Kit Carson's Autobiography by Kit Carson

Author:Kit Carson [Carson, Kit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ISBN: 9780803250314
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: 2013-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

1 Lindsay Carson, born about 1755 and possibly a native of Scotland, grew up in North Carolina. He served as a soldier in the Revolution, and subsequent to the death of his first wife in 1793, migrated to Kentucky, where in 1797 he married Rebecca Robinson, a native of that state. According to the history of Howard County, Mo., they had eight children (ten according to Diet. Am. Biog.), four boys and four girls; Christopher, hero of our present narrative, was the third son of the family.

Lindsay Carson removed to the Boone’s Lick country, settling in Franklin Township, Howard County, Mo., probably early in 1811. In 1818 he was killed by a falling limb, while engaged in burning timber. Four years later the widow married Joseph Martin.

2 The Boone’s Lick country was much harassed by the Indians during the War of 1812. The settlers “forted” for mutual protection, the forts being commonly log houses, loop-holed and barricaded. The Carson family lived near Fort Hempstead, and Lindsay and Moses Carson, father and brother of Kit, were enrolled among its defenders. Illustrative of the conditions of the time, is the old-age story of a survivor, who lived in Fort Hempstead, that there were seven widows in the fort, and the penalty fixed by the settlers for falling asleep on sentry duty was to require the offender to grind a peck of corn for each widow.

3 David Workman lived in Old Franklin, which flourished in the decade of the twenties as the westernmost outpost of settlement on the Missouri and the entrepôt for the trade with distant Santa Fé. An illuminating picture of the town in this period is given by Jonas Viles in “Old Franklin; a Frontier Town of the Twenties,” in Miss. Valley Hist. Rev., IX, 269–82. Since Carson was a minor, whose father was dead, he must have been apprenticed to Workman by his mother or his step-father. The boy terminated his service by the simple process of running away. His own explanation agrees substantially with Louis Houck’s terse observation (Hist. of Mo., III, 146) that the labor became “irksome” to him.

4 Miss Grant states (Kit Carson’s Own Story of His Life, 10) that Carson himself was the volunteer who performed the amputation, citing Peters’ biography as her authority. Peters, who spins out the recital of the incident to about two pages, merely states that Carson and two others performed the amputation. To the present Editor it seems improbable that a band of veteran plainsmen would have assigned the chief rôle in such an emergency to their newest recruit, a tenderfoot, and still a mere boy. Carson knew how to be reticent on proper occasions for silence, but if he had actually wielded the surgeon’s saw and razor on Broadus, he would in all probability have recorded the fact in his autobiography.

5 Ewing Young was a native of Knox County, Tennessee, where he learned the trade of cabinet maker. Sometime in the early twenties he found his way to Santa Fé, and by 1826 was organizing parties to trap in the Mexican Southwest.

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