Kit Carson: A Portrait in Courage

“Doctor! Compadre! Adios!” with these words passed a wiry little man who has become a legend of the Old West.

Much has been written about Kit Carson, some of it truth, a great deal of it fiction. The two have been mixed all too often, resulting in an unfaithful and highly distorted picture of the Great Scout. Incorporating as its introduction a paper on the subject by the late Professor Edgar L. Hewett, M. Morgan Estergreen’s Kit Carson is the long-awaited corrective to that picture.

Born in the wilderness of Iredell County in Western North Carolina on December 24, 1809, Kit grew up on the frontier as it moved ever westward. In Missouri, he ran away from the saddlers to whom he had been apprenticed and joined a Santa Fe-bound caravan at Independence.

Trader, interpreter, teamster, scout, trapper, guide, express rider, Indian agent, brevet brigadier general, Indian fighter―Kit Carson was all of these things and more. He was a faithful and devoted husband to Josefa, his second wife, a gentle and loving father to their seven children, and loyal and trusted friend to all who knew him. Modest and soft-spoken, he was a man of quite but fierce courage, a man who could be counted on when the chips were down.

Based on the unpublished notes and other primary source materials of the late Blanche C. Grant, including interviews and letters from Kit’s family and friends, Kit Carson is the story of Kit’ life as he lived it, not as many wishful-thinking writers have imagined it to be.

M. Morgan Estergreen, who spent many years of research in preparing this volume, was a long-time resident of Taos, New Mexico, Kit's final resting place, and now lives in Santa Fe.