The Way to the West / and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone-Crockett-Carson

There is no figure of speech that so exactly describes the westward advance of the American population as that which compares it to the feeding of a vast flock of wild pigeons. These, when they fall on a forest rich with their chosen food, advance rapidly, rank after rank. As those in the front pause for a moment to feed, others behind rise and fly on beyond them, settling for a time to resume their own feeding operations.

Thus the progress of the hosts resembles a series of rolling waves, one passing ever on beyond the other, each wave changing its own relative position rapidly, yet ever going forward.

It was so with the American people. The Alleghanies could not stop them in their west-bound march, nor the terrors of a relentless Indian warfare, which endangered lives dearer to the rugged frontiersman than his own. Nothing would do until the pathway of the waters had brought the American settler to the Mississippi River, the great highway that, whether by whim, chance, or design, had now become wholly the property of the growing American government. Having arrived at the Mississippi River, the population could not rest. Those behind pressed ever on.

Once across the Alleghanies the pathways had been pointed out by nature; beyond the Mississippi these pathways were reversed. Man had not wings like the wild bird. His pilgrimage must still be slow, his methods of locomotion clumsy. The paths no longer lay even with the currents of the streams. The adventurer into the West must, for the most part, follow the reversed pathways of the waters. Briefly, the journey of the frontiersman from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi was one of angles, the first leg running to the southwest, thence northwest, thence southwest. The pilgrimage profile from the Mississippi to the Rockies was equally angular. The line of travel did not, for the most part, run directly to the west. It angled out and upward, wherever water transportation led, and where the streams showed the way.

In the story of Daniel Boone we have seen how he moved again and again, seeking ever to edge a little farther to the west than his nearest neighbors. Still another great frontiersman, Davy Crockett, beloved of the American people, gives us instance of this patient progress of the west-bound, halting, advancing, but never tiring. The life of Crockett will afford in itself a good view of the profile of the population movement, and will give as well a notion of the life and customs of those early times.

Davy Crockett, backwoodsman and bear hunter, magistrate, legislator and congressman; a man who at the time of his marriage scarcely knew one letter of the alphabet from the other, yet at middle age was one of the best-known figures of the American political world, and who was even mentioned as a possibility for the presidency of the United States; a man that lived like a savage and died like a hero-one of the uncouthest gentlemen that ever breathed-such a man as this could have been the product of none but an extraordinary day. We shall do well to note the story of his life, for his is one of those colossal figures now rapidly passing into the haze of forgetfulness or the mirage of mere conjecture.

In some fashion the names of Boone and Crockett are often loosely connected. They were in part contemporaneous though not coincident. Showing in common the rugged traits of the typical man of their time, they were yet distinctly unlike in many qualities. A writer who knew both men states that he considered Crockett the mental superior of Boone. After weighing carefully all the evidence obtainable-and there is much more information available concerning Crockett than in regard to Boone-one would be disposed to differ from such an opinion.

Boone was the simpler and sincerer soul, the graver and more dignified figure; Crockett the more magnetic personality, the more plausible, if at times less candid, man. One man was practically as ignorant as the other. Boone had no taste for political life, and his sole wish was to live ever a little beyond that civilization of which he was the pioneer and guide. Crockett, built also of good, common, human clay, for two-thirds of his life seemed animated by no greater ambition.

Then all at once we see him turned politician. He succeeds, and his name grows larger than his neighborhood and country. Not knowing the basis of the tariff, ignorant of the text of the Constitution, master of the practice, but unable to explain the theory, of a caucus or a town meeting, he finds himself owner of a seat in the United States Congress, fairly the central figure of that Congress, the cynosure not only of the South but of the East and North.

He is at this time nothing but a great, good-humored boy, the very type alike of an open-handed generosity, and an open-mouthed and sometimes ill-timed levity. He is the product of political accident. Yet, wonder of wonders, we find this man, quite past the time usually assigned as the limit for the development and fixing of a man's character, suddenly blossoming out into a second development, a second manhood, more thoughtful and more dignified than that of his early days. Without education when he started for the halls of Congress, he gains that education more rapidly than did ever man before.

Crockett returned to his home a graver and broader man. Even his speech had gained freedom, ease and clarity, though still he delighted, perhaps more in jest than otherwise, to bring in the crudities of expression, the quips and quirks of that language through which he had, to his own surprise and without his own plan, won his sudden notoriety-a notoriety that was later to turn to fame.

There is not to be found in all the history of American statesmanship so swift and sound a ripening into mature thought as that of this backwoodsman, the first political "mugwump" or independent; who engaged in politics for reasons of self-interest, and then all at once grew big enough to set self-interest aside and to do what seemed to him wise and right-a type of statesmanship now well-nigh defunct in America. And yet we see him, in the pang of his first decisive political defeat, growing bitter at his reverses, losing the genial philosophy of his earlier years, even renouncing his country, and forthwith turning away from family, friends and commonwealth to seek a new fortune in an alien land.

Some biographers of Crockett accord to him in this act the motives of bold knight-errantry; yet impartial review of known facts leads one to believe that Crockett's abandonment of his family and his somewhat erratic journey into Texas were most easily explicable by reasons of a plausible self-interest. He was seeking political advancement along lines of less resistance. Then, finding himself a member of a party of souls as adventurous as himself, souls reckless and unrestrained, ardent, eager, fearless, yet without a leader and without a definite plan, Crockett the backwoodsman, Crockett the thinker, the orator, the statesman, if you please, flings himself with the others into a needless and fatal fight, rages with them in the most glorious struggle yet chronicled in the pages of American history, fights like a Titan, dies like a gallant gentleman, helps write the shining history of that squalid hut in old San Antonio, and makes possible one of the most burning sentences that ever adorned monument above hero's grave: "Thermopyl? had three messengers of defeat; the Alamo had not one!"

Here are contradictions that might be thought sufficient to give us pause; yet not contradictions large or conclusive enough to rob Davy Crockett of aught of the fame that has been accorded him by the American people. In order to reconcile or explain these contrarieties, and hence to understand this strange early American, we shall do well to review the better known and most authentic incidents of his peculiar career.

Crockett does not go so far back in the history of the west-bound American as does Daniel Boone. The latter died at the age of eighty-six. Crockett, who died about ten years later than Boone, was but fifty years of age. His life falls in the trans-Mississippi period of the Western population movement. He was born August seventeenth, 1786, in Greene County, Tennessee. His grandfather was an Irishman who came to Pennsylvania, thence moved west in order to avail himself of the settlers' right of four hundred acres of land, which carried the preemption right of an additional one thousand acres. A goodly portion of a goodly earth lay ready to every man's hand in that day of American opportunity.

The second Crockett homestead, on the Holston River, was broken up by the Indians, who killed the parents and several of the children, John Crockett, David's father, being one of the few that escaped. John Crockett became a Revolutionary soldier, and after the Revolutionary War moved to North Carolina, just as did the father of Daniel Boone.

Following the path of the earlier Argonaut, Boone, John Crockett in 1783 crossed the Alleghanies, but settled in eastern Tennessee, instead of Kentucky. In this wilderness David was born. It was a land without religion, without schools, without civilization. In such an environment the weaker children died. Naked as a little Indian, David Crockett ran about the rude cabin, and lived because he was fit to survive. One of his earliest recollections is that of an incident in which his uncle, Joseph Hawkins, figured. Hawkins accidentally shot one of the neighbors, the ball passing through his body. There was no surgical skill possible, and it was considered the proper thing in the treatment of this wound to pass a silk handkerchief, carried on the end of a ramrod, from one end to the other of the wound. Crockett appears to have seen his father pull a silk handkerchief entirely through the body of this wounded neighbor. It was a strong breed, that of Tennessee a hundred years ago!

Of course this settler must move west, and again west. At the fourth move of his life he located on Cove Creek, the boy Davy being now about eight years of age. About this time Crockett's father lost his grist-mill by fire. Naturally the remedy for this was to move, and he again took up his journey, settling this time on the road between Abingdon and Knowlton, where he opened a rude tavern, patronized mostly by teamsters of the roughest sort,-certainly a hard enough environment for the coming statesman.

The earliest description of Crockett represents him to be "a wiry little fellow, athletic, with nerves of steel." Even in childhood he was given to fierce encounters, yet he was of an open and generous disposition. He grew up practically without care, his father, if truth be told, being a man of somewhat gross and drunken habits. Davy finally, at the mature age of thirteen, forsook the paternal roof and set out in the world for himself.

He chanced fortune with drovers, driving cattle to the eastward, and learned to be hostler and general utility man, becoming acquainted with the trail that ran between Abingdon, Witheville and Charlottesville, Orange Court House and other points in Virginia. He worked for a few months as a farm hand in Virginia. He wandered into Baltimore, with wonder noticed the shipping there, and came near becoming a sailor, but was rescued from that fate. Buffeted by fortune from pillar to post, he worked one month for a farmer at a wage of five dollars. He went apprentice to a hatter and worked for eighteen months for nothing, at the end of which time the hatter unfortunately failed in business.

Poor Davy spent two years in these wanderings, and was fifteen years old when all at once he again dawned upon the paternal grounds in eastern Tennessee. These two years had been spent in considerable physical discomfort and anguish of spirit, and the journey home was accomplished only after many dangers and difficulties. Crockett admits that at this time he did not know the letters of the alphabet. His father, shiftless as ever, had been lavish with his promissory notes. He offered Davy his "freedom" if he would work six months for a neighbor to whom he had given a note for forty dollars. Davy generously did so, and capped it off by working another six months and taking up another one of his father's notes, for thirty-six dollars. This last he was not obliged to do, yet in spite of these bitter surroundings, there had flowered in the young savage's heart a certain feeling of family honor.

Now all at once the boy backwoodsman became conscious of his own infirmities. He went to school six months, the only schooling he ever had in his life. He learned to write his name, to spell to some extent, to perform a few simple sums in arithmetic. Twice blighted in love at eighteen years of age, he married a pretty little Irish girl, a daughter of a neighboring family. "I know'd I would get her," says he, "if no one else did before next Thursday."

Crockett was married in his moccasins, leggings and hunting shirt. His bride was dressed in linsey-woolsey. There was no jewelry. The table on which the wedding feast was spread was made of a single slab. The platters were of wood, the spoons of pewter and of horn. In his own abode, as he first entered it, there was no bed and not a chair, a knife or a fork. Yet, after the expenditure of fifteen dollars, which he borrowed, Crockett and his wife "fixed the place up pretty grand," and found it good enough for them for some years. Here two boys were born to them.

At the ripe age of twenty years, that is to say in the year 1806, Crockett considered it necessary for the betterment of his fortunes that he should remove farther toward the West, this having been the universal practice of his kind. He journeyed for four hundred miles through the Western wilderness, taking his family and household goods with him. Their transportation, as we are advised, consisted of one old horse and two colts. These animals were packed with the household goods. In the wild journey down the Holston the family, children and all, camped out, enduring the weather as best they might. At last they came to a halt on Mulberry Creek, in Lincoln County, in what they took to be the Promised Land. The soil was generously rich, game and fish were abundant, the climate was all that could be asked. Crockett built him a cabin, and here he lived for two years, much as he had lived in eastern Tennessee. Then, in the easy fashion of the time, he moved once more, this time settling in Franklin County, on Bear Creek, still in the wilderness.

Here we find him living in 1813, at which time the call went out for volunteers to serve in the Creek War under General Jackson. Without much ado, Crockett said good-by to his family, joining those wild irregular troops who, amid countless hardships, plodded up and down the region of Alabama and Georgia, meeting the southern Indians, destroying them wholesale or piecemeal as the case might be. Crockett marched, counter-marched, acted as spy and hunter, doing his full share of the work.

All the time he was rising in the esteem of his fellow men. He was now a tall, large-boned, muscular man. His hair, we are told, was sandy, his eyes blue, his nose straight, his mouth wide and merry; and so we see Davy Crockett the grown man. Never having known anything but hardship all his life, he has none the less never known anything but cheerfulness and content. The apt jest and catching story are always ready on his lips. He is the life of the camp-fire. Gradually he forges to the front. The qualities of leadership begin to appear.

In all these rude military experiences, although Crockett does not fancy the revolting scenes which in some instances he witnesses at the Indian killings, he shows the ardent nature, the fighting soul. Hence he respects the fighting man and pays his obedience to General Jackson. There is no hint of that fatal falling out between the two men that later is so suddenly to terminate Crockett's ambitions.

In 1822, after his return from this petty war, Crockett's fortunes once more needed mending, and the remedy, of course, was to move again. He had previously explored nearly all of Alabama, and later investigated southern Tennessee, finally locating on Shoal Creek, in Giles County. Crockett's faithful wife, the little Irish woman, had died, and he, ever ready to console himself, now married a widow of the neighborhood, an estimable woman, who added two children to his already growing family. This second wife appears to have been a dignified and able woman. Little is known of her, and she seems to have lived the life of the average frontier woman, patiently and uncomplainingly following her lord and master in all his enterprises and his wanderings. Two pack-horses still served to transport all the family goods on this latest journey.

The greed for land had rapidly sent a turbulent population into the Cherokee country of the "New Purchase" where Crockett now resided, and among these lawless souls restrictions were needed, although the country knew no law and had no courts. Crockett was elected judge, without any commission and without any formal process of law. He served wisely, and although unable to write a warrant, he sometimes issued verbal warrants. He claimed that his decisions were always just and that they "stuck like wax."

Meantime he had been elected colonel of militia over a bumptious rival. Now, all at once, and perhaps originally more as a matter of jest than anything else, as was the case in his second candidacy, his name came up for the legislature. Crockett inaugurated a canvass on lines of his own. In brief, he talked little of politics, for he knew nothing of such matters. He told a brief story, traded a 'coon skin for a bottle of liquor, treated the crowd, promised to sell a wolf scalp and treat them again, and so passed on to the next gathering. He was elected without difficulty.

But of course misfortune once more must overtake our hero, and he must move again, this time as far as he can go and not cross the Mississippi River. This next home, and the last one he established, was made in the northwestern corner of Tennessee, on the Obion River, near the Mississippi River, not far from what is now known as Reel Foot Lake, and in the heart of that wild country then known as the "Shakes."

This was near the submerged lands affected by the New Madrid earthquakes, a country naturally rich in many ways. It was a cane-brake country, a heavily timbered but somewhat broken region, crossed now and again by terrific windfalls locally known as "hurricanes." You may see such country in the Mississippi Delta to-day, two hundred miles south of Crockett's home. Crockett's neighbors on the Obion were three in number, respectively seven, fifteen and twenty miles distant.

On his trip of exploration he planted his first crop of corn by means of a sharp stick, just as he had broken the earth at each of his earlier homes. He was rejoiced to find that the corn grew excellently, and yet more rejoiced to know that he had found a superb hunting ground. In his early life his game consisted chiefly of deer and turkey. Here bear, deer and turkey were very numerous, and there were also elk occasionally to be seen. The buffalo is never mentioned up to this time in Crockett's life, and that animal had probably by this time, 1822, become practically extinct in Kentucky and Missouri.

Mr. J. S. C. Abbott, in his biography of Crockett, writes of his station at this time: "Most men, most women, gazing upon a scene so wild, lonely and cheerless, would say, 'Let me sink into the grave rather than be doomed to such a home as this.'" Such is the point of view of the narrow observer that never knew his America. Not so Davy Crockett. He did not find this region lonely or cheerless. On the contrary, we find him fraternizing with the rude boatmen from points lower down on the Mississippi River, and making himself very comfortable. Presently he goes back after his family, bringing them on to his new home in October of that year. They and their belongings are transported by two horses, this limited cavalcade being still sufficient to carry all the worldly belongings of David Crockett, hunter, warrior, magistrate and legislator. Davy is still poor, but he does not wish to "sink into the grave." On the contrary, as he journeys along the wild woodland path he sings, jests and whistles, happy as the birds about him, content among the sweet mysteries of the untracked forests. He is the product of wild nature, as savage as the most savage, a man primeval, unfettered, free. He is the new man, the man of the west, the new-American.

As an example of Crockett's early electioneering methods, we may cite his procedure in his first canvass for the legislature. He says:

"I didn't know what the government was. I didn't know but General Jackson was the government;" a statement not wholly the product of sarcasm. He met Colonel Polk, later President Polk, and according to his own story the colonel remarked:

"It is possible we may have some changes in the judiciary."

"Very likely," replied Davy, "very likely," and discreetly withdrew.

"Well," he comments, "if I know'd what he meant by 'judiciary,' I wish I may be shot. I never heard there was such a thing in all nature."

Yet another electioneering story attributed to Crockett, perhaps authentic as many of those told regarding him, shows well enough the rude temper of his region, if we do not go further, and accord to it a certain hint of that native humor that was later to see its growth in America.

"I had taken old Betsy," says he, referring to his rifle, "and straggled off to the banks of the Mississippi River, and meeting no game, I didn't like it. I felt mighty wolfish about the head and ears, and thought I'd spile if I wasn't kivvered in salt, for I hadn't had a fight in ten days. I cum acrost a fellow who was floatin' down-stream, settin' in the stern of his boat, fast asleep. Said I, 'Hello, stranger, if you don't take care your boat will get away from you;' and he looked up and said he, 'I don't value you.' He looked up at me slantendicular, and I looked down at him slantendicular; and he took a chaw of turbaccur, and said he, 'I don't value you that much.' Said I, 'Come ashore. I can whip you. I've been tryin' to get a fight all the mornin';' and the varmint flapped his wings like a chicken. I ris up, shook my mane, and neighed like a horse.

"He run his boat plump head foremost ashore. I stood still and sot my triggers-that is, I took off my shirt, and tied my gallusses tight around my waist-and at it we went. He was a right smart 'coon, but hardly a bait fer a feller like me. I put it to him mighty droll. In ten minutes he yelled enough, and swore I was a ripstaver. Said I, 'Ain't I the yaller flower of the forest? I'm all brimstone but the head and ears, and that's aquafortis.' Said he, 'You're a beauty, and if I know'd yore name I'd vote for you next election.' Said I, 'I'm that same Davy Crockett. You know what I am made of. I've got the closest shootin' rifle, the best 'coon dog, the biggest bear tickler and the ruffest rackin' horse in the district. I can kill more likker, cool out more men, and fool more varmints than any man you can find in all Tennessee!' Said he, 'Good morning, stranger, I'm satisfied.' Said I, 'Good morning, sir; I feel much better since our meeting-don't forget about that vote.'"

Congressmen to-day do not employ language quite so picturesque, or methods of vote-getting quite so crude. The story is a trifle apochryphal; yet Crockett himself, in what is called his autobiography, a work which he no doubt dictated, or at least authorized, gives the following account of one of his speeches to a stranger, at Raleigh, while Crockett was en route to Washington to take his first seat in Congress.

"Said he, 'Hurrah for Adams!' and said I, 'Hurrah for hell, and praise your own country!' And he said, 'Who are you?' Said I, 'I'm that same Davy Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half horse, half alligator, a little touched with snapping turtle, can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride a streak of lightning, slide down a honey locust and not get scratched. I can whip my weight in wildcats, hug a bear too close for comfort, and eat any man opposed to Jackson.'" Which last remark he fain would qualify largely later in his political career! An innate shrewdness that told him how to avoid committing himself was Crockett's original capital in politics, as it was in life. His native wit, his good fellowship, his rollicking good humor, his courage and strength, his skill with weapons brought him success. He was fitted for success in those surroundings.

Crockett is always chronicled as one of the great American hunters, and this name he deserves. He was a good rifle-shot. In his cane-brake country he hunted the black bear just as it is hunted to-day in the similar country of the Mississippi Delta, by means of dogs, without which the hunter would only by the remotest chance ever get sight of an animal so shy as the black bear.

Abbott, who seems to apologize for Crockett, needs for himself an apologist, for he displays a lamentable ignorance of the environment of which he writes, as well as of many common facts in natural history. As a matter of fact there was no risk whatever in the pursuit of the black bear, even when the hunter was not accompanied by his dogs, whose presence eliminated the last possible danger of the chase. In those days the rifle was a single-shot muzzle-loader, in no wise so effective as the modern hunting arm, but even thus early in the history of American wild game, the black bear had ceased to be a formidable animal, if indeed he ever was such.[14]

Abbott, with gross and indeed singular inaccuracy, repeatedly speaks of Crockett as killing the "grizzly bear" and he mentions the "shaggy skins" of these "ferocious animals." In reality Davy Crockett saw nothing but the flat, smooth hides of the common black bear of the South, one of the most cowardly animals that ever lived. He killed numbers of them, and enjoyed the vociferous chase with his hounds. Sometimes he did not need to use the rifle, but killed the bear with the knife, a feat often repeated by men of the present generation in the cane-brake hunting of the South.

Crockett mentions killing one bear that weighed six hundred and seventeen pounds, and he speaks of another that he thinks weighed six hundred pounds. In one hunt of two weeks he killed fifteen bears. Once he killed three bears in half an hour, and at another time six in one day, with an additional four on the following day. In one week the total was seventeen bears, and in the next hunt he speaks of killing ten of the same animals. He states that he killed fifty-eight bears in the fall and winter of that year, and in one month of the following spring he added forty-seven bears to his score, a total of a hundred and five killed in less than one year. In all he killed several hundred bears, very many deer and countless small game. He was a benefactor to all the poor laboring folk that lived anywhere near him, and speaks of giving one poverty-stricken neighbor a thousand pounds of meat, the product of his rifle during a few hours of one afternoon.[15]

There never was a land more fruitful in animal life than this South which supported the early Westerners. In such surroundings life was a simple matter. The chase and the rude field of corn offered sufficient returns to satisfy the frontiersman.

One day as Crockett happened to be in a settlement, some forty miles from his home, it was suggested that he run once more for the legislature. He agreed, and forthwith announced himself as candidate. His early methods were again successful. Discovering in himself now certain latent powers whose existence he had not suspected, he later agreed to run for Congress, but was defeated by his late supporter and friend, Colonel Alexander, by the scant margin of two votes. Cotton was high, and Alexander said it was because of the 1824 tariff. Davy did not know what the tariff was, and could not answer!

Crockett at this time is described as a "finely proportioned man, about six feet high, forty-five years of age, of very frank, pleasing and open countenance." He was dressed in homespun and wore a black fur cap on his head, when seen by a traveler who met him at his house. He now began to show "an unusual strength of mind and a memory almost miraculous." Uncultured, ignorant, terribly handicapped by lack of training and opportunity, he overcame it all. He got his ammunition from the enemy. He received his sole political education from his opponent's political speeches, as witness his second campaign for Congress. Cotton dropped in price. Davy promptly found that the tariff argument would work both ways, and he took his advantage. He was elected to Congress, and re-elected, the second victory showing a majority of three thousand five hundred votes.

It is at this stage of his career that we may speak of the birth of the second or real David Crockett. These wild surroundings have now begotten in him a rugged sense of self-reliance and a personal independence that henceforth manifest themselves unmistakably. He is a politician, but an independent politician. "I would as soon be a 'coon dog as to be obliged to do what any man or set of men told me to do," he says. "I will pledge myself to support no administration." "I would rather be politically dead than hypocritically immortalized," he declares; and in yet another instance he says that he "will not submit to the party gee-whoa-haw;" that he will be "no man's man, and no party's man."

In spite of all these personal dicta he is elected. His election costs one hundred and fifty dollars, all in borrowed money. It costs David Crockett, congressman, an additional one hundred dollars, also borrowed, to get to the national Capitol at Washington, where he arrives perhaps the most unique specimen of Congressman ever produced in this broad land of ours. His first act is to pay his debts-which not all Congressmen since then have done so promptly. It is hard for the backwoods congressman at Washington, yet he has good sense, good tact, good-nature and a magnetic temperament. His motto, "Be sure you are right, then go ahead," wins for him sudden fame. Perhaps it is fame too sudden. Now we must bid good-by to Davy Crockett, bear hunter. He is bitten of the fatal poison of political ambition. From this time on the record of his life is for a while public, plain and well known.

Crockett was a Southerner and, as has been stated, at first a friend of the Jacksonian Democracy. Naturally he should have been expected to prove loyal to the doctrines of the South, and the South at that time was held in the hollow of Old Hickory's hand. Note now a sudden sternness of fiber in the bear hunter's character that entitles him to a better name than that of time-serving politician. As a matter of conviction and principle he differs from the autocratic leader then sitting in the president's chair. He opposes President Jackson's Indian bill, and the proposition to withdraw the deposits from the United States banks. Indeed, instead of being a follower of Jackson, he comes out boldly as an opponent of his former leader.

The North hails him joyously as a Southerner with a Whig heart. Let Davy make the most of it; none the less he loses the next contest for Congress in his district. Yet he fights again, gets the nomination for the next term, wins once more and hastens rapidly toward the height of a national popularity. Realizing his own ignorance of the North and East, in 1834 he undertakes a journey to those sections. At Baltimore he sees a railroad for the first time in his life, and witnesses the tremendous feat of seventeen miles made by a railway train in the time of fifty-five minutes! At Philadelphia crowds meet him at the wharf and cheer him to the echo. He is banqueted repeatedly, wined and dined times without number, and made the recipient of countless attentions. The young Whigs of Philadelphia come close to his heart when they make him a present of a fine rifle, the very rifle that took the place of "Old Betsy" and was with Crockett in his last fight at the Alamo.

In New York, in Boston and the larger manufacturing towns of Massachusetts, Crockett repeats his Philadelphia triumphs. He is now a national figure. His sayings and doings are quoted throughout the land. If his Northern speeches are correctly reported, he has at this time suddenly become the possessor of an easy and not undignified oratorical style, though all his speeches are still well sprinkled with quaint epigrams and homely illustrations.

We see in the Crockett of 1834 a figure not approached by any other American statesman so nearly as by that other rugged Westerner, Abraham Lincoln. These crude, virile, tremendous, human men, product of the soil, born of the hard ground and the blue sky-how they do appeal, how they do grow, how they do succeed.

Crockett is asked to visit Harvard College, but refuses for quaint reasons of his own. Andrew Jackson has been made an LL. D. by Harvard, and Crockett says that "one LL. D. is enough for Tennessee." He is the guest of Lieutenant-governor Armstrong, and chronicles na?ve surprise that Mr. Armstrong "did not charge him anything," for entertaining him. He states that in New England he found "more liberality than the Yankee generally gets credit for." He expresses his gratitude for the kindly reception accorded him in New England and chronicles his admiration for the thrift and industry of that country, which seems to have made a vivid impression on his mind, different as these scenes were from the wild surroundings in which he himself had grown up.

This trip into the North wrought epochal change for our bear hunter. He learns now about the tariff, studies and approves the doctrines of protection-rank heresy for a Southerner. Deep water for Davy now! He seems to have had no counsel of prudence, for now he loses no opportunity to chronicle his animosity toward General Jackson.

"Hero-that is a name that ought to be first in war and last in peace," says he. Commenting on the faithlessness of the government, he flames out: "I had considered a treaty as the sovereign law of the land, and now I hear it considered as a matter of expedience." This was in reference to the treatment accorded the southern Indians by the United States government.

"This thing of man-worship I am a stranger to," says he, with personal allusion, of course, to Jackson. In all these sayings he is, it may naturally be supposed, heartily applauded by the Northerners, who rejoice in this notable accession to their own ranks.

Davy Crockett, bear hunter and congressman, has now had his chance. He takes himself seriously, even when he jokes about his being the next president of the United States. Crockett represents now the success of perfect digestion, of the perfectly normal nervous system. Nothing irritates him. The world to him runs smoothly, as it does to any hardy animal. He cares not for the past and has no concern for the physical future. His big brain, so long fallow, so long unstirred, begins now to fill up with thoughts and ideas and comparisons and conclusions. His reason is clear and bright. He presents to the world the startling spectacle of a middle-aged man educating himself to the point of an intelligent statesmanship, and that within the space of a few brief months or years. He displays a clarity of vision nothing short of marvelous. His memory of names, of dates and data is something startling. The world of books remains closed to him, so that he learns by ear, like a child, but he surprises friends and foes alike. The husk of the chrysalis has been broken. The Westerner has been born into the American!

Davy Crockett had thus far never met any danger of a nature to inspire fear, any difficulty he could not overcome, any hardship he could not lightly endure. He now encountered one enemy greater than any to be met with in the wilderness-that great and menacing foe, the political machine. He found to his sorrow that honor and manhood will not always serve, and at the summit of his success he met his first and irremediable defeat.

Crockett, once the politician, now grown into Crockett the eager student, the earnest statesman, had stirred up animosities too great for him to overcome. The relentless hand of Jackson smote hard upon Crockett's district. There was talk of money, and of votes influenced by its use. Poor Davy, who went into this last campaign of Congress as blithely and as sure of success as ever in his life, learned that he had been defeated by a total of two hundred and thirty votes! Then there arose from the honest and generous soul of this strange child of the wilderness a great and bitter cry. He was among the first to exclaim against the creed of politics pursued as politics, of statesmanship that is not statesmanship-the creed of party and not of manhood.

"As my country no longer requires my services," he writes, "I have made up my mind to leave it." Expressing his determination forthwith to leave Tennessee and to start for the distant land of Texas, he says, "I have a new row to hoe, a long and rough one; but I will go ahead." He adds as quaintly as ever, "I told my constituents they might all go to hell, and I would go to Texas."

We come now to the third and closing stage of the life of David Crockett, and in order to understand it we must bear in mind the nature of the opinions then current concerning the new land that to the Southerners of that time was "The Great West," the land beyond the Mississippi. Texas, a magnificent realm eight hundred and twenty-five by seven hundred and forty-five miles in extent, already had an American population of nearly forty thousand; and of all wild populations ever gathered together at any place or time of the world, this was perhaps the wildest and the most indomitable. There was hardly a soul within the borders of that great land who was not a fighting man and who had not come to take his fighting chance. It was fate that Davy Crockett should drift into this far Southwest and take his chances also.

As to the chances of it, they were not so bad. It was almost sure that Texas would ultimately be won from Mexico. In 1813 an expedition of Americans had fought Spain and killed some hundreds of Spaniards, on the strength of the general claim that the territory of Louisiana extended westward as far as the Rio Grande, and not merely to the neighborhood of the Sabine River, as was claimed by Spain. The latter river was in 1819 generally accepted as the boundary line, but this fact did not serve to stop the Americans.

In 1823 Stephen A. Austin was settling his Mexican grant with his new colony. These families drew after them the inevitable train of relatives and friends, so that the great River Road to the South and Southwest soon began to be pressed by the feet of many pilgrims. In 1821 Lafitte made his rough settlement at Galveston, and the pirates of Lafitte were no worse than the average Texas population of that time. There were no schools, no courts, no law. One writer states that he sat at breakfast with eleven men, each of whom had pending against him in another state a charge of murder. Then originated the etiquette of the wild West that demanded that no one should inquire into his neighbor's past, nor ask his earlier name.

In 1833 there were twenty thousand Americans that wished Texas to have an organization separate from the state of Coahuila. They were not so particular as to what government claimed their state, but they wished to organize and run it for themselves. Meeting a natural opposition from Mexico in this enterprise, in the year 1835 they banded their forces, overturned the Mexican government, and set up a provisional government of their own. Henry Smith was chosen provisional governor and Sam Houston commander-in-chief of this wildest of all American republics.

On December twentieth, 1835, these Texans issued their proclamation of independence, some sixty years after the Declaration of the American Independence. This meant but one thing. Santa Anna, then as much as anybody governor of affairs in Mexico, marched with an army, stated to have numbered seven thousand five hundred men, to besiege the Texans, whose main body was located at San Antonio. No American doubted the ultimate issue. All the South knew that the wild and hardy population of this new region would beat back the weak Latin tenants of the soil. The matter was well discussed and well understood. It was not knight-errantry, therefore, so much as politics, that led Davy Crockett southward into this wild hornets' nest. Rather should we say that all this movement was part of the mighty, inexplicable, fateful, irresistible Anglo-Saxon pilgrimage across this continent. It was a New World. These new men were those fitted to occupy and hold it.

At this time the historian of Crockett falls on a curious difficulty. There is published what purports to be an autobiography of David Crockett's life, a linsey-woolsey affair, made up partly of good English and partly of rough backwoods idiom such as we are accustomed to associate with the speech of this singular man. This "autobiography" purports to be continued after Crockett leaves his Tennessee home for far-off Texas. Yet at this point its style and subject matter assume such shape as to lead one inevitably to conclude that Crockett did not write it. There are many contradictions and discrepancies, and much of the detailed story of Crockett's wanderings in the Southwest is denied by practically the only eye-witness of the time qualified to tell of his experiences-that Jonathan H. Greene (the "Harrington" of Crockett's correspondence), once gambler and later reformed man, who was with Crockett for a time before the Alamo fight. Greene's story does not in all points tally with the so-called autobiography of Crockett, nor with many of the popular histories of his life.

In general it may be determined that, with some feeling but without much ado, Crockett said farewell to his wife and family. He had no longer heart for bear hunting. He wished a wider field of life. His journey was down the Mississippi and up the Arkansas River to Little Rock. There he encountered many hail-fellows-well-met, and had several experiences, which are set forth at length in his autobiography. He journeyed then horseback to Fulton, descended the Red River to Natchitoches and thence made his way westward across Texas.

The so-called autobiography of Crockett describes two or three strange characters: the "Bee Hunter," who might have been the hero of an English melodrama of the time; "Thimblerig," the sharper whom Crockett reforms and leads on to die a hero's death; the "Pirate," who dies in front of the Alamo gate; and so on. There is something strangely unreal in much of this. It does not ring true. Yet we are further told that Crockett crossed the Sabine, that he met the Comanches, that he saw for the first time the tremendous herds of buffalo, that he encountered bands of wild horses, that he saw much wild game, and in a knife fight killed a panther. The feeling is irresistible that many of these pictures are made to order.

At last, however, without much ado and without any adequate explanation of Crockett's real motives, we find him inside the gates of the San Antonio barracks, one of that little party whose heroic death was to set the whole American nation a-throb, first with vengeful fire, and then with a passionate love and admiration.

The situation was thus: Travis in San Antonio, practically hemmed in at the adobe building known as the Alamo; Fannin at Goliad, with other noble fellows later to fall victims to Mexican treachery; at a distance Sam Houston, apparently irresolute and non-committal. Austin, Fannin, Travis, Rush, James Bowie, the Whartons, Archer of Virginia-what a list of strong names was here, these fighting men, some of whom had come for politics, some for sport, some for sheer love of danger and adventure. Of these, Bowie, Crockett, Fannin and Travis might have been declared opposed to the party of Houston and Austin. Crockett's authentic letter bitterly accuses Houston, the leader of the Texans. Houston, mysterious, vain, enigmatical, as able as he was erratic, might perhaps, had his followers been less tempestuous and independent, have united them into a harmonious and powerful whole. He could not, or did not. Hence came the Alamo fight.

Of this wild army, half ruffian, half adventurous, most of the men were poor, although they came in many cases from good families. They had behind them an undeniable sentiment in favor of the independence of Texas, and were backed by money raised for that purpose. General Jackson openly and notoriously favored the annexation of Texas, and perhaps even of Mexico, and went so far as to suggest a few practical though unauthorized plans of his own as to how the army might be used to bring about a conflict and later a pax Jacksonii. Thus we find our hero, Davy Crockett, once more falling into the plans of his former chief, his recently victorious antagonist, Old Hickory.

It is possible that Crockett was deceived in his pilgrimage to Texas. There is more than a suspicion that he was used as a cat's paw in a political movement. He says that "Houston is enjoying the support of the Government, while others are left to do the fighting." He continues, "Houston has dealt with us in prevarications." He calls Houston the "agent" and Jackson the "manufacturer." Yet certainly Crockett was backed by a prevalent and strongly growing sentiment. The records are too vague and insufficient. We shall never fully understand all these complications of early and adventurous politics.

Be all these things as they may, Crockett was one of the devoted little band of a hundred and eighty-three Texans, who in time found themselves besieged by an army of Mexicans from five thousand to eight thousand strong. The peons of Santa Anna's worthless army came on day after day, the bands playing the Dequelo, which meant "no quarter." For eleven days the Texans held the Alamo, in that historic fight whose details are so generally and so uncertainly known. These one hundred and eighty-three men killed of the enemy more than one thousand. Worn out by loss of sleep and continuous muscular exertion, their arms simply grew weary from much slaying. Their hands could no longer push down the ladders weighted with the struggling peons goaded forward by the swords of their officers.

At length an assault was lodged. The swart Mexicans, more in terror than in exultation, poured across the broken wall. In the hospital lay forty helpless men, each with his rifle at his side. These, sick and crippled, broken-bodied, iron-hearted, poured their last volley into their assailants as they came in. A cannon was discharged down the room and nearly a score of the crippled and sick were blown to pieces. Outside, in the open space, the lances of the Mexicans reached farther than the clubbed rifles or the bitter, biting knives of the stalwart Americans, now raging in their last tremendous, magnificent and awful Baresark rage.

No one knows the story of the end. Even the number of the victims is matter of dispute to-day. Some say there were a hundred and eighty-three defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. Some say one woman escaped; some say two. Some declare that one negro servant got away; some say two. The state of Texas adopted the "Alamo baby," but the Alamo baby did not see Crockett fall. There are different reports. Some state that there were six Americans left hemmed up against the wall, and that the Mexican general, Castrillon, called upon them to surrender. They did so, Crockett being one of the six. Confronting the Mexican commander, they were treacherously ordered to be shot down. It is said that Crockett, bowie knife in hand, sprang with all his force for the throat of the Mexican general, but was cut down or shot down with the others, "his face even in death wreathed in an expression of contempt and scorn at such treachery."

All this is but imagination; and there is all reason to suppose that there never was any surrender of these six last survivors. The commoner story is that Crockett fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed against the wall, before him lying the bodies of some twenty Mexicans. The usual impression is that he killed these twenty Mexicans himself before he was cut down, but this is perhaps the result of emotional writing. No one knows how many foes had fallen to his arm. No one can tell how many Mexicans each of these raging, fighting men destroyed before he himself went down. Earlier in the siege Crockett recounts picking off five cannoneers one after the other. He tells how the Bee Hunter and Thimblerig did their sharpshooting, how the Pirate died of wounds received in a sortie, how the Bee Hunter-a most unlikely thing-burst into poesy and song at the hoisting of the Texas flag. Some of these things have too unreal a sound. There is something not quite Crockett, though à la Crockett, in the conclusion of Crockett's so-called, or rather alleged, diary:

"March 5.-Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! throughout the day. No time for memorandums now. Go ahead. Liberty and independence forever!"

These are the last recorded words of dear Davy Crockett. It is probable in the extreme that he never wrote them. It is unlikely to an equal degree that, in all the turmoil of the Alamo fight, he could deliberately have kept a diary, or that it could have been preserved after all the horrible details of that bloody and disastrous conflict. As to the end of Davy Crockett, there is and has been no living human being who could speak with absolute accuracy and authenticity. Bloody San Jacinto, the field where the cry "Remember the Alamo!" was the watchword of a dire and just revenge, left but few Mexican eye-witnesses of the Alamo.

Be that as it may, we know that Davy Crockett died fighting, that he died with his face to the enemy, like the brave man that he was, undaunted, unafraid. No politics now, no statesmanship, no little ambitions now for Davy Crockett. He was once more the child of the wilderness, stark, savage, exultant, dreadful, one more of those Titanic characters that swept away a weaker population, beat down all opposition, conquered the American wilderness and made way for an American civilization.

* * *

The study of Crockett's life shows us an America yet loose and scattered, not knit together into a national whole; and the political problems of that day were still those arising from geography. Backwoods Davy was after all not so poor a thinker, nor so far from getting to the marrow of things. After his visit to the North, and his reconciliation to the doctrines of a protective tariff, he makes one comment which, while it may not settle political argument, ought to teach a national courtesy and a human tolerance on both sides in any national difference.

"If Southerners would visit the North," he says, "it would give different ideas to them who have been deluded and spoken in strong terms of dissolving the Union." A trifle ungrammatical this, perhaps, but startling reading, when one remembers that it was recorded in 1834. Again we find our independent thinker discussing freely the questions of transportation, which were then and always have been so important in this country. He was opposed to Jackson in the first place because Jackson "vetoed the bill for the Maysville road." He was opposed to Van Buren because he "voted against the continuance of the national road through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and against appropriations for its preservation." He opposed Van Buren further because he "voted in favor of toll gates on the national road, demanding a tribute from the West for the right to pass on her own highways, constructed out of her own money,-a thing never heard of before."

Crockett's changes of residence, ever drifting farther to the westward in his native state, and his final long pilgrimage to the Southwest, where he certainly, though his autobiography does not so state, visited different parts of Texas and the Indian nations, is index of the tendency of the times. The West of that day is the South of to-day. Thus, a writer of 1834 states, "The West is settled by representatives from every country, but it is very largely indebted for its inhabitants to Virginia, Georgia and the two Carolinas." History and our census maps show us that the day of the upper West was yet to come. Boone and his like had led across the Appalachians. Crockett and his like had crossed the Mississippi. The march toward the Rockies was now steadily and determinedly begun, under what difficulties and with what results we shall presently observe.

* * *

[14]

The black bears which fed on the corpses left on the field of Braddock's Defeat became for a time bold and somewhat fearless of man.

[15]

These stories are not to be doubted, and are not especially wonderful. The writer has often hunted in Mississippi with a planter, Colonel R. E. Bobo, who more than equalled all of Crockett's records. In one year, soon after his first arrival in Coahoma County, Mississippi, Colonel Bobo killed two hundred and six bears. The writer was present when ten bears were killed in eight days.

In reviewing the life of Christopher Carson, another of our Western leaders in exploration, we come upon the transition period between the time of up-stream transportation and that which led across the waters; the epoch wherein fell the closing days of Western adventure properly so called, and the opening days of a Western civilization fitly so named. Kit Carson, as he was always called, was born in Madison County, Kentucky, on December twenty-fourth, 1809. Thus it may be seen that his time lapped over that of Crockett and even of Boone.

It is not generally known, yet it is the case, that Kit Carson was a grandson of Daniel Boone.

Carson's life, therefore, rounds out the time of the great Westerners. He comes down to the railroad-building day. His was the time of the long-haired men of the American West. John Colter, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, the mulatto Beckwith or Beckworth; the great generals of the fur trade, Lisa, Ashley, Henry, Smith, Sublette, Fitzpatrick, all that company of the great captains of hazard-these were the men of his day; and among them all, not one has come down to us in more distinct figure or with memory carrying greater respect.

We call Frémont "The Great Pathfinder," and credit him with the exploration of the Rockies, the Pacific slope, and the great tramontane interior basins. Yet Frémont did not begin his explorations until 1842, and by that time the West of the adventurers was practically an outlived thing. For ten years the fur trade had been virtually defunct. For more than a decade the early commerce of the prairies had been waning. The West had been tramped across from one end to the other by a race of men peerless in their daring, chief among whom might be named this little, gentle, blue-eyed man, of whom that genially supercilious and generally ignorant biographer, J. S. C. Abbott, is good enough to write: "It is strange that the wilderness could have formed so estimable a character!"

This little man-he is described by one who knew him as a small man, not over five feet six inches in height-had, long before he ever heard of Frémont, ridden and walked along every important stream of the Rocky Mountains; had journeyed across the "American Desert" a dozen times, back and forth; had seen every foot of the Rockies from the Forks of the Missouri to the Bayou Salade; had seen all of New Mexico; had visited old Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California as we now know them; had camped at every resting ground along the Arkansas and Platte; had fought and traded with every Indian tribe from the Apaches up through the Navajos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Sioux, and Crows; had even fought the Blackfeet, redoubtable Northern warriors.

In short, Kit Carson and his kind had really explored the West, and by 1842 had rendered it safe for the so-called "exploration" that was to make its wonders public. It is Kit Carson who might better have the title of "pathfinder." Yet this was something to which he himself would not have listened, for well enough he knew that he was not the first. Ahead of him were other apostles of the fur trade, so that even Kit Carson took the West at second hand, as later we shall see. He would not have vaunted himself as knowing very much of the West. Yet even to-day men of the East are exploring the West, and writing gravely of their "discoveries."

Five feet six, with twinkling blue-gray eyes, a large and well-developed head, with hair sandy and well brushed back, Kit Carson at his best was the reverse of impressive. He was simple, peaceable and quiet in disposition, temperate and strictly moral in a time and place where these qualities made one a marked man. Yet throughout the length and breadth of the Indian country this little man was more feared, single and alone, than any other trapper or Indian fighter in all the West. He was respected as well as feared. One who knew him well said: "Carson and truth mean the same thing. He is always the same, gallant and disinterested. He is kind-hearted and averse to all quarrelsome and turbulent scenes. He is known far and wide for his sober habits, strict honor, and great regard for truth."

One of Carson's historians describes him as five feet nine inches in height, as weighing one hundred and sixty pounds, and as having a "dark and piercing eye." This "dark and piercing eye" is something that, as we have noted, the average writer on Western themes and Western adventures will not willingly let die. As a matter of fact, however, we are to believe that our hero was a much smaller man than this description makes him out to be, and that, though of well-developed and compact frame, he was by no means of imposing presence.

We shall do better with his raiment, for here we take hold upon the characteristics of the West at its most romantic time. In the garb habitual with him for more than half his life, Carson was clad in a fringed buckskin shirt, with leggings of the same material, also befringed. The shirt was handsomely embroidered with quills of the porcupine, and as much might be said for the moccasins that protected his feet. His cap was of fur, sometimes of fox skin, sometimes of 'coon skin, mayhap in days of great prosperity, of otter.

His rifle was that of Boone or Crockett, improved only to a limited extent, though carrying a ball somewhat larger than that needed in the forests of Kentucky. Otherwise he might have been the typical early American rifleman of the Alleghanies. Under his right arm rested his powder horn and bullet pouch. A heavy knife for butchering hung at his belt, as well as a whetstone to keep it in good condition. At a certain time in his career Carson wore an ornamented belt, with heavy silver buckle, which supported two revolvers and a knife.

He took on in modest sort the picturesque fashions of the wilderness, and, uniting as he did the mountains and the plains in his habitat, at times showed something of the Spanish love of display in the trappings of his horse. His saddle and bridle had trace of Mexico in their gold and silver ornamentation. His horse, be sure, was a good one; for those were times when a man's safety much depended on the fleetness and soundness of his mount, and the horse was the means of transportation for Carson and his kind.

As to the career of this Western man, if we come to follow it out as it occurred in sequence, we shall arrive at but one conclusion, to wit: that, conditions considered, Kit Carson was the greatest of all American travelers. It is almost unbelievable, the distances he traversed along with his wild fellows during those vivid years in which he forced the wild West to yield him a living. We can not do better than to trace some of his wanderings, more especially those that occurred before the day of the so-called exploration of the West.

Frémont, who knew Carson well, speaks of him as a native of Boone's Lick County, Missouri; but Doctor Peters, his biographer, states, apparently with Carson's authority, that Carson was born in Madison County, Kentucky, as above stated, and while but one year of age was brought to Howard County, Missouri, by his parents. The father of Carson was a good farmer, according to the lights of his time, and a good hunter, the life of Missouri during those early times being practically that known by the blockhouse farmers of Kentucky in the time of Boone. Kit grew up sturdy, quiet, self-contained, self-reliant. In his boyhood he was a steady rifle shot, and early acquired a reputation. He "hunted with the Sioux Indians," we are told, when yet a boy; which means he must have gone north up the Missouri.

At fifteen years of age he was called "old for his age;" he was known to be plucky, prompt, and tenacious of his rights, though not in the least quarrelsome. Just as well-meaning parents tried to send Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone to school, so did the kind parents in this case undertake to instil commercial principles into the mind of Kit Carson. To his father it seemed important that he should be apprenticed to a saddler. From the saddler's stool Kit promptly fell off. It was the out-of-doors that appealed to him; the West that spoke to him, just as it had to Boone and Crockett. He broke his heart for two years at the saddler's bench, and that ended both his commercial and scholastic education. In 1826, while still but a boy, he was off and away across the plains, having, without his parents' consent, joined a party bound for Santa Fé. Thus would the youth seek his fortune.

Carson reached Santa Fé in the month of November, 1826, and went thence to Fernandez de Taos, eighty miles northeast of Santa Fé, and spent the winter with an old mountaineer named Kincaid, or Kin Cade, who taught him something of the lore of the mountains. Perhaps a little homesick, in the spring of 1827 he started back for the East, without a penny in his buckskin pockets. He worked back homeward on the long journey down the Arkansas to a point about four hundred and fifty miles east of Santa Fé, and there, at the ford of the Arkansas, met another band of traders, west-bound, to whom he hired out as a teamster.

He again reached Santa Fé, still without a dollar, and went as teamster thence as far south as El Paso, returned to Santa Fé, and again to Taos. He was learning Spanish and learning New Mexico all this time. He now hired out as cook to Ewing Young, and continued in this interesting capacity until the spring of 1828. Again he started East, again failed to win farther than before, and joined another west-bound party, to reach Santa Fé a third time. Now he could do a bit in Spanish, and hence engaged as interpreter for Colonel Tramell, and wagoned it as far south as Chihuahua, in old Mexico. All this sounds full easy, yet even these few journeyings hitherto covered many, many weary, blistering miles.

In far-off Chihuahua young Carson hired out as a teamster, serving in the employ of Robert McKnight. He went to the Copper Mines, on the Gila River, and thence back once more to Taos, which latter place was to serve as his headquarters all his life. All this time it was Carson's ambition to be something better than a cook, or a teamster, or even an interpreter. The adventurer's blood was in his veins. It was April of 1829 when he joined Young's party of trappers, and soon thereafter he saw his first fight, in which the white men killed some fifteen Indians. It is not known whether or not Carson distinguished himself in this fight, but certainly he remained with the party, and it was no coward's company.

This band now worked toward the West, trapped down the Salt River, and reached the head of the San Francisco River. They concluded to go over to the Sacramento River of California, then reported to abound in fur. On the seventh day's journey to the west and southwest, they reached the Grand Ca?on of the Colorado, now admitted to be one of the wonders of the world. These trappers always remembered the Grand Ca?on of the Colorado; for it was near there that they bought a horse of some wandering Indians, and ate it. They were very hungry.

There were no trails across the interior desert in those days. Hence, although these were not the first adventurers to cross to California, they were in effect pioneers. In some way they succeeded in reaching San Gabriel Mission of California, and thence-by some very wonderful geography on the part of one or two biographers-they reached the Sacramento River. In the San Joaquin valley they met Peter Ogden's party of Hudson Bay trappers. So we may see that the West was far from being an unexploited country when Kit Carson began his travels.

This early transcontinental party was successful in its trapping, and the leader, Ewing Young, visited San Rafael with the catch of furs and sold it out in entirety to the captain of a trading schooner. He then bought horses for the return East. The Indians of the Sierra foothills promptly stole certain numbers of these horses. Witness augury of the future of Kit Carson, when we read that he was detailed as the leader of a little party sent out in pursuit of the horse thieves. This was his first independent scouting trip. He and his party killed eight Indians and retook the horses. Already his hand was acquiring cunning in the stern trade of Western life.

September of 1829 found Kit Carson back again in New Mexico. It took the party nine days to ride from Los Angeles to the Colorado River. Thence they seem to have descended the Colorado to tidewater, to have crossed over to the Gila, and to have ascended the Gila to San Pedro. There was some more horse stealing, a little exchange on both sides between the whites and Indians in this line. The whites needed horses, for they had no other meat. Yet in some fashion they won up the Gila River to the copper mines of New Mexico; which, we may see, was ground already known to Carson. Here they cached their furs, since these would be contraband under the Spanish law, nearly all of these wanderings having taken place in the Spanish territory that was the western goal of the early commerce of the prairies.

In time the party turned up at Santa Fé, reaching that city in April, 1830, where the leader, Young, disposed of his furs, the net result for eighteen men during a term of one year being twenty-four thousand dollars. Kit Carson was now twenty-one years of age, and he was fully initiated in his calling. We can not appreciate these journeyings except by taking an accurate map of the great Western country, and following, finger by finger, along stream and across mountain, the course of the early voyagers.

This, however, is but the beginning. In the fall of 1830 the noted Western fur trader, Fitzpatrick, organized a strong party, and it was matter of course that Carson would find his way into it. This band visited the Platte River, whose long southern arm reaches so deep down into the heart of the Rockies. Thence, along good beaver waters, they moved over to the Green River, Pacific waters, also historic in the fur trade. We find them later in Jackson's Hole, east of the range, even today the center of a great game country. Thence they moved west to the Salmon River, into a country still one of the wildest parts of America; and there, much as a matter of fact, they joined others of their party, who had started out slightly in advance of them, and "for whom they had been looking," as one chronicler na?vely advises us. It was a search and a meeting in the heart of a wilderness many hundreds of miles in extent.

The winter of 1830-1831 was spent by Carson on the Salmon River. Now enter those stern warriors of the North, the Blackfeet. Kit saw four of his companions killed. He was inured to such scenes, and the incident gave him no pause. April of 1831 found him on the Bear River. Moving, always moving, we see him now on the Green River, again in the "New Park" of Colorado, on the plains of Laramie, again on the long South Fork of the Platte, and presently on the Arkansas. Beseech you, let your finger ever follow on the map; and accept warrant that if your following has been honest, your eyes shall stare in wonder at these journeyings. Let one seek to duplicate it himself, even in these civilized days when towns and ranches crowd the West; and then, having restored that West to the day of beaver and Blackfeet, ask himself how had it been with him had he been in Carson's company!

This winter camp on the Arkansas River furnished a certain amount of interest. A party of fifty Crow Indians raided the camp and stole a number of horses. It was Carson once more, we may be sure, who was elected to lead the pursuit. Twelve Indians were killed by the young leader and his hardy riflemen. Carson was now accepted as one of the captains of the trails. He had fully learned his bold and difficult trade.

In the spring of 1832 Carson's party moved to the Laramie River; moved again to the headwaters of the South Fork of the Platte, and caught beaver and fought Indians for a few months; from the Laramie to the Bayou Salade, or Ballo Salade, as it was sometimes spelled in those days. These operations were carried on in the heart of the most dangerous Indian country of the West. Heretofore it had been the custom of the trappers to go in parties of considerable size, so that they might successfully meet the Indians, who even thus made affairs dangerous enough. The quality of Carson's spirit may therefore be seen when we discover him, with only two companions, breaking away for a solitary beaver hunt in the mountains in the heart of the range. Yet these three were fortunate, and returned to Taos in the fall of 1832 well laden with furs.

At Taos, Carson met Captain Lee of the United States Army, a partner of that Bent who founded Bent's Fort on the Arkansas. Captain Lee had a cargo of goods that he wished to take to the rendezvous of the trapping bands for that year. Kit joined him for the time, and in October of 1832 they pushed on, traveling part of the time on the old Spanish trail to California. They reached the White River, the Green River, the "Windy" River, and here, as though by special plan, they met their band of trappers, erected their skin lodges, and passed the winter. Kit joined the Fitzpatrick party for a time in the next spring, but after his own restless fashion broke away again, with only three companions.

In the summer of 1833 we find the four on the Laramie River, doing independent trapping and taking their chances as to Indians. It was about this time that Kit had his historic adventure with two bears, which chased him up a tree, and which he repelled by beating them over the noses with a branch broken from the tree. The ever-wise biographer Abbott, who gravely informs us that Crockett killed "voracious grizzly bears" in the cane-brakes of Tennessee, with equal accuracy advises us that the "grizzly bear can climb a tree as well as a man." Herein we find some mystery about Carson's bear adventure. Carson as a hunter would have been the first to know that a grizzly bear can not climb a tree unless it be a horizontal one. There is no doubt, however, that some such adventure took place with some sort of bears, and that Carson saved his leggings if not his life by a knowledge of the tenderness of a bear's nose.

All this time our Westerner, our trapper, is fitting himself for his work in the West as guide for "explorers." We find him with fifty men, pushing up quite to the headwaters of the Missouri River, and later he and some companions turn up along the historic Yellowstone River, a country then well known in the organized fur trade of St. Louis. We do not discover that he ever went into the regular employ of any of the fur traders. No engagé or ordinary "pork eater" he, but a companion nearly always of these independent fur traders, the individual gentry of the wilderness. We find him now becoming acquainted with the Big Horn. He knows also the three forks of the Missouri; and he visits the "Big Snake" River and the Humboldt River, then called Mary's River, since scientists still were scarce in the Rockies.

He wanders continually back and forth across the upper Rockies. Brown's Hole, Jackson's Hole, Henry Lake, the Black Hills, all the upper waters of the great rivers, the Columbia, the Snake, the Green, the Colorado, the Platte, the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Arkansas,-you shall hardly name any well-known Western region, any remote mountain park, any accurately mapped Western stream which you shall not, providing you have faithfully followed the wanderings of Kit Carson, discover to have been familiar to this man even before geographies were dreamed of west of the Missouri River.

It would be but wearying to go on with the monotonous chronicle of repeated journeys back and forth, of hardships, of toils and dangers, of the round of the trapper's employment, of the wild life at those wild, strange annual markets of the mountains, the trappers' rendezvous. It will suffice us and serve us to remember that Carson practically closed his life as a trapper in 1834,[28] this date marking the end of eight years steadily employed by him in trapping and trading and in learning the West. In 1834 he and such companions as Bill Williams, William New, Mitchell, Frederick, and scores of others of his old-time friends, found themselves practically without a calling. When, after one long expedition west of the range, they readied Fort Roubidoux, it was only to discover that furs had gone very low in price.

The advent of the silk hat had caused terror in St. Louis, and gloom throughout the Rockies. The day of the beaver trade was at an end. That animal, of so monstrous an importance in the history of the American continent, was now to assume a place far lower in estimation. Our bold, befringed mountaineers learned that it would no longer pay to pursue it into the remote fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains. Yet the beaver had served its purpose. Following its tooth-marks on the trees, there had pressed on to the head of every Western river a man qualifying for office as guide of the west-bound civilization beyond the Missouri. Kit Carson, type of the graduated trapper and adventurer, had had his schooling.

Yet a man must live, and if there be no price for beaver peltry he must turn his hand to something else for occupation. For eight years Kit Carson served as hunter for the post, well-known as Bent's Fort, on the Arkansas River. There he fed forty men on the wild meat of the plains, and during his eight years of hunting killed thousands of buffalo, elk, and deer. He saw the plains in all their ancient undimmed splendor, and whether he most loved the mountains or the plains he himself never could tell. Carson at an earlier time had married an Indian girl, and during his engagement at Fort Bent he sent his one child, a daughter, to St. Louis for the purpose of acquiring an education. There the daughter married, went to California, and apparently passes from the scene. Carson's later marriage was with a Mexican woman very much younger than himself.[29]

If in the year 1834 Carson terminated the first term of his Wanderschaft, in 1842, when he closed his first engagement as hunter for Bent's Fort, he completed the second season of his Western life and was ready for the third. In that year he joined a wagon train bound eastward, having determined to revisit his old home in Missouri, which he had not seen for sixteen years. The visit was sad and cheerless enough. He returned to find his parents dead and forgotten, the old homestead in ruins, and not a friend left to take him by the hand.

He hastened thence to St. Louis, but ten days of even the capital of the fur trade proved sufficient for him. Soon afterward, as is stated by his most reliable biographer, he by mere chance met young Frémont, then bound West to "explore" the Rocky Mountains, more especially that part of the Rockies in the vicinity of the South Pass. Frémont's guide did not materialize at the time, and Carson's modestly proffered services were engaged by the army officer, who needed a guide across country, which to many a Western man was as familiar as his own dooryard.[30]

During his first expedition Carson does not seem to have been much valued by Frémont. Basil Lajeunesse was the favorite, and it was always Basil Lajeunesse here, there, and everywhere; Carson, a man of much greater experience and reliability, having not as yet come into his own as a guide, though forsooth there was small need of guiding on this journey. Frémont engaged Carson at one hundred dollars a month, and he was the twenty-eighth man in the party, which also included two boys, young relatives, who after all were not in so very dangerous an enterprise.

Little of the eventful occurred in the long journey across Kansas to Fort Laramie, and so at last they arrived at the South Pass, having met no Indians at all, although they had feared the Sioux. Frémont rode across the gentle summit so long known to the fur traders, climbed the mountain that was later named for him, and returned to Fort Laramie in September, 1842. Thus ended his first expedition, which began his reputation as a "pathfinder." Let him who has followed the travels of Kit Carson in the trapping trade state who was the real finder of the paths.

After the first Frémont expedition, Carson returned to Bent's Fort, and in February of 1843 married the young Mexican woman who remained his faithful companion throughout his life. Carson was sent with a message to Governor Armijo with a warning for the latter, but one hundred of the Mexicans connected with Armijo's wagon train were killed by the Texans on the historic wagon road up the Arkansas River; we being thus now in touch with the strong and warlike population that, led by Houston, Travis, Fannin, Crockett, had been fighting the Spanish arms to the southward of Carson's hunting grounds.

Up to this time Kit Carson had been more savage than civilized. He had never cast a vote for any office. He had lived on the product of his rifle. He had learned the habits of the wild men and wild animals of the West. Yet he seems to have gained something of that forcefulness and self-confidence which sooner or later is bound to impress itself upon others; for on May twenty-ninth of 1843 we find Frémont again sending for him, and asking his services as guide for his second expedition.

This time it was Frémont's purpose to connect his last year's work with the Pacific Coast surveys which had been begun by Wilkes. All know how Frémont exceeded his orders, how his wife pluckily held back from him the knowledge of his recall, and how this transcontinental expedition, by no means the first, though one of the most widely acclaimed, made its way over grounds new to Frémont but old to Carson. The first part of the journey was among the old trapping grounds along the North Fork of the Platte and on the Sweetwater, thence to Salt Lake-all points fully known to the fur trade many years before. The journey thence ran to Fort Hall and along the perfectly determined trail northwest to the Columbia River. Frémont then pushed on to Tlamath Lake, Oregon, heading thence for California.

This country between the Tlamath Lake and the Sacramento valley was new even to Carson. Everybody supposed[31] that there was a great river, known as the Buena Ventura, which rose on the west side of the Rocky Mountains at a point directly opposite the headwaters of the Arkansas, and flowed westward directly into the Pacific ocean. The little fact of the Sierra Nevada mountain range was wholly overlooked.

Carson honestly did his best, but he was in the hands of a leader who undertook to cross the Sierras with a pack-train where there was six feet of snow, and with a party the total number of which counted only two men that had ever before worn snowshoes in all their lives! Never was there poorer mountaineering or worse leadership than this. But it was not Kit Carson that was responsible.

After very many hardships, the expedition worked to the south and southeast of the Tlamath country, and got down near to what is now known as Pyramid Lake. Then they started across for the Sacramento, not having discovered the fabled Buena Ventura. Carson, quiet, not boasting, openly confessing his ignorance of a country he had never seen, none the less in these hard conditions proved serviceable as a guide. He pushed on ahead, and from a peak of the Sierras got a glimpse of the Coast Range. He had not seen this Coast Range chain for seventeen years, but now he noted two little mountains that seemed familiar to him. He told his leader that if only they could win across the Sierras, they would presently be in a country of warmth and plenty.

The men by that time were eating their saddle leathers, the mules were eating each other's tails. It was a starving, freezing time, this foolish bit of mountain work, such as in all his trapping experience Carson never saw equalled. Yet at last they did reach Sutter's Fort, on March sixth, 1844, two thousand miles from Fort Hall. Some of the men were physically ruined and mentally deranged from their sufferings. It was military and not mountain leadership that was responsible for all this.

But our continually traveling man, this little man, Kit Carson, was not to have any rest even in the pleasant valley of the Sacramento. We find the expedition soon starting East again, now by way of the San José valley, over the Sierras to the Mojave River, country long known to the traveling trappers. Here Carson and his friend Godey conducted a little enterprise of their own, undertaken in sheer knight-errantry, in behalf of a party of Mexicans that had been nearly annihilated by the Indians. These two men rode a hundred miles in thirty hours, and alone attacked a large camp of Indians, killing two of them and stampeding the remainder.

The Frémont party arrived at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas July second, 1844. They had traveled somewhere between thirty-five hundred and four thousand miles, had circumnavigated the mysterious "Great Desert," and for eight months had never been out of sight of ice and snow. Frémont was able to report upon the great Columbia River, and he and his contemporaries did not hesitate to extol the value of Oregon as a gateway of the Asiatic trade-a line of commerce which for half a century did little to establish the truth of their prophecy.

This, then, was the end of the first exploration of the Rockies accompanied by thermometer and barometer rather than by trap sack and "possible bag." It was of value. If we were asked what was the most valuable result of this second expedition of Frémont, we should be obliged to answer that it was his mention of the great value of the Western grasses. Frémont was an observer, a chronicler, a writer. It was he that first began to bring back accurate story of the resources of the West.

The mineral wealth of the West, over which the trappers had tramped for a quarter of a century, was as yet unsought and unsuspected by Frémont or any one else. It was to be first the fur trade, then the mining trade, then the cattle trade in the trans-Mississippi West; and after that the agricultural life, followed by the days of swift transportation, of change, of transition and expansion and gourd-like growth in all visible ways.

We are now well forward in the third era of Kit Carson's career. If at first he was a trapper and hunter in order that he might become fit guide, during the third stage of his life he was to be accepted as the authorized guide of the most important preliminaries for the west-bound movement of the trans-Mississippi population. After the close of the second Frémont expedition, and during the year 1845, Carson tried to be a ranchman or farmer, pitching his tents for the time about fifty miles east of Taos. It was of no avail. Frémont called for him once more. The farm was sold for half its value, and once more Carson set his face toward the West, in company with a Frémont now older, better seasoned and of better judgment. A more direct trail across the Great Basin and into California was desired than that taken either in going or returning on the second expedition.

Carson was the one to go ahead. He traveled alone for sixty miles west of the Great Salt Lake, directly into the desert, and the rest of the party came up to his signal smoke. Thence they pushed on to the Carson River, searching still for a new pass over the Sierras into the valley of the San Joaquin. At last they won across, as did the earlier trappers, and again they reached Sutter's Fort in due time. A branch of the main party, that headed by Talbott, did not appear at the appointed meeting place. It was Carson, of course, Carson the traveler, who was despatched down the San Joaquin valley to discover the truth of a rumor that Talbott and his party had appeared in that locality. Needless to say the wanderers were found.

Now there broke out the Mexican imbroglio, in which the part of Frémont is well known. For a time Frémont's party moved north, along the Sacramento, thence toward the Columbia River. They did not know that war had been declared between the United States and Mexico. Lieutenant Gillespie, hot on their trail, brought the message that hostilities had broken out. In Oregon, in the Tlamath country, came the night attack in which Basil Lajeunesse and three others of the party were killed. Carson saw his companion, a brave Delaware Indian, stand up and receive a half-dozen arrows from unseen foes. He joined the pursuit in the dark; and later, on the backward trail to California with Gillespie, helped execute the stern mountain vengeance on the Tlamaths, leading the mountaineers in all their desperate little fights.

The exploring party had now become military, and so the flag, led and backed by American mountaineers, went up above a Western empire. As to the services of this far-traveling mountain man to his leader and to his country, we can scarcely overestimate them. Some idea of the confidence in which he was now held may be gathered from the fact that, after the Frémont operations in California, Carson was sent with despatches to Washington, in order that the government might know what was happening on the far-away Pacific slope.

He started on September fifteenth, 1846, and it was asked of him that he make the entire trip to Washington inside of sixty days; this at a time when there was not a foot of railway west of the Missouri, and when all the country from the Pacific to the Missouri was more or less occupied with hostile savages. None the less Carson started, the first overland rider to bear despatches on a continuous journey of this nature.

By October sixth he was far toward the eastward, across the Rockies, when he met General Kearney's column. Kearney ordered Carson to turn back and guide him westward to California. Without a murmur the little blue-eyed man remarked: "As the General pleases." He did not stop to visit his own family at Taos, but went back once more to lead the west-bound flag. By December third the slow column had reached California, and here it met more warlike experiences than it liked or had believed possible. The California Mexicans that fell upon Kearney's column were fighters. They killed fifty of the Americans, surrounded the remainder, and bade fair to exterminate the entire expedition.

Witness again the service of the scout and guide. Carson and Lieutenant Beale of the Navy were sent out as special messengers to San Diego. In some way they got through the beleaguering lines, and after a perilous journey arrived at San Diego and secured the desired help. This sort of thing was nothing new to Carson. It was so severe for Beale that he went deranged, and it took him two years to recover from his journey, brave man and bold as he was. The Army and Navy had not the seasoning of the American mountain men, the hardiest breed ever grown on the face of the globe.

At Los Angeles Carson finally rejoined Frémont, in time for that tempest in a teapot wherein Frémont and Kearney fell at swords' points. These things are of no moment, yet it is significant that in March, 1847, Carson was sent once more as despatch bearer to Washington. He went light and speedy as before, met the Indians on the Gila, fought them and won through. This time he reached Washington, after his long and steady ride across New Mexico and down the Arkansas River to the Missouri, arriving in the month of June, after having made four thousand miles in three months. We make it in about three days to-day.

In Washington Carson met Jessie Benton Frémont, wife of the "Pathfinder" and daughter of the arch-protector of the fur traders and of Frémont, Thomas Benton. Carson was now appointed lieutenant of the rifle corps of the United States Army; a commission which, by the way, was never ratified, although he did not know this for some months. He was sent back, four thousand miles, to bear despatches in return. He crossed the Missouri River, fought the Comanches at the Point of Rocks, got through them, pushed on west as steadily as ever, and reached the Virgin River, in the dry Southwest, before he met his next Indian fight. He and fifteen comrades here stood off three hundred Indians. In due time he reached Monterey, and after this he took service against the Mexicans on the border for a time.

So energetic a man cannot be allowed to rest, and in the spring of 1848 he is sent back once more to Washington. The physical frame of any other man except Kit Carson had been by all these journeyings too far racked to enable him to make this long and hazardous trip. The souls of most men would have failed them long ere this. Yet this hardy, tough little man, just big enough for steady riding, cheerfully undertakes his third journey across the mountains as despatch bearer for the United States Army.

This time he meets Utes and Apaches, fights them, wins through them, and goes on. He stops on this trip just for a day to see his family at Taos, averaging a visit home about once in three years. It is here that he learns that he is not a lieutenant, after all; but that does not check his loyalty to the flag. He goes east now up the Bijou, and down the Platte to the Republican Fork, in order to dodge certain Indians, who, he hears, are numerous and bad along the Arkansas.

He reaches Washington safe and sound, of course; starts back for New Mexico; and arrives there in October, 1848. Figure yourself, if you like, as chief actor in a quarter of a century of such traveling as was done by Kit Carson. His travels are given thus in detail that we may have just estimate of the man of those days, of the tremendous demands upon his courage and endurance. Only the West could produce such a man.

Now we may picture Kit Carson in the fourth stage of his career, as settler and rancher. He was at home now, but he knew no rest. He fought the Apaches, and guided Colonel Beall against that tribe and the Comanches, in an endeavor to round up all the Mexican prisoners in the hands of the Indians, who were to be returned to their own firesides. After this little expedition Carson was once more a man without an occupation. There was a lull in fighting and scouting. Having no profession except that of trapper and of guide, he cast about him and once more determined to be a ranchman. He and his friend Maxwell established a ranch fifty miles west of Taos, at what is known as Rayado or Rezado. Again he joined an expedition against the Apaches, a day and a half to the southeast, a disastrous expedition, in which he was not leader, but might better have been. At another time he helped chase some Apache thieves, and assisted in the killing of five of them, being always desired in these errands of swift punishment. Our army could never catch the Apaches, the Nez Percés, the Comanches, the Crows, the Blackfeet. Kit Carson always could and did.

This Indian fighting, however, did not bring money to his coffers; therefore in 1850 we find him and a partner taking a band of horses from New Mexico up to Fort Laramie, a journey of five hundred miles.[32] After this followed some more horse stealing on the part of the Indians, yet more punitive expeditions, and considerable amateur sheriffing, for which service Carson had become a necessity in the district. He was not afraid. He could read the signs of the trails. He could ride.

In 1851 Carson and Maxwell tried their hands at a bit of the Santa Fé trade themselves, although this was long after the glory of the old-time wagon trade had departed. They got a train load of goods at St. Louis, and started westward up the Arkansas, after the old-fashioned way. They met the Cheyennes, always ambitious to acquire tax title of the plains to such valuable property as this. Carson knew that the protestations of these Cheyennes were not to be believed, and told the Indians that they could neither deceive him nor frighten him; yet with diplomacy equal to his courage, he edged on and on for three doubtful days, farther and farther to the westward, and so at last came safe. Kit Carson was no blusterer and no swashbuckler, but was first and last of all a good business man. He knew that it was good judgment to keep out of a fight whenever possible, which he did.

And now comes one of the most romantic, indeed one of the most pathetic pages in the whole history of this brave man, if not in all Western history. Rebelling at the tameness of ranching and horse trading and wagon trafficking, longing once more for the freedom of the trapping trail, Kit sent word about among his old friends, the free traders of the Rockies. A party of eighteen old-time long-haired men was made up; and thus they sallied forth, with rifle and ax and pack and jingling trap chains, in the fashion of the past, making once more deep into the heart of the Rockies. They visited the Arkansas, the Green, the Grand, all the loved and lovable parks of the mountains. They came back through the Raton Mountains, bearing with them abundant fur. They said that it was their last trail; that they had seen the old streams they loved, in order that they might "shake hands with them and say good-by!" This expedition was made for sheer love of the old life, which they knew had now gone by forever. The settlement of the West was at hand, and this they knew very well. No wonder that it brought them sadness! We to-day may grieve in some measure over the dignity and glory of those days gone by.

We might believe that by this Kit Carson would have had enough traveling, and would have been content to bound his ambitions by the little mountain valleys that lay about him in New Mexico. Not so, however; for we find his next exploit to be the unusual one of a sheep drive to far-off California. He assembled a band of six thousand five hundred sheep, and following by easy stages along the old mountain trails with which he was so familiar, at length arrived with his herd, in August, 1853, at his far-off destination. He sold his sheep at the good price of five dollars and a half a head, this being the most considerable and most profitable speculation in which he had ever engaged in all his life.

He remained for a time in California and looked about him, but he found California no longer a wilderness occupied by wandering and infrequent trappers, but a land overflowing with gold, and tenanted with a restless and swiftly increasing population. He saw a San Francisco of fifty thousand souls spring up as by magic within sight of those two little hills of the Coast Range that had marked the land of salvation for Frémont and his party in their starving journey across the Sierras. He found himself a hero in this new and busy San Francisco; but he was ever unfamiliar with the art of heroing, so presently he left the town and returned again to New Mexico, traveling this time by the old trail to the copper mines, by which he had led Frémont in his first journey east from southern California.

Carson was now living in a West experiencing sudden and general change. The old West was nearly gone, and all its ancient ways. The government at Washington was familiar with the doings of this quiet little man of New Mexico, and it was suggested that he would make a good Indian agent for the district of New Mexico. Witness, therefore, the last stage of Kit Carson's career, that of counselor and guide to those savage peoples whose enemy and conqueror he had been.

At this time the Utes and the Jicarilla Apaches were rebellious, and one of Carson's first acts was to ride two hundred and fifty miles into the Ute country. He led the forces that broke up the coalition between the Utes and the Apaches. It was Carson, old Indian fighter, who was one of the first to say that the Indians must be "rounded up and taught to till the soil." This was his belief even at the time when he acted as guide for Colonel St. Vrain and his New Mexican volunteers, in the expedition that routed the Indians at the Saugache Pass.

The Indians that had feared Carson in the past came at length to trust him, and indeed to love him. He was known as "father" by many a warlike tribe. Thus he became the friend of the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes and the Kiowas, peoples scattered over a wide range of country. Behold now, therefore, our trapper, guide and scout fairly settled in life. Remember also that he was not the guide of Frémont in that last fatal, starving expedition when, blundering foolishly once more into the wilderness of the Rockies in the winter-time, and undertaking the wild project of crossing eight feet of snow with a pack-train, that officer once more came near paying the penalty of his ignorance by his own life and the lives of all his party.

It was Bill Williams who was guide this time, a Bill Williams that had not been trapping on the Del Norte for years, and who might have been forgiven memory less keen than had been Carson's when he saw the two little peaks, far away in the Coast Range, in that other starving march of this same leader. It was to Taos that the enfeebled survivors of Frémont's disastrous expedition found their way in search of help. If Kit Carson reproached his former "leader" it is not on record. Never was there a leader whose follies won him greater praise.

Later in his life, leaving the United States service as Indian agent, Carson was made colonel of a regiment of New Mexican volunteers, during the War of the Rebellion. He was brevetted brigadier-general of volunteers. In the closing years of his life he was known as "the general" among his friends, just as he was always known as "father" among the Indians who dwelt about him.

Kit Carson's death occurred at Fort Lyon, Colorado, May twenty-third, 1869, the immediate cause being an aneurism of the aorta. Eight years before, Carson had sustained a bad fall, and had been dragged for a distance by his horse. From this hurt he never fully recovered. "Were it not for this," said he, meaning his mishap, "I might live to be one hundred years of age." Yet, knowing that he was doomed, he lived bravely and sweetly as ever, and to the end remained as unpretentious as during his early days.

"It was wonderful," says the chronicler who saw his last hours and who heard most of the biography of Kit Carson read in the presence of the hero himself, "it was wonderful to read of the thrilling deeds and narrow escapes of this man, and then look at the quiet, modest, retiring but dignified little man who had done so much. He was one of nature's noblemen, a true man in all that constitutes manhood, pure, honorable, truthful and sincere, of noble impulses; a knight-errant, ever ready to defend the weak against the strong without reward other than his own conscience. His was a great contempt for noisy braggarts of every sort."

So, surrounded by his friends, facing the impending end with his customary bravery, Kit Carson passed away. There was a struggle and a fatal hemorrhage. "Doctor-compadre,-adios!" he cried. "This is the last of the general," said his friend. So passed one of the last of the great Westerners.

It was nearly time now for all the old mountain men to put up the rifle. The day of the plow was following hard upon them.

* * *

[28]

Pray remember always this date of 1834. It is writ in few histories. It marks the closing scenes of the fur trade, the waning of the wild West, the beginning of the new day. In 1834 the preliminary survey of civilization had been practically completed.

[29]

One of Carson's daughters, after a sad life story, is said to have died in New Mexico, in an insane asylum, in 1902.

[30]

V. Chapter III, Vol. III; Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri. The Oregon trail was then a plain highway.

[31]

In spite of the Gallatin map, two years earlier. V. Chapter IV, Vol. III; "Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri."

[32]

The beginning of the New Mexican branch of the Long Trail, later to become famous in the cattle trade.

To-day we think in straight lines. We believe, ignorantly, that our forefathers moved directly westward from their former homes. We do not ask how they did it, but think that in some way they must have done so. Dwellers in Chicago think of New York, and it means New York in a straight line due east. They think of California, and it implies a straight line due west. To us of to-day all railroads run without curves, and are governed only by time-schedules, which annually grow shorter. Geography is well-nigh a lost art.

Indeed, there is but little use for it, since the time-tables of the great railways answer all our questions so conclusively. To-day it matters not to us what may be the course of a journey; the sole question is as to the time that journey will require. The railroad men do our thinking for us. We do not concern ourselves with how those good, but somewhat old-fashioned folk, our ancestors, got about in a country that once was large. We care not at all for matters of down-stream or up-stream.

In a general way, therefore, we are prone to believe that the way from the Alleghanies to the Missouri was in a straight line. It was not so. We think that the way to the Rockies and across them was equally straight, because the railways now make it so easy. Yet as a matter of fact the railways proceeded, without much difficulty as to exploration, to lie sure, for nothing new was left for them to discover, yet in hesitating and halting steps westward, shortening the old trails, destroying the old history, wiping out the old geography of the West.

All America can remember the days when we were agitated by the tremendous problem of a line of rails across the American continent, a feat so long regarded as chimerical. We knew of California and we wished for a road thither, had long wished for it. But many years before we had begun to dream of an iron road, and many years after we had dreamed of it, we made our way from the Missouri to the Rockies, over the Rockies to the Pacific, by the same methods that had brought us to the heads of all our Western rivers. We used the pack-horse and the wagon train. Those were the days of the heroically great transcontinental trails. It is interesting to study these ancient land routes; and for our purposes we shall start the wagon roads at the Missouri River, and shall speak chiefly of the two historic and great Western pathways, that by the Arkansas and that by the Platte.

Of these two great land trails west of the Missouri, one, broken midway, does not deserve actually the name of transcontinental trail. This was the old Santa Fé trail, which could be called continuous only as far as the Spanish province of New Mexico. Commerce got westward even so far as California in some fashion, now and again, from Taos and the old city of Santa Fé, but Spanish trails and the old trapping roads west of New Mexico were commonly concerned with the pack-train and not the wagon.

The other overland trail, and the greatest of all American roads, if we measure length and importance as well, was the ancient Oregon trail up the Platte, over the South Pass and down the Columbia; a trail forgotten by most of the young men of to-day, and existing no more to terrify the young women whom young men marry, as they did in the times of our fathers, when moving West meant tearing out the heart.

As to the theory of straight lines, Lieutenant Pike tells us that the first men to reach Santa Fé did not go straight westward, but also wandered up the aboriginal highway of the Platte valley, over what was later to be the course of the Oregon trail, turning to the southward when far up the stream, and following the South Fork of the Platte down into the Rockies, which would bring the traveler within wilderness-touch of the Spanish settlements. La Lande, the perfidious trader, who so sadly left in the lurch his patron, the merchant Morrison of Kaskaskia, and took up his permanent abode in Santa Fé, is thought to have reached that city, in the year 1804, by this route; and it is known that James Purcell (or James Pursley, as Pike has the spelling) was directed to Santa Fé in the year 1805 by some Indians whom he met on the upper Platte.

This route by the Platte was not, however, either the permanent or the original one. Indeed, the first expedition between the Spanish and the American settlements came, strangely enough, from the west, and not from the east, and was undertaken by the Spaniards as early as 1720. Then, in 1739, the Mallet brothers, Frenchmen from the settlements along the Mississippi, started for New Mexico by the strange route of the upper Missouri River, getting far up into the big bend of the Missouri before they discovered that they were going quite the wrong way! Their belief that the Spanish settlements could be reached by way of the head streams of the Missouri is strange confirmation of our doctrine that early traveling man ever clung to the waterways. The river-it would lead anywhere! The Mallet party returned in 1740, some of them by way of the Arkansas River, which presently brought them out at New Orleans!

We may therefore discover that neither the Missouri nor the Platte could have been called the accepted highway into the lower West at the time Lieutenant Pike set out to find the headwaters of the Red River. There is a shrewd doubt as to Pike's innocence in getting over on the head of the Rio Grande instead of the Red River. It was at least a lucky mistake; and his captivity among the Spaniards was productive of very good results to the United States later on, one of its most important results being his suggesting the route along the Arkansas, instead of the Platte, for the west-bound travelers. It was strong-legged, stout-hearted Zebulon who told of the profits of the possible Spanish trade, and credit is usually given him for first outlining the historic trail along the Arkansas.

It grew shorter and shorter, this wagon trail to the West, as the traders came to know the country. The government surveyed a fine way for the caravans, which took them around the dangerous Cimarron desert, and clung to the waters a trifle longer; yet the travelers would have none of it, but built their trail so direct from Independence to Santa Fé that not even those air-line lovers, the railway engineers, could so very much improve it when they came to make their iron trail between those two points.

One finds something uncanny when he reflects upon the discoveries of these Western regions. The ancient ways seem to have lain ready and waiting, the lines of travel simply falling into the foreordained plan, so that there remains no extraordinary credit to any venturer, no matter how early. For instance, we know that our hardy young soldiers, Lewis and Clark, to whom we habitually ascribe the credit of being the first white men up the great waterway of the Missouri, were preceded by half a century by the Frenchman, Sieur de la Verendrye, who took his two sons and started west by way of the Great Lakes in 1742, jumped from the Red River of the North to the Mandan villages on the Missouri, and explored the region along the Missouri, the Yellowstone and the Bighorn rivers, just one hundred years before Frémont "discovered" the Rockies!

De la Verendrye is thought to have been the first man of the North to see the Rockies; yet back of him we have Nicollet and Champlain, and all those hardy ancients who sought cheerfully and hopefully for the China Sea by way of the Green Bay portage, and the Wisconsin and Minnesota rivers, in search of the fabled "Asian Strait," which later was practically materialized in the interlocking Western rivers of America.

As to Pike's journey across the plains, we must know that the Spaniards had sent out an expedition, under Malgares, to meet him or anticipate him. The Spanish leader who thus ventured boldly so far to the east to head off this dreaded invasion of the Northern whites, and to set the Indians against them, must have traveled somewhat along this same pre-ordained trail of the Arkansas. Not all Spain could keep the feet of the young Anglo-Saxons out of that trail. There were always the adventurers; and there were always the trails there, ready, waiting, expectant, prepared for them. There is no reading so thrilling as the bare truth about our West; and the most thrilling part of it is the awesome feeling that our venturers were after all themselves but puppets in a grim and awful game. There lay the Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas; and stretching out to meet them reached the Columbia and the Colorado. It was appointed, it was foregone!

Among those to go out early into the unknown Southwest, after Lieutenant Pike had told us some few things regarding the pueblos of old Spain among the mountains of the Rockies, were the fur trader Phillibert, and the traders Chouteau and De Munn, of St. Louis, who bought out Phillibert's goods and men in the Rockies. Phillibert had planned a rendezvous on Huerfano Creek. This was in 1815, the year following that in which Phillibert had made his first trip into that Western region.

These St. Louis men met the officials of Santa Fé, and were warned out of the country. Na?vely, since they could not trade in New Mexico, they started for the Columbia River, by way of the high mountains of Colorado; and the mountains, of course, stopped them. They fell back on the Arkansas, were caught by the Spaniards, had their goods confiscated, and so lost three years of time as well. Not even this pointed advice as to Spanish preferences served to hold back the west-bound men, and no doubt they sent out some party for Santa Fé every year thereafter, until they had their way, and until the Anglo-Saxon grasp was fixed upon that sleepy old Southwest, which lay winking in the sun a couple of centuries belated by the way.

The Spaniards were suspicious, as are ever the slothful, and they made a practice of imprisoning the whites that got down into their country. They imprisoned Pike, they imprisoned Merriwether, an intrepid trader who reached that country in 1819; and history tells us how, in 1812, they imprisoned the first party of the white traders to venture into New Mexico after the return of Lieutenant Pike, the twelve men who made up the party of Baird, McKnight and Chambers, commonly called the party of McKnight, Beard and Chambers. This gallant little company they kept in the fearsome penitentiary at Chihuahua for nine long and weary years,-a fate terrible enough, one would certainly think, to warn away all other adventurers from a neighborhood so hostile.

As to this first and most unfortunate of the early trading expeditions to the Southwest, that of Baird, McKnight and Chambers, there is first-hand information in the form of a personal letter from J. M. Baird, of Louisville, Kentucky, a grandson of the early trader that helped to lead the way of commerce across the plains. Mr. Baird writes:

"As to the expedition of Baird, Chambers and McKnight, it is often spoken of as that of 'McKnight, Beard and Chambers.' Gregg, in his book 'The Commerce of the Prairies,' published in 1846 (I think), first mentioned the matter. He derived his information from James Baird's sons, and they were much disgusted to have him print the name 'Beard.' All other writers seem to have derived their particulars from him. James Baird was my grandfather. He was personally known to Lieut. Zebulon Pike, had known him at Fort Duquesne and at Erie. Baird went to St. Louis in 1810, where he again met Lieutenant Pike upon his return from Mexico, and learned from him the possibilities of trade with that country.

"Upon hearing of the success of the Hidalgo revolution, and believing the embargo upon trade with the United States raised, he organized a venture with Chambers and McKnight, left St. Charles, Mo., May 1, 1812, and reached Santa Fé in regular course, to find the embargo rigorously enforced. He was arrested and imprisoned in Chihuahua prison for nine years and three months, until released by Iturbide in 1821. Chambers and McKnight started back at once. McKnight was killed by the Indians on the Arkansas River. Chambers succeeded in getting back to St. Louis. Baird started back two months later, could find no company, and rode alone from Santa Fé to St. Louis. This ride has been credited to Bicknell and one Kennedy or Kendall, but James Baird was the man that did it.

"Baird and Chambers organized a second expedition in 1822. They started too late, and were caught in a blizzard at the crossing of the Arkansas, where their animals froze to death. They were compelled to remain the entire winter upon the island at that place. It was Baird and Chambers' second expedition that made the caches near there (in 1822), and near where Dodge City now stands. Inman in his 'Old Santa Fé Trail,' chapter 3, says Bicknell[33] crossed the river at the Caches in 1812. No other caches were made in that vicinity. Bicknell was a trader with the Iatan Indians and did not go into Mexico until after Baird and Chambers' second venture, which was made in 1822. However, it was through some of Bicknell's men writing from Franklin, Mo., to my grandmother, in 1816, that she learned of grandfather's fate, they saying that they heard of it from the Indians.

"Baird, Chambers and McKnight followed the course marked for them by Lieutenant Pike, and that course became the great Santa Fé trail. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé R. R. follows practically the same course. If any one is entitled to credit for the selection of the route, Lieutenant Pike ought to have it. However, my purpose is to ask you to correct the name Beard to read Baird. If one will refer to 'American State Papers,' Vol. 4, folio 207, and Executive Papers, p. 197, 8th Vol., 15th Congress, he will see that it is Baird."

This communication would seem to a certain extent to discount the claims on reputation of William Becknell, generally known as the "father of the Santa Fé trail." It ascribes the credit for the original selection of the Arkansas River route to Pike, with what justice we may ourselves determine as well as any. Our venturesome Southerners, of the Baird, McKnight and Chambers party, had lain in jail for nine years before John McKnight, the brother of Robert McKnight, in the year 1821, undertook the long journey to Chihuahua, which seems to have resulted in the setting free of all these Americans. Coming back to the United States over the Arkansas River trail, Baird and the two McKnights met the Ohio man, Hugh Glenn, and his associate or friend, Jacob Fowler, who were already at Taos, regardless of the ill-fortune of their predecessors in the hazardous game of prairie commerce. Becknell himself did not start out until 1821, and he did not intend to trade in Santa Fé, but only went thence after he had met some Mexicans on the headwaters of the Arkansas, who persuaded him to take his goods to Santa Fé instead of trading them among the Indians. Hugh Glenn and Becknell were thus both at Santa Fé during the winter of 1821-22.

That following summer Braxton Cooper and his sons, as well as Becknell, made trips to Santa Fé, and it seems to have been on this second trip that Becknell attained the distinction commonly accorded him. He took three wagons through to Santa Fé, and instead of hugging the Arkansas clear out to the mountains, he struck off southwest toward San Miguel, by way of the Cimarron desert, the risky but shorter route to which the later traders adhered ever after, in spite of surveys and all else. It is really only upon the ground of his wagons and this cutoff angle that Becknell is entitled to the glory of his title as "father of the Santa Fé trail."

Our prisoners, who nine years before had taken the chance of the far-off Southwestern trade, were willing to take another chance, for no sooner had they reached the States than they outfitted and started back again for the Mexican trade. Their second party, that which made the famous caches referred to in the grandson's letter above, was made in 1822. By that time there was little glory left for any one; and indeed, when we come to sift it, there was never very much glory in any part of the history of the Santa Fé trail. It was not a pathway of heroes. The true hero trail lay farther to the north, as we shall presently see.

The first mergers, the first combinations of capital ever made in the commerce of America began here on the far-off prairies, when the traders of the Arkansas began to band up and pool their outfits for mutual protection. The strength of these great companies rendered the danger of attack by Indians very slight, and it is a fact that but few lives were ever lost on the Santa Fé trail, scarce a dozen in a dozen years. It was indeed irony of fate that splendid Jedediah Smith, the hero of such tremendous undertakings in the mountains of the Northwest, should meet his fate while hunting for a water hole in the hated desert of the Cimarron, afar down in the dry Southwest.[34]

By 1824 the Santa Fé trade was well organized. The route was proved feasible, and the business assured of profit, wherefore many went into it, and presently the old trail became a great road, later to be very prominent in the history of the West. The Spaniards did their best to keep on both sides of the fence in this matter. They wanted the goods of the Americans, but hated the Americans themselves. They tried to kill the trade with excessive frontier duties, yet allowed smuggling and bribery to any limit; and these latter two industries were accepted as part of the conditions of the trade. The greatest loss of life began to occur when the fighting Texans from below, actuated by a desire for revenge and pillage, began to push up and to harass the commerce which was proving so profitable to Mexico, in spite of Mexico's vacillation.

These fighting Texans traveled far to the north of the trail, indeed, and followed the Mexicans into their villages, where they killed them in numbers. Texas, we must remember, was not yet a state, and little answer was made to the wail of the thrifty traders, who besought the United States government to give them protection against the Texans. The latter did some things not altogether pleasant to recount, but were for the most part serving nearly right the government of the United States, which could so long hesitate in accepting Houston's gift of Texas, the "bride adorned for her espousal;" which, indeed, so long hesitated to believe that there was or could be a West really great. Small indeed were some of the "great" men of that time; and small are some of our great men to-day.

The common belief is that all the capital engaged in this trade toward the Southwest was American capital, and that the enterprises ran all one way. This was not the case, for by 1843 the Mexican capital embarked in the commerce to the Spanish colonies was about equal to that of the Americans. The trade grew steadily, even subject as it was to the caprice of Mexican governments, and of Texas privateers on the high seas of the prairies.

We learn that in 1831 a party of two hundred persons, with one hundred wagons and two hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods, started for Santa Fé. This party was notable in that one of its members was Josiah Gregg, a level-headed, shrewd man, who was later to become famous as the historian of the Santa Fé trail. Nearly all the later histories of that highway and its peculiarities are based upon Gregg's able work; which fact he himself points out with a certain plaintiveness in his later years (1846), stating that pillagers of his papers did not always stop to give him credit. Gregg was a big man, a thinker, a man whose sound sense would succeed in any time. One likens him to the good, sensible business man of to-day, the mainstay of our republic, the practical conductor of affairs.

One detail will serve to show how much in advance he was of his time. In 1846 we find the Easterner, Francis Parkman, and his friend Shaw, killing scores of the great bisons of the plains for no better purpose than the securing of the tail for a trophy. It makes one blush to read of such wasteful barbarity as this, which could kill tons and tons of such creatures and leave the meat to rot on the ground. Our sensitive Eastern writer Parkman, keen mind and able pen as were his, was a very savage in his lust for "sport;" indeed worse than any savage, for the latter never killed for sport alone. Gregg was neither a Parkman nor a modern "lover of nature," but something much better, a man of forethought and of good sense. His protest at the waste of life and food in the wanton killing of buffalo is one of the most worthy things of his worthy book. He prophesied what Parkman could not see with all his florid pictures of the West that was to be-a West soon to be barren of the great game that did so much to win that West from savagery. The wicked wastefulness of the killing of the buffalo was one of the American national crimes. Stout Josiah Gregg saw it and deplored it, knowing as he did that much of the success of the Southwest trade ever depended upon the buffalo.

As to the distances and the direction of the ancient trail, we may consider it as starting at the old Western town of Independence, on the Missouri River, and extending properly no farther than the town of Santa Fé, in New Mexico. Many traders went on down into Old Mexico, as far as Chihuahua, which city so many of the first adventurers knew against their will. We have heard of Kit Carson, as a teamster, as far to the south as Chihuahua, and know that in 1828 he hired out there to Robert McKnight, one of the long-time prisoners in that city, later prominently identified with the history of the trail. Different Missouri towns outfitted parties for the trading to the Southwest, among these prominently St. Louis, and the less important point of Franklin. We may consider the Missouri River as our frontier at this epoch, and find most of our traders among those who lived near the border or were concerned in business ventures in that neighborhood. Assuredly this talk of the Santa Fé trade was the first Western bee in the Kit Carson bonnet, while he was yet a boy in Missouri.

The course of the old trail was astonishingly direct. It left little to be gained in distance saving, or in the essential qualities of grass and water, except along the cut-off over the Cimarron desert, which the travelers would not forego. The first section of the trail, that from Independence to Council Grove, the place where the wagon trains usually organized and went into semi-military formation, was over a pleasant, safe and easy country, a distance of one hundred and forty-three miles, according to Gregg.

Thence the next stage was to the Great Bend of the Arkansas, in the line of such modern towns as Galva, McPherson and Great Bend, although probably it touched the Arkansas at the top of the bend, near the village of Ellinwood, the first railway station east of Great Bend. This lies in a region now tamed into a wheat country and settled with contented farmers, raising crops that have, by the education of the years themselves, grown fit to endure that high, dry air, on the edge of the once rainless region. It was two hundred and seventy miles out to the Bend of the Arkansas, and two hundred and ninety-three miles to the noted Pawnee Rock, which to-day has a town named for it. Not crossing the Arkansas as yet, the trail kept down the western leg of the Great Bend, passed the islands known as the Caches, kept up-stream for a time to a point twenty miles west of the town now known as Dodge City-the same "Dodge" so famous in the cattle days-and reached then the ford of the Arkansas, which Gregg says was three hundred and eighty-seven miles west of Independence.[35]

This was about half way on the journey, and on the border line between the United States and the Spanish provinces. Gregg makes the jump from the safe Arkansas to the risky Cimarron a distance of fifty-eight miles, two or three days' travel, and without water, as well as without landmarks. The erstwhile boom town of Ivanhoe, of which one remembers talk in county-seat wars as far back as 1886, a little town far down in the dry country, is near the line of the old trail. Reaching the Cimarron, the trail bent up that doubtful waterway to Cold Spring, five hundred and thirty-five miles from Independence. There it took another leap to the southwest, over a country then fairly well known from the Spanish end of the line, and over a well defined road, which could not be mistaken.

A RETREAT TO THE BLOCKHOUSE.

The Wagon Mound was a point of note, situated about six hundred and sixty-two miles west of the starting point. One might depart thence for Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, located in a country very profitable for traders to keep in view; for above Bent's famous hostelry on the mountain branch of the trail lay the yet wilder pack-horse commerce of the mountain trappers' rendezvous, far more romantic and profitable, if less safe and steady than the wagon commerce of the prairies. From the Wagon Mound to the first settlements of the Mexicans, on the Rio Gallinas, was an easy stage, and to Santa Fé by this time all roads of the mountains thereabout pointed. It was seven hundred and eighty miles to Santa Fé, according to Gregg, the more modern chronicles making it seven hundred and seventy-five miles, the latter figures being for a part of the time above, and part of the time under the old Gregg estimates, which are singularly correct in view of Gregg's facilities. The present Santa Fé railway follows the upper or mountain leg of the old trail, which went on up the Arkansas to Bent's Fort, and did not take the leap into the desert. From the Wagon Mound on into Santa Fé the railway route is practically identical with the old wagon way.

Thus we may see that this great highway, broken midway and deflected to the southward, was less than one thousand miles in length. There was no connection, except a rude sort of pack route by way of Taos and the Colorado River country, between the end of the Santa Fé trail and the California country. The wagons did not go that way. The later railway drops down along the Rio Grande valley, just as did the Chihuahua wagon road; and bends westward far below the old trails of Walker and Jedediah Smith, who started on their transcontinental voyagings from points higher up in the mountains than Santa Fé or Taos.

The way from Santa Fé to California seems to have been well known, but the trade did not dare to attempt a commerce so distant, and so unprofitable as it must have been, consumed by such necessarily heavy transportation charges. We speak of the Santa Fé trail as one of the great Western highways, but it was a halting and broken and arrested highway. It was not yet quite time for the straight leap across the rivers. The trail clung to the rivers as far as it might, and the attempts to cut loose from the streams, and go straight across from the Red River to Chihuahua, proved to be unprofitable or impracticable.

The total amount of merchandise carried in these picturesque caravans of the prairies was perhaps not so great as we should imagine, though we must remember that a dollar was larger then than it is to-day. The extent of the trade varied from year to year, and did not regularly increase; for though we note one caravan in 1831 taking out two hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods, we find that in 1841, ten years later, the whole annual trade was but one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The climax was in 1843, when goods to the value of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars were transported.

The pay for this came back partly in specie, partly in furs, sometimes largely in horses and mules, the trade thus bearing a double profit and a double risk. The Indians did not care for gold or silver so much as they did for horses and mules, and diligent enough were their efforts to stampede the live stock of the traders. Upon occasion the United States Army was asked to escort a caravan, but this aid was not generally to be expected, especially since the worst part of the route, that infested by the Comanches, lay west of the then accepted western border of the United States. The average value of the trade was about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars yearly, and the total sum for the duration of this strange branch of American commerce was only about three million dollars.

The goods carried were at first largely prints and drillings, for the Mexicans got such goods from Vera Cruz on the coast, and only at great expense. Later silks, velvets, hardware and the general line of American goods began its first westward way across the American borders. Sometimes the stocks were retailed, sometimes sold at wholesale, the latter more often when the trader was in a hurry. It was a wild, peculiar and fascinating sort of commerce, and strong was the hold it naturally took upon the people of the Western border.

This trade was carried on mostly by our Southern-Western men, our new-Americans, as we may see by the letter of the grandson of James Baird, written from Kentucky. Glenn came from Cincinnati, Fowler from Covington, Kentucky, most of the other familiar figures from St. Louis, Franklin and other Missouri points. Morrison, the merchant of Kaskaskia, was a man who came down-stream. The Northern man, the man of New England or New York, had not yet become very much of a Westerner. The West was not yet safe enough for him. Nor indeed was he to lead the vanguard of the men who, far to the north of the old Santa Fé trail, were building another, a greater and more significant trail, one whose end we do not see even to-day; the men that were tapping all the secrets of the upper Rockies, that were to lead us to the brink of the Western sea and even to point beyond that sea. But for politics, the Southerners of to-day, the sons of the old daring ones, would admit the virtue of that finger pointing over seas.

There is still in New England something of the old timidity, the old unwillingness to see the pointing finger, the same un-American tardiness to recognize the challenge of the West. Had it not been for the fascinations of this upper country, for the allurements of the great trail that was to run across the continent to the far Northwest, there had been more competition in the Southwest trade, and mayhap a swifter crowding of events toward that state of affairs that Parkman saw when he visited the Santa Fé trail on his way home from the Rockies in 1846-the volunteers of Missouri, kindred to the men of Doniphan, who were straggling on out toward Mexico on an errand of justice that had long been overdue. Shuffling, angular, awkward, uncouth we may, with Parkman, admit these Southern-Western men to have been; each man his own commander, reluctant to admit a superior officer, as had been the fathers of these men from the time they left the Atlantic coast; but they did the work in Mexico. They opened the trail forever, and saw to it that the borders stretched and spread and gave us room. It is of no use to talk politics in questions like these, nor is there need to speak of the moralities. It is for the most part a matter of transportation. It was the Arkansas River trail that conquered Mexico.

This, then, was the great thing that the Santa Fé trail did for us, although we have forgotten it. It taught the people of New Mexico that the Americans were a greater and stronger people, a more just and steadfast people, than those to the south, who had done naught in all their lives but butcher and hesitate, butcher again and vacillate. They were not sad to take on the institutions of the United States in exchange for those of Spain. The Old World had not established its ways on the soil of the New World. The greatest of all Monroe doctrines still prevailed, the doctrine of the fit, the doctrine of evolution, of endurance by right, of hardihood got by a sane dwelling close to the great things of nature.

Far to the north, the Oregon trail led to California and the Orient. The Santa Fé trail, broken as it was in its transcontinental flight, points now in the same direction. The only ignoble part of the American story is the history of American politics. All politics aside, is it not easy to see that the old broken trail is a fate-finger pointing to Mexico and the trans-Isthmian canal; to an America wholly American; and to an Orient that again and by another trail is destined to be our West? We may spill our oratory, may deplore utterly and sincerely, yet we shall not prevail to build any wall high enough to stop this thing. The Old World might combine for the time against the New, might for a term of years conspire to put our venturers in prison; but at last it all were futile. Much of the temperate zone of the world belongs to a people whose history is but the history of a West; it will always so belong while the character of that people shall retain the dignity and force of those men who "could not otherwise."

This people is concerned to-day, as it has always been, not with sentiment but with self interest. Its great movements have been based not on theories but on common sense. Its great policies have been founded on geography and not on polemics. Its great adversities have been those of transportation; its great successes have been those built on transportation problems ably mastered. To-day this American people waxes somewhat flamboyantly boastful, according lightly and cheerfully to itself the title of the greatest nation of the world. It may indeed be such, or potentially such; but it will retain better claim upon that greatness if in all humility it shall remember the slow days wherein that greatness was founded, wherefrom that greatness grew. Therein lies the import of the early Western trails.

* * *

[33]

The spelling of this name is by most authorities given as "Becknell," which is thought to be correct.

[34]

V. Chapter IV, Vol. III; "Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri."

[35]

Other authorities, as for instance Chittenden, make it 392 miles.