Page 113 - Kit Carson News Today

A team of veteran mountain men and native scouts to guide the way. >> carson and fremont were kind of an odd couple from the start. fremont is quite we hll educate. carson, on the other hand, has a dry sense of humor, hes always giving someone else the credit. >> with carsons help, fremont makes a wagon route through the northern rockies. >> they became natural scouts and the government would go to them just to know what was out there. they were walking atlases of the united states at that point...

Hes a good leader but hes not the superman that the novels made them out to be. >> mrs. whites infant is never found and the incident haunts carson to the end of his days. as the indian wars drag on, atrocities mount on both sides. kit often holds gathering in his home to help strengthen fractured relations. fluent in several languages, including tribal sign, hes later appointed a federal indian agent for the utes. >> the utes were a special tribe to kit carson. he absolutely loved them. he rode...

>> kit carson might have had that type of an attitude towards this. >> i want you over here. >> instead of taking up arms ta with the navajo, carson attempts to starve them out. >> carson realized that he could not fight the navajo in conventional terms. instead he had to fight their land. he essentially had to destroy every cornfield, kill every horse, every sheep, every cow, and he had to perform the scorched earth campaign. this was the only way he realized he could bring the navajo nation to...

He was hungry and he wanted a buffalo steak and he wanted to smoke his pipe, like in those days as a trapper. he was never so happy as he was when he was a mountain man. ♪ (coughing) >> doc, adios. >> kit carson dies as he lived, with humor and humility, loyal and selfless to a fault, choosing his duty before personal honor. he is buried in tawas, new

>> within hours, 100 marines rushed to mule hill and the mexican army retreats. a year later, the u.s. wins the mexican-american war and triples in size stretching from the atlantic to the pacific. largely due to polks political ten nasty and kit carsons efforts on the ground, manifest destiny is fully realized. after riding over land to st. louis, carson catches the train for washington to deliver fremonts field reports to the president. ♪ >> washington, d.c., at the time of kit carsons arriv...

The civil war as begun and the western territories are caught up in the struggle. kit carson joins the yankee fight. as colonel of the new mexico volunteers and helps fend off the texas confederates. with the rebel threat largely contained, commanding officer general james carlton decides to go after them while the union army was preoccupied. >> these navajo savages, they are far past the point of talking to. they need to be whipped and they need to fear us.

Reservations. >> carson is in a real predicament here. to refuse a commanding officer is insubordination and carson always follows orders. yet to carry out these atrocities would violate his sense of decency. this is a classic question for soldiers historically and still today, when must a soldier disobey a command because its unjust? >> carson actually tried to resign at one point. he said, i joined the union army to fight texans in the civil war, not indians. but carleton had other ideas for h...

>> shes still warm. couldnt have been dead more than five minutes. >> we found a book in camp in which i was represented as a great hero. slaying indians by the hundred. knowing that i live nearby, must have prayed for my appearance in order that she might be saved. >> thats a lot of pressure when you cant do magic and they are telling people that youre a magic man. carson is very confident that

Woman named ann white and her infant daughter. >> the white family got separated from the wagon train they were in. they were attacked by native americans and they were massacred except for mrs. white and her child. >> but carson is an expert scout. kit would look for imprints in the dirt, cinders from camp fires. >> the form tif experience for kit carson was when he worked as a mountain man. his ability to track animals became an important asset in his ability to track human beings. >> kit cars...

Vengeful. >> in retaliation, carson and these men go on the warpath and they find a calamath village not far away that they completely destroy and its truly a massacre. its kind of overkill in retaliation for the original violence. >> did you get your revenge? >> we gave them something to remember. >> just days after the clamath incident, the united states declares war on mexico. navy warships close in on the mexico coast and army troops advance from the east. in california, fremont and