St. John's Lodge No2, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of Delaware

Christopher Houston
"Kit" Carson
1809 – 1868

Christopher Houston Carson was born on Christmas Eve, 1809, in a little log cabin on Tate's Creek in Madison County, Ky. His Scotch‐Irish beginnings were humble. His father, Lindsey, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War who fought with Wade Hampton in the Carolinas. After the war, Lindsey had followed in the footsteps of frontiersman Daniel Boone and gone to Kentucky. When Christopher Houston was born, his father decided the nickname 'Kit' fit him better, and the name stuck.

Kit was still a toddler when the family moved farther west, to Missouri, where they settled in Boone's Lick, Howard County. Kit's oldest brother, William, strengthened the ties with the Boone family by marrying Daniel's great-niece. The couple's daughter Adaline became Kit's favorite childhood playmate.

Indians were a constant problem on the Missouri frontier, and early on, Kit was taught the skills of a man. He hunted with his father and older brothers and learned the ways of the frontiersman. His "book learning" was considered far less important than picking up basic survival skills. "I was a young boy in the school house when the cry came, Injuns!"' Carson once said. "I jumped to my rifle and threw down my spelling book, and thar it lies." He never returned to school.

Carson's inability to read and write did not make him an "unlearned" man. He enjoyed having books read to him. He was fond of the poetry of Byron and thoroughly enjoyed a biography of William the Conqueror. When Carson discovered William's favorite oath was "By the splendor of God," he embraced it as his own. That was the closest thing to profanity anyone ever heard Kit utter.

Young Kit's life changed forever in 1818 when his father was killed. Two weeks later his mother gave birth to her 10th child. When she remarried, Kit couldn't get along with his stepfather and became a wild and headstrong youth. His stepfather apprenticed him to a saddlemaker, David Workman, in Franklin, Mo., in 1824. In those days, Franklin was the starting and stopping point for anyone traveling west. Kit heard many of the wild and romantic tales of the new land from trappers and explorers who patronized Workman's shop. The lure of the West was too strong for the young man. He ran away in 1826, joining a trading party headed toward the Rocky Mountains.

In 1827 Carson arrived in Taos, a northern outpost of Mexico. The town, which was popular with traders and trappers, would become his home. Carson spoke more easily in Spanish than in English worked as an interpreter down in Chihuahua and became a teamster at the Santa Rita copper mine. In Taos he met veteran mountain man Ewing Young, and in 1829 he joined Young's trapping expedition.

During the next five years, Carson had a series of extraordinary adventures and gained valuable knowledge about the Western wilderness and the native people and animals who occupied it. He traveled from Taos to California and as far north as present-day Idaho. He fought

Indians, the elements and, occasionally, other trappers. He crossed the vast Mojave Desert, where he nearly died of thirst and starvation. In the high Rocky Mountains he experienced blizzards and frostbite. He learned to exist on any food he could find‐horse, pregnant mule and sometimes dog.

Kit Carson's friends and associates from this part of his life read like a who's who of the American frontier. Jim Bridger and Tom "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick were among his trapping partners. He knew the famous missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman. William Bent, who built what would become known as Bent's Fort, became a close personal friend and brother‐in‐law. Lucian Maxwell, who married the niece of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, was Carson's best friend.

During this time Carson also became fluent in a third language, French. As a trapper and frontiersman, he could also converse in Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfoot, Shoshone, Piute and Ute, and he also knew the sign language used by mountain men throughout the West.

In the summer of 1836, Kit Carson and a French trapper became rivals for the affections of a pretty Arapaho girl named Waanibe. In a scene reminiscent of a medieval joust, the two men fought a duel. Carson won. He and Waanibe, also called Alice, were married. They had one daughter, Adaline, but in 1840, Alice died giving birth to a second child. Adaline needed a mother, and Kit soon married a Cheyenne woman, Making-Out-Road. But in short order, she divorced him Indian style. Kit came home one day to find his belongings and Adaline outside. Making-Out-Road went home to her family.

By then, the era of the fur trade was drawing to a close and Kit realized he had to change with the times. There was another, more important reason to change careers. Kit Carson was smitten with Josefa Jaramillo, daughter of a wealthy and influential Taos family. Although only in her early teens, she was well dressed and already quite refined. It was sometime during the spring or early summer of 1842 Carson reached an understanding with Josefa's father.

Kit and Josefa were married in Taos on February 6, 1843, which otherwise was a typical year for him. A few months after his marriage, he was off on the Santa Fe Trail with William Bent.

Carson and Fitzpatrick guided Fremont's second expedition as far west as Fort Vancouver (Washington). The men wintered at Sutter's Fort in California before heading home in 1844. While they were on the Mojave River a party of Indians stampeded the livestock. In his memoirs, Fremont wrote: "Carson may be

considered among the boldest...so full of daring... the two men, in a savage desert, pursue day and night an unknown body of Indians into the defiles of an unknown mountain, attack them upon sight, without counting numbers, and defeat them in an instant." Thanks to Fremont's report‐as well as various diaries, dime novels and newspaper accounts‐Carson's fame spread throughout the United States. His services as a scout, hunter and Indian fighter were in demand.

Fremont and others realized that Carson's quick thinking, frontier experience and knowledge of Indian culture could make the difference between life and death. Kit Carson was fast becoming a legend in his own time. Every schoolboy knew about his daring deeds.

Carson was dismayed at the scope of his growing fame. Settlers, traveling along the Santa Fe Trail, read dime novels about his exploits by the light of their campfires. One specific incident unnerved the man with nerves of steel. A white woman captured by the Apaches was found dead in their camp. At her side was a book that chronicled a fictional account of Kit Carson's rescue of a woman in a similar situation. In his memoirs, which Carson dictated in 1856, he recalled: "In camp was found a book, 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 Mrs. White [the slain white woman] read the same...would pray for my appearance that she might be saved."

By 1867 it was apparent that he was quite ill. In January 1868 traveled to Washington with a group of Ute chiefs to negotiate a treaty. He also consulted with a number of doctors on the East Coast about chest pains and other health problems. Kit returned home in time for the birth of his seventh child, Josefita, in April 1868. It was a difficult birth, however, and his beloved Josefa died within two weeks.

Carson lost the will to live. He made arrangements for his children, wrote his will. On May 23, 1868, at 4:25 p.m. in the Fort Lyon quarters of Assistant U.S. Surgeon H.K. Tilden, an aneurysm ruptured into Kit Carson's trachea. "Doctor, compadre, adios," Carson cried out. Blood gushed from his mouth. A few moments later, the flag at Fort Lyon, in southern Colorado Territory, was lowered to half-mast. he had died one month to the day after his wife's death.

Later that day, the wife of an officer used her wedding dress to make a lining for the plain, rough wood of Kit Carson's casket. No flowers grew near the fort, which was located on the arid plain. Wives of other officers removed the silk flowers from their hats and placed them atop the casket.

The following day, a military escort took Carson's body across the Arkansas River to Boggsville and buried him beside his beloved Josefa,. Their remains would be brought to Taos, New Mexico Territory, a year later for final burial. Theirs had been one of the great love stories of the American frontier, and their final resting place was near their old home in Taos.

The Masonic Record of Bro. Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson shows that at the age of 44 he was initiated an Entered Apprentice on April 22, 1854, passed to the degree of Fellowcraft June 17, 1854, and raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason December 26, 1854 in Montezuma Lodge #101 in Santa Fe Territory of New Mexico. In 1859 a dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Missouri was recieved to form Bent Lodge #204 A. F. & A. M. in Taos, New Mexico. Bro. Carson was the first Junior Warden and the following year moved up to Senior Warden. Due to his service in the U. S. Army during the Mexican and the Civil War he was never able to sit as Master of a Lodge.