Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies

by David Fisher

  The real Kit Carson was not impressed by his own celebrity. In fact, after making four more trips across the country as President Polk’s personal courier, Carson happily mounted up and headed home.

  At this point in his life, Carson and one of the men he’d traveled with, Lucien Maxwell, decided to build a real homestead in the Rayado valley, about fifty miles east of Taos. “We had been leading a roving life long enough and now, if ever, was the time to make a home for ourselves,” he explained. “We were getting old and could not expect much longer to continue to be able to gain a livelihood as we had been doing for many years…. We commenced building and were soon on our way to prosperity.”

  It was impossible for him to stop adventuring, though, and he continued to accept commissions from the government. He led other survey teams into the Rockies; he drove a herd of 6,500 sheep from New Mexico to the markets of California, where they sold for $5.50 per head; and at times he pursued Indians and outlaws. Not long after he had settled down with his third wife, “Little Jo,” he learned that a Jicarilla (Apache) Indian raiding party had attacked a small group riding toward Santa Fe, killing merchant James White and another man and taking his wife, daughter, and a black female slave captive. The Jicarillas had then killed the child with one blow of a tomahawk and thrown her body into the Red River. Carson couldn’t let this stand. He saddled up and joined the posse headed by an army major. They tracked the Indians for twelve days over harsh terrain. In camps along the way they found scraps of Mrs. White’s dress and some of her possessions. When they finally found the Indian band with their captives, Carson wanted to attack immediately, but the major insisted that they instead parley with them and try to arrange a trade for the women. Carson was furious, knowing that the Indians had no interest in talk, but he was a man who followed orders. As the major waited, a single rifle shot rang out from the Indian camp, striking that officer squarely in the chest. In an incredible coincidence, only minutes earlier he had taken off his buckskin gauntlets and put them in his breast pocket. The buckskin had saved his life.

  The 1847 Battle of Buena Vista was one of the bloodiest fights of the Mexican-American War. More than 3,400 Mexican troops and 650 Americans under the command of General Zachary Taylor were killed or wounded before Santa Anna withdrew in the night.

  The outnumbered Indians scattered, leaving behind their belongings, but the major’s order to charge came too late. They found Mrs. White’s body and determined “her soul had but just flown to heaven.” She had been shot through her heart with an arrow only minutes earlier. Then Carson found something he would never forget. According to his biographer,

  Among the trinkets and baggage found in the [Indians’] camp there was a novel, which described Kit Carson as a great hero, who was able to slay Indians by scores. This book was shown to Kit and, he later wrote, “It was the first of the kind I had ever seen … in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds…. I have often thought that perhaps Mrs. White, to whom it belonged, read the same and knowing that I lived not very far off, had prayed to have me make an appearance and assist in freeing her. I consoled myself with the knowledge that I had performed my duty.”

  The ride home had been difficult. The posse was caught in a blizzard and one of their men froze to death. Later Carson learned that the Jicarilla had been caught in the same storm. And he shed no tears when he learned that without the furs and blankets that they had been forced to leave behind in the camp, many of them had frozen to death as well.

  Sometime in 1849, Carson was told about a plot to murder two merchants. A man appropriately named Fox had hired on to guide the merchants on a trip to buy goods they would use for trade. To accomplish that, they were carrying a large sum of money. In fact, Fox intended to kill them on the trail and then leave the bodies in the wilderness. Fox made the mistake of trying to enlist a shady character living in Rayado to help him. This man turned down the offer and, when Fox went back out on the trail, told the story to the local army post commander. When Carson learned of it, he gathered a small posse and raced almost three hundred miles through Indian territory to catch up with the party, arriving just in time to save the two merchants. Although they offered Carson a substantial reward, he refused to accept even one penny and instead took Fox back with him to jail.

  Kit Carson fought Indians, then went to Washington to fight for those same peoples, but his actions eventually caused him to be reviled by the tribes of the Southwest.

  As the American frontier moved steadily westward, Indian resistance to the settlers increased. The pioneers lived in fear of sudden and deadly attacks. Few people dared leave a settlement without first making careful preparations. It would be impossible to determine how many encounters Kit Carson had with the tribes, but it is accurate to state that precious few men could match that number. He had come to be known as the greatest Indian fighter in the West. No man was more qualified or better prepared to deal with the tribes, whether the encounter required words spoken over a shared peace pipe or the skilled use of a rifle, knife, or hatchet. But Carson avoided violence when possible. For instance, in the summer of 1851 he went east to St. Louis to visit his daughter and buy provisions for the winter, and on his way back, a few miles after crossing the Arkansas River, he encountered a band of Cheyennes. Carson could not have known these Cheyennes were on the warpath; a chief had been flogged by an American officer and they were out for revenge. Carson knew his party was too small and ill equipped to outrun them; he ordered the wagons to stay close and told his men to have their rifles ready. The Indians’ war party shadowed them for more than twenty miles. When the caravan made camp for the night, Carson invited the advance party to join him for a talk and a smoke.

  In 1865, Kit Carson, the nation’s most famous Indian fighter, told a congressional committee, “I came to this country in 1826 and since then have become pretty well acquainted with the Indian tribes, both in peace and at war. I think, as a general thing, the difficulties arise from aggressions on the part of the whites.”

  These young braves did not recognize Carson. Although they would have recognized his name, they would not have known what he looked like. So they certainly did not suspect that this white man spoke their language. As the pipe was passed, the Indians began speaking to each other in the Sioux language, so that if any of the white men escaped this trap, the Sioux would be blamed for the attack. It was not an unusual ruse. But as they continued smoking into the night, they eventually resorted to their own tongue. Finally they revealed their plan: When the pipe was next passed to Carson, he would have to lay down his weapon to take it, and at that moment they would attack and kill him. Then they would kill the other members of the party.

  Carson understood every word, and he waited. When it was his turn, rather than taking the pipe, he grabbed his rifle and stood in the center of the circle, ordering his men to ready their weapons. The Cheyennes were stunned. Speaking to them in their own language, Carson demanded to know why they wanted his scalp. He had never been guilty of a single wrong to the Cheyennes, he said, and in fact their elders would tell them that he was a friend. Finally he ordered them out of his camp, warning that anyone who refused to leave would be shot and that if they returned, they would “be received with a volley of bullets.”

  Carson knew his threat would not stop the Indians indefinitely, but it would buy time. At the darkest point of that night, he took a young Mexican runner aside and instructed him to run as fast as possible to Rayado and return with soldiers. Their lives depended on him, he whispered. The boy was long gone by sunrise. It was said that young runners could cover more than fifty miles in a day. Almost a full day passed before the Cheyennes reappeared. They were wearing their war paint. As their braves approached, Carson warned them that a scout had been sent ahead for help. If they attacked, he admitted to them, the Cheyennes would suffer large casualties but eventually they would win. He knew that. But he had many friends among the soldiers and they would know which people had c
ommitted this crime “and would be sure to visit upon the perpetrators a terrible retribution.”

  Indian scouts found the boy’s footprints, but with his long lead time they knew he could not be caught. Reluctantly, the war party withdrew. Two days later an army patrol under the command of Major James Henry Carleton arrived to escort Carson’s party safely to Rayado.

  As ruthlessly as Kit Carson often fought against the Indians, he also fought for them. In the early 1850s, he became the Indian agent—the government’s representative to the tribe—for the Mohauche Utes, or Utahs, and several Apache tribes. While the Apaches continued to fight, initially the Utes remained at peace with the white man. Carson worked for the best interests of the tribe and at times fought doggedly with officials in Washington. He even requested permission to live with the Utes on their reservation, which was denied. Utes came almost daily to his ranch for food and tobacco, which he had paid for himself and happily supplied to them. He was so respected by the tribe that he became known as “Father Kit,” and General Sherman once remarked, “Why his integrity is simply perfect. They [the Utes] know it, and they would believe him and trust him any day before me.”

  Unfortunately, when many Utes died from smallpox after receiving blankets from the government’s Indian supervisor, the tribe joined the Apaches on the warpath. Eventually this uprising was smothered, but Carson’s relationship with the tribes of New Mexico never completely recovered. The days when the Indians had freely roamed the plains were ending. During the gold rush, more than a hundred thousand people flocked to the West, and the Indians were pushed off their traditional lands onto reservations. Carson watched this clash of civilizations from his ranch and eventually began to believe that the two peoples could not live together peacefully and that it was best for the Indians to live far away from the white settlers.

  In 1868, Carson led a delegation of Utes to Washington, where he negotiated the “Kit Carson Treaty” that guaranteed peace, territory, and government assistance to the tribe.

  By 1860, the issue of slavery had raised passions in the West, although in that region slaves were mostly Mexican and Indian. While many people in New Mexico sympathized with the Confederacy, Carson remained loyal to the Union. When the Civil War began in 1861, he was appointed a colonel in the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry. Years earlier, young Kit Carson had walked into the wilderness to live by wit and skill, and finally civilization, or at least the shadow of it, had caught up with him. He moved his family to Albuquerque and went to war.

  Carson’s first engagement was the 1862 battle of Val Verde, in which both Union and Confederate troops suffered large casualties but neither side declared victory. After two days’ hard fighting, the Union troops withdrew and the Rebels made a wide swing around the garrison at Fort Craig and proceeded up the Rio Grande toward Albuquerque and Santa Fe. After that battle, Kit Carson spent the rest of the war once again fighting Indians. His commanding officer for much of that time, coincidentally, was General James Carleton, the same man who while a major had rescued Carson’s caravan from the Cheyennes. After the Confederate attempt to capture New Mexico had been repulsed, Carleton took aim at the Indian tribes—in particular, the Navajos. Navajo raiding parties had taken advantage of the war to become a serious threat to settlers, a threat that Carleton, who didn’t share Colonel Carson’s respect for the native tribes, was determined to remove.

  In 1862, Carleton ordered the Mescalero Apaches moved from their lands in the Sacramento Mountains to newly constructed Fort Sumner and the Bosque Redondo, the Round Forest, on the Pecos River. He issued an order: “All Indian men of that tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them…. If the Indians send in a flag of truce say to the bearer … that you have been sent to punish them for their treachery and their crimes. That you have no power to make peace, that you are there to kill them wherever you can find them.”

  Carson was appalled. He had lived his life with honor, and now he was being forced to choose between disobeying a direct order, which would mean facing a court-martial, and committing despicable acts. No one knows what went on his mind, but he might well have realized that even if he refused the order, the man who replaced him would not—and that man probably would not understand the tribes as he did. While he accepted the command to force the Apaches into confinement, he refused to follow the rest of General Carleton’s orders. Instead he met with the elders of the tribe and convinced them to surrender. Within a few months, he brought four hundred Apaches to Bosque Redondo.

  The Mescalero campaign was simply the beginning. Carleton then gave Carson command of two thousand troops and ordered him to capture the Navajos and imprison them on the same reservation as their enemy, the Apaches. “You have deceived us too often,” Carleton warned the Navajos, “and robbed and murdered our people too long, to trust you again at large in your own country. This war shall be pursued against you if it takes years, now that we have begun, until you cease to exist or move. There can be no other talk on the subject.”

  During his campaign against the Navajos, Carson’s commanding officer, the brutal general James Carleton, told his troops that Indians “must be whipped and fear us before they will cease killing and robbing the people.”

  That was too much for Carson. He resigned his commission, stating, “By serving in the Army, I have proven my devotion to that government which was established by my ancestors…. At present, I feel that my duty as well as happiness directs me to my home and family and trusts that the General will accept my resignation.”

  The reason for what happened next will never be known, but the result has caused the name Kit Carson to be reviled by the tribes of the Southwest from that time forward in history. Carleton somehow convinced Carson to change his mind. Some historians believe General Carleton gave him assurances that once the Navajos were on the reservation they would be allowed to live peacefully. It also is true that Carson had come to believe that Indians and settlers could never live peacefully together and urged their separation. He may well have believed that by carrying out this policy he actually was ensuring the safety of both the Native Americans and the new Americans. Whatever the cause, Carson agreed to round up the Navajos.

  By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Navajos, here crossing Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona, had settled peacefully on this land, as negotiated by Carson.

  Rather than standing and fighting the army, the Indians dispersed and fled into the hills. The army retaliated by burning their crops and orchards, their cornfields and bean patches, their fruit trees and melon fields. Guards were posted by sources of salt and water, and Carleton authorized a fee to be paid to soldiers for each Indian animal they captured or killed. The army invaded the Navajos’ main hunting grounds and camp, Canyon de Chelly, and destroyed it, burning it as completely as Sherman would level Atlanta. Without a single major battle being fought, almost ten thousand Navajos surrendered to Carson’s troops. It was the largest number of Indians ever captured, and back east it added to the legend of Kit Carson.

  In April 1864, the army led these captives on a forced march of more than three hundred miles to Fort Sumner. Hundreds of Indians died on “the Long Walk,” as it is known in tribal history. Although Carson was not riding with his troops, as their commander he was responsible for their actions. Captives died from sickness, starvation, and exposure to the cold. Some of those who could not keep up were shot by soldiers. When they reached the reservation, conditions were not much better. Many more of the native peoples died during their four years of captivity. Eventually the Apaches escaped and disappeared into the hills, while the Navajos, after signing a treaty in 1868 with General Sherman, were moved to a portion of their traditional lands, where they have remained.

  For his service, Kit Carson was promoted to the rank of general.

  In late 1864, General Carson was sent to west Texas with 325 soldiers and 75 Ute scouts to subdue the Indians there. Kiowas, Comanches, and Cheyennes were known to be in t
hat area. Carson headed toward the ruins of Adobe Walls, which he remembered from his scouting days two decades earlier. On November 25, his troops attacked a Kiowa village estimated to include 176 lodges. But the scouts failed to discover that this was one of the smallest of many villages in the area. The Kiowas fled from the attack but began gathering a massive Indian force. Within hours, about fourteen hundred warriors attacked. It was similar to the situation in which General Custer would find himself a few months later. One of the men with Carson later described the initial counterattack, writing that the Indians charged “mounted and covered with paint and feathers … charging backwards and forwards … their bodies thrown over the sides of their horses, at a full run, and shooting occasionally under their horses.” Carson’s men dug into the ruins of Adobe Walls. Unlike Custer, Carson had brought with him twin howitzers, big guns, and used them to his advantage. But he was greatly outnumbered. Backfires and the howitzers kept the Indians at a distance until Carson was able to effect a retreat. Carson suffered 6 dead and 125 wounded, while the tribes suffered many times that. Both the army and the tribes declared victory, the Kiowas calling it “the time when the Kiowas repelled Kit Carson.”