American Experience (1988) s20e07 Episode Script

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NARRATOR: To some, he was one
of America's greatest heroes,
a man who had helped open
a vast continent for settlement.
SALLY DENTON: Kit Carson was
this larger-than-life figure
that represented freedom
and independence and adventure.
It was the cowboy mythology
and the cowboy ethic
long before that
had even been thought of.
NARRATOR:
To others, he was a villain
who waged a merciless campaign
against one of the great
native tribes of the West.
HARRY WALTERS:
My great-grandfather lies buried
in Basque Redondo
because of him.
NARRATOR:
In the end,
his contradictions
would define his legacy
and tell the true story
of how the West was won.
PAUL HUTTON:
He represented his country,
and he represented
what America was becoming.
And so when
we look at Kit Carson,
if we get uncomfortable,
well, that's because
we're looking in the mirror
and we're seeing ourselves.
(horse grunts softly)
(horse snorts)
NARRATOR:
Early in the fall of 1862,
a military courier
made his way south
from Santa Fe to the U.S.
Army post at Fort Stanton
with a dispatch addressed
to Colonel Christopher Carson.
At 52, Kit Carson was
one of the most famous
Americans of his time.
When the West
was still a mystery
to most of his countrymen, he
had been the one to master it.
Few white men knew the vast
western landscape as intimately
or understood the ways
of its native peoples so well.
He was the brave and loyal guide
who had marked out a path
for the westward-going nation,
the sought-after Indian tracker
who could follow any trail,
the fearless warrior
portrayed in dozens
of best-selling books.
Now he had been chosen to lead
an historic military campaign,
one that would force
New Mexico's
most formidable tribes
into submission,
remove them to a reservation
and clear the way
for American settlement.
As a clerk read
the dispatch aloud,
Carson listened
with mounting dismay.
"All Indian men are to be killed
wherever you find them."
(gunshots)
“The women and children
will not be harmed,
“but you'll take them prisoners
until you receive
other instructions about them.“
Carson had never before
defied an order.
His sense of honor
would not allow for it.
But duty in this case
seemed dishonorable as well.
To carry out the task
now given him,
Carson would have to destroy
an entire way of life,
the very one
that had made him who he was.
DAYTON DUNCAN:
Kit Carson lived in a world
in which there weren't
a lot of good choices often,
and he tried to navigate it
as best he could,
true to his own lights.
And, in some instances,
that led him
to moments of great heroism,
and, in some instances,
that led him
to moments that he will
forever be reviled for.
(birds chirping)
NARRATOR: As a young man, Kit
Carson had been sure of two things:
he would not make
his life in Missouri
the way his father had done;
and he would not earn his living
making saddles,
as his mother had hoped.
He was just 16
and a bit shorter than average.
He had no money, few prospects,
and so little education
that he couldn't even
write his own name.
But he was tough.
He knew how to handle a rifle.
He figured that and a horse
would take him anywhere
he wanted to go.
(horse neighs)
The year was 1826, and Missouri
was then the vanguard
of American settlement.
Beyond its border
lay another world.
Just five years earlier,
merchants had opened
the Santa Fe Trail,
an international trading route
that ran southwest from Missouri
nearly 900 miles
and linked America's frontier
to Mexico's.
Carson had been itching to hit
the road almost ever since.
HUTTON: The West offers
boundless opportunity,
the freedom from
all the restraints of family,
all the restraints
of a shopkeeper's life,
and, of course,
the promise of adventure,
of danger, of excitement.
And so he runs away,
he does a Huck Finn
and lights out
for the territories.
NARRATOR:
He wound up in Taos,
a small, high-desert settlement
in the far corner
of the Mexican frontier
that for nearly
a quarter century
had been the hub
of the southwestern fur trade.
When he arrived
in early winter,
the place was teeming
with trappers--
Americans,
Frenchmen,
Canadians--
all of them
scruffy and sunburned
after months spent
pulling beaver
from the rivers of the Rockies.
With their furs now sold,
soon to be turned
into fashionable hats
back in the East,
they frittered their days away,
playing cards, telling tales,
and tossing back a local
moonshine called Taos Lightning.
HAMPTON SIDES: Carson wanted to be
a part of this fraternity of men,
these greasy, grizzled, hairy,
often drunk
international cast of characters
who knew the rivers of the West
and had been
to all these amazing places.
He wanted to be
one of these guys
as quickly as they'd have him.
NARRATOR:
Over the next two years,
Carson worked as a cook
and a hunter in Taos
and then,
having learned Spanish,
as an interpreter
for a merchant caravan.
Finally, in the spring of 1829,
when he was 19,
he was hired as a trapper
on an expedition to the untapped
tributaries of the Gila River.
He was the greenhorn among
some 40 seasoned mountain men,
deep in the wilderness,
on Mexican soil,
and surrounded
by hostile Apaches.
“They would frequently of night
crawl into our camp,“
Carson remembered.
“They would steal a trap,
kill a mule or horse,
and endeavor to do
what damage they could.“
In a world populated
almost exclusively
by Native Americans,
the trappers' best chance
at survival
was to act as if they were
just another tribe.
SIDES: The mountain men
were very practical people.
They had a job to do,
and they had to go
into these dangerous areas
and extract a commodity.
So they formed all kinds of
alliances with American Indians
and found that it was practical
to live
more like an American Indian
than like a,
like a Frenchman
or, or a Anglo-American.
(horse whinnying)
N. SCOTT MOMADAY: Carson acquired a
good many skills from the Indians,
and, uh, an attitude as well,
a way of thinking of the world
around them.
I think he adopted
a large part of that
and it became, um, inseparable
with his personality.
HUTTON: He understood what was
expected of him by native peoples
that he came in contact with
in terms of peaceful
relationships
and trade relationships,
but also in terms of conflict.
And he understood that
retribution must follow crime
and follow it immediately
and harshly
if one was to survive
in this environment.
NARRATOR:
On one occasion, while trapping
on the North Fork
of the Missouri River,
Carson and his companions
came in sight
of a large encampment
of Blackfeet,
a tribe that had attacked them
at every opportunity
for several seasons past.
(horses whinnying)
As Carson recalled it, “We were
determined to try our strength
to discover who had right
to the country.“
(gunshot)
Catching the Blackfeet
off guard,
the trappers charged the
village, firing as they went.
"It was the prettiest fight
I ever saw,“ Carson said later.
“After three hours,
we finally routed them
“and took several scalps.
(gunshots)
This ended our difficulties
with the Blackfeet.“
SIDES:
Whatever situation he was in--
would he negotiate,
would he fight, would he bluff
based on knowledge that he had
of the specific tribe
and sometimes a sub-tribe
within the tribe.
It was not a monolithic
situation, the American Indian.
He didn't live that way
and nor did many
of the mountain men.
Their experience
was much more informed
by practical considerations
of how to get along day to day.
NARRATOR:
In time, Carson became
what Americans of his generation
might have called
a “white Indian.“
He mastered the universal
sign language used
by the Western tribes, and
acquired a working knowledge
of more than a half-dozen
Indian tongues.
He dressed in buckskins,
slept on buffalo robes,
dined on buffalo jerky.
And when he was 25,
he took an Indian wife,
an Arapaho named Singing Grass,
offering her father
a bride price of five blankets,
three mules and a gun.
SIDES:
Like many of the trappers,
Carson settled down with
an American Indian woman.
He found that this marriage
was certainly
a marriage of convenience
in the sense that he had someone
on the trail with him
who helped do
all the thousand and one tasks
that had to be done,
but it was
the first love of his life.
He was devoted to her.
NARRATOR: Not long after
they were married,
Carson gave Singing Grass
a gift of glass beads,
an item highly prized
among the Arapahos as decoration
for their moccasins.
“She was a good wife to me,“
he told a friend years later.
“I never came in from hunting
that she didn't have
warm water ready
for my cold feet.“
Carson and Singing Grass would
have two daughters together.
Only one, Adaline, would survive
early childhood,
and the birth of the second
in 1839
would claim
Singing Grass's life.
By then, the era of the mountain
man was coming to an end.
Just as decades of overtrapping
took their toll
and the beaver grew scarce, the
fashion shifted to hats of silk.
Within a year,
the market had collapsed,
and Carson suddenly found
himself out of work,
widowed and shouldering the
burdens of parenthood alone.
He was 29.
Another man might have headed
back to the place
he had come from.
Carson decided to stay.
You know, he knows that there's
this whole life that is going on
back East that he left.
And he's got
a curiosity about it.
But I think he knows
that's not a world that he can
operate in successfully.
He knows the West,
he loves the West,
and this is his world,
this is his life.
He has become a Westerner.
HUTTON: The West is
where races intersect,
cultures intersect,
sometimes violently,
more often not.
Kit Carson moves easily
in that world.
He's not opposed
to confronting people
straight on
and engaging in combat,
taking a scalp if need be
to make a point,
but that doesn't mean
he couldn't sit down
and break bread
the very next week.
(steamboat whistle blowing)
NARRATOR: In May, 1842, two years
after the fur trade went bust,
Carson was heading up the
Missouri River from St. Louis,
having just brought
his daughter Adaline
to be educated in the East.
He was on his way back to Taos,
his pockets all but empty
and his future uncertain,
when he struck up a conversation
with a young Army lieutenant,
who introduced himself
as John C. Frémont.
Frémont was about to embark
on an expedition
to survey and map the West,
and he had yet to hire a guide.
Carson saw an opportunity.
After more than ten years
as a trapper,
there was no trail
he hadn't traveled,
no wilderness challenge
he couldn't meet.
But his pitch to Frémont was
characteristically modest.
“I informed him that I had been
some time in the mountains,“
Carson later recalled,
“and I thought I could guide him
to any point
he would wish to go.“
DAVID ROBERTS:
Frémont's suspicious at first.
He says, “Uh, I don't know
about this guy,“ you know?
For one thing, Carson was not
physically impressive.
He doesn't look
like a rugged outdoorsman.
He was a short little guy.
SALLY DENTON: He was kind of
self-effacing and understated,
but had this reputation
for being quite capable.
And Frémont hired him
on the spot.
In early June,
Carson and Frémont set out
from St. Louis
with a party of 25 men.
Their mission was to map the
first leg of an overland route
to the Pacific,
a route that had been discovered
some 30 years before,
but virtually unused by anyone
but fur trappers and Indians
ever since,
a route that soon would be
called “The Oregon Trail.“
The expedition had been
sponsored
by the federal government
at the urging of Frémont's
father-in-law,
U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton,
one of America's most zealous
promoters of western expansion.
SIDES: Benton saw early
on the importance
of America being
a continental nation,
having ports on the Pacific and
having all the land in between.
He also understood that
before this could happen, um,
the United States needed
to understand this land.
NARRATOR: Carson likely did not
realize it, but he had signed on
to the most ambitious political
enterprise of the 19th century,
a project that would come to be
known as “Manifest Destiny.“
HUTTON: Carson, he's right
on the cutting edge
of this movement-- this idea
that God or nature
or whatever one wants to call it
is going to open up the West
for the American Republic,
going to make the West
the empire of liberty.
NARRATOR:
With Carson in the lead
and a dozen wagons' worth
of equipment
and scientific instruments
in tow,
Frémont's party covered
some 1,200 miles that summer,
moving steadily westward
along the Platte
and the North Platte, through
the present-day states of Kansas
and Nebraska and up into the
Rockies as far as South Pass--
the broad valley that cut
through the mountains
and separated the first leg
of the trail from the second.
The next summer, they returned
to complete the route,
following the trail west
across Mexico's frontier
to the Pacific, then turning
south and continuing on
over the Sierra Nevada
in the dead of winter,
down into Alta California
and across the Mojave Desert
before finally winding back
around to the southern Rockies.
By then, they had surveyed
nearly 5,000 miles,
and Frémont was convinced
he'd found the ideal guide.
DENTON:
He knows the land,
and that's what attracts Frémont
to him and vice versa.
Frémont is a romantic
and a lover of nature.
Carson had a real sense of duty
and loyalty and devotion
to John C. Frémont.
I don't think he had
a sense of duty
to American expansionism.
HAMPTON SIDES: Carson was a very
pragmatic, very humble, very steady guy.
He had great judgment
and a sort of education
that was hard won
over many winters as a trapper.
He understood
all sorts of practical things
that Frémont had no idea about.
DUNCAN:
He could give cool advice.
When you come across
an Indian tribe,
you know, how should you act?
If you want to try to figure out
where water might be,
or also how to read signs,
how to get from here to there
over a mountain pass.
Carson's the person
you want to ask.
SIDES: One of the
things that Carson did
during one of the expeditions
with Fremont was
they encountered
some Hispanic wayfarers
who had had their horses
stolen from them.
HUTTON: The New Mexicans have
been attacked by Indians
and, uh, the kind of mindset
of the frontiersman
was that you didn't allow
this kind of behavior to go on,
that you had to make
a statement.
SIDES: Rather spontaneously,
Carson decides
to pursue
these Indian horse thieves.
HUTTON:
The Indians
were a large group.
But nevertheless, Carson
and his companions
snuck up on the band,
killed several of them,
retrieved all the horses
and brought back the horses
and several Indian scalps
to Frémont's camp.
SIDES:
This really impressed Frémont--
Carson risking his life
for a complete stranger.
And this is really where
the myth of Kit Carson
as this great
sort of white adven avenger
on the trail got its start.
NARRATOR:
Thanks in large part to Carson,
Frémont would come to be known
as the Pathfinder,
the man responsible for mapping
the entire length
of the Oregon Trail,
a great American explorer
on the order of Lewis and Clark.
Frémont returned the favor.
In August 1844, he had
his expedition reports bound
into a single volume and
published in Washington D.C.
and on nearly every page,
he lavished praise
upon his trusty scout.
“Mounted on a fine horse,
without a saddle,
and scouring bareheaded
over the prairies,“
he wrote in one typical passage,
“Kit was one of the finest
pictures of a horseman
I have ever seen.“
HUTTON: Carson became a great
romantic figure as an explorer,
as a guide, as a frontiersman,
as an Indian fighter
in these books
that were supposed to be reports
that were actually
grand adventure tales.
These books were bestsellers
in their day
and were used as handbooks
by hundreds of thousands
of people going west.
DENTON: Immigrants would be
in their wagons holding that,
and it would say,
“This is where you're going
to find fresh water,
“this is where there's
going to be grass
where you can graze
your cattle.“
It was really the first map
of its kind in America.
NARRATOR:
Native people and mountain men
had long known the way across
the vast Western wilderness.
Now, most of America
knew it, too.
In July 1844,
Carson rode into Taos,
weary from his travels
with Frémont
and ready to settle down with
the girl he'd come to love.
The youngest daughter of
a prominent New Mexican family,
she was petite
and raven-haired--
"a beauty,“ said one observer,
"of the haughty,
heart-breaking kind.“
Her name was Josefa,
but Carson called her Josefita
or sometimes, Little Jo.
SIDES: She was 18 years
Carson's junior.
Carson was not exactly winning
any beauty contests,
but he clearly had some sort
of charm and charisma
if he was able to win her over.
NARRATOR: The wedding had been
celebrated 17 months earlier,
in February 1843,
in the parish church in Taos.
Carson had been away from home
almost ever since.
Now, he and Josefa were finally
able to make a life together
in their own little adobe house,
not far from the town plaza.
SIDES: He truly married into this
whole Hispanic life in Taos.
He converted
to the Catholic faith
in order to please her family.
They spoke Spanish
in their household.
Their kids spoke Spanish
as their first language.
You know, this was
this was his world.
ANDRES RESENDEZ:
Taos is a very special place.
It's literally the hinge
between Mexico and the U.S.
It is Mexico's
northernmost town.
It is a traditional
trading place for indigenous
peoples throughout the region--
the Utes, Comanches, Apaches,
Pueblo Indians.
So this is a trading hub
of the first magnitude.
NARRATOR: In the two decades
since Carson first arrived,
the suing trade
an the Santa Fe Tran
had turned the place
noisy and crowded.
Scores of Americans already
had put down roots in town
and more were coming
all the time.
With his mind
on his young bride,
Carson may have missed
the meaning
of all those new arrivals.
But they had come to stay
and with the might of the
American government behind them,
they soon would make the West
their own.
NARRATOR: It all happened more quickly
than would later seem possible.
When 1845 dawned, the western
border of the United States
was officially drawn
at the Rocky Mountains.
Except for Texas, which had
declared its independence,
and the as-yet-unclaimed
Pacific Northwest,
the remainder of the continent
was officially
Mexican territory.
But due to
the expansionist designs
of President James K. Polk
and a bloody war with Mexico
that he provoked,
by the late winter of 1847,
the entire region--
more than 500 million acres--
was on the verge of becoming the
property of the United States.
SIDES: It was a bald land grab
is essentially what it was,
during the Mexican War.
The American army
marched all the way
from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,
to New Mexico.
It conquered New Mexico, it kept
on marching towards California.
NARRATOR: Carson happened to
be in California that winter,
on yet another expedition
with Frémont,
and at Frémont's urging,
had lent his assistance
to the American forces there.
In the field reports
that were scribbled out
during the course
of the fighting,
his name appeared
again and again,
describing how he had guided
troops to San Diego,
slipped through enemy lines
to conduct vital messages,
secured aid for several hundred
soldiers under siege.
As a reward
for his valuable service,
Carson now had been sent east
with a thick packet
of sealed letters
for the secretary of state
and the war department,
the glowing accounts of his own
battlefield heroism among them.
DUNCAN: When the United
States conquered California,
took it away from Mexico,
they needed
to get the news back.
There was no telegraph
or anything at that time.
They wanted to get news
across the entire continent
of the United States,
and the guy that they decided
was the best to do it
was Kit Carson.
NARRATOR: He arrived in
Washington, D.C., in May 1847,
some three months
after he'd set out,
having made the last leg
of the journey by train.
On the platform to meet him
was Jessie Benton Fremont,
wife of the nation's Pathfinder
and daughter to its most vocal
champion of Manifest Destiny.
She had never laid eyes
on Carson before,
but she easily recognized him
from the descriptions
in her husband's
expedition reports.
It would be her honor, she told
Carson, to act as his guide.
But Carson found the capital
bewildering,
a welter of inscrutable signs
and gawking strangers.
He was outraged at having to pay
for transportation
and complained about it
so bitterly
that Jessie was moved
to get him a horse.
His room at the Benton mansion
was stifling,
and he soon quit
the soft mattress there
for a bedroll
out on the veranda.
But nothing put him at ease.
SIDES: It was almost like a
Tarzan character had been
dragged out of the jungle
and brought into the city.
He didn't really
understand city life
and had spent very little time
in any sort of urban situation.
Most of the time,
he's with Jessie Fremont.
She introduced him to all
these influential figures
in Washington.
And people were
fascinated by him.
HUTTON: Everyone wants
to meet Kit Carson.
And that's because
Kit Carson is
the very living, breathing
symbol of the American frontier
and of our expansion westward.
And of course,
everyone wants to hear
from his lips
what the opportunities are
for America in the West.
NARRATOR:
Their schemes were ambitious
and, to Carson's ears,
a bit outlandish.
They saw the western landscape
transformed:
its forests cleared,
its valleys covered over
with farms and towns.
There was even talk
of a railroad
that would run clear across
the continent.
HUTTON: He's sort of amazed
at the attitude of these men.
He said, “They're princes
here in the East,
“but they would be nothing
in the West.
“They would be completely
helpless there,
but here they put on such airs.“
SIDES:
You get a sense that Carson--
as much as he hated it--
he knew that it was important.
These men had sponsored him
and were sort of the agents
of all of these changes
that had come to the West.
Carson was deferential towards
men who were better connected
and who were better educated
than he was,
and he felt a duty to respond
to their inquiries
in various ways.
NARRATOR: By the time he was
ushered into the White House
for a private audience
with President Polk,
Carson had only one objective:
to get back to Taos and Josefa.
Polk had other plans.
He had some official
dispatches to send
to the U.S. commanders
in California,
and he wanted Carson
to carry them.
You know, he wasn't the kind
of guy that said no.
He's going to you know,
he's got a job to do,
he's going to do it.
SIDES: Carson assumes a new role
as a transcontinental courier,
ferrying these messages
back and forth
from California to Washington.
It's unbelievable
when you think about
how many tens of thousands
of miles this guy covered.
In many ways, Kit Carson was the
field agent of Manifest Destiny.
NARRATOR: Before he finally
returned to Taos, 16 months later,
Carson's sense of duty
would take him across
the country four times
and over some 16,000 miles,
most of it on the back
of a mule.
Along the way, he would convey
government reports
and military orders and news
of developments on the ground--
all of it vital information
that would bind the two sides
of the country together
and help to make the West
an entirely different place.
HUTTON: Kit Carson went to the West
for the freedom and the openness,
to escape from the constraints
of society back home,
back in the States.
But then, of course,
he brought it all with him.
The dream of a continental
nation has been met
and America stretches
from sea to sea.
The West is transformed
and he sees it all,
but he's also one
of the major instruments
that brings about that change.
NARRATOR:
By the late 1840s, Kit Carson,
the hero of Frémont's
best-selling expedition reports,
was fast becoming
a national obsession.
It began innocently enough,
with stories told in taverns
and names on a map.
Then, in 1849,
came a new literary hero--
Kit Carson: The Prince
of the Gold Hunters,
a giant of a man
who referred to Indians
as “redskins, critters
and varmints“
and cheerfully slaughtered
them by the dozen.
(gunshot)
Written by an East Coast
hack who claimed
it had been “founded
on actual facts,“
the book was a smash hit.
Almost overnight, it became the
template for a brand new genre
of adventure stories--
hair-raising, action-packed
and set in the uncharted wilds
of the far West.
Americans called them
“blood and thunders.“
These were atrocious books.
I mean, they were
just terrible to read.
I would dare you to read them.
But they were enormously popular
in the late '40s, '50s and '60s.
During the Civil War,
they were read
by northerners and southerners
in the trenches.
One theme that everyone
could agree on,
the American West
and great plucky characters
like Kit Carson.
NARRATOR: Rocky Mountain
Kit's Last Scalp Hunt,
Kit Carson's Bride,
Kit Carson to the Rescue,
some 70 books would be written
over the years to come.
Priced to sell
at just 25 cents or less,
they would seal
Carson's reputation
as a hunter-avenger-killer
whose exploits helped clear
the way for civilization.
ROBERTS:
These popular romances
are unabashedly
about killing Indians.
The ones featuring Kit Carson
have him riding into a camp,
greeting 20 hostile savages,
dispatching all of them and
scalping them and riding out
with his scalps dangling
from his saddle.
In the mood of the day,
this is heroic.
SIDES: They had made no attempt to
understand the real Kit Carson.
They had not gotten his consent
to use his name.
They certainly didn't
pay him any money.
And the final irony
of the blood and thunders
was that Carson couldn't read
them because he was illiterate.
NARRATOR:
Of course, the fictional Carson
bore almost no resemblance
to the real one.
As a stranger once put it,
after being told that
the small man before him
was the legendary Kit Carson,
“You ain't the kind of
Kit Carson I'm lookin' for.“
DUNCAN:
Kit Carson just was who he was
and other people
projected onto him
their own beliefs,
their own myths.
And in that respect, I think
he is like the West itself.
It's a real place.
There were real things
that happened
and they were fascinating,
dramatic, tragic.
But that wasn't quite enough
for us as a society.
We had to twist it
and mythologize it
and sometimes distort it
completely out of context.
Kit Carson was
the greatest living symbol
of that desire that Americans
had to mythologize the West
and take real things and turn
them into something else.
SIDES: Throughout Carson's life,
he doesn't linger anywhere really.
He's always on the move.
He seems to be constitutionally
incapable of saying no
to these various missions
that are laid at his feet.
But the central theme
in his life
is always that he wants
to get back to New Mexico
and get back to Josefa
and live this sort
of normal existence
that he imagines
um for himself.
NARRATOR: By the close of 1848,
Carson was home in New Mexico,
the last of his courier missions
finally behind him.
In six years of marriage,
he and Josefa
had so far lived together
fewer than six months.
With their first child
now on the way,
Carson had partnered
with a fellow ex-trapper
and launched a cattle operation
in the Rayado Valley,
some 50 miles east of Taos.
Like settlers
all over New Mexico,
they were treading
on contested ground.
RESENDEZ: We tend to see maps
of that area of New Mexico
and we see, of course,
the American settlements
and we draw lines and the rest
is just Indian territory.
We don't know what's in there.
In fact, a more realistic map
of that area would see
very large, very powerful,
very stable Indian nations,
and even though these nations
were nomadic,
they had clearly formed
territories
and whenever somebody
trespassed, they were punished.
NARRATOR:
Carson had spent too many years
among native peoples
to be daunted.
“We had been leading a roving
life long enough,“
he later remembered, “and now
was the time, if ever,
to make a home for ourselves
and our children.“
Then, one afternoon
in late October 1849,
Army Major William Grier
came tearing up to the ranch
to ask Carson for help.
A few weeks before, a Missouri
trader named James White
had been heading west
on the nearby Santa Fe Trail
with his wife Ann
and their infant daughter
when their party had been
attacked by Indians.
(gunfire)
White had been killed,
Ann and the child taken captive.
In the days since,
the captured woman and her baby
had been spotted in a Jicarilla
Apache encampment,
out on the plains
somewhere east of the Trail.
Grier figured, if anyone
could find them, it was Carson.
SIDES: Kit Carson understood the
Jicarilla Apaches quite well,
spoke their language, uh,
and he was a likely candidate
for this for this job.
So he begins to pursue them
east towards Texas.
He was accompanied
by a group of soldiers.
They chased the Jicarilla Apache
for something like 12 days.
NARRATOR: "It was the most
difficult trail I ever followed,"
Carson later said.
"In nearly every camp.
“We would find
some of Mrs. White's clothing,
“which was the cause
of renewed energy
on our part
to continue the pursuit.“
Finally, late on the 12th day,
Carson saw plumes of smoke
curling skyward
in the distance--
the cooking fires of
a large Jicarilla Apache camp.
SIDES:
There's a disagreement
about how to approach
the Jicarillas.
Some within the party
hope that, uh,
they can negotiate with them.
Carson believes
they should attack immediately.
Uh, in the confusion, however,
the Jicarilla Apaches
spot the party,
and scatter.
(gunshots)
NARRATOR: "Grier ordered the men
to charge," Carson remembered,
“but the order was too late
for the desired effect.
“In about 200 yards, the body
of Mrs. White was found,
“perfectly warm.
“Had not been killed
more than five minutes.
Shot through the heart
with an arrow.“
Later, sorting through
what remained of the camp,
one of Grier's men
came across a book,
which presumably
had belonged to Mrs. White--
a copy of the wildly popular
blood-and-thunder Kit Carson:
The Prince of the Gold Hunters.
SIDES: Of course, Carson
couldn't read it;
he had to have someone else
read it to him.
But it was extraordinary,
because in this book,
Kit Carson was assigned the task
of rescuing a woman
who'd been kidnapped by Indians.
And here he was
given the task
of saving this woman,
but in this case,
in the real situation,
he'd failed
and she had died,
and he felt, perhaps,
that this, uh,
this book had given Ann White
some sort of false hope
that she would be rescued,
that Kit Carson was near.
HUTTON:
The myth of the West
came head to head
with the reality of the West
in that moment,
and Kit Carson was just stunned
by that experience.
And he never got over,
never got over the incident,
and it haunted him
all the rest of his days.
NARRATOR:
Things might have been different
if James and Ann White
had been the last or the only.
But they were two
among tens of thousands,
a tiny drop
in the massive migratory wave
that was then rolling westward
and swamping everything
in its path.
Carson could trace
the start of it
back to the discovery
of gold in California,
news of which
he is thought to have carried
on one of his
courier missions east.
In 1849 alone,
some 100,000 Americans
had set out for California,
and as the traffic
on the trails increased,
so, too, did the clashes
between settlers and Indians.
Inevitably,
Carson was called upon
to help mediate those conflicts,
and, in 1853.
He accepted a position
as an Indian agent
for the northern
New Mexico Territory.
RESENDEZ:
I'm sure part of his calculation
was that he would
moderate whatever
destructive impulses
the U.S. may have had
towards these groups.
So part of his calculation,
I'm sure,
is that, “Well, I better do it
rather than somebody else.“
NARRATOR:
For an annual salary of $1,550,
he would now serve
as the U.S. government's
official representative in its
dealings with the Muache Utes,
a band of nomadic hunters
that New Mexican officials
had branded the most difficult
to manage in the territory.
Day after day, Carson listened
to the Utes' grievances,
lodged complaints
on their behalf,
smoked and talked with them.
He grew especially fond
of a chief named Kaniache,
who would prove
a lifelong friend.
SIDES:
The Utes
called Carson “Father Kit,“
and they they loved him,
by all accounts.
He was fair-minded and honest
and began to really do
the very tough work
of thinking about Indian policy.
What are we doing
to the lives of these tribes?
DUNCAN: He was a better Indian agent
than most of the other people
at the time, because
he actually knew the Indians.
A lot of times
they were political appointees,
people with connections.
Sometimes
they were missionaries,
come not necessarily
just to understand the Indians
but to make them not Indians,
to convert them.
And Carson was
not entirely unique,
but he stands out as somebody
who honestly tried to do
what he thought
was the best for them.
NARRATOR: By far the bulk of
Carson's time was taken up
with New Mexico's most
persistent source of conflict,
an ancient practice,
common to the Utes, the Navajos
and other native peoples,
known as raiding.
(war whoops)
RESENDEZ: This was part of their
way of gaining resources.
You would go out and raid--
because some of these
settlements were exposed,
and because they had
tangible resources
that you could appropriate.
There were women and children
that could further
your population expansion.
All of these things
came into play.
These were
very shrewd communities
living in
a very harsh environment,
and so you had to do
what you had to do.
(two gunshots)
NARRATOR:
Carson considered raiding
a grave threat
to frontier security,
and he knew from long experience
that the Indians' own code
of justice demanded retribution.
But as the months
and years passed,
he began to see that many
of the crimes blamed on Indians
were in fact
the fault of whites,
newcomers who were settling
on traditional hunting grounds
and driving off all the game.
When a Ute chief called Blanco
was accused of robbing sheep,
Carson reported that the Indian
had had no other choice.
"If the government
will not do something
to save the Utes
from starving,“ he argued,
“they will be obliged to steal.“
RESENDEZ:
Here we have a world
that had existed on its own
for thousands of years,
a world that is coming to an end
because of a very rapidly
growing American population.
Carson came to see
the moment white settlers
outnumber indigenous people,
then it's very hard
for these indigenous peoples
to actually hold the line.
SIDES:
He was alarmed.
Everywhere he turned,
he saw that the Indian
populations were dwindling,
and he began to grapple,
in his own way,
dictating hundreds
and hundreds of letters.
You begin to see
a realization that
many of the changes
that he had set in motion
were really changing the whole
complexion of the West.
NARRATOR: No American,
least of all Carson,
believed that
the nation's westward migration
could be stopped.
“The government has but
one alternative,“ he concluded,
“either to subsist
and clothe the Indians
or exterminate them.“
DUNCAN: There are these incredible
forces at work at this time.
There is a nation
intent on moving
across the West as quickly
and as decisively as possible.
Kit Carson
found himself incapable
of stopping those larger forces,
so he became an agent
in their
in the destruction
of their way of life,
though he was not
an Indian hater
in thein the sense
that a lot of Anglos
of the mid-19th century
were true racist Indian haters
in the worst possible sense.
That was not Kit Carson.
HUTTON: His children are
Indian and Hispanic.
And he knows that they
will carry
that appellation in their life
because of the blood
that they carry.
He deals easily
with native peoples,
because he's just like them.
That doesn't mean
he's on their side;
he's not.
But it means he understands
where they're coming from.
NARRATOR: On the day the
army courier turned up
with his orders
to round up the Indians,
in the fall of 1862,
Carson had just marked
his one-year anniversary
as commander of the First
New Mexico Volunteers.
He'd accepted the position
during the early months
of the Civil War,
when a force of Texas cavalry
rode into southern New Mexico
and proclaimed the area
Confederate territory.
The Confederates had been
easily turned back,
and Carson hoped soon
to be mustered out,
returned to Josefa and
reinstated as an Indian agent.
But events had conspired
against him.
While the New Mexican forces
had been preoccupied with
the Civil War, the Indians,
especially the Mescalero Apaches
and the Navajos,
had stepped up their raiding.
Over the previous year alone,
more than 30,000 sheep
had been stolen
and some 300 people killed.
Now, Carson had received
an urgent dispatch
from Brigadier General
James Henry Carleton,
ordering him to put the Indian
troublemakers down,
one tribe at a time,
and once and for all.
SIDES: James Henry Carleton
was a piece of work.
He was a New England Calvinist.
A man of a very tidy intellect.
These were messy social problems
and he could not countenance
this sort of situation
and believed
with great conviction
that he could fix it
almost overnight.
NARRATOR: Convinced that
treaties had no lasting effect,
Carleton planned
the most comprehensive
and most ruthless campaign
ever to have been carried out
in the West.
Carson and his men would make
total war on the Indians.
They would kill all
the adult men on sight,
take the women
and children prisoner,
and march them several hundred
miles to the new reservation
Carleton had established
in the grasslands
oi eastern New Mexico--
the Basque Redondo.
SIDES: He wanted to force
them overnight at gunpoint
to become Christian farmers.
He believed this was important
not only for their own good,
but he believed this was a model
for how to deal with
all the nomadic tribes
of the West.
He felt that he could solve
this problem in New Mexico,
this Indian problem,
and Carleton turns to Carson,
of course,
because he's Kit Carson.
NARRATOR: Carson was 52
now and bone-tired
and there was an odd pain
in his chest
that came and went
without warning.
He missed his wife and regretted
that the four children
they'd had together
lately had seen so little
of their father.
But an order was an order,
and Carson could not refuse.
As he struggled
to reconcile himself
to another season
away from his family,
he called in his clerk
and dictated a letter,
in Spanish, to Josefa.
“Adora Esposa,“ he began.
“Do not worry about me,
because with God's help
“we shall see each other again.
“I charge you above all
“not to get weary of caring
for my children
“and to give each one
a little kiss in my name.
“I remain begging God
“that I return in good health
to be with you until death.
“Your husband who loves you
and wishes to see you
more than to write to you.“
Four months later, Carson
could report to Carleton
that the first phase of the
campaign had been accomplished.
Although he'd quietly
ignored the order
to shoot the men on sight, he'd
nevertheless managed to round up
the Mescalero Apaches,
and he asked that Carleton
release him from his commission.
SIDES: He had not joined the U.S.
Army to fight Indians.
He joined to fight the Texans
during the Civil War.
And he said,
"If the Texans return,
“I'll put on a uniform again,
but I need to go back
to my wife and children.“
Josefa was pregnant again.
He wanted to get back home
m Tans.
NARRATOR:
Carleton refused.
He needed Carson
to complete the campaign.
No one else, he insisted,
possessed Carson's “peculiar
skill and high courage.“
And no one else stood a chance
against Careton's next target,
the most formidable of all
of New Mexico's native peoples,
the Navajos.
(woman speaking Navajo)
(speaking Navajo)
NARRATOR:
For nearly 500 years,
they had lived on the ground
bordered by
the Four Sacred Mountains.
For 500 years, they had tended
their flocks of sheep
and cultivated
their fields and orchards.
And for 500 years,
they had tangled continually
with their neighbors,
perpetuating the cycle
of raid and retaliation
that had made the New Mexico
Territory infamous.
They called themselves the Dine.
But to the many who feared them,
they were the Navajos.
MOMADAY: New Mexico was
terrified of Navajo.
They were warlike.
This was a part
of their culture--
raiding, stealing, killing.
They were formidable,
they were dangerous
and people were afraid of them.
SIDES: Carson had lived in New
Mexico his entire adult life,
and public enemy number one
was the Navajo.
Everybody in New Mexico,
every Hispanic person
had some friend or family member
who had been killed
by the Navajo or had been stolen
by the Navajo.
And I think he thought
Carleton's idea
of a reservation on the Pecos
was as good as any
that had been put forward
as to how to end
this cycle of violence.
NARRATOR: In early July
1863, Carson set off
in the direction
of Navajo country
with a column
of several hundred men:
U.S. Army officers,
New Mexican volunteers
and auxiliary troops recruited
at Carson's request
from among his former charges,
the Utes,
who were longtime and bitter
tribal enemies of the Navajos.
DUNCAN:
Kit Carson followed orders.
That was part of how he had
gotten to where he had gotten--
not questioning
the society he was in,
and he got there
by taking orders
and doing a good job
of carrying them out.
When Carleton told him, “Go take
care of the Navajo for me,“
he was going to go do it.
NARRATOR: "The Colonel is after
the Indians at full speed,"
one of Carson's men noted, “and
is determined to overtake them
if horseflesh will stand it.“
In a typical scout, Carson
pushed his men nearly 500 miles
in 27 days, capturing over
a thousand head of livestock,
but pitifully few Navajos.
SIDES: He goes out into Navajo
country and he doesn't see a soul.
You know, he basically thinks
this is kind of like
a ghost campaign
against a ghost tribe.
He's fighting an enemy
he can't see.
NARRATOR: Frustrated and
eager to bring the campaign
to a rapid conclusion,
Carson made a fateful decision--
one that would define him
for generations to come.
WALTERS: He could not get the
Navajos to come out in open battle.
And so the thing to do is
to destroy their source of,
uh strength, you know,
which is the food
and their homes.
And that's what he did.
His tactics causes
great suffering.
SIDES: He ordered every
cornfield to be destroyed,
every melon patch,
every bean patch.
He had his men guard the salt
sources and the water sources
and chop down every tree.
It was brutal.
This was not majestic,
heroic warfare,
if there is such a thing.
This was a dirty
little war of attrition
with the express intent
of starving the Navajos out.
MOMADAY:
He knew the Indians.
He had known them from an early
time as a mountain man.
He probably knew Indians better
than any other white man
of his time.
He knew what they would stand
and how they could be brought
to terms with the army.
And, you know, he didn't
hesitate, I think, to
to act
on the basis of his knowledge.
NARRATOR: Carson later estimated
that his men had destroyed
nearly two million pounds
of food.
“Come winter,“ he told Carleton,
“the loss will cause
actual starvation
“and oblige the Navajos
to accept emigration
to the Basque Redondo.“
For the moment, however,
the Navajos remained
maddeningly elusive.
“I deplore it the more,“
he complained to Carleton,
“as I now have only one way
of communicating with them
through the barrels
of my rifles.“
Summer gave way to fall,
and the campaign ground on
with little result.
Finally, in November, on the eve
of his 54th birthday,
Carson requested
a leave of absence
to attend to what he called
“some private business
of importance.“
Carleton would not hear of it.
Carson would be permitted
to leave the field
only after he had captured
100 Navajos,
and then only on the condition
that he first conduct
a thorough sweep
of Canyon de Chelly,
a 100-mile sandstone labyrinth
in the heart of Navajo country.
SIDES: I think Carson was a little
spooked by Canyon de Chelly.
All his instincts
as a mountain man had taught him
to stay away from tight spots
and situations
where you're vulnerable,
you're on the defensive.
He really had no interest
in personally going down
in the canyon.
He skirted around
the sides of it.
He scouted from the rim.
But he was more than happy
to have
his subordinate officers go in
and get the glory
of having penetrated, uh,
this great bastion
of the Navajo people.
MOMADAY: He knows that
this is a powerful place
and that he can violate
the rules of the game there
and suffer for it.
We think of him
as being the person
who led the siege
in Canyon de Chelly.
He did it at a distance.
NARRATOR: By now, the Navajos
had begun to feel the effects
of Carson's scorched earth
campaign.
Hidden in various caves
and atop a towering butte
known as Fortress Rock,
they daily grew hungrier,
colder and more desperate.
LUPITA McCLANAHAN: They were trying
to save themselves from being killed,
and so they had to run and hide.
They ran off into the caves
and were hiding.
They had hiding places
along the rim of the canyon.
They wanted to take our lives;
they wanted to end the life
of the Dine people.
NARRATOR: Two days after the first
of his men entered the canyon,
Carson encountered a party
of Navajos
riding under a flag of truce.
SIDES: This is where
Carson's at his best.
He's able to communicate
with them, reassure them
that this campaign is not a war
of extermination.
WALTERS:
He selected ten influential men,
gave them a horse
and ten days' ration,
and told them to go home
and tell them
they would be treated well;
that if they surrendered,
they would not be harmed,
and that works.
McCLANAHAN: There was no other way,
because they said, "We're dying off.
We have to listen to this man“
and that we have to follow
his rules if you wanted to live.
NARRATOR: By 10:00 the
next morning, January 15,
60 Navajos had surrendered
to Carson.
Soon, that number would swell
to more than 800
and Carleton's quota
would be met.
The end was finally in sight,
and Carson determined
to hasten it along.
“Now is the time,“ he declared,
"to prosecute the campaign
with vigor.“
He then issued a new directive
to one of his captains
ordering him
to march his company
the length of the canyon
and lay waste
to the Navajo orchards.
MOMADAY: There were a thousand peach
trees, orchards, in the canyon,
and the Navajos had taken
great pride in those trees
and they loved the fruit
that was borne.
Carson ordered them burned.
Needn't have been done.
There was no real point in that.
It was so gratuitous,
but it was
it was, in a way,
the last blow, you know?
HUTTON:
By invading Canyon de Chelly,
by laying waste to it
and by making it impossible
for the Navajos to remain there,
Carson breaks them.
He breaks their spirit.
McCLANAHAN:
The whole canyon was silent.
It was dead.
No harmony in it anymore.
(woman speaking Navajo)
NARRATOR: If Carson felt any remorse,
his final report gave no sign of it:
"We have shown the Indians
that in no place
“are they safe from the pursuit
of troops of this command;
"that the principle is not to
destroy them, but to save them,
if they are disposed
to be saved.“
HUTTON: He absolutely guarantees
them that he will protect them,
he will make sure
that their families
are taken care of.
This is the power of Carson,
they trust his word.
They believe him.
He is, after all, Kit Carson.
NARRATOR: In Santa Fe, Carson
received a conqueror's welcome.
Jubilant New Mexicans
accosted him in the streets,
slapping him on the back
and shaking his hand
in congratulation.
Even Carleton gushed with praise
and declared Carson's victory
"the crowning act in a long life
spent fighting the savages.“
The Carson of fiction,
the ruthless Indian fighter
who had animated dozens
of blood-and-thunders,
no longer seemed
quite such a caricature.
HUTTON:
For hundreds of years,
the Navajo had been a threat
to the New Mexico settlements.
He's broken them
in just a matter of months,
and, uh, he's lionized again
as the great American hero.
NARRATOR: The adulation
meant nothing to Carson.
The pain in his chest
was constant now
and his exhaustion so complete
that one of his men
had described him
as “reeling in his saddle.“
As soon as it was possible,
he made his excuses to Carleton
and pointed his horse
toward home.
Meanwhile, thousands of Navajos
set off on the grueling trek
to the Bosque Redondo, a journey
of between 375 and 500 miles,
depending on the route,
most of them with nothing
but the ragged clothes
on their backs.
What rations the army provided
made many of them sick,
and in any case, there was
nowhere near enough food
to sustain them all.
Of the nearly 9,000
who made the journey,
the U.S. government estimated
that 350 died en route,
most from starvation,
illness or exposure,
and some 2,000 others
simply went missing.
The Navajos would count
the missing as dead
and put the number of casualties
at more than 3,000.
The episode would come
to be known as “The Long Walk.“
Those Navajos who survived
would remember it
as a death march
and they would hold one man
responsible.
WALTERS: He did a lot of
damage to the Navajo nation.
Every Navajo today, you know,
has family history of someone
that went on the Long Walk.
My grandfather, you know, was
six years old when he went,
and the stories
that my grandmother
and my mother used to tell
were of great hardship
and pain,
and I hated Carson for that.
HUTTON: He abandons the
Navajos on the Long Walk.
He deserts them.
Perhaps he knows what's coming
and he wants to be
protected from the blame.
Perhaps he's just
getting old and tired.
But whatever the reason,
Kit Carson breaks his word.
NARRATOR: Over the years that
followed the defeat of the Navajos,
years that would prove
to be Carson's last,
the West he'd chosen
as a young man
increasingly came to resemble
the world he'd left behind.
Americans pushed their way in,
built their towns and railroads,
and one way or another,
they pushed the Indians aside.
Somewhat unexpectedly,
the voice that was raised
time and again
on their behalf was Carson's.
He'd spent one summer
as superintendent
of the Bosque Redondo,
and, as he put it to a Senate
investigating committee in 1865,
one summer was enough
to convince him
that the entire experiment
had been a terrible mistake.
SIDES:
He told the commission
that these forced
relocations don't work,
to remove a whole tribe
from their ancestral lands
was to doom the experiment
from the start,
and that if these reservations
were going to work at all,
they had to be located
on the land
of the people in question.
So Carson emerges
in this testimony
as really one
of the most eloquent
and most perceptive thinkers
with regard
to Indian policy in the West.
NARRATOR:
Now in the twilight of his life,
Carson became a sort of elder
statesman of Indian affairs.
He helped to negotiate a treaty
with the Plains tribes
and advised both the military
and the government
on Indian policy reforms.
And in 1868, despite
chest pain so severe
that he could barely breathe,
he again made the long journey
to the nation's capital,
where he assisted in talks
that established a permanent
reservation for the Utes,
on the very ground the tribe
claimed as their own.
DUNCAN: I think he felt an
obligation to the Utes,
friendship
to the Utes, loyalty,
all those things that were
part and parcel of his makeup.
Um, and so he needed
to go to Washington
because he was the person
who would be the one
who could really represent them.
SIDES: Here he is, this Indian fighter
known for his various campaigns,
and yet he was also
a peacemaker and a diplomat.
I think the trick
to understanding Carson
is to go back to that idea that
for him, there was no such thing
as the American Indian.
He sided with certain groups
and other groups were
his enemy throughout his life.
NARRATOR:
Before Carson left Washington,
he paid a call on his old friend
and employer, John C. Frémont.
Distressed at the sight
of his former scout,
whom he later described as
“greatly altered by suffering,“
Fremont recommended
a specialist
and begged Carson
to consult him.
The diagnosis was bleak,
an aneurysm of the aorta.
It could rupture, the doctor
said, at any moment.
“My wife must see me,“
Carson told Jessie Frémont.
"If I was to write about this,
“or died out here,
it would kill her.
I must get home,
and I think I can do it.“
Two days after his return,
his eighth child,
a daughter, was born.
Two weeks after that, Josefa,
suffering from complications
related to the birth,
died in his arms.
SIDES: Here he thought he was
going to try to get home
just in time to die
and instead, she dies first.
He's just completely
stricken with grief
and, um, pines away
and is really kind of kind
of catatonic after her death.
NARRATOR: Carson's health
deteriorated rapidly.
Soon, he was moved
to a nearby military post,
where his doctor kept him
as comfortable as possible
and spent long hours
reading aloud from a book
entitled Nestor of the Rockies--
the first full-fledged
biography of Carson
ever to have been published.
HUTTON: How that must have
been, with death closing in,
to hear those words
and to relive
all those glorious days
from the past.
DUNCAN: He wanted to be
back in that old world,
sleeping on a buffalo robe,
having a buffalo steak,
a little coffee,
smoking his pipe.
You know, that's
not a bad way to go.
In one sense, it's
very much
like the real Kit Carson,
the less assuming
part of him,
which is, he wanted to be
the way he had been once.
NARRATOR:
As Carson lay on his deathbed
during the waning days
of May 1868,
the U.S. government was
in the midst of negotiating
an historic treaty
with the Navajos,
one that would acknowledge
the hardship
of their forced relocation
and return them to their land
among the Four Sacred Mountains,
but Kit Carson would not live
to see their homecoming.
On the afternoon of May 23,
eight days before
the Navajo treaty was signed,
he called out suddenly
from his pallet
of buffalo robes on the floor,
“Doctor, compadre. Adios.“
There was a rush
of blood from his mouth
and then he was gone.
DUNCAN: Kit Carson never
really questioned
what might have been
going on in the West.
He accepted those things,
that that was just
the way the world was
He brought into it
no sentimentality,
no myth of what was going on.
He was living in that moment
and it was just pretty
straightforward for him.
MOMADAY:
He was a complicated man,
turning upon himself
in certain ways.
This confliction between, uh,
compassion on the one hand
and, uh, very violent
behavior on the other--
how to reconcile those.
Maybe we need to remember
that in him, those things
were never reconciled.
Maybe one of Kit's quotes
would fit best here.
He said, “I don't“
something to the effect that,
“I don't know if I did right
or if I did wrong,
but I did
the best that I could.“
HUTTON:
He dies at just the right time.
Kit Carson had no place
in the new West--
not the West of railroads,
not the West of the slaughter
of the buffalo herds,
not the West
of the Indians' last stand.
The new West
was not a place
he would have been happy in,
but he's the man who created it.
He was that agent of empire
that made everything possible
that was to follow.
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