward Taos again, in the early spring of 1829, we may not know. Whether the Apaches temporarily interrupted the mining, whether he had a little money in pocket once more, whether now in the caravan season he preferred the caravan trail to the ore trail, or whether he was just sick for the sight of Americans other than McKnight and his fellows, and for news of his own country, who can say? But leaving McKnight (who in due course made a fortune, and encouraged thereto by the Apaches settled down in Chihuahua to enjoy it), having signed with no caravan in Santa Fe, he arrived in Taos at the end of March, when the trapper parties would be set- ting out into the beaver country. Here he found Captain 37 38 KIT CARSON DAYS Ewing Young, and almost immediately was engaged, at last, as a trapper. For Captain Young and Taos were both on the alert, a company which the captain had dispatched for the Rio Gila country, on a spring hunt, having trailed in, driven back by the Apaches. This was not necessarily unexpected; and very likely it was deserved. Bad as he has since proved, in the begin- ning of his intercourse with the invading whites the Apache was not as a rule unfriendly or vicious. He soon grew to hate with fierce hatred the Spanish and their descendants, the Mexicans, and met deceit and rapine with rapine and deceit. You have taken New Mexico, and will soon take California ; go, then, and take Chihuahua, Durango and Sonora. We will help you. You fight for land; we care nothing for land; we fight for our rights and for food. The Mexicans are ras- cals; we hate them and will kill them all. After such manner spoke the Apache chief to General Kearny, in explaining that Americans were safe; and he fairly well set forth the situation. But it came to be with the Apaches as with the other Indians of the West: they must fight; and once settled down to hostility toward everybody who wore a hat, they accepted their enforced role. However, it is with this spring of 1829 that our narra- tive is just now dealing, and with a brigade of forty men, including Kit Carson, about to set forth, under Ewing Young, from old Taos, to punish the Apaches and to trap the Gila and the Colorado. Immediately upon the report from his defeated detach- ment, Ewing Young reorganized, reinforced, and led the brigade himself. By virtue of his three winters in the country, the last passed in the exposed districts of the " copper mines," and by virtue also of his previous acquaint- THE TRAPPER'S TRAIL 39 ance with Captain Young, Kit Carson was, as said, given a berth. When this expedition had left, Taos must have been pretty well cleaned out of able-bodied mountain men; the time was the first week of April, and the spring hunt had long been summoning into plain and hill. The roll of this Ewing Young company is still uncalled. The members were Americans, French-Canadians, Germans ; no doubt a few Mexicans, and men of mixed blood. Only a few names of the forty have been preserved: Ewing Young's, because he was a leader; Kit Carson's, because he had a Boswell ; James Higgins', because he shot " big " James Lawrence who therefore, also received honorable mention and Francois Turcote, Jean Vaillant, Anastase Curier, because they mutinied. The expedition did not make course at once into the Southwest and for the Rio Gila. It had no trapping or trading license from the Mexican government nor did Captain Ewing Young intend that it should thus be mulcted. To understand the license requirement, it must be remem- bered that the Mexicans themselves would not trap. That was too hard work, and too dangerous. Even as late as 1846 Lieutenant Johnston, of the American column to California, remarking the tameness and prevalence of fur-bearing ani- mals along the Rio Grande del Norte, close to Mexican settlement, adds, " these creatures will not rejoice in the change of Government." And while the natives would not trap, under Spanish rule foreigners could not trap, except by challenging con- fiscation for their furs and the calabozo for themselves. But after Mexico became an independent republic in 1821, licenses were issued to foreigners for hunting and trap- ping and trading. As New Mexico was presumed to extend to the Arkansas on the north, and westward indefinitely, it covered the main fur territory of the South, and therefore 40 KIT CARSON DAYS the great proportion of trapping and hunting licenses were issued from Santa Fe. At first the permissions were granted only with the stipulation that a certain number of the natives should be taken along by the foreigners and " shown how." Later this stipulation was omitted ; but at all times the license was a rather spasmodic instrument, with a bad recoil. Often a license soon after being issued would be declared void because it had been issued under a previous adminis- tration. The rise and fall of political parties in New Mexico was so frequent and so sudden that the returning traveler could not foretell what policy he would encounter. It was alleged by Americans that although the license might be pronounced valid, the Mexican officials were not above hiring Indians or other desperadoes to follow the trapper and to rob him of his goods. However, in many cases the trapper or trader was not an innocent offender. He penetrated into Mexican terri- tory without leave, and took the risk of being unable to evade the authorities or to fight his way out if caught. He was reckless, overbearing, and defiant, treating the Mexicans much as he treated the Indians. Captain Ewing Young, therefore, took out no license for his party of this April, 1829. He seems to have had some excuse for his course. In the previous year he and Milton Sublette, having trapped under a license from Governor Narbona, were arrested and their furs confiscated by order of his successor, Governor Armijo. A change in the admin- istration had occurred during their absence. The confis- cated furs were spread out to dry, before the guardia,, in Santa Fe; whereupon Sublette boldly seized two packs which belonged to him, carried them off, and secreted them and himself among friends. The whole military force was called against him, and the enraged Armijo even had cannon leveled against a suspected house; but the plucky Sublette \ THE TRAPPER'S TRAIL 41 finally saved his two packs and himself, reaching the frontier. What Captain Young was doing, Gregg (the chronicler) does not mention. Farnham alludes to the fact that Young " had been plundered by the Mexican authorities of $18,000 or $20,000 worth of fur " ; but whether this time or another time, is left in doubt. As a subterfuge, to cloak overcurious eyes, Young marched his company northward out of Taos, taking pos- sibly the usual trappers' trail, which led over the Raton Pass and down to the Arkansas a trail which the earliest caravans had used, and which after the establishment of the historic Bent's Fort was a beaten highway. But long before reaching the Arkansas, beyond which was American territory, the party swung to the southwest, recrossed the ridge, and descended into the latitude which they had just left. There was slight danger that anybody would now ask for a license. Before lay only that wide desert expanse, from the Rio Grande to the Pacific coast, from Chihuahua of Old Mexico to the Salt Lake, totally uninhabited by white people and as yet scarcely trodden by Americans. Strange to say, although this section of the West was the first to be explored, it was the last to be exploited. The country of the conquistadors and the padres, penetrated by Cabeza and Estevan in 1531, by Friar Marcos in 1539, traversed by Coronado, Diaz, Alarcon, 15401542, and thereafter by Fathers Lopez, Rodriguez, Santa Maria, by Father Baltran and Don Espejo, Onate, the Jesuit Kino and his companions, establishing missions along the Gila and the lower Colorado, by Garces in 1774, by Escalante in 1776, it remained as in the beginning. The trails of hoof and sandal made so bravely endured not even in memory ; for half a century after Escalante's feat, the great, wondrous region between the Rio Grande del Norte and the Cali- fornia coast was all unmolested by any outsider. The mis- sions were deserted, the native ceased to worship his little 42 KIT CARSON DAYS crosses, the fabulous cities lost their fascination, and the Indian became the conquistador, levying upon that civiliza- tion which had attempted to levy upon him, the feeble efforts of which had dwindled into but a few shallow inden- tations along the southern borders. So the Southwest slumbered again. But the Northwest was awakening everywhere. The contrast was an efficient lesson in the difference between New World and Old World government between Amer- ican and Spanish supremacy. Since 1803, the date of the opening of Louisiana Province to the Anglo-Saxon, or during but half of that fifty years while the Southwest slept, under impetus from Saxon and Gaul, Americans together, the Northwest had advanced more than had this same Southwest in its three centuries from 1531 and Cabeza. Trappers, American and French, w r ere exploring the secret places of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, broad- ening old trails and making new ones, preparing the way for the hosts of civilization. But western New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada remained uncharted and neglected. However, the Ewing Young party was not the very first expedition of Saxon proclivities to invade the waiting region. From 1776 the year of American Independence, which signified naught to this vivid, sunny area, some day, nevertheless, to profit by it until 1824 there is no record of alien foot set upon sands beyond the Rio Bravo the Rio Grande del Norte of New Mexico, save at the cop- per mines, or as Apache and Navajo returned to their haunts with Spanish-Mexican prisoners, or as occasional punitive columns, in revenge, darted from the white settle- ments of east and south, and back again. Then, in the spring of 1824, from Missouri boldly struck out the Pattie party of trappers and traders ; first determined upon the Northwest, soon, however, to turn and travel down to Santa Fe and on to the Gila of Arizona, which at that time was Nueva Mejico. THE TRAPPER'S TRAIL 43 Father and son were the Patties Sylvester and James Ohio, Kentuckians (of course) acclimated to Missouri, the new country. Having thus penetrated to the Southwest, they divided much of their time for two years between the " cop- per mines," where they preceded Kit Carson, and the " Heelay " to the west ; they followed the Gila down to the Colorado; ascended along the Colorado past the Grand Canon, pushing northward even to the Yellowstone in Wyoming; and ended their wanderings in 1828, in prison at Sta. Catarina of Lower California. 11 It is claimed that in 1826 Richard Campbell, an early trader of New Mexico, and later a prosperous ranchero near Santa Fe, took a pack train across the desert from Santa Fe to San Diego. 12 As has been noted, Ewing Young himself had been trapping, evidently, in southwestern territory, with Milton Sublette, and moreover had just sent out another venture, for the Colorado. So that, having such precedents, the student of early Southwestern history must realize that trapping parties aside from those of the Patties, of Young and Sublette may have been roaming hither and thither, through this region, working, playing, fighting, feasting, suffering, with no pen or pencil to jot down their journeyings. The Ewing Young party of April, 1829, if not the first expedition since the Spaniards to brave the waiting, inhos- pitable depths, at least was the first of the kind successfully to cross from the settlements of the Rio Grande to the Pacific coast, and back again. It undoubtedly was encour- aged thereto by the reports from the Pattie enterprise; but it seems to have effectually broken the trail through and to have proved what could be done. CHAPTER VII TO THE GRAND CANYON, AND ON SO, AS it happened, Kit Carson, who was to make a name in the Northwest, was to win his spurs in the South- west. A wonderful journey now lay before him. The trail first cut down diagonally through the northwestern corner of the present New Mexico the realm of the well-formed, light-complexioned, proudly-independent Nav- ajos. Like the Apaches, in the beginning they were friendly to the Americano that is, not openly hostile. But before their men now young had become old, Kit Carson was their conqueror. After leaving the Navajo country the expedition crossed Zuni land, the people of which had gained wide, although undeserved, fame as being " white." Thus Father de Nica had defined them in 1539 through seeing, doubtless, one of their albinos. 13 Leaving Zuni the expedition entered what is today Arizona, and traversing toward the south this home of the Apache, came upon the head of the Rio Salido, or Salt River on modern maps the Salido. The Salido rises near the New Mexican line, and flowing west through east central Arizona empties into the Gila, of which it is the largest tributary. Thus far the Ewing Young party had traveled as in a hurry, and by route direct tracing again, perhaps, the course of that first party which had been turned back. As evidence of all this, it is recorded that upon the sources of the Salido one object was achieved; here were encoun- tered the same Apaches who had been concerned in the previous attack. TO THE GRAND CANYON, AND ON 45 But whether the same, or not, it would have made little difference to the trappers. When a Navajo's wife died, he was under obligations to go out and kill somebody. And borrowing from the Indian, the trapper, when an offense had been committed against him or his, took vengeance, if not upon the very offender, then upon the tribe. In this respect savage and frontiersman were much alike. Seeing the Apaches, the Ewing Young company lured them on with a show of weakness, until they caught them in an ambush and shot down fifteen by crossfire from rifle and pistol. The rest fled. Having exacted blood atonement, and cleared the way, the Ewing Young trappers might proceed to gather their furs. The valley of the Salt River was and is of exceeding romantic interest; ruins of large towns, acequias, or irri- gating aqueducts twenty-five feet wide, myriad fragments of pottery, speak of a vanished civilization. While on the road out from Taos the expedition had passed the Chaco Canon, the pueblo of Zuni, El Moro or Inscription Rock, and many another witness, mute or speaking, to bygone epochs. But the route, and the Salt River, and what must have been sighted thereafter, have come down to us only in Indians and fur; as unromantic a narration as the parasangs of the Anabasis. The Rio Salido (christened in 1698 by busy Father Kino, who upon one of his pilgrimages surveyed it from a hilltop) is at first a swift, cold mountain stream, until rushing out of the range it enters a series of richly alluvial flats, and swirling on, with rapid, clear current, finally merges with the Gila, in central Arizona. During the lower half of its course it flows over a bed of pure salt, so that its waters are perceptibly brackish. This was another of the wonders which Father Kino met. The Salido, wherever its banks were wooded, was ai beaver resort. The Ewing Young party trapped down it 46 KIT CARSON DAYS until they reached the mouth of the Verde, or San Francisco a tributary coming from the north. As was the custom, they turned and trapped up the San Francisco, to its head. " A fine, large stream," has been said of the San Francisco, in some cases rapid and deep, in others spreading out into wide lagoons. The ascent * * * by gradual steppes, which,, stretching into plains, abounded in timber. The river banks were covered with ruins of stone houses and regular fortifications ; which * * * appeared to have been the work of civilized man, but had not been occupied for cen- turies. They were built upon the most fertile tracts of the valley, where were signs of acequias and cultivation. 14 Indians bothered the trappers almost nightly from the time they reached the San Francisco. Trapped animals were killed and animals and traps stolen. Meanwhile much fur was " caught." Twenty-two of the men were dispatched back to Taos, with the pelts, there to sell them and to buy more traps, for a fall hunt. Retaining seventeen men (among them Kit Carson), and now stocked with the traps of the Taos-bound party, Captain Young decided to strike in the opposite direction, for California. His retention of Kit Carson is the first definite token that the future celebrity was making good. During the two years and more that Carson had been in the far West his career would not indicate any sudden rise. On the con- trary, his offices as wrangler, teamster, and cook, and his failure to be enrolled with the enterprises of these mountain men whom he had met, would relegate him to the ordinary crowd. But when Captain Young divided his company, he would discard the chaff the weak, the laggard, the ineffi- cient for return to Taos, and would keep, for the Cali- fornia trail, only the tried and true. He was now, probably, in the vicinity of Bill Williams Mountain, seventy-five or eighty miles northeast of Pres- TO THE GRAND CANYON, AND ON 47 cott, Arizona. Thereabouts the modern traveler disem- barks at the station of Williams, en route for the Grand Canon to the north. And he was, roughly speaking, half way from Taos to the coast. However, California could have been but little known to Ewing Young or his men, as yet, and the distance to be covered must have been only guessed at. Commercial intercourse between New Mexico and California had not yet been established. But lured by some report or by some notion, as if the Golden State were already wielding its magic wand, making his own trail across the grimmest of deserts, Ewing Young led his sev- enteen men onward to the West. Warned by friendly Indians (possibly wandering Mo- haves, but more likely Tonto Apaches, a degraded tribe frequenting the Bill Williams country) that a dry entrada or march, was ahead, the California-bound party remained in camp, around the sources of the San Francisco, for several days, to provision with meat and water. But they killed only three deer. We are accustomed to look upon the western hills and plains of early days as swarming with game; and so, according to many chronicles, they were. But the game then, as today, was erratic. Here around Bill Williams Mountain were abundant timber, grass, and springs of the great San Francisco forest tract, a favorite resort of deer and antelope; yet the eighteen trappers, good shots all and versed in hunting craft, secured only the three animals. Making tanks of hides they filled them with water; suf- ficient, it was hoped, to last the entrada through. The flesh was jerked or dry cured. Then, mainly afoot, and driving before them their pack mules, they started upon an unknown way, for the Sacramento Valley, which lay somewhere in Nueva California, far beyond a waterless stretch of one hundred and eighteen miles. Their course was northwest, and must have been right 48 KIT CARSON DAYS across the desolate Colorado Plateau, which borders the Grand Canon of the Colorado on the south. " A more frightfully arid region probably does not exist upon the face of the earth," says Lieutenant Ives, in his report of the government expedition of 1857-58. His route south- ward from the Grand Canon must very nearly coincide with that of the Ewing Young party, northward, thirty years before. The Ives description is vivid: A rolling plateau with occasional thick growths of pines and cedars; with expanses of loose, porous soil wherein the mules sank to their fetlocks; with sharp slopes, forming small, higher plateaus, and unexpected, sheer, impassable canoncitos, or ravines, sometimes so thickly intersecting that the plateau was shattered like a ruin ; with an intensely hot sun stream- ing down through a dry, thin air that sucked moisture from the body; with not an animate thing encountered; and finally, with mules staggering along as if drunken, and men's brains afire with the scorching rays. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed. The handful of Indians that inhabit the se- questered retreats where we discovered them have probably remained in the same condition, and of the same number, for centuries. The country could not support a large population, and by some provision of nature they have ceased to multi- ply. The deer, the antelope, the birds, even the smaller reptiles, all of which frequent the adjacent territory, have deserted this uninhabitable district. Excepting when the melting snows send their annual torrents through the ave- nues to the Colorado, conveying with them sound and mo- tion, these dismal abysses, and the arid table-lands that enclose them, are left, as they have been for ages, in unbroken solitude and silence. The lagoons by the side of which we are encamped furnish, as far as we have been able to dis- cover, the only accessible watering-place west of the mouth TO THE GRAND CANYON ', AND ON 49 of Diamond River. During the summer it is probable they are dry, and that no water exists upon the whole of the Colo- rado Plateau. 15 But Lieutenant Ives' party was not the first. The padres had preceded him. Cardenas, in 1540, and Garces, in 1776, had penetrated this portion of the great, lonely pla- teau guarding the south approach to the Grand Canon. And the party of Ewing Young, containing Kit Carson, were the first Americans, and the first white men after Garces, to cross it. It was in the middle of April that the Ives expedition traversed the Colorado Plateau; the time of the Young party must have been June or July (they had trapped on the way), so that the region was yet drier. To trace abso- lutely the trappers' trail is impossible; we can only see them, in our mind's eye, toiling on and on, northwest from the San Francisco country, pigmies amidst the wide desolation of gigantic ruin, conquistadors and padres again, whose hope was no seven cities nor savage souls, but simply fur. Through four days they had water from the hide tanks doled out to them; each night an armed guard was placed over the scant supply; but when four days had passed they came upon other water, camped beside it for two days, and rested. This may have been the lagoons mentioned by Ives, in the extract just preceding, and located toward the northwestern edge of the plateau, or it may have been a pool or spring (of which there are several) lower down. From the camp beside the water it was another four days' entrada, of hunger and thirst (pleasantly broken, at the close, by purchase from some Mohave Indians of a tidbit in shape of an old mare) to the Colorado, which was struck at the Grand Canon. I am inclined to think that this point was near the western end of the Grand Canon 50 KIT CARSON DAYS proper, or about at the sharp elbow (on the map) where is marked Diamond Creek and the present Walapai reser- vation. It " failed not to awaken a thrill of delight in every member of the party/' inscribes Peters, Carson's earliest biographer. The rest is left to the imagination of the reader. But this we know: from the time of Cardenas, who, traveling up from the south in 1540, was the first white person to stand upon the canon brink, until today, none can have gazed into this mighty chasm without an overpowering rush of feeling. This was the point where the Ives expedition, after having experienced a long suc- cession of only slightly lesser canons below, came upon it. At the end of ten miles the ridge of the swell was attained, and a splendid panorama burst suddenly into view. In the foreground were low table-lands, intersected by numberless ravines; beyond these a lofty line of bluffs marked the edge of an immense canon; a wide gap was directly ahead, and through it were beheld, to the extreme limit of vision, vast plateaus, towering one above the other thousands of feet in the air, the long horizontal bands broken at intervals by wide and profound abysses, and extending a hundred miles to the north, till the deep azure blue faded into a light cerulean tint that blended with the dome of the heavens. The famous " Big Canon " was before us ; and for a long time we paused in won- dering delight, surveying this stupendous formation through which the Colorado and its tributaries break their way. 10 As far as is recorded, the Ewing Young party was the second party of Americans to see the Grand Canon. The Patties, two years before, must have seen it and their remarks upon the nature of the country are less in admira- tion than in a great desire to be free of it. Jedediah S. Smith and party (of whom more will be told, presently) did not, probably, see it; they saw only the canons further down. Before the Patties and Smith, were but the Spanish ; TO THE GRAND CANYON, AND ON 51 after them, came Ewing Young, Kit Carson, James Law- rence, James Higgins, the three Frenchmen, and their comrades whose names no man knows. On the brink of the Grand Canon the Ewing Young party now stayed three days, recouping while doubtless also vainly wondering if it were possible to cross this tre- mendous gorge. But pass there was none. Mohaves from the south found the camp, and brought in a small quantity of corn and black beans. From these Mohaves the trappers would learn that southward the walls lowered, and a cross- ing existed. Having rested, the Ewing Young party there- fore diverged from the Canon, and traveling southwest for three days, by this short cut of the big bend which projects from northwestern Arizona into Nevada, reached the river again at the valley home of the Mohaves, where Nevada tapers to a slender point between Arizona and California. A people warlike, able to defend themselves, sturdy, independent, proud, but generally just and friendly to the whites, have been the Mohaves; devoted less to the chase than to the raising of corn, squash, and beans, upon the river bottoms, their land, and to tattooing of their bronze bodies. The men have been noted for their fine, tall stat- ures. When aroused they are fierce fighters and as mer- ciless as other Indians. The Ewing Young party were not the first trappers who had visited them. The Patties had passed up the Colorado, from the mouth of the Gila, two years before; and three years before Jedediah Smith and party on a beaver hunt from Utah had passed down, on the same side (the east) from the mouth of the Virgin River in what is now south- eastern Nevada. Bound from the Salt Lake of Utah to the teeming streams of California was Smith; the first man, he, to lead across the desert which lies between. At the Virgin he crossed the Colorado to the east bank ; at the Mohave vil- lages he crossed back again by raft, to the west bank, thence 52 KIT CARSON DAYS journeying boldly on southwest into the sands, for Califor- nia. The Mohaves had been friendly; but when he would have repeated the trip, the next year, incited by the Spanish of California to keep the gringo out they attacked his raft in midstream and of the eighteen men killed ten. Smith himself escaped, with his wounded, to reach San Diego by that parching desert trail which he had broken the year before. 17 Taos being, we may easily believe, the center of mountain gossip in the far West, and Smith and the Sublettes having been associates in the trapping business, the chances are that Captain Young was informed as to Smith's move- ments just as he must have been informed, by word from the copper mines and Santa Fe, if not more directly, of the journeyings of the Patties. So he doubtless was upon his guard against the Mohaves. The Colorado was to be crossed by means of the Mohaves' rafts, for although a river people, the Mohaves never have possessed boats or canoes. The one contemporary biography, upon which all other biographies have been based, states that in the vicinity of the Jedediah Smith " massacre " (when the Indians are the victors in a fight, " massacre " is the proper word), on their route the Ewing Young party met with a dry river, rising in the coast ranges and leading " northeast " into the Great Basin. This they followed for several days before they came to water in it. Making due allowance for errors of geography natural to the first trip in a new country forty years before the same trip was chronicled, we may assume this dry river to have been the Mohave, of the modern map, in San Bernardino County of southern California. There is no other stream with the faculty of flowing " bottom-side up," between the Mohave Valley and Los Angeles, which one might follow for several days' travel, or say one hundred miles. TO THE GRAND CANYON, AND ON 53 This is a very singular stream. It may be said to run south- eastwardly about two hundred miles, and empty into the Colo- rado. But on all its length it does not run two miles without entirely disappearing in the sand. So that it presents to the traveler a long line of little rippling lakes, from two to two and a half feet deep, at one time sunken among hard flinty hills or piles of drifting sands, and at others gurgling through narrow vales covered with grass, and fields and forests in which live the deer, the black bear, the elk, the hare, and many a singing bird. 18 In four days from the erratic river the trappers arrived at the mission of San Gabriel, near El Pueblo de los Angeles which is today Los Angeles city. This was a welcome sta- tion, one goal upon the march of over a thousand miles just for fur. When we read of the distance covered, the perils braved, the discomforts endured, by the western trapper, we can but marvel. It was the prospector's gamble. CHAPTER VIII AMERICAN TRAPPERS IN CALIFORNIA SO HERE was Captain Ewing Young, and here with him were Kit Carson and the rest, gaunt, burned, bearded, or bristly, in tattered, patched buckskins, but steady-eyed, unabashed, handling easily their long rifles, and, in sooth, a little company compact and f ormidable. The missions of California still were prosperous, although hampered by interference from the new overlord, the repub- lic of Mexico. Materiality was succeeding spirituality, and the end was near, for secularization loomed upon the hori- zon and already the priesthood was divided, its powers upon the wane. However, they yet were fat, these splendid missions, ooz- ing oil and wine, gathering about them those flocks and herds and lands coveted by the State which had not earned them. San Gabriel Arcangel, old (lacking but two years of being the oldest) and honorable, was proud mistress over 1,000 Indians, 70,000 neat cattle, 4,200 horses, 400 mules, 54,000 sheep; its vines produced annually 200 bar- rels of brandy, and twice as much wine; and here were stationed a priest, and fifteen Mexican soldiers serving as guard. 19 The governor of Alta California, in this summer of 1829, was Colonel Jose Maria Echeandia, " a man of scholastic bent and training and of Castilian lisp." He it was who had maintained such close espionage upon Jedediah Smith ; he it was who had retained the Patties : for, first man as he was to penetrate by land into California, Captain Smith had been arrested and expelled pursued by suspicion all 54 AMERICAN TRAPPERS IN CALIFORNIA 55 the way from San Gabriel to San Jose of the north; and the Patties, the second Americans to enter by land, like- wise were arrested, the father to die. The Hudson Bay Company, entering from the north, knew how to conciliate the authorities ; but the American freebooter, as a rule disregarding those niceties of intercourse which marked the gente de razon and gente Una, was unwelcome. So Ewing Young did not tarry at San Gabriel ; his party, the third one of Americans thus invading from the interior, not only were American trappers, but they had no license or other conciliations. So Captain Young paused in his course only to trade four butcher knives for a fat ox, and hastened on before the presidio of San Diego, under whose protection the mission was, should have been notified. Moreover, the summer was advancing and the valleys of the North waited. Northward this little party pressed; past the famous olive orchard mission of San Fernando Rey de Espana, but a short march of thirty miles from San Gabriel, stop- ping here only an hour or two, and hastening onward. The rounded hills of a landscape already browning in a Cali- fornia summer waxed richer in natural resources; and by reason of streams, herbage, and groves was a pleasing con- trast to the desert behind. Such a region, under the soft Cali- fornia sky where never a cloud appeared, roamed over by vast quantities of deer, elk, bear, and wild horses must have appeared as trappers' paradise. Few civilized beings could have been met. The twenty- one missions, the four presidios, San Diego, Santa Bar- bara, Monterey, and San Francisco; the pueblos, de los Angeles, Monterey, Yerba Buena and San Jose de Guada- lupe, all were along the seaboard ; the route of the trappers was inland, up the middle of the present state, towards the Sacramento Valley. The settlement by Anglo-Saxons also was entirely by sea and upon the coast captains of Amer- 56 KIT CARSON DAYS ican and English vessels and their supercargoes being the chief gringo residents. Up through the pleasant land pushed the Ewing Young party, until in the Tulare Valley, amidst sign of beaver and otter, they found fresh sign of other trappers. Here had entered the alert, energetic Hudson Bay Company, to glean along the trail of Jedediah Smith. Perhaps disappointed, and no doubt spurred to renewed endeavor for the purpose of overtaking and passing their rivals, the Ewing Young company made greater haste. They emerged upon the noble San Joaquin (Joachim), where with sweep from the west into the north it continues on through its lush valley for the yet far distant bay. Trap signs were constant; somebody had been reaping the harvest; and upon the lower San Joaquin the Amer- icans overtook a party in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company of Vancouver, under command of that Peter Skene Ogden for whom Ogden, Utah, is named. As neither party would let the other go ahead, and as Captain Young must have been too shrewd a trapper and trader to trust much in any professions by that powerful corporation of the Northwest, whose country he really was invading, the two must trap together, more or less amicably. To this, Ogden probably was nothing loath, for he was a jovial, easy-going man, fond of social amenities of the wilderness. And as he had been in the valley since the preceding fall, his packs were heavy with fur. The two parties trapped down the San Joaquin to its delta, at Suisun Bay, which is the innermost extension of the Bay of San Francisco, and crossed over to the Sacra- mento. Now was it well into the summer; the fur season was done; the Ogden party, their mules laden high, pro- ceeded up the Sacramento Valley for the Pitt River country beyond, and for Vancouver; the Young party turned back for the lower San Joaquin, and went into camp. AMERICAN TRAPPERS IN CALIFORNIA 57 The summer passed with no interference from the jealous Calif ornian government. It is likely that the soldiery of the missions of the few presidios cherished a wholesome respect for American trapper rifles. Little was to be gained by armed conflict. And at Monterey Captain Young pos- sessed a friend in residence: Captain Cooper, of famous surname (as witness the Missouri Coopers), but not more definitely designated, and said to be not a woodsman but a seaman, now in business at Monterey. 20 Fortunately, the Taosans were enabled to be of service to the mission San Jose, situated some twenty or thirty miles westward from the camp, and seventy miles north of the town Monterey. Powerful and rich was San Jose, raising much grain. From eighty bushels of wheat sown were gathered 8,600 bushels. It grazed 60,000 cattle, and in 1825 was suzerain over 3,000 Indians. But it was reputed to be a harsh taskmaster; and in this July, of 1829, the alcalde came to the trappers' camp on a hunt for run- away neophytes. He had pursued them to an Indian village, where he had been defeated. 21 A few years before (in 1826), by the Republic of Mexico a decree had been issued, applying to California, setting free mission Indians. But spiritual power was slow to resign to temporal; and the missions clung to their home- rule policy. The alcalde was determined to capture and punish the San Jose refugees. The camp of the Americans (recognized as invaders, heretics, and ruffians, but great fighters) was appealed to, and twelve men, Kit Carson of course being one, volun- teered to help. Thus augmented, the mission force returned to the attack, the village was captured, and " one-third of its inhabitants killed." The demand to deliver over the refugees " was complied with." Relying now upon the obligations of the mission, Captain Young, a few days after this affair, visited it and engaged 58 KIT CARSON DAYS to trade in some furs for horses, of which he was in need. Tallow, grain, hides, beef, and wine were the California missions' main support; augmented occasionally by furs from the stock of foreign trappers (the natives would not trap), as in this case. Either through the mission, or direct, Captain Young disposed of his pelts to the skipper of a schooner, which had put in to Monterey harbor, and took back to camp with him a fresh outfit of horses. Almost immediately sixty of the animals were stolen from the camp cavvy by Indians who sneaked in at night; a revenge, no doubt, by those savages whom the trappers had needlessly rendered hostile toward them. This was serious, as it left only fourteen animals. Evi- dently Kit Carson, youth- though he was, had been demon- strating that caution and boldness combined, directed by intuitive right choice, which set him above the majority of his contemporaries; for Captain Young put him at the head of ten other trappers, and sent him in pursuit of the thieves. After a ride of one hundred miles, into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the marauders were surprised in the very act of feasting upon six of the horses ; eight were killed, the rest were routed, and with the regained horses and three captured Indian children the victorious squad returned to the waiting camp. It may here be remarked that whereas the forest and prairie Indian of the East and the plains and mountain Indian of the West differed by the use of the horse, the animal was not at first put to the same purpose by all the Western tribes. The Eastern Indian traveled either afoot or by canoe; the plains and the majority of the mountain Indians traveled horseback, but a portion of the desert Indians, and of the California Indians, ate the horse rather than rode him. This was especially the case w r ith those more or less indolent or impoverished tribes, such as the Diggers, the Calif ornians, and even the Mohaves. 1^* THE PUEBLO OF LOS ANGELES, CAL. AT THE TIME OF CARSON*S SECOND VISIT, 1853 (From Vol. V, Pacific Railroad Survey) OLD FORT UNION, NEW MEXICO, 1853 SIXTY MILES SOUTHEAST OF TAGS (Sketch by Lieut. Col. Eaton in Darts' New Mexico and her People) L/~ A CARSON LETTER DICTATED AND SIGNED BY HIM WHILE COMMANDING OFFICER AT FORT GARLAND, COLO. TERRITORY, ADDRESSED TO MAJOR (BREVET LIEUT. COL.) A. H. PFEIFFER HIS FORMER COMRADE-AT-ARMS, AND IN ITS EXPRESSIONS SHOW- ING CARSON'S WARM, LOYAL HEART. (Original letter possessed by A. H. Pfeiffer, Jr.) Fort Garland, C. T. October loth, 1867. Dear Friend. It is with extreme regret on my part that the necessities of the service has at last separated us, as a brother officer of six years acquaintance, and an intimate and esteemed friend of a prior [time I] have long learned to place in [you my] confidence as an officer and a man. [It] is useless for me to make any expressions of my esteem for you, this is known by all, and better felt than expressed. Whilst your knowledge of frontier and Indian life in this country is unsurpassed, your courage is too well known to need any endorsement of mine. Your loss and sufferings since in the service are of so peculiarly severe a cha- racter as to deserve the thanks of a grateful country, and receive my hearty sympathy and commisseration. Receive with this my brother- ly regard and Believe me, Your true friend, Bvt. Lt. Col. A. H. Pfeiffer, C. Carson Santa Fe, N. M. B'v't Brig. Gen'l, U. S. Vols. AMERICAN TRAPPERS IN CALIFORNIA 59 At the beginning of fall, or in September, 1829, Captain Young broke camp and with his men started back for New Mexico. However, another episode had occurred. Toward the close of that same July three of his French Canadians Francois Turcote, Jean Vaillant, and Anastase Curier, before mentioned deserted, and announced at Monterey that they were going to stay in California. But the doughty captain apprehended them, and on the charge that they owed him money paid to them in advance forced them to return with the party. He brooked no insurrections. Having retraced the former route to San Fernando mis- sion, thence the captain made the mistake of paying a visit with his party to the near-by Pueblo de los Angeles. His followers may have importuned him for this dissipation, on the eve of leaving upon their long desert march. The action of the three Canadians has shown that in the ranks were turbulent spirits. El Pueblo de Nuestra Sefiora la Reina de los Angeles : the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, was a place of more pretensions than Monterey, and older. In 1830 it had 1,000 inhabitants; and although the houses were little more than hovels of mud, eight feet high, with roofs of reeds and asphaltum, it was known as a " city of gar- dens," as today. Amusements were many; the trappers determined to have a final " fling." And Captain Young, unable to produce the proper papers at the demand of the vigilant alcalde., saw what an error he had committed. To arrest eighteen rough-and-ready American trappers and deprive them of their arms and outfits was rather more of a task than the small force at the alcalde's immediate service could manage. However, with true natural shrewd- ness taking advantage of the trappers' bent, he did not press the demand but encouraged his citizenship to show the visitors a good time. Abstinence had been over pro- longed ; the men were reckless ; and Captain Young presently 60 KIT CARSON DAYS had the chagrin of seeing his charges, plied with free brandy about to be made helpless and easy subjects for the calabozo. Moreover, he well knew that when reinforcements arrived (as soon they would) from San Gabriel and from the presidio of San Diego or Santa Barbara, he and his party, drunk or sober, would be in serious plight. The Patties, a year before, had been taken off their guard and arrested without valid reason whatsoever, con- fined at San Diego, and treated most harshly. Captain Young, trapping without papers, had really broken the law ; and this meant confiscation of all property, and impris- onment indefinitely. In the crisis he again put reliance upon youthful Carson, who, as was characteristic of him in after years, evidently had kept his head. Carson was directed to take three of the still somewhat sober men, and the extra horses, and to go on; if the captain and the other men did not catch up, in time, they were to be reported in Taos as having been " massacred " by the Mexicans of California. In that case, Captain Young probably had dreams of being revenged. Carson succeeded in getting his squad together and head- ing them into the country. The Calif ornians still hung about, but were hoist with their own petard. The other trappers had meanwhile waxed more turbulent, so that a free-for-all fight occurred among them. This would include knives and bullets ; James Higgins shot " Big Jim " Law- rence, and the Calif ornians temporarily withdrew to avoid damage. A trapper at a certain stage in his cups was apt to make less of killing either Indian or " greaser " than of killing a comrade. The short march to water and the night's sleep restored sense to the hardy mountain men, so that on the next day, under realization of their peril and again united with Carson, they hastened on until out of reach by pursuit. They recrossed the San Bernardino Desert, and after nine days' AMERICAN TRAPPERS IN CALIFORNIA 61 travel out of Los Angeles stood once more upon the brink of the Colorado. The homeward course was now pursued leisurely down the Colorado and up the Gila, with many stops to trap likely points. As the lower Colorado and the Gila were in the warm latitudes of Arizona, the party could trap all winter. The Colorado itself never could have been a first-class beaver stream; in those deep, rock-bound canons, between whose bare walls the waters run turgid and fierce, no beaver would live; only in the more placid spots and wider pock- ets which intervened now and then would the animal be found. But the progress of the Young party was not monotonous. The lower Colorado and the Gila also had been invaded sufficiently by white people Spanish, Mex- icans, and trappers to produce the usual friction with the Indians there. On the Colorado, while Kit Carson and two or three com- rades were taking care of camp, the other men being out running traps, a large body of Indians came in: probably Chemehuevi, who occupied a valley down from the mouth of the Bill Williams River, below the Mohaves ; or Yumas, who dominated the Rio Colorado from the Chemehuevi country to the gulf. Both are of a cunning, thievish nature. Weapons were concealed. beneath the visitors' blankets and shirts, and for a moment the camp must have been in a precarious position. Experience of many years has proven that in a case of this kind there is only the one thing to do. Promptness and boldness are necessary; Carson had both. At a word each trapper selected his man and held cocked rifle against him ; addressing one of the Indians who spoke Spanish, Carson ordered him to clear out, with his fellows, at once, or the whites would fire. When it comes to exchanging life for life the Indian balks; and the band sul- lenly left. They may not have planned any harm at all, but the trappers must be on the safe side. 62 KIT CARSON DAYS Having for four hundred miles followed down the Colo- rado, whose rocky canons, as they proceeded, became less frequent, and whose welcomed stretches of alluvial beaver ground grew more continuous, the Ewing Young trappers arrived at the flat intake of the Gila, in the southwestern extremity of Arizona. They turned from the Colorado (the prime trapping territory was still below) and entered the Gila. This river, the famous and romantic beaver stream of the Southwest, they ascended three hundred miles to the mouth of the San Pedro, above the present town of Florence in south central Arizona. A typical stream of the desert country of the Southwest, where sands and trap rock enclose fertile valleys, during the last four hundred miles of its course the Gila, at low water, averages one hundred feet wide and two or three feet deep ; now flowing through the green, now through the gray, and now through the whitish yellow. Where was brushy growth, beaver were. At the mouth of the San Pedro, which enters from the south above Florence, the trappers came upon a camp of those Apaches with whom they had had the brush in the previous spring. They promptly charged the camp, taking it by surprise, driving the Indians out and away, and taking possession of their animals. Then, that night, while the party were camped, in turn, they were aroused by the trampling of hoofs. More of the tribe were approaching, apparently from a raid into the Mexican borders, driving before them a large bunch of stock. No questions were asked and doubtless there was no time for such preliminaries. As promptly as before, the trappers poured in a volley, shot the Indians down or routed them, and on the theory that thieves have no property appro- priated the stock. This last herd contained two hundred or more horses. " To return the animals to their owners was an impossibil- AMERICAN TRAPPERS IN CALIFORNIA 63 ity," naively chronicles Peters; and in any case we cannot easily picture Captain Young or other old-time trapper rid- ing very far to restore to Mexicans their Apache-stolen stock. The Young party had thus brusquely accumulated many more horses and mules than they could manage, so they retained only the best, killed two for meat, and let the others go presumably for the Apaches to round up again ! Having thus effectually reestablished their claim to the country, the company continued to trap, ascending the Gila until, near its sources, across the line into what is today New Mexico, they were opposite the copper mines. Here they abandoned the river and proceeded south the sixty miles to the mines, where Robert McKnight still was mining and trading. The bales of pelts were stored in some of the old prospect holes and abandoned workings, McKnight engaged to look after them, and marching on with most of his men for Santa Fe, from the innocent authorities there Mr. Young procured license to trade with the Mimbrenos Apaches, who frequented the Mimbres River and the copper mines district. When, having journeyed to the mines, the party quickly returned to Santa Fe with a fine amount of beaver, " everyone considered the trappers had made a very good trade!" It is stated that the fur aggregated two thousand pounds which would be some fifteen hundred skins, as a beaver skin weighs about a pound and a quarter and that twelve dollars a pound was paid. If true, this price was excep- tional, six dollars a pound being top price usually in the industry, and the southern skins not being as prime as those of the cold North. The shares of the venture having been apportioned, every man with a pocketful of money, the expedition, in April, 1830, just a year from departure, rode jubilantly into old " Touse." And right speedily old Touse was feeling the 64 KIT CARSON DAYS influx of the loose wealth. A trapper home again was like Jack in port. But when the money was gone there was more beaver. 22 That the youthful Kit Carson performed his part in con- tributing to the gaiety of the home-coming we may not doubt. In after years he confessed that in his early days he was rash and quick; and now in token of being a full- fledged mountain man he probably did as his comrades did. Most readers will be interested to follow the adventures of Ewing Young to the end. California summoned him again. He left Taos in September, 1831, with Moses Car- son, Kit's elder brother, in his party, and trapped through to the coast, arriving there in April, 1832. Some time or other he essayed to cross the terrific Great Basin from the Salt Lake region to Upper California, direct. The sequel of this undertaking of the gallant old beaver trader was, that having traveled until his animals had exhausted their supply of fodder, and all had died, he cut food from their carcasses for himself and men and commenced his return to the lake. On the way five of his men perished. The cap- tain and the rest reached the lake in a wretched condition. After an exhaustive trapping tour up the northern Cali- fornia coast and backward again through California clear to the Gila, the veteran captain of trappers settled at Mon- terey. In 1834 he joined the company of Hall J. Kelly, bound for Oregon to colonize it for the Americans. In Oregon he located in the Willamette Valley and organized the " Wallamet Cattle Company," from which the Oregon settlers might obtain beef, and returning to California he made a drive of cattle and horses to Oregon. There he erected a whisky still only to abandon it at the request of the missionaries. " He was one of the three powers of the country the first being the Hudson Bay Company, the second the Methodist Mission, and the third Ewing Young." He died February 15, 1841, on his farm near the AMERICAN TRAPPERS IN CALIFORNIA 65 Willamette. He was a " man mysterious, a natural leader, a loyal American, courageous, of integrity, and honest," who, in 1829, pioneering across the desert to California, made of Kit Carson a mountain man and trapper, and brought out word of a new market. CHAPTER IX THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 1830 TN EVERY party of men banded together on a common * enterprise, there always are one or two who jump right to the front; who, by common consent, are given leader- ship. Kit Carson seems to have been such a character. Slight in stature, younger, perhaps, than any of the others, his reputation that of a roving teamster, a hard worker, and a Carson of frontier breed from the Boone's Lick dis- trict, he went out with Ewing Young upon the trapper's trail as a promising hand who yet had much to learn ; from that trip he came back Ewing Young's lieutenant, and a youth whose cool-headedness and decision already had placed him well above the average mountain man. So it was with some natural pride that he now might meet, in Taos or in Santa Fe, his elder brother Moses, and trade with him news of the trail for news of home. The brothers would not meet again for twelve, or more likely, fifteen years. The summer of 1830 would be spent by the majority of the returned trappers in Taos and Santa Fe, for they had plenty of money and the season (this being April) was advanced. By fall the money would be gone, the delights of town life would have palled, the beaver and the trail would call again. When in September word was spread that the Rocky Mountain Fur Company wanted good men, young Kit Carson, among others, enrolled his name. The destina- tion was the Northwest. The ever active Ewing Young already was in fresh enterprises. Whether he and Kit saw THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 67 one another again is doubtful; but he had served his pur- pose in Carson's life. That Northwest country the upper Missouri and the Platte, and the Rockies of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah and beyond was then and continued to be for many years the real fur ground of the West. A few trappers, such as Ewing Young, made a specialty of the Southwest, principally because it was on a direct line out of the market, Santa Fe. Before Kit Carson had swapped the saddler's bench in old Franklin for the back of a mule on the Santa Fe Trail, the Northwest had been well traversed. The impetus given by Lewis and Clark had gained in momentum; and while the steady exodus into New Mexico was mainly along beaten lines staked out by a suspicious Latin government, that to the northwestward was without law and without restriction, diverging, as it traveled, where it pleased, free to seek out whatever spots were to its advantage. The trader established his fort, the trapper on his pony ranged through hill and plain. It was their country: essentially by right of exploration the mountain man's country; he who had succeeded to the voyageur and the coureur des bois of the eastern rivers and lakes. In the five years (1825-1830) which Kit Carson had spent as saddler, wrangler, cook, teamster, and finally trap- per, the Northwest had advanced rapidly, but its affairs were little changed on the surface. The Missouri Fur Company, in which Moses Carson had served, was defunct; while the great General Ashley, after having achieved a fortune by those splendid expeditions which he had sent out, and hav- ing retired from the mountains, was about to enter Con- gress, there to be stout exponent of the interests of the Far West. Three of that really brilliant company which enlisted under him Jedediah S. Smith, David E. Jackson and 68 KIT CARSON DAYS William L. Sublette bought his fur business from him. Smith has been noted as the first American overland into California. The name of Jackson comes down to us in the famous game resort, Jackson Hole, of northwestern Wyo- ming. Of William Sublette much might be said : a foremost partisan or captain of trappers, he, the best known among five brothers ; a fighter and a trader, one of the few recorded, besides Ashley, who " amassed a handsome fortune." This transfer had been made in July, 1826. To the part- nership, which never was known by title save as, occa- sionally, " Smith, Jackson & Co.," or " Smith, Jackson & Sublette," had succeeded in August, 1830, the Rocky Moun- tain Fur Company, formed by five other thorough mountain men, of whom two, at least, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and James Bridger, were graduates of the Ashley school. The three others were Milton Sublette, brother of William ; Jean Bap- tiste Gervais, unknown to fame because he has lacked a chronicler; and Henry Fraeb (commonly styled " Frapp "), destined to be slain by the Sioux and Cheyennes. Thus the Rocky Mountain Fur Company had come into existence, to continue business in the main Rocky Moun- tains, the Continental Divide being its especial field. Across in the Northwest reigned the Hudson Bay Company of Great Britain; old, powerful, autocratic, its feet upon the ruins of Astoria. But another fur company was already aiming to wrest from Fitzpatrick, Bridger and partners their legacy. This was the American Fur Company, child of John Jacob Astor of New York, whose Astoria had so failed ; with a western branch established in St. Louis, dur- ing Kit Carson's novitiate of four years in the Southwest it had waxed stronger, and was at last taking decisive steps for advancing from the Missouri River fur trade to the mountain fur trade. And the fur business was booming. Ashley had given it impetus; Kit Carson entered it in its heyday. Not yet had THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 69 the western soil been turned by the plough of a settler ; the ground of plain and of valley was suffered to lie despised, while north of the Arkansas and west of Missouri the only incentive to the white man was trade and fur. By keelboat and by caravan the bales from post and rendezvous came pouring into St. Louis ; by keelboat and by caravan went forth the supplies to rendezvous and to post. Not, as in the North before the West was discovered, was traffic by water alone; now at the opening of this decade of Ameri- can supremacy in the trans-Mississippi country, the pack train threading lone plan and wooded pass, bearing its cargo, was a recognized institution. The trading posts were the fur country's principal pro- tection. They were little forts, established in the Indian precincts, and semi-military. They already extended along the Missouri to its headwaters and well up along the Platte. Beyond the Rockies were the posts of the Hudson Bay Com- pany, encouraging a flow of furs westward, not eastward. The only aggressive military occupation of the country had been an expedition (boat and horse) up the Missouri to the mouth of the Yellowstone in Montana, by General Atkinson in 1825, and in 1827 the establishing of Fort Leavenworth on the Missouri in northeastern Kansas. The Missouri frontier had advanced one hundred and fifty miles, from old Franklin to Independence, toward the mouth of the Kaw or Kansas River where Kansas City now stands. At Independence landing the goods for the Santa Fe trade were unloaded, and from Independence went trail- ing out into the dusty Southwest the long caravans, as of yore, save that oxen were supplanting mules for teams. Franklin, once " a center of wealth and fashion," was approaching its early decay, and soon was to be abandoned its graveyard alone remaining as token of the days that were. The Northwest was still forging ahead of the Southwest, 70 KIT CARSON DAYS despite the constantly increasing Santa Fe business. To be sure, beside the mountains south of the Platte, in United States territory, during Kit Carson's novitiate, had been founded, in 1829, Bent's Fort; two hundred miles north of Taos, upon the " mountain " Santa Fe Trail up the Arkansas. But from Bent's Fort northward through Col- orado to Wyoming there was not a white man's habita- tion, other than the rude trapper's lodge, as movable as the tipi of the Indian. As said, up into the Northwest from St. Louis to the mountains, post after post had been established. Such posts had even crossed the mountains, tentatively feeling their way, to meet the Hudson Bay Com- pany posts inward creeping from the Pacific ; while the Salt Lake, the Green River, the Henry Fork of the Snake, and the Snake itself in Idaho were becoming to St. Louis, base of supplies, as household words. The Rockies were indeed better known to the East than were the plains. Such, briefly sketched, is a bird's-eye view of the West when Kit Carson, in this September, 1830, as a seasoned hand, entered in earnest into the trapper calling ; from now on he mingled as an equal with the most skilled frontiers- men hunters, trappers, fighters, and scouts in one that the world has produced. We know but little of that com- pany with whom he traveled to California and back ; it must have contained experts, good men and true; but when he engaged with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company he entered a different atmosphere, where the gay, active homme du nord coureur or voyageur transplanted from Mak- inaw, vied with the Illinoisan and the Kentuckian; where the mighty pine-clad slopes of the snow-capped mountains invited ever to fresh endeavors; where the air was full of energy, and where the Indian, even, was of type superior to the cowardly Apache and the lethargic, squash-raising Mohave. Carson served only intermittently with the Rocky Moun- THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 71 tain Fur Company. Although it existed, under its title, but four years, yet for its stirring history and for the men connected with it early and late this company should be famous. It had rivals, better known; the American Fur Company, whose boast was to be designated simply as "The Company," and the Hudson Bay Company; but in its search for fur it opened up that wonderful territory now comprising Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah; in the Rocky Mountain center of the United States it reigned, for a time, supreme; and it educated the major- ity of the scouts and guides who in after day piloted across the wilderness army detachment and colonist column. From Taos there was a good 300 miles of travel before traps should be set. Four trapper trails were available. They led by the one route (the caravan road) north from the town and over the Raton Range down to the Arkansas, long miles, where Bent's Fort had been located. Thence one trail diverged west, up the Arkansas, into the mountains loo miles away, and where Canon City is located at the mouth of the famed Royal Gorge crossed by a Ute and Arapaho trail to the north and into South Park. An- other trail branched from this one where Pueblo, Colorado, is located, followed up Fountain Creek, toward Colorado Springs, and turning into the Manitou country crossed by a pass here for South Park and the regions beyond. This also was an Indian-made trail. A third trail, instead of turning into the west at Colorado Springs proceeded on northward, over the little divide between the Arkansas and the Platte, about as the various railroads skirting the foot- hills from Denver south now run, and at Denver's site, enter- ing the mountains along a trail later widened by the South Park stages, climbed " over the hill," passed the future min- ing center of Breckinridge, and dipping down, in the north end of Middle Park, joined with the two other trails, before mentioned, at the "junction." The fourth trail, essen- 72 KIT CARSON DAYS tially a trappers' and traders' trail (although all these old trails were cut first by the elk, the buffalo, and the red man), from the Arkansas at Bent's Fort or about the mouth of the Purgatoire stretched almost straightaway into the north, traversing the plains well out from the foothills, passing thirty miles east of Colorado Springs and consid- erably east of Denver, and striking into the South Platte about at the mouth of the Cache la Poudre, or just east of the present town of Greeley. Thence it continued north to the Laramie. The second trail mentioned that up the Fountaine qui Bouille Creek, and through Manitou and over was the favorite. I am inclined to think that the Kit Carson party took this. The routes skirting the foothills or through the plains traversed what was known as the " neutral strip " a highway, from the Arkansas to the Platte, about thirty miles wide, which was a debatable ground of all the tribes; Crows, Sioux, Blackfeet, Cheyennes, Snakes, Utes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, and even the Comanches and the Apaches. Consequently no traveler here could consider himself safe. Engaged not as hired trappers but as " skin " trappers, who had contracted only to sell their pelts to the Rocky Mountain Company, the Kit Carson detachment followed into the fur country by the trail up the Fountain. And we can see them, Frenchman, American, Irishman, half-breed Mexican, with long hair, long rifles, fringed buckskins, broad hats, short stirrups, in compact yet mobile squad, at trappers' rack or cow pony trot, pressing on into the hills ; around the foot of Pike's Peak, past the boiling soda spring where today the gaiety of a pleasure resort has suc- ceeded the Manitou rites of the Indians, through the strange red-rock region of the Garden of the Gods, over the ridge and on. Behind and about, naught for which they par- ticularly cared; before, beaver, Injun, and maybe death. 23 THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 73 Simultaneously with this expedition of the fall of 1830, which took Kit Carson into the mountains, occurred two other events of importance in the opening of the far West. The keel of the steamboat Yellowstone was being laid, at Louisville, Kentucky, on commission from the American Fur Company, and thus was born the first steamboat to ascend the upper Missouri. With the next spring it entered the fur trade, thus greatly facilitating the operations of the company which was to crush and absorb the Rocky Moun- tain Company. And as Kit Carson started for the North- west, William Wolfskill (Wolf scale), with a party of trad- ers, broke a new trail, soon to be, and long to remain, popular as the " Old Spanish Trail," through to California. This trail, at best only a saddle and pack trail, from Santa Fe and Abiqui pointed northwest, up the Chama, from the headwaters thereof rounding north of the San Juan River and cutting the southwest corner of Colorado. Passing north of Durango city, and of Cortez town (Colorado) it paralleled for some distance the Dolores River; thence diverged westerly to enter Utah, striking present Moab and crossing the Green about where the railroad crosses now. It passed into the west by Castledale, and bending south, by way of Fillmore (Utah) and the Parowan coun- try, following down the Virgin to the mouth of that river it swerved off for the Smith and Young route across the San Bernardino Desert, the Cajon Pass of the Sierra Madre Mountains, and Los Angeles. A portion of this trail, or that in southwestern Colorado, had been broken by the Spanish explorer, Juan Maria Rivera, from Santa Fe, in 1761 ; it was) better and further broken by the padre Francisco Silvestre Velez Escalante, in 1776; for that reason it may have been termed the " Old Spanish Trail." The names such as Dolores, Piedra, Las Animas, Ancapagari (Uncompahgre) applied by Escalante linger yet. 74 KIT CARSON DAYS William Wolf skill, then, enthused by the new report of Ewing Young, in the fall of 1830 revived a portion of the Trail of the Father, and pushed the terminus through to California. It was a longer and more circuitous route than the southern routes; but it afforded, through the first half, grass and water, and it avoided the canons of the Colorado Plateau, where Ewing Young had struggled. And the Old Spanish Trail, the inception of which was the glory of God and the Catholic Faith, became highway for horse trader and horse thief ; and, still later, as between the Utah desert country and New Mexico, known as the " Durango Trail " it became famous for cattle drives and bandit flights. But to return to Kit Carson. The first traps were set on the North Platte River, probably in what is today North Park, of Colorado; for through Middle Park from South Park trended the trappers' trail from Taos by way of the mountain route. Trapping down the Platte, and across the Wyoming line< while the river ran now pebbly, now smooth, with wide curves washing sage flats and high brushy hills the fur hunters arrived at the Sweetwater, flowing into the Platte from the west. Up this Sweet- water the Taos squad turned, facing west for the snowy ranges and the country that bided beyond. Pleasantly falls upon the ear the word " Sweetwater " word which meant so much to those thirsty emigrants who along this Indian and trapper bridle path, ascending the rapid stream, found a way open to the Salt Lake, Oregon, and California. For the Sweetwater formed a most important link in the trans-continental route of old; at its source was South Pass, over which might pour down, buoyed by the vain trust that at last they were " across the Rockies," colonist, Mormon, and gold seeker. It was Ore- gon Trail, Mormon Trail, and Trail of the Forty-niner. What white man first ventured over the original Indian track made by Crow, Black feet, Snake, and marauding THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 75 Sioux from the Black Hills eastward, we may not know. But it is safe to say that; the indefatigable General Ashley was close upon his heels. The French negro, Creole Jim Beckwourth, Crow chief (in time), intimates that in 1823 he and an Ashley party passed this way. In the fall of 1825 another Ashley company adopted the route, and the next spring the doughty general himself, lured from his bride of six months, traveled through by the same course, trundling overland to the rendezvous at Salt Lake a six- pounder cannon herald, it, of those countless creaking, white-topped vehicles preparing. In 1827 up the Platte and the Sweetwater trail, from Council Bluffs for 1 the Salt Lake Valley had marched Joshua Pilcher, of the declining Missouri Fur Company, with forty-five men and more than one hundred horses, to emulate the celebrated Ashley's successes. And in the spring of 1830 had passed up also William Sublette, of Smith, Jackson & Co., with eighty-one men upon mules, ten wagons of merchandise, two Dearborn carriages, some cattle, and a milch cow, bound for the last rendezvous of this company, in the Wind River Valley. Many smaller parties, recorded and unrecorded, had been coming and going, through the dozen years, so that the Sweetwater trail was well defined. " L' Eau Sucree " the stream is called in early records the language another tribute to the French Canadian who through the West as through the North blazed a way for the Anglo-Saxon to follow " L' Eau Sucree," or Sweetened Water, a pack mule laden with sugar having, one time, been capsized in the current; or, according to Missionary White, " a company were once passing the stream, and during a drunken carousal, emptied into it a large bag of sugar, thereby, as they said, christening it, and declaring it should hereafter be called Sweetwater Val- ley, as long as water ran." 24 76 KIT CARSON DAYS Of the two explanations the former is the more credible; for sugar in the mountains was too valuable a commodity to be thrown away by the bag. However, neither need be accepted; the title in English may stand of itself, fully merited by this invigorating, life-saving creek flowing so bravely amidst potash, and salt, alkali, and other bitterness. Above the mouth of the Sweetwater would be encoun- tered Independence Rock, an isolated, sudden outcrop into the sagy, desolate plain. Like to Pawnee Rock of the Santa Fe Trail, and to El Moro, or Inscription Rock of the Conquistador's trail through Zuni of Arizona, was this land- mark, famed to the Indians, the trappers, and the Oregon Trail: a signboard or bulletin board, so to speak, for all who passed. But the names scratched and painted upon it were as yet comparatively few. It is the first appearance of a strange ridge of granite masses, near a hundred miles long, which stand in the midst of a great plain, in a direction perpendicular to that of the Rocky Moun- tains. The Sweet Water for nearly half its course, from the South Pass to the Platte, runs near its southern base. Some of the dome-like elevations are about 1,500 feet high; apparently no tree or shrub no beast or bird relieves its stern and life- less gray; its monumental solemnity. For how many ages, since its upheaval by the primitive fires, has it stood change- less in summer heats and wintry storms in untrodden soli- tude; in awful silence. 25 It is about five miles up stream from Independence Rock that the ridge actually begins; and through a fissure in its lower extremity issues the Sweetwater, boiling out from the hill country. This fissure is Devil's Gate a spec- tacular gorge which excited the wonder of the early trav- elers. And I am dwelling upon these features of the Sweet- water trail, for we must bear in mind that this was Kit Carson's first trip as a trapper into the genuine Rockies. The Sweetwater was an Ashley trail, opened by the men INDEPENDENCE ROCK ON THE TRAPPER-MADE OREGON TRAIL (From Report of the March of the Rifle Regiment to Oregon, 1849) DEVIL'S GATE ON THE OREGON TRAIL (From Report of the March of the Rifle Regiment to Oregon, 1849) 3 g . g K S I 2 J n > >- pa d 5 w * z H i_j Q W S M-l W )-H W S !P1 en -ig in W o ^ K g i w | _ ^ ^ BH S g 4 CO c 5 2 ^^ Q PH ^ S - H o M E ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 219 suspicion of the land-grabbing schemes which so attach to the throwing open of new territory today. This second expedition again was one, states Senator Benton, by which the administration at Washington is entitled only to the credit of compliance, not to any credit of origination. It was authorized by the War Department, to pursue on the west side of the Rockies, in joint territory, the same objects that had been pursued on the east side, in American territory : or technically, " to connect the recon- naissance of 1842 with the surveys of Commander Wilkes on the coast of the Pacific ocean, so as to give a connected survey of the interior of our continent." It is known offi- cially as the " Exploring Expedition to Oregon and North California, in the years 1843-44." Practically, it extended far beyond its scope farther than even Fremont himself, who, once cut loose from red tape, rambled as the spirit moved him, could foresee. It suggested Utah. Mrs. Fre- mont declares that it led to the acquisition of California; and it did, in that the leader returned enthusiastic over a country which had been misjudged as badly as the coast to the north. He sowed fresh seed of covetousness in the heart of the American people. The Fremont second expedition left the village of Kansas (or Westport Landing) on the south bank of the Missouri at the present Kansas-Missouri line, May 29, 1843, and returned thereto July 31, 1844. It left hurriedly, on a mes- sage from Mrs. Fremont, who had opened orders from the War Department directing the leader to return to Wash- ington and explain why he w r as taking along a brass how- itzer. And, truth to tell, just at this period of territory agitation and of war talk between the United States and Mexico and England, a brass howitzer imported by a strictly scientific expedition into disputed bounds might fire another shot " heard 'round the world ; " especially in the hands of the impulsive Fremont. 220 KIT CARSON DAYS Besides this brass howitzer (supplied legitimately by Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, from the arsenal at St. Louis) were taken other anomalies, in shape of Jacob Dodson, young free negro in the service of the Benton family; a Prussian ex-artillerist, for the howitzer; two Delaware Indians for hunters. Thomas Fitzpatrick, " the Bad Hand," " whom many years of hardship and exposure in the West- ern territories had rendered familiar with a portion of the country it was designed to explore," was the guide. Super- numeraries were Frederick Dwight, a tenderfoot from Springfield, Massachusetts; Theodore Talbot, a young government draughtsman, and William Gilpin, page to Andrew Jackson, West Pointer of one year cadetship, lieu- tenant in the Seminole War, editor of the Missouri Argus, St. Louis (a Senator Benton paper), secretary of the Mis- souri General Assembly, friend in the Benton family, soon now to be major and lieutenant colonel of Missouri Volun- teers in the Mexican War, and later to be first governor of Colorado Territory. Lucien Maxwell accompanied them on his way home to Taos. The force was larger than that of 1842, the men, besides those especially mentioned, listing as thirty-two the great majority, as before, Creole French or Canadians, but the enrollment naming such as Patrick White, two Campbells, Henry Lee, etc. 86 From the Missouri at the mouth of the Kansas, the route of the expedition Fremont and the horsemen preceding, Fitzpatrick and the wagons following led westward up along the Kansas, thence up the valley of the Republican, and westerly again through the northern border of Kansas, where drain the southern tributaries of the Republican; it struck the South Platte in northeastern Colorado, and followed it up to Fort St. Vrain. This was reached July 4. From the post a detour was made southward, to obtain mules from Taos. At the mountain-man settlement of the Pueblo (name retained, in the same spot, by the second city 02V THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 221 of Colorado) it was learned that owing to the fomentation by the Texans against Mexican peace and prosperity the Mexican frontier was being closed to traffic, and that expor- tation of supplies from Taos was doubtful. But here at the Pueblo they " accidentally " encountered Kit Carson. He readily undertook a mission to procure mules from Charles Bent of Bent's Fort, seventy-five miles down the Arkansas. From the Pueblo the party returned, with a slight digres- sion on the way to examine the Boiling Springs of the pres- ent Manitou, to Fort St. Vrain, which had been appointed as the rendezvous with Fitzpatrick and his carts, and Carson and his mules. Lucien Maxwell had proceeded from the Pueblo south for Taos. As upon the previous expedition, Carson decided to take along his own retainers who were not loth to go. Fort St. Vrain, the meeting-place agreed upon, was a trading post at the mouth of the St. Vrain Creek, forty-two miles from the present city of Denver. Chamberlain, the lieutenant under Carson, started for the fort in time to reach there July 4, and that very day something happened that resulted in a serious breach between the Carson and Fremont parties. St. Vrain's people, assisted by the Fremont men, were having a celebra- tion. It had been a long time between Fourth of July cele- brations with us fellows out on the plains, and we wanted to get in on a little of the fun. I was out with the horses some distance from the fort and a sergeant of the Fremont company was in charge. I insisted upon going to the fort, and Pat White, the sergeant, refused permission. He was new to the ways of the plainsmen and forgot that we were not soldiers, hence not under any orders from his commander. Pat thought he was physically capable of making me submit to his orders, but when I went into the fort I asked them to send a wagon out after the sergeant, while I enjoyed the fun. There was a sharp scene between Fremont and Carson over the affair, but Kit was firm and Fremont finally instructed his men to keep out of trouble. Here Carson's character and determination cropped out plainly, and Fremont learned what kind of men had opened the pathways over the plains. Carson's men were 222 KIT CARSON DAYS out-numbered, but he plainly warned Fremont that although he was not a government officer, his word was supreme with his men, and that a few men armed with repeating rifles were more dangerous than a small army with old-fashioned guns and government authority. 87 At St. Vrain's fort there joined the party as official hunter, Alexander Godey, " a Creole Frenchman of St. Louis, of medium height with black eyes and silky curling black hair, which was his pride " and which he permitted no one to disparage. In 1843 he was about twenty-five years of age, a trapper and trader of Indian country experience, and " in courage and professional skill a formidable rival to Carson." Here also joined the company " an Indian woman of the Snake nation, desirous, like Naomi of old, to return to her people." Newly widowed, she took her two children, " pretty little half-breeds, who added much to the liveliness of the camp." So narrates Fremont. In two divisions again, the expedition left the post. With the heavy baggage Fitzpatrick, " the White Head," pro- ceeded north to strike the Platte at Fort Laramie, and thence crossing by the South Pass, to unite with the first division at Fort Hall on the Snake. With Carson and other tried men Fremont struck up the Cache la Poudre River, and past Fort Collins of today, making northwest, around the north end of the Medicine Bow Mountains in northern Colorado, around North Park above the Wyo- ming line, and to the Sweetwater, approximating the future Overland Stage route from Denver to Salt Lake, via Bridger's Pass. At the Sweetwater he found already a " broad, smooth highway, where the numerous heavy wagons of the emi- grants had entirely beaten and crushed the artemisia (sage), a happy exchange to our poor animals for the sharp rocks and tough shrubs among which they had been toiling so long." ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 223 The emigrant trail was followed into the valley of the Bear, where the various curiosities, known to trappers, were investigated. Fremont could not resist the lure of the lonely Salt Lake ; and who may blame him ? "Its islands had never been visited; and none were to be found who had entirely made the circuit of its shores. * * * It was generally supposed that it had no visible outlet; but among the trappers, including those in my own camp, were many who believed that somewhere on its surface was a terrible whirlpool, through which its waters found their way to the ocean by some subterranean communication." Not surfeited by his descent of the Platte Narrows the year before, Fremont, the indefatigable, had brought with him on this trip another rubber boat; and the act would indicate that out of his prosaic instructions by the War Department he had been inspired by thoughts which the department, from its office chairs in the East, little dreamed. Thus, with the keen enthusiasm of a Balboa (as he says), from a butte at the debouchment of Weber's Fork he gazed, the morning of September 6, upon the white-capped waters of the sluggishly rolling lake. I can fancy that Carson, beside him, surveyed them likewise with a gleam of studi- ous, calculating interest in his usually mild, blue eye. That he had visited the lake before it is reasonable to presume; but only incidentally, with his mind upon beaver. On the morning of September 9, 1843, ^ ne rubber boat, its crew Kit Carson, the mountain man ; John C. Fremont, the army man; Preuss, the German topographer; Basil Lajeunesse, the Creole trapper; and Baptiste Bernier, the Canadian voyageur, cleared away for a low island; and if white men were not then for the first time upon these mys- terious waters this was at least the first " deep sea voyage " recorded. And much like the mariners of the Columbus caravels must the explorers have felt; even the steady Carson, here out of his element, betrayed nervousness; 224 KIT CARSON DAYS " Captain," said Carson, who for some time had been looking suspiciously at some whitening appearance outside the nearest islands, "what are those yonder? won't you just take a look with the glass? " We ceased paddling for a moment, and found them to be the caps of the waves that were beginning to break under the force of a strong breeze that was coming up the lake. No other portents were encountered. Beyond being more lonely, it was the lake of today. After a night's stay upon the island, whose haunted soli- tude undoubtedly was, on this September the 9th, 1843, for the first time broken by " the cheerful sound of human voices," return was made to the shore. The island, about eight miles out, named " Castle Island " by the first Mor- mons, was by the government party of Captain Howard Stansbury, in 1849, christened Fremont Island, as was proper. 88 Having done a little more than the previous explorers, Fremont and Carson might head north, up the Bear, for the rendezvous with Thomas Fitzpatrick at Fort Hall. At old Fort Hall (which had been drained of provisions by the passing emigrants) the long threatened rupture between the Fremont party and the Carson party occurred ; and that such a rupture was inevitable may easily be under- stood, when we understand also that the Carson men were mountaineers, under no obligations to the leader, and that the Fremont men were French voyageurs and American Fur Company engages. And without doubt the Taos party were tired of the methodical measures of the army expedi- tion. They foresaw much hard work, and, perhaps, little satisfaction. It was now late in September and very stormy, with rain and snow. When the Taos men learned that the goal was the coast, they balked. Many of them had been to the west- ward, and they knew what a tough trail it was, down the ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 225 Snake, and that the desolation would be heightened by the bleak season approaching. California was mentioned, and this made matters worse, for the snowy passes of the Sierras had been a spectre ever since the Jedediah Smith and the Joe Walker ventures. According to Oliver Wiggins, the Carson contingent told Fremont that they would continue if he would winter at Walla Walla and postpone further exploration until spring : Fremont's men refused to go on the California trip unless driven to it, and the nervy youngster was told by the moun- taineers in the party that to be caught in the passes with sixty to seventy f^et of snow to block the way would be certain death. Carson tried to dissuade the impetuous Fremont, but he was not a man to be balked, and retorted : " I '11 show you fellows who think you know all about moun- tain exploring that I can go where I please." " All right, boys," said Kit to us ; " I shall go with Fre- mont; I cannot ask you to go." Fremont threatened to put us all under arrest for insubordi- nation, or something equally as terrible, but Kit faced him with a calm determination to prevent trouble. ********** However, Fremont placed us under arrest as a matter of form, allowing us to retain our arms. The Irish sergeant with whom I had been unpleasantly mixed up early in the year, was in charge of the party, and we were sent on ahead. A particularly rocky cut caused a hurried order from the explorer to the prisoners to return and assist in clearing a passageway for the wagons, and we sent back a very saucy answer. When the messenger returned, full of wrath, our men were far up the mountains in another trail, going faster all the time, and with the helpless Irishman, whom we all hated, trying to hustle along and keep track of his prisoners. The sergeant (Patrick White, as would appear) aban- doned the long-winded mountain men as impossible charges, and descended to join the main party. As for the Taosans, 226 KIT CARSON DAYS " it broke us all up to leave Kit to the whims of Fremont, but we knew our traveling with the Fremont party was all off, and we started back alone." Blankets and a few supplies were obtained at Fort Hall. Taos was not reached until January. As for the onward bound expedition, the van, commanded by Fremont and guided by Kit Carson, the rear being in charge of Thomas Fitzpatrick, marched along the Oregon Trail down the Snake, passing many emigrants and noting where, at Fall Creek a short distance above Raft River of Idaho a fresh wagon trail branched off, a trail made by the main division of the Chiles California party guided by the veteran Joe Walker of Bonneville fame. November 8 Fremont called upon Governor McLoughlin, at Vancouver, " who received me with the courtesy and hospitality for which he has been eminently distinguished." This completed the survey as ordered. Now Lieutenant Fremont was officially expected to seek his station. " He might then have returned upon his tracks, or been brought home by sea, or hunted the most pleasant path for getting back," announces his zealous patron, Senator Benton ; " and if he had been a routine officer, satisfied with fulfilling an order, he would have done so." Possibly life would have flowed smoother for Fremont, and he would have escaped humiliation had he been more of a routine officer. As to his returning, in winter, by the trail of the Snake and the South Pass that would have been a problem. However, with true Fremont audacity and largesse of toil like- wise with true Fremont zest for spectacular endeavor for his return east he headed south. The Great Basin haunted Fremont. " All that vast region, more than seven hundred miles square, equal to a great kingdom in Europe, was an unknown land, a sealed book, which he longed to open and read." 89 After consul- tation with McLoughlin, he aimed to strike diagonally south- ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 227 east and by cutting from the tower Columbia of Oregon down to the upper Colorado of Arizona, cleave the heart of the mystic mid-region of the continent. The Great Basin had already been traversed from east to west : by Jedediah Smith, Joe Walker, the Bartleson-Bidwell party, and more than halfway by Carson himself. It has been traversed from east to west many a time since. But it had not, and has not, been traversed from north to south. That is a different proposition. However, such a fact never would deter Fremont. Although the courtly Captain Bonneville's map and report, showing the contrary, had now been half a dozen years in circulation, still it suited the credulous world, per- sistent in this, as it was for a Northwest Passage, to believe that from the interior of the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada there flowed rivers to the western sea. The coast range was ignored, the distance was ignored, the dry atmos- phere which withered streams at their source was ignored, and ignored were the failures to locate such rivers. Popu- lar superstition, dating back to Father Escalante, named the principal stream the Buenaventura. And the Buenaven- tura, as the Green itself, or as a river with its head in the Salt Lake or some Lake Salado; the River Los Mingos or Timpanogos; or other river, draining that Great Basin country, connecting the western slope of the Rockies with the Pacific Ocean, thus continuing a waterway from the Rocky Mountains to the coast, was confidently anticipated. To locate such a stream ; to locate the Tlamath ( Klamath ) Lake ; to locate another lake termed " Mary's " these were the three chief objects of the desert trail by Lieutenant Fremont in the winter of 1843-44; and only one of the three objects was attained. 90 With a band "of many nations, American, French, Ger- man, Canadian, Indian and colored and most of them 228 KIT CARSON DAYS young, several being under twenty-one years of age; " 104 mules and horses, many of " thin, inferior quality," and the howitzer as the only thing on wheels, at noon of November 25, " weather disagreeably cold, with flurries of snow," they started from the Protestant mission at The Dalles. On March 8 asylum was gained at Sutter's Fort, in Cali- fornia, near the present site of the city of Sacramento. The party had found the desert stern and implacable, giving naught and requiring all, even to life. They had found it hedged along its border by mountains of snow. And they had found no great river " with rich bottoms covered with wood and grass, where the wild animals would collect and shelter ! " When they traveled the sparsely timbered high- lands they were frozen and impeded by snow; when they descended to the bare lowlands they were starved; and at last, like a bird beating against the wires of a cage, having clung along the east base of the Sierra to the latitude of San Francisco Bay, they had the alternative of perishing here on the desert or of crossing the snow mountains there as well, perchance, to perish. The decision was made January 18, and the next day the ascent of the divide was begun. The howitzer soon had to be abandoned. Out of the sixty-seven horses and mules present at the east base, only thirty-three reached the west base of the Sierra; and among the lost was the buffalo horse Proveau. But, lead- ing the other animals "a woeful procession crawling along one by one, skeleton men leading skeleton horses " the explorers, after having encountered, as they had been forewarned by Indians, snow deep as a tree and precipices whence the wayfarer would fall half a mile, the travelers appropriated the future trail of the Forty-niners, topped the high Sierra and following a little creek which, ice-covered, waxed to a rushing river, the American, they won out, on the last of February, into the genial, paradise valley of the Sacramento. ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 229 Here was Captain Johann August Sutter, Swiss-Ameri- can, who, in 1839, had wandered down from the Oregon Trail, and with his " eight Kanakas, three white men, an Indian and a bulldog," having out of his awarded inch taken an ell, was now, the self-styled Gobernador de Fortel- eza de Nueva Helvecia, as secure as any pirate king or baron of rock-eyried castle on the Rhine. Governor John McLoughlin himself of Vancouver, was a seigneur scarce more powerful. " Sutter's Fort " was destined to be the Mecca for the gold pilgrimage of '49, was destined sooner to be the base for the Fremont invasion of the memorable year '46, and was already a harbor for revolutionists and always a haven for the traveler and particularly the Americano. The outer walls, 1 50 by 500 feet, according to Lieutenant Joseph Warren Revere of the United States sloop of war Cyane, were fifteen feet high and two feet thick, flanked by the customary bastions at diagonally opposite corners. 91 Recuperated by the kindly offices of the sturdy, bald- headed, blue-eyed Captain Sutter (whom men like Carson and Thomas Fitzpatrick, as well as Fremont himself, could appreciate) the expedition proceeded southward up the val- ley of the San Joaquin, scene of Kit Carson's first excur- sion through California, as a boy, 1829, with Ewing Young. Ewing Young had been dead three years ; and the California as he knew it was soon to be dead, also. About the northern latitude of southern California, or opposite San Luis Obispo above the Point Conception, the expedition, which had been skirting the inner flanks of the Sierra Nevada range between California and the desert, made obliquely to the east, and led by a native refugee Christian Indian through the Tah-ee-chay-pah Pass (the route today followed by the Santa Fe railroad from the desert to Bakersfield), emerged upon the awaiting arid stretch of the Mohave Desert. 230 KIT CARSON DAYS Across this Mohave Desert had Kit Carson toiled west- ward, on his trapping trip under Ewing Young; and back across it had he and Captain Young fled, evading the out- raged authority of the alcalde of Los Angeles. But this third trip, of 1844, was in April, when, if ever, the desert had softened and bloomed. After a continued traverse southward, the Spanish Trail was encountered; and by this, leading northeastward, the Great Basin was skirted not, as Fremont had planned, cut asunder. The energetic Joseph Walker, again return- ing to the States, via Santa Fe, with a great caravan of horses and mules, the first of the spring caravans out of Los Angeles, joined the party at the good-water camp of Las Vegas de Santa Clara (the Santa Clara Meadows), and accompanied them from the rim of the desert, past Utah Lake, and over the Wasatch. Now by the Uintah of northeastern Utah (where Antoine Robidoux was maintaining his fort for the last year), east- ward up the Yampah of northwestern Colorado, and along the Wyoming line (where the veteran Fraeb had forted and died) they traveled fast, turning south, descending through the three parks of central Colorado North or New Park, Middle or Old Park, South Park or the Bayou Salade, famil- iar and reminiscent ground to all trappers and traders, but yet, as Fremont explains, " unknown to science and history." From the Bayou Salade crossing to the upper Arkansas, the party descended, having Pike's Peak as a landmark, to the Pueblo, " where we had the pleasure to find a number of our old acquaintances." And now our cavalcade moved rapidly down the Arkansas, along the broad road which follows the river, and on the ist of July we arrived at Bent's Fort, about 70 miles below the mouth of the Fontaine-qui-bouit. As we emerged into view from the groves on the river, we were saluted with a display of the national flag and repeated discharges from the guns of the fort, where ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 231 we were received by Mr. George Bent with a cordial welcome and a friendly hospitality. As chronicles the Peters biography of Carson : " On the following Fourth of July Mr. Bent gave a dinner in com- memoration of the occasion to Fremont and his party. Although hundreds of miles separated from their country- men, yet they sat down to as sumptuous a repast as could be furnished in many towns of the States." The icehouse and the carefully doled stirrup cups for which the post was famous, doubtless added zest to the banquet. At the post the expedition practically disbanded; and those who wished to remain did so. Carson, and probably Captain Joe Walker, on his way to Santa Fe, rode for Taos, the former to seek his home and bride, after a year's absence and the completion of his longest continuous trail, roughly 5,500 miles, the trail of the explorer surpassing the trail of the trapper. With his spoils of the country with his Indians, his Mexicans, his saddle-horse Sacramento, iron-gray, " of the best California stock/' gift from Captain Sutter Lieu- tenant Fremont set out for St. Louis. He arrived, " inspired with California," full of facts and theories, convinced that the Buenaventura and other alleged rivers draining the Great Basin into the Pacific were myths, but to write upon his map in a long arc covering that immense vacant area from the Salt Lake to the Sierra, from the Columbia River to the Mohave of southern California: THE GREAT BASIN: diameter 11 of latitude, 10 of longitude; elevation above the sea between 4 and 5,000 feet; surrounded by lofty mountains ; contents almost unknown, but believed to be filled with rivers and lakes which have no com- munication with the sea, deserts and oases which have never been explored, and savage tribes, which no traveler has seen or described. But he returned to fame and to the double brevet (well 232 KIT CARSON DAYS earned) of first lieutenant and captain, and, if conquered by the desert, nevertheless to spread word, by authority, of the Great Salt Lake, the Utah Lake, the Little Salt Lake ; at all which places, then desert, the Mormons now are; the Sierra Nevada, then solitary in the snow, now crowded with Americans digging gold from its flanks; the beautiful valleys of the Sacramento and San Joachin, then alive with wild horses, elk, deer, and wild fowls, now smiling with American cultiva- tion ; the Great Basin itself, and its contents ; the Three Parks ; the approximation of the great rivers which, rising together in the central region of the Rocky Mountains, go off east and west, toward the rising and the setting sun: all these, and other strange features of a new region, more Asiatic than American. 92 ' Where in 1844 only that arc of Fremont's printed words, in lieu of any trail, traversed Utah and Nevada, condemning them, today are scattered the homes of enlightened men, despoiling of fruit and ore the giants' caches in earth and rock. But even knowing this, we cannot disparage the accurate guess of Fremont as to the topography of the vast country; and it was his report upon the territory along the east of the Salt Lake (" good soil and good grass adapted to civilized settlements") which attracted the eye of Brig- ham Young. Or, at least, so rather superciliously states the Mormon governor himself: From Fremont's reports, we determined to get our wagons together, form a grand caravan and travel through the country to the Salt Lake, 1,000 miles from any civilized settlement. We started out with 147 people and 73 wagons. This was in 1847. * * * Salt Lake plain is a natural desert. When we struck this plain there was nothing on it but sage-bushes. 93 In this the second of the government explorations engi- neered by the Oregon expansionists, but which really exploited California (for Oregon was taking care of itself) Kit Carson might have just pride. It was a distinct achieve- ment and he had played a Carson part. The first expedi- ON THE TRAIL WITH FREMONT 233 tion, to the South Pass and back, had required of him little extra ability, and had brought him no added repute. He had proved a safe guide; that was all. On this second expedition he was given opportunity to demonstrate his high qualities of frontiersman. Moreover, although his status in the expedition is not declared, Fitz- patrick being the guide and Godey being the hunter, he appears to have been an important factor. When messages were to be carried he usually was selected; and when the commander chose a bodyguard he was in the number. It was his descriptions of the vales of the Sacramento which put heart into the company, toiling amidst the snow and ice of the Sierra; and it was his keen eye and his experience, out of all the party, which enabled him to renew hope again languishing. Far below us, dimmed by the distance, was a large snowless valley, bounded on the western side, at the distance of about a hundred miles, by a low range of mountains which Carson recognized with delight as the mountains bordering the coast. " There," said he, " is the little mountain it is fifteen years ago since I saw it; but I am just as sure as if I had seen it yesterday." Between us, then, and this low coast range, was the valley of the Sacramento ; and no one who had not accom- panied us through the incidents of our life for the past few months, could realize the delight with which at last we looked down upon it. The one incident which stands out above the routine of daily heroism shared by all the company announces Carson, and must have fixed him indelibly in the minds of the Gov- ernment. And, at the same time, it shows that in the West Kit Carson did not possess the only stock of generous cour- age. Alexander Godey, younger and less widely known, was a man who, granted the opportunity, was doubtless Kit Carson's equal in dash and bravery. Whether he possessed those intrinsic qualities which elevated Carson above the 234 KIT CARSON DAYS majority of the mountaineers and plainsmen, no matter how daring, we cannot judge. Of course, it takes more than the deed to make a man ; motives are to be considered. But for the incident : on the homeward way by the Span- ish Trail two Mexicans, Andreas Fuentes and an eleven- year-old boy, Pablo Fernandez, came as refugees into the Fremont camp, reporting that the remainder of their party (the wife of Fuentes, the father and mother of Pablo, and one Santiago Giacome), surprised in camp by the Indians, had probably been killed or captured. The two refugees, on horse-guard, had escaped with about thirty horses. The Fremont camp took the back trail of the two Mexi- cans, found that the horses, left at a watering place, had been seized by the savages and driven away; and here Carson, Godey, and the Mexican Fuentes set off upon the fresh trail to pursue the marauders. The Mexican presently was back with Fremont, his horse having failed. But in the afternoon of the next day a war-whoop was heard, such as Indians make when returning from a victorious enter- prise; and soon Carson and Godey appeared, driving before them a band of horses, recognized by Fuentes to be part of those they had lost. Two bloody scalps, dangling from the end of Godey's gun, announced that they had overtaken the Indians as well as the horses. The entrance was spectacular and truly mountain-man. The twain, Carson and Godey, had continued the pursuit, and at nightfall had entered among mountains. They fol- lowed the plain trail by moonlight, until the moon was low and did not penetrate into defiles. The trail was to be dis- tinguished only by feeling, while the two led their horses and groped for it. They judged that the fugitives were but a few hours ahead, so they unsaddled and camped, without fire or food, to rest and wait until daybreak. Early in the RETURN OF CARSON AND GODEY AN INCIDENT OF THE SPANISH TRAIL IN THE FREMONT SECOND EXPEDITION, SPRING OF 1844 (From Fremont's Memoirs) P, -S H b DO Q C/) fa H ^ I < ^-^ ^ H 5 h.2 SB|*| " J < "^ Q 5 2 ; S Lieut. Gillespie of the marine corps, arrived last evening from their pursuit of Gen. Castro." So chroni- cles, July 20, 1846, the Reverend Walter Colton, chaplain of the frigate Congress, newly anchored in the bay at Monterey. They are two hundred strong, all well mounted, and have some three hundred extra head of horses in their train. They defiled, two abreast, through the principal street of the town. The ground seemed to tremble under their heavy tramp. The citizens glanced at them through their grated windows. Their rifles, revolving pistols, and long knives, glittered over the dusky buckskin which enveloped their sinewy limbs, while their untrimmed locks, flowing out from under their foraging caps, and their black beards, with white teeth glittering through, gave them a wild, savage aspect. They encamped in the skirts of the woods which overhang the town. The blaze of their watch-fires, as night came on, threw its quivering light into the forest glades and far out at sea. Their sentinels were posted at every exposed point; they sleep in their blankets under the trees, with their arms at their side, ready for the signal shot or stir of the crackling leaf. 112 Thus Fremont and his men returned in force to Mon- terey, whence they had retired, although sullenly, four months previous, before this same Don Jose Castro. He as commanding general, must now himself retire southward, soon to meet, in an alliance of mutual protection, with the Governor, Don Pio Pico, at Los Angeles, where six months later the American leader would appear with his battalion. 268 CARSON UNDER KEARNY 269 The re-entry into Monterey and civilization of the famous explorer and his men attracted the attention that today is attracted by a Wild West parade; for their deeds had preceded them. The English admiral was still at Monterey * * * and looked on with his officers with much interest. It was, in- deed, a novel and interesting sight the command, number- ing two or three hundred men, marching in a square, within which was the cattle which they were driving for their sub- sistence. They were mostly clothed in buckskin, and armed with Hawkins rifles. The individuality of each man was very remarkable. When they dismounted, their first care was their rifles. Fremont * * * was the conspicuous figure. Kit Carson and the Indians accompanying him were the objects of much attention. 113 It was a unique experience for many of the Fremont battalion. Few in the original expedition ever had seen the ocean "a great prairie without a single tree." In the interval while Fremont was explaining to the alarmed Commodore Sloat that he had not been acting under writ- ten orders from Washington, and that he had not been notified of the declaration of war, his riflemen more or less cautiously ventured among the ships. Meanwhile the report by Fremont had thrown Commodore Sloat into a wretched state. Now, having climbed so far, he feared a) fall. Pending the announcement of formal declaration of war between the United States and Mexico, he declared that he would do nothing more ; and finally he cut the Gordian knot by resigning command and responsibility into the hands of Commodore Stockton of the Congress and by starting for home on the plea of ill health. Commodore Robert F. Stockton, a Princeton man, with the Princeton spirit, courted the command and the responsibilities, gladly assumed them; immediately, or on July 24, he appointed Fremont a major, Lieutenant Gillespie a captain, and en- 270 KIT CARSON DAYS rolled the woodsmen as that unique organization, the Navy Battalion of Mounted Riflemen! But they suffered for the distinction. On July 27, in their new service, they sailed on the sloop of war Cyane, Commander Dupont, for San Diego, 400 miles by land and more by sea. Amused eyes watched them embark, and the Reverend Mr. Colton took a malicious pleasure in soon making the accurate prophecy : " The wind is fresh, they are by this time cleverly sea-sick, and lying about the deck in a spirit of resignation that would satisfy the non- resistant principles of a Quaker. Two or three resolute old women might tumble the whole lot of them into the sea." It is safe to say that Kit Carson, for one, would willingly have exchanged his misery in the scuppers for another dead mule rampart, and siege by the Comanches, on the plains. By a march from San Diego, Los Angeles was taken with- out bloodshed; the combined forces of Stockton and Fre- mont entered the pueblo; Governor Don Pio Pico and Commandante-General Jose Castro retired, and Commodore Stockton issued, on August 17, a proclamation, declaring the country a territory of the United States. He appointed himself governor of California, Major Fremont military governor, and Captain Gillespie commandant of the South- ern District, with headquarters at Los Angeles; and he sailed away. Kit Carson set out, with his friend, Lucien Maxwell, overland with the news for Washington; and across the desert from Santa Fe was meanwhile approaching the real governor of California, General Stephen Watts Kearny, leading the remnants of his Army of the West. This dispatch duty to which Carson was assigned seems to have been a personal tribute to his abilities. It was awarded to him to be an achievement and a privilege in one. He would, if the plan were carried out, have the pleasure and the honor of announcing direct to the President the CARSON UNDER KEARNY 271 alleged conquest of California, and en route he would see wife and friends at Taos. " Going off at the head of his own party, with carte blanche for expenses and the prospect of novel pleasure and honor at the end, was a culminating point in Carson's life," adds Fremont. Thus far rank had passed Kit Carson by. Godey was a lieutenant, Talbot was lieutenant and adjutant, Dick Owens was a captain, all in the California Battalion service. There- fore it is with real satisfaction that we witness, on Sep- tember 15, 1846, Carson, as lieutenant upon special service, starting out with an escort of fifteen men (six being Dela- wares) and fifty horses, from Los Angeles for Washing- ton, and engaged to make the round trip in 120 days! It is the first of three round trips across the desert, carrying government dispatches. This time he travels from Cali- fornia almost to Santa Fe and back; within a few months he must travel from California to Washington and back to California; and soon thereafter he must travel from California to Washington, and back to New Mexico. The aggregate of the three journeys, each through perilous ter- ritory, was 16,000 miles, more than half being by horse or mule back. This route of 1846 was not unknown to him, for he had traversed the same country, between Los Angeles and Taos, in 1829 and 1830 with Ewing Young; and there now was a traders' trail, slight, to be sure, from Santa Fe to San Diego by the Gila and Yuma. But the Apaches and hostile Mexicans still infested the desert. Almost upon the same date that Carson set out upon his ride, or upon the 25th of September, from ancient Santa Fe, which now also flew the American flag, General Stephen Watts Kearny set out for the coast. Santa Fe had been captured without a fight; New Mexico had been annexed; Charles Bent was governor of the Territory; and with his 300 men " the Horse-Chief of the Long Knives " (as he 272 KIT CARSON DAYS was known among the plains Indians) proposed to complete the subjugation of California, a thousand miles away. Moreover, 448 Mormons, intercepted in their pilgrimage from Nauvoo, and enlisted as a separate battalion, infan- try, were expected to follow their services having been promised to the Government under Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke. Thomas Fitzpatrick guided the Kearny column; Antoine Robidoux was interpreter; and the topographer was J. M. Stanley, the beaver-days artist. On the Rio Grande del Norte, ten miles below Socorro, New Mexico, the Kit Carson party, hastening east, and the General Kearny column, toiling west, met. The dragoons were eleven days out of Santa Fe and had covered 150 miles. The Carson company were twenty-six days out of Los Angeles and had covered 800 miles. They had worn out thirty-four mules, but they were on schedule time. Carson was not entirely unprepared for the meeting, which we may best describe in the words of Captain Abraham Johnston, who rode to his death at San Pasqual. October 6 Marched at 9, after having great trouble in get- ting some ox carts from the Mexicans; after marching about three miles, we met Kit Carson, direct on express from Cali- fornia, with a mail of public letters for Washington; he in- forms us that Colonel Fremont is probably civil and military governor of California, and that about forty days since, Com- modore Stockton, with the naval force, and Colonel Fremont, acting in concert, commenced to revolutionize that country, and place it under the American flag; that, in about ten days, their work was done, and Carson, having received the rank of lieutenant, was dispatched across the country by the Gila, with a party to carry the mail; the general told him that he had just passed over the country which we were to traverse, and he wanted him to go back with him as a guide ; he replied that he had pledged himself to go to Washington, and he could not think of not fulfilling his promise. The general told him he would relieve him of all responsibility, and place the mail CARSON UNDER KEARNY 273 in the hands of a safe person, to carry it on; he finally con- sented, and turned his face to the west again, just as he was on the eve of entering the settlements, after his arduous trip, and when he had set his hopes on seeing his family. It requires a brave man to give up his private feelings thus for the public good; but Carson is one such! honor to him for it! Carson left California with fifteen men ; among them six Delaware Indians faithful fellows. They had fifty animals, most of which they left on the road, or traded with the Apaches, giving two for one; they were not aware of the presence of the American troops in New Mexico; they counted upon feeling their way along, and in case the Mexicans were hostile, they meant to start a new outfit, and run across the country. When they came to the Copper-mine Apaches, they first learned that an American general had possession of the ter- ritory of New Mexico. The Apaches were very anxious to be friendly with the Americans, and received them very cordially, much to their surprise. 114 Thomas Fitzpatrick turned east, for Washington, with the precious mail ; Kit Carson turned west, for California again, with the dragoons. The act brings tribute not only from Captain Johnston, but from Colonel Cooke. " That was no common sacrifice to duty." However, Carson was not persuaded. He testifies that he was not persuaded, but obeyed orders. " And I guided him through, but with great hesitation, and had prepared everything to escape in the night before they started, and made known my intention to Maxwell, who urged me not to do so." 115 All in all, the occasion was one of much perplexity for Lieutenant Kit Carson. The conflict of authority now, and to come, perplexed men more expe- rienced than he. He was fortunate, in his simplicity and honesty, to get off as easily as he did ; for in Stephen Watts Kearny he met the superior officer, a soldier from the ground up, and a man with an eye of blue colder than that in the eye of the Fremont whom he outranked. Reduced after hearing that California was pacified, the 274 KIT CARSON DAYS column proceeded : 100 enlisted men, six eight-mule wagons, two howitzers, with a flag strange to the desert solitudes. Kit Carson dryly informed them that at the rate they were traveling they would not get to Los Angeles in four months ! Within three days after leaving camp below Socorro, the six wagons had to be dismissed, and packsaddles sub- stituted. To Captain Cooke and his luckless Mormons fell the uncertain privilege of making the first wagon road through the farthest Southwest Santa Fe to southern California. For a week the Kearny trail descended along the Rio del Norte; 230 miles below Santa Fe, under Carson's guidance, it diverged to the west and entered the Mimbres country. Thence the dragoon column crossed, October 20, to the head of the Gila, which was to be followed to its mouth at the Colorado, 600 miles away. Dragging the constantly disabled howitzers, with mules continually failing, the men without shoes, partially naked, and exposed to night temperatures below freezing, and days of thirst, hunger, and burning sun, the First Dragoons, C and K Companies, plodded along the trail first traversed by the beaver-hunting Patties in 1827; afterward in 1830 by the homeward returning Ewing Young and Kit Carson, his assistant, and in 1831 by the trading party of Davy Jackson, the mountain man, and William H. Warner, who became one of the first American ranchers of California. Lieutenant Carson, the guide, was invaluable; the route w r as the one by which he had met the column, and so he knew its peculiarities. Every day Lieutenant W. H. Emory, of the topographical corps, recorded his meteorological observations, wrote up his diary; every day the fated Cap- tain Abraham Johnston, Kearny's aide-de-camp, maintained the official journal. If the march was hard, it was not unin- teresting, for the many ancient ruins still awaited the depre- dations of the vandal. The Indians were uniformly friendly, CARSON UNDER KEARNY 275 viewing the Americans as allies against the hated Spanish, and as good customers who paid promptly for what they obtained. 116 November 22 the juncture of the Gila and the Colorado was just ahead. The day was warm, the dust oppressive, and the march, twen- ty-two miles, very long for our jaded and ill-fed brutes. The general's horse gave out, and he was obliged to mount his mule. Most of the men were on foot, and a small party, composed chiefly of the general and staff, were a long way ahead of the straggling column, when, as we approached the end of our day's journey, every man was straightened in his saddle by our suddenly falling on a camp, which, from the trail, we estimated at 1,000 men, who must have left that morning. Speculation was rife, but we all soon settled down to the opin- ion that it was Central Castro and his troops; that he had succeeded in recruiting an army in Sonora, and was now on his return to California. Carson expressed the belief that he must be only ten miles below, at the crossing. Our force con- sisted only of no men. The general decided we were too few to be attacked, and must be the aggressive party, and if Castro's camp could be found, that he would attack it the moment night set in, and beat them before it was light enough to discover our force. 117 Lieutenant Emory and squad reconnoitered ; horses were heard neighing, and a fire was seen blazing. But the no did not attack the fancied 1,000, for the camp was found to consist of Mexican traders, conveying some 500 horses from California. The chief of the party, a tall, venerable looking man, rep- resented himself to be a poor employe of several rich men engaged in supplying the Sonora market with horses. We sub- sequently learned that he was no less a personage than Jose Maria Leguna, a colonel in the Mexican service. 118 The next day, however, was marked by a more porten- tous meeting, which resulted in the capture of a Mexican 276 KIT CARSON DAYS jogging as upon a journey. Taken to the tent of General Kearny, he was found to be carrying California mail. Among the letters was one addressed to General Jose Castro at Altar, one to Antonio Castro, and others to men of note in Sonora. * * * We ascertained from them that a counter revolution had taken place in California, that the Americans were expelled from Santa Barbara, Puebla de los Angeles, and other places, and that Robideaux, the brother of our interpreter, who had been appointed alcalde by the Americans, was a prisoner in jail. They all spoke exultingly of having thrown off " the detestable Anglo- Yankee yoke," and con- gratulated themselves that the tri-color once more floated in California. 119 Here was news, indeed, for an invading column of no men, without a base, and the desert behind. The date of the letters was October 15. What had been occurring in the meantime? The no pushed on to the Colorado, and ten miles below the mouth of the Gila crossed by a ford known to Carson into the sandy, dry- wash Colorado Desert of southern California. This last of the desert fornadas was begun on November 25. The distance was about ninety-one miles. The wild horses seized from the Mexican " traders " were soon tamed, and sank and died. On November 30 the men were inspected. " Poor fellows ! They are well nigh naked - some of them barefoot' a sorry looking set. A dandy would think that, in those swarthy, sunburnt faces, a lover of his country will see no signs of quailing. They will be ready for their hour when it comes." And the hour was at hand. In the face of high, cold winds and hostile surroundings, salty grass and water, deep sand, hot days and numbing nights, the column toiled on to the foothills of the other edge, and with one horse and a few worn mules, on Decem- ber 2, arrived at the green valley of the Agua Caliente, where CARSON UNDER KEARNY 277 was situated the ranch of Warner, the American. San Diego was now but sixty miles southwest; Los Angeles some 100 miles northwest. The trail through Warner's rancho was the Sonora Trail, and General Kearny, thus informed, might congratulate himself that he was blocking Mexican traffic between Sonora and Southern California points. That evening Lieutenant J. W. Davidson, with Kit Carson as guide and with twenty-five men, rode fifteen miles and despoiled a herd of unbroken horses and mules held for the command of General Flores. By the English rancher, Senor Stokes, a letter was sent on to Commodore Stockton, who was reported as still in possession of San Diego. The commodore was apprised of the arrival of the Kearny dragoons, and asked to open communication " as quickly as possible." On December 4 the march for San Diego was resumed. The weather was murky and cold, with an all-day rain. Little definite infor- mation had been gained as to the state of the country ahead, except that everything between San Diego and Santa Barbara was in the hands of the " country people." What was the situation in California since Kit Carson and his fifteen men had departed, September 15, to carry to Washington the word that Fremont and Stockton had " pacified " the coast ? In August, Castro, the inefficient, complaining that he was unable to gather more than " one hundred men, badly armed and worse supplied," and Gov- ernor Pico, his colleague, had delivered a farewell procla- mation and fled together over the Sonora road, not to return until 1848. But scarcely had the Kit Carson command spurred forth to bear their tidings east, when the chafing Mexican citizenship squirmed into renewed life. This was due in part to Archibald H. Gillespie, formerly lieutenant in the marines, but at that time captain in the California Battalion, and as commandant of the southern district of California, stationed with a company of forty men 278 KIT CARSON DAYS at the Pueblo de los Angeles. " A man of Fremont ideas," he was without the Fremont finesse ; instead of conciliating the people, he had tactlessly enforced his orders. Conse- quently, on September 24, he had waked up to find a rebel- lion in full flower, the head gardeners being General Jose Maria Flores, Colonel Jose Antonio Carrillo and Captain Andres Pico, former Castro officers. The small American garrison of the town yielded perforce, and on October 4 they marched, with the doubtful honors of the defeated, to embark at San Pedro (Los Angeles' port) and sail for Monterey. From Santa Barbara the hard-fighting young Washing- tonian, Theodore Talbot, sergeant major and first lieutenant, had cut his way with his squad to the hills ; thence, smoked out by fire in the brush, they had made retreat for Monterey. From San Diego the redoubtable Ezekiel Merritt and his little command of hunters had abruptly sought the incongru- ous sanctum of a whale ship in the bay. Commodore (who was also Governor) Robert Stockton was at San Francisco ; Lieutenant Colonel and Military Governor John C. Fremont had been in the valley of the Sacramento, bear hunting and recruiting, unsuccessfully, for a Stockton descent upon the western coast of Mexico and a conquering march inland to the City of Mexico. A hurried message from the commo- dore had recalled him to San Francisco, and a boat squadron from the ships had met him at the head of Suisun Bay to hasten him on. With the California Battalion (428 men, including Indians and servants, says Lieutenant Edwin Bryant, the newly arrived emigrant) now augmented by three compa- nies of emigrants, a party of Walla Walla Indians and two pieces of artillery, on November 30 Major Fremont, soon promoted to a lieutenant-colonelcy, had set out from the neighborhood of his first campaign, the mission of San Juan Bautista, under Gavilan Peak, to retake Los Angeles. Com- CARSON UNDER KEARNY 279 modore Stockton moved to San Diego, which he found closely beleaguered by California horsemen. In the midst of such alarms the little battalion of Kearny's First Dragoons, piloted by Kit Carson himself presumed to be in Washington arrived from their long desert jour- ney. December 3 Commodore Stockton, seaman turned land commander, and chafing at the mobile enemy, in his head- quarters in San Diego received at the hand of the merry- faced Sefior Stokes the tidings that a detachment of troops from New Mexico were as far as Warner's rancho; and that " by orders from the President of the United States," a new commander in chief was near. CHAPTER XXV THE MEXICAN WAR CARSON AT SAN PASQUAL WE slept till morning." In these, the last penned words of Captain Johnston, is something prophetic and comforting. His journal reads: December 4 Marched at 9, and took the route for San Diego, to communicate with the naval forces and to establish our depot, not knowing yet in what state we would find the country. Marched 15 miles in a rain, cold and disagreeable, and encamped at St. Isabella, a former ranch of San Diego mission, now, by hook or by crook, in the possession of an Englishman named Stokes; here hospitality was held out to us Stokes having gone to San Diego. We ate heartily of stewed and roast mutton and tortillas. We heard of a party of Californians, of 80 men, encamped at a distance from this; but the informant varied 1 6 to 30 miles in his accounts, ren- dering it too uncertain to make a dash in a dark, stormy night ; so we slept till morning. 120 Lieutenant Emory must continue the journal. December 5 A cold rainy day, and the naked Indians of the rancheria gathered about our fires. We marched from the rancheria of San Isabel to that of Santa Maria. [This was another of the Stokes ranches.] On the way we met Capt. Gillespie, Lieutenant Beale, and Midshipman Duncan of the navy, with a party of thirty-five men sent from San Diego with a dispatch for Gen. Kearny. We arrived at the rancheria after dark, where we heard that the enemy was in force nine miles distant, and not finding any grass about the rancheria, we pushed on and encamped in a canon two miles below. 121 The day had been so murky that little of the country was visible, and any movements of the reported enemy were 280 CARSON AT SAN PASQUAL 281 concealed. The country hereabouts is rolling, the sparsely timbered but brushy southern California hills undulating monotonously. The Kearny dragoons, worn by their desert march of 900 miles and more, poorly mounted on untrained horses and fagged-out mules, were at great disadvantage as opposed to the native cavalry, superbly mounted and acquainted with all the trails. Bttt Gillespie was burning for revenge to counterbalance his discomfiture at Los Angeles. He made light of the Cali- fornia valor. So did even Kit Carson, who, in common with other mountain men of the Southwest, thought little of Latin courage. After their easy conquest of New Mex- ico, when the march from Bent's Fort to Santa Fe, the capital, had been practically undisputed, General Kearny and his officers and men also were inclined to dismiss the Calif ornians curtly. Influenced by the contempt of Gillespie and Carson, and not realizing that here the fight was with free Calif ornians accustomed to more initiative than the New Mexicans, Gen- eral Kearny's council decided to push on for San Diego, and to attack the enemy if they were opposed. In this plan was sound military sense. Boldness would win a way, whereas hesitancy might result in the little force being shut off from the sea and all supplies, and, by a constantly increas- ing foe, confined helplessly inland while their chances grew less. So, in the night of December 5, through the darkness from the camp a party under Lieut. Hammond was sent to reconnoiter the enemy, reported to be near at hand. By some accident the party was discovered, and the enemy placed on the qui vive. We were now on the main road to San Diego, all the "by- ways " being in our rear, and it was therefore deemed neces- sary to attack the enemy, and force a passage. About 2 o'clock, a. m., the call to horse was sounded, 122 282 KIT CARSON DAYS San Diego was forty miles distant; the Calif ornians were between. " I then determined," reports General Kearny, " that I would march for and attack them by break of day." With the advance guard of twelve under Captain John- ston was Kit Carson, scout ; behind this advance guard rode the general himself, with lieutenants Emory and Warner and four enlisted men. Upon this little detachment devolved the brunt of the first onslaught. The Calif ornians under Captain Andres Pico, brother of Don Pio Pico, the late governor, were encamped comfort- ably at the small Indian village of San Pasqual (Pascual), seven miles ahead, and thereby about thirty miles from San Diego. 123 At dawn the advance guard of the Ameri- cans, with the general and staff close following, from a mile away sighted the fires, which " shone brightly." The gen- eral himself now " ordered a trot, then a charge, and soon we found ourselves engaged in a hand to hand conflict with a largely superior force." Captain Andres Pico, ignorant of the numbers of the invaders, as the invaders likewise had been ignorant of his numbers, upon learning of their approach by way of War- ner's ranch, had planned not to oppose at once, but to reconnoiter until he had drawn them to ground of his own choosing. When the advance guard of twenty men (for the general and his escort joined the Johnston command) charged, as the general states, " furiously," downhill upon the pickets, the latter, vaulting to ready horse and clutching bridle, spurred for the main camp. The twenty Americans pursued hard down the hill into the village. Kit Carson's horse stumbled and threw him headlong, shattering his rifle at the grasp. At the same moment the Pico force, aston- ished by the rash valor of the few, and pausing to see if there was a large support behind, in their saddles received the charging dragoons with a volley from carbine, escopeta and pistol, killing Captain Johnston and a dragoon. CARSON AT SAN PASQUAL 283 Carson, lying still while his comrades rode over him, staggered up unharmed, and, seeing the dead dragoon near, grabbed carbine and cartridge box, caught a horse, remounted and hastened for the fray. In the village and just beyond the Calif ornians were now standing their ground. Cheered on by Captain Ben Moore, down thundered the fifty men of the support, and the Californians gave way. Captain Moore on his white horse led in pursuit; the Calif ornian horses easily distanced the dragoon horses, and the dragoon horses distanced the dragoon mules. Thus the pursuit strung out over half a mile of road, when, quickly grasping the advantage, the Parthian Californians rallied, and turned compact. They were eighty or more (official reports place the number at 160), and they were enabled now to take the dragoons, little squad by squad. Here the lance, wielded from horses as agile as wasps, proved its worth. Against these nine- foot staves the saber and the clubbed carbine, swung from fagged and stub- born animals (the mule is always badly bitted and badly dispositioned for a cavalry fight), were totally ineffectual. Conspicuous on his white horse, Captain Moore was lanced to death; Lieutenant Hammond was lanced so that he died soon after; General Kearny was wounded twice and would have been thrust through and through had not Lieutenant Emory stopped his assailant by a lucky pistol ball ; Lieutenant Warner was lanced in three places, Captain Gillespie in three places, Captain Gibson, and even the vet- eran trader, Antoine Robidoux, likewise were w r ounded. Of enlisted men were killed two sergeants, two corporals, ten privates of the dragoons; a private of the Gibson company of volunteers and an employee in the topographical service ; wounded, one sergeant, one " bugleman," nine privates of the dragoons. Total, eighteen killed ; fifteen wounded of the latter " many surviving from two to ten lance wounds, most of them when unhorsed and incapable of resistance." 284 KIT CARSON DAYS The howitzers arriving on the gallop, the Calif ornians fled. When the pieces were being unlimbered the span of mules drawing one ran off with it into the midst of the retreating enemy, but fortunately the Pico force did not try to make use of it. Such was the battle of San Pasqual, thirty miles north- east of San Diego, fought at break of day, December 6, 1846, and resulting in the discomfiture of the American regular dragoons and the vindication of the Calif ornian irregular cavalry. The killed and wounded (General Kearny reports that six Calif ornians also were left on the field) were being gathered, when, records Emory: a large body of horsemen were seen in our rear and fears were entertained lest Major Swords and the baggage should fall into their hands. The general directed me to take a party of men and go back for Major Swords and his party. We met at the foot of the first hill, a mile in rear of the enemy's first position. Returning, I scoured the village to look for the dead and wounded. The first object which met my eye was the manly figure of Capt. Johnston. He was perfectly lifeless, a ball having passed directly through the center of his head. The work of plundering the dead had already commenced; his watch was gone, nothing being left of it but a fragment of the gold chain by which it was suspended from his neck. By my directions Sergeant Falls and four men took charge of the body and carried it into camp. Captain Johnston and one dragoon were the only persons either killed or wounded on our side in the fight by firearms. It was found that the mules were not strong enough to transport the dead to San Diego; and in order to save the bodies from further plundering the American dead were buried at night, to the sound of the howling of coyotes, under a willow at the east of the battle field camp. Before allowing his injuries to be dressed the general fainted. Captain H. S. Turner, as senior officer left, CARSON AT SAN PASQUAL 285 assumed the command. The surgeon of the column, Dr. J. S. Griffin, was occupied until late afternoon in stanching the many lance wounds of the rank and file. A sorry sight was the bloody camp. " Provisions were exhausted, horses dead, mules on their last legs, men, reduced to one-third of their number, were ragged, worn and emaciated." So records Lieutenant Emory. Ambulances were lacking, and soon after the fight Lieutenant Godey, with three others, was sent to make his way, with best mountain-man skill, through byways to San Diego for wheeled vehicles. Already the English ranchero, Stokes, was nearing there, posthaste, with an excited tale of the fight. The dragoon camp was unmolested throughout the day; the night settled cold and damp from the previous rains, and " the ground, covered with rocks and cacti, made it difficult to get a smooth place to rest, even for the wounded * * * and notwithstanding our excessive fatigues of the day and night previous, sleep was impossible." December 7, says Emory, dawned on the most tattered and ill-fed detachment of men that ever the United States mustered under her colors. The enemy's pickets and a portion of his force were seen in front. The sick, by the indefatigable exertions of Dr. Griffin, were doing well, and the general enabled to mount his horse. The order to march was given, and we moved off to offer the enemy battle, accompanied by our wounded, and the whole of our packs. The ambulances grated on the ground, and the suffer- ings of the wounded were very distressing. We had made for them the most comfortable conveyance we could, and such as it was, we were indebted principally to the ingenuity of the three remaining mountain men of the party, Peterson, Lon- deau, and Perrot. The fourth, the brave Francois Menard, had lost his life in the fight of the day before. Kit Carson, with his usual fortune, had come out of the fight practically unscathed. 286 KIT CARSON DAYS The slow column moved on the wounded and the packs in the center. Upon the hills about hovered the lancers of the Calif ornians, constantly threatening, but ever yielding the advance* In about nine miles was attained the rancho San Bernardo. Here the column commandeered water for the animals and chickens for the men ; but there was no grass, and the march must turn aside, " driving many cattle before us," for the rich San Bernardo River bottoms, south. We had scarcely left the house and proceeded more than a mile, when a cloud of cavalry debouched from the hills in our rear, and a portion of them dashed at full speed to occupy a hill which we must pass, while the remainder threatened our rear. Thirty or forty of them got possession of the hill, and it was necessary to drive them from it. This was accomplished by a small party of six or eight, upon whom the Californians discharged their fire; and strange to say, not one of our men fell. The capture of the hill was then but the work of a moment, and when we reached the crest, the Californians had mounted their horses and were in full flight. We did not lose a man in the skirmish, but they had several badly wounded. By this movement we lost our cattle, and were convinced that if we attempted any further progress with the ambulances we must lose our sick and our packs. The tactics of Captain Pico were apparent: the Ameri- cans must permit themselves to be menaced from higher ground, or must take the hill and lose their cattle ; they now must occupy the hill and cease their advance, or else be flanked again and again until they lost all their packs and probably their wounded, too. General Kearny decided to occupy the hill until the wounded were so improved as to require less attention from the able-bodied. The night of December 7 was spent upon the hill. One hundred more Californians were on their way from Los Angeles to reinforce the besiegers, but the Kearny company CARSON AT SAN PASQUAL 287 did not know it, and could only fear as yet that every hour was making their position worse. On the hill there was no forage except the mahogany and manzanita brush. There was no water until, by boring holes, a modicum was obtained, for the men only. The animals must constantly be guarded, lest they break for the grass and the river below. The fattest of the mules was slaughtered for meat. While the camp was wondering whether Godey and his companions had succeeded in winning through with the message to Commodore Stockton, Captain Andres Pico sent in word under flag of truce that he had four prisoners, just captured, whom he would like to exchange and the hopes of the camp were dashed. The prisoners could be no others than Godey and his companions. The Americans had only one prisoner, but Lieutenant Beale was delegated to meet the Calif ornian representative and treat for an exchange on that basis. The request for Godey was refused by Pico, he being considered too valuable a man; but one Burgess, the least intelligent of them all, was offered. However, upon Lieutenant Beale reporting to the general, Lieutenant Emory was sent down with the prisoner to make the exchange. He found Captain Pico to be a " gentlemanly looking and rather handsome man," and in demeanor evidently as courteous as the Spanish-Mexican customarily is. Burgess took " rather a contemptuous leave of his late captors." He related that the Godey party had safely reached San Diego, but that when in sight of the camp, on their return, they had been spied and taken by the Pico videttes. Before capture they had " cached " their dis- patches under a tree. He did not know what was in the dispatches ; he did not know what Godey had communicated to Commodore Stockton, and therefore the exchange of prisoners resulted in but little satisfaction to the Americans upon the hill. They could not guess that, apprised both by the excited Stokes and by Godey, Commander Stockton was 288 KIT CARSON DAYS at this moment assembling all his available sailors and marines for a forced march to their relief. At this juncture the young Lieutenant Beale volunteered to take his Indian servant and try with another message for Stockton; Kit Carson instantly offered himself as the third. Of Kit Carson we have heard much ; the Indian must pass on to Valhalla as only one of the earth's heroes unnamed and unsung; but Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale on this December 8, 1846, made himself famous. The grand- son of Commodore Thomas Truxtun of the old navy when it was new, and son of another naval officer, Lieutenant George Beale, born in 1822 Acting Lieutenant Beale was now but twenty- four years old and sixteen months com- missioned as midshipman. But the American traditions animating him dated back through seventy years. Now the brief preparations for the forlorn hope were soon made; and brief they were. A rifle each, a revolver, a sharp knife, and no food ; there was none in the camp. General Kearny in- vited Beale to come and sup with him. It was not the supper of Antony and Cleopatra; for when the camp starves, no general has a larder. It was meager enough. The general asked Beale what provision he had to travel on; the answer was, nothing. The general called his servant to inquire what his tent afforded; a handful of flour, was the answer. The general ordered it to be baked into a loaf and be given to Beale. When the loaf was brought the servant said that was the last, not of bread only, but of everything; that he had nothing left for the general's breakfast. Beale directed the servant to carry back the loaf, saying that he would provide for himself. He did provide for himself; and how? By going to the smouldering fire where the baggage had been burnt in the morning, and scraping from the ashes and embers the half-burnt peas and grains of corn which the conflagration had spared, filling his pockets with the unwonted food. Carson and the faithful Indian provided for themselves some mule beef. 124 San Diego was still thirty miles southwest. This, it must CARSON AT SAN PASQUAL 289 be understood, was the old San Diego later called Old Town about two miles ' north of the present city, or between it and the mouth of Mission Valley, which opens upon the flats of Mission or False Bay. Here, back of the squalid collection of adobe huts, Stockton was fortifying his quarters on a hill commanding the presidio. The interior country, to the Kearny position, was composed of mesas and abrupt hills covered by the chaparral, or brush, mingled with prickly pear and other cacti, and cut by deep clay and gravelly ravines or arroyos. It was the rainy season, although General Kearny, in a letter to his wife, reports the country to be very dry. With the fall of dusk the three started. Knowing that among the Americanos pent upon the hill was Kit Carson, the renowned hunter, and knowing also that every effort would be made to effect a juncture with Stockton, at night Captain Pico threw a double and triple cordon of sentries around the base of the hill and kept a patrol moving. He warned his men with the significant Spanish : " Se escapara el lobo " " The wolf will escape ! " To descend the hill slope the three scouts must crawl, in order not to limn themselves against the sky line. That the twigs should not crack underfoot, and that stones should not ring, the two whites removed their shoes and tucked them in their belts. Speedily their feet were afire with the stinging spines of the cacti. Presently the canteens were discarded, lest they, too, give out the alarm. Slowly, but surely, they evaded the vigilant guard of the Mexican sentinels, whom they found to be mounted and three rows deep, * * * So near would they often come to these Mexican sentinels, that but a few yards would measure the distance between them and their enemies, yet, with brave hearts they crept along over the ground foot by foot ; they were almost safe beyond these barriers, when all their hopes came near being dashed to pieces. This alarm was caused by 290 KIT CARSON DAYS one of the sentinels riding up near to where they were, dis- mounting from his horse and lighting, by his flint and steel, his cigarette. On seeing this, Kit Carson, who was just ahead of Lieutenant Beale, pushed back his foot and kicked softly his companion, as a signal for him to lie flat on the ground as he (Carson) was doing. The Mexican was some time, being apparently very much at his leisure, in lighting his cigarette ; and during these moments of suspense, so quietly did Kit Carson and his companion lie on the ground, that Carson said and always after affirmed, that he could distinctly hear Lieutenant Beale's heart pulsate. 125 Presently the unconscious Calif ornian remounted his horse and rode away. It was during an interval of despair such as this that the lad Beale, his stout spirit worn by the torture, physical and mental, wavered, and reaching for Carson, whispered in his ear: " We are gone. Let 's jump and fight it out ! " But Carson, of longer experience in this work, and of a frame and spirit inured to keen dangers, answered : " No. I 've been in worse places before." And the boy was encouraged. They passed through the cordon of sentries and videttes ; and before them lay two miles of open valley across which, despite the clustering cacti and the sharp stones, they must still crawl. Here beyond was broken ground, with covert of chaparral and of some trees. This slight vantage ground they gained at last. Now they might stand and don their shoes but they found that the shoes had been lost from their belts, and that the remainder of the way, like that preceding, must be trav- eled in tattered stockings or bare soles. Reckless of the cactus, they proceeded, as rapidly as possible, and daylight caught them well on their circuitous trail for San Diego. They left the high ground and took to the canons. Their feet swollen by bruise, cut, and cactus spine, their throats parched, they were yet elated at the progress they had CARSON AT SAN PASQUAL 291 made. However, the cordon thrown about San Diego awaited to be pierced. Meanwhile the camp on the hill had passed another wretched night. Among the sufferers who seemed doomed was Don Antoine Robidoux, the trader of Fort Uncom- pahgre and Fort Uintah. He, " a thin man of fifty-five years," slept next to Lieutenant Emory, who describes his plight : The loss of blood from his wounds, added to the coldness of the night, 28 Fahrenheit, made me think he would never see daylight, but I was mistaken. He woke me to ask if I did not smell coffee, and expressed the belief that a cup of that beverage would save his life, and that nothing else would. Not knowing there had been any coffee in camp for many days, I supposed a dream had carried him back to the cafes of St. Louis and New Orleans, and it was with some surprise I found my cook heating a cup of coffee over a small fire made of the sage. One of the most agreeable little offices performed in my life, and I believe in the cook's to whom the coffee belonged, was to pour this precious draught into the waning body of our friend Robideaux. His warmth returned, and with it hopes of life. In gratitude he gave me, what was then a great rarity, the half of a cake made of brown flour, almost black with dirt, and which had, for greater security, been hidden in the clothes of his Mexican servant, a man who scorned ablutions. I ate more than half without suspicion, when, on breaking a piece, the bodies of several of the most loathsome insects were exposed to my view. My hunger, however, overcame my fastidiousness, and the morceau did not appear particularly disgusting till after our arrival at San Diego, when several hearty meals had taken off the keenness of my appetite. This day, December 9, the Kearny camp stayed upon its hill. As for the three scouts, they made what progress they might, unseen, through the canoncitos, and at evening were within twelve miles of San Diego. Now they nerved them- selves for another ordeal. At dusk they separated to attempt 292 KIT CARSON DAYS the settlement by three routes and thus triple the chance of success. In San Diego Bay, on the frigate Congress and the sloop Portsmouth and the merchant vessels two bells were strik- ing for the hour of nine, and in the town itself the Stockton relief force were just starting for a night march to rescue Kearny, when an outpost challenged and was answered by an Indian. It was the first of the three scouts the Indian had won. He was taken to Stockton and scarcely had fin- ished telling his story in Spanish when Lieutenant Beale was carried in, unable to walk. By the time Carson arrived, about three in the morning, last because to assure success he had taken the more roundabout course, the relief force had long been upon their way, and the Indian, exhausted, and Beale, partially out of his head, had been cared for by the surgeon. Thus terminated what may be regarded as one of Kit Carson's greatest feats a feat in which he was not alone, but in which he was rivaled by a sailor and an Indian. Although, without doubt, he would have got through by himself, and without doubt Lieutenant Beale, if alone, would have failed, lacking the mature advice and the example of woodcraft supplied by his more skilled companions, to me the chief merit of the feat lies in the fact that its incentives were not escape for themselves, but succor for their com- rades. The danger was not so much capture (Pico seems to have been a kindly host, respecting bravery) as failure; and the chief sufferings to be feared were those which they did endure through thirst and cactus, and those which they would have endured had their efforts come to naught. That their tidings had preceded them does not lessen the merit of their performance. Carson was disabled for several days; Beale was so broken that for more than a year he was not in good health ; of the heroic Indian we hear naught. His was the CARSON-BEALE TABLET IN THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution) o X u o H in CARSON AT SAN PASQUAL 293 burden of stoicism and anonymity. Back at the beleaguered camp on the hill Sergeant Cox had died from his wounds. December 10 The enemy attacked our camp, driving be- fore them a band of wild horses, with which they hoped to produce a stampede. Our men behaved with admirable cool- ness, turning off the wild animals dexterously. Two or three of the fattest were killed in the charge, and formed, in the shape of a gravy-soup, an agreeable substitute for the poor steaks of our worn down brutes, on which we had been feeding for a number of days. The surgeon announced that the wounded and ill were about ready for the saddle. Dependence could not be placed upon the scouts, who had not been heard from; and when the cache under the tree, where Burgess said the dispatch from Stockton was placed, was examined, no letter was found. This left the camp apparently without resource; and yielding to the importunities of his officers and men, General Kearny determined to cut his way to the coast, regardless of sacrifice. By orders, all the baggage, even to the greatcoats, was burned; and on this, the evening of the loth, the camp sought its hard beds. Again quoting Emory: We were all reposing quietly, but not sleeping, waiting for the break of day, when we were to go down and give the enemy another defeat. One of the men, in the part of the camp as- signed to my defense, reported that he heard a man speaking in English. In a few minutes we heard the tramp of a column, followed by the hail of a sentinel. It was a detachment of loo tars and 80 marines under Lieutenant Gray, sent to meet us by Commodore Stockton, from whom we learned that Lieutenant Beale, Carson, and the Indian had arrived safely in San Diego. The detachment left San Diego on the night of the 9th, cached themselves during the day of the loth, and joined us on the night of that day. These gallant fellows busied themselves till day distributing their provisions and clothes to our naked and hungry people. 294 KIT CARSON DAYS The union of sailors and dragoons, revealed by morning, was a disagreeable surprise to Captain Pico. He withdrew his forces, the Americans marched down from their hill, and, gathering the abandoned cattle, proceeded on the road now open to San Diego and the sea. 126 CHAPTER XXVI THE RE-CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA AT THE hamlet of San Diego (" a few adobe houses, two or three of which only have plank floors ") Kit Carson, and presumably the forgotten Indian, speedily recovered, although for a day or so it was feared that Carson might lose his feet. Lieutenant Beale remained in a bad way. Meanwhile Commodore Stockton carefully conserved his titulary position as commander in chief and governor in the province which he claimed by uncertain conquest, and in the north Lieutenant Colonel Fremont still marched at the rate of three to fifteen miles a day upon Los Angeles. In New Mexico a revolt kindred to one which upset the Stock- ton-Fremont plans was about to interrupt the Kearny paci- fication also ; and in Old Mexico the Missouri volunteers of the noted Doniphan column, offshoot of the Army of the West, pressed another desert march into populous Chi- huahua. The principal news, of course, was war news; neverthe- less amidst the roll of cannon, the clank of saber, and the creak of army wagon and pack mule leather could plainly be heard the crack of the emigrant's lash and the groaning lurch of his white-topped wagon. A History of Texas; or, the Emigrants' Guide to the New Republic, by a Resident Emigrant (New York, 1845), was a rival of Scott's Tactics, and itself was rivaled by the Oregon books of Robert Green- how and C. G. Nicolay. 127 Upon the Overland Trail by the South Pass another new vade mecum was The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California, by L. W. Hastings of "Hastings' Cut-Off" the Fremont-Kern byway of 1845 295 296 KIT CARSON DAYS from Salt Lake to the Humboldt River. The last of two thousand emigrants by land were assailing the Sierra. As to the mid- West, the Latter Day Saints, pressing for- ward from the new state of Iowa, were spending a hard winter among the Potawatomi at the edge of that Indian country beyond which lay a promised land ; and six months more were to witness the Mormons marching in to accept old Jim Bridger's challenge of $1,000 for a car of corn from the Salt Lake valley. But we are with Kit Carson at San Diego and our ways are not the ways of peace. He who traveled with Carson rarely lacked for action; and here in California there was still in the field, assisted by the Picos and Manuel Castro, the ex tempore governor, Jose Maria Flores, whose dic- tum read : 1. We, the inhabitants of the Department of California, as members of the great Mexican nation, declare that it is and has been our wish to belong to her alone, free and independent. 2. Consequently the authorities intended and named by the invading forces of the United States are held null and void. 3. All the North Americans being enemies of Mexico, we swear not to lay down our arms till they are expelled from the Mexican territory. 128 On the morning of December 29, the allied forces of those rivals, the general and the commodore, marched for the north to meet Flores, to support Fremont, or to take Los Angeles, or all three. Carson accompanied as chief of scouts ; 129 Beale was still on the disabled list in the sick bay of the Congress and a month was to elapse before he would be able even to hold a pen. Fifty-seven dragoons out of the original no; sixty rifle- men Volunteers, 433 sailors and marines (forty-six of the tars being artillerists), three engineers, three medical offi- cers, twenty-five Indians and Calif ornians as teamsters, etc., made up the force of about 600 men, who were divided THE RE-CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA 297 into four battalions, commanded by Captain Turner of the Dragoons, Captain Gillespie of the Volunteers and Lieuten- ants Renshaw and Zielin of the Navy. The battery of six pieces, " got up with great exertion, under the orders of Commodore Stockton," was commanded by Lieutenant Tilghman of the Navy ; the wagon train " of one four- wheel carriage and ten ox-carts " was in charge of Lieuten- ant Minor of the Navy. The wheels of the carts being only two feet in diamater, and (carreta fashion) literally rough- hewn from cross sections of trees, the march was somewhat impeded. Paralleling the romantic highway of the fathers the Camino Real, which connected the missions, but which was not by any means the smoothly traveled highway that the title, " Royal Road " implies in the form of a square termed by the sailors a " Yankee corral " (baggage in the center, artillery at the four corners), the column marched laboriously, taking ten days to cover 125 miles. Sometimes in sight of the surf, sometimes not within sound of it, up one sandy hill and down another whereon the grass was already sprouting, and amidst occasional ranch patches, past the abandoned missions of San Luis Rey de Francia and San Juan Capistrano, proceeded the toiling Americanos, until on the afternoon of January 8 the Calif ornians, under Flores himself, assisted by his colonels, Andres Pico and Jose Antoine Carrillo, gave the battle with artillery and 500 cavalry, at the Rio San Gabriel. With skirmishers out, in the face of cannon muzzles ranged point blank along the opposite high bank only 100 yards distant, the Americans dragged their pieces across the knee-deep current and through quicksands, into counter battery, and now, " very brisk in firing/' protected the cross- ing of the wagons and cattle. The grape and ball of the enemy, directed from the bank beyond, for the most part sped too high. Calif ornian cavalry, which had been show- 298 KIT CARSON DAYS ing their heads on right and left, suddenly charged the American rear (the favorite Mexican lancer practice) but were repulsed. Another furious but ineffectual charge or two, a counter charge (afoot), and the battle of San Gabriel, January 8, 1847, was won. The Calif ornians then withdrew a short distance, while the Americans camped on the field. But when on the morning of January 9 the Kearny- Stockton forces looked about them, the Calif ornians had vanished from the hill. The Americans marched across the mesa of the angle between the San Gabriel and the Fernando (Los Angeles) rivers. The Calif ornians were awaiting them. Says Emory : Here Flores addressed his men, and called on them to make one more charge; expressed his confidence in their ability to break our line ; said that yesterday he had been deceived in sup- posing that he was fighting soldiers. Flores fired at long range with his nine-pounders on the right. The Americans did not reply, or halt except for a moment. Los Angeles was only a few miles before. Flores sallied and made a " horseshoe in our front " ; his cannon extended on the points of the right and the left. The Americans marched into the horseshoe, silenced the nine-pounders on the right flank, received with deadly car- bines and rifles a charge on the left flank, and another charge on the rear; with a round of grape completed the discomforture of the enemy; and while considering that this was but the beginning of a good fight, found that it was the end! It was now about three o'clock, and the town, known to con- tain great quantities of wine and aguardiente, was four miles distant. From previous experience of the difficulty of con- trolling men when entering towns, it was determined to cross the river San Fernando, halt there for the night, and enter the THE RE-CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA 299 town in the morning, with the whole day before us. The dis- tance today, 6.2 miles. And so passed the battle of Los Angeles, January 9, 1847, the final battle in the re-conquest of fair California. On the morning of January 10 the capitulation of Los Angeles was accepted, and Captain Gillespie " raised again the banner which four months before he had lowered." From the north Fremont, having in one black, rainy Christmas lost among the ravines a hundred horses and mules, on January n defiled upon the plain of San Fer- nando, twenty miles north from Los Angeles. To him, the third party, fell the spoils; and if there was anything in " Fremont luck," he here sipped of the last savory cup that fate had in store for him through many a month to come; for to him, at the rancho Cahuenga, January 13, Andres Pico and Jose Antonio Carrillo engaged to