Kit Carson

Previously:

We learn of the Traveler's infatuation with Utah and meet the Navaho Indians.

Chapter 17

Kit Carson started the Indians on The Long Walk in the beginning of spring in 1864. Bands of Navaho led by the Army were relocated from their traditional lands to Fort Sumner in the Pecos River valley.

The march was difficult and pushed many Navahos to their breaking point. The distance itself was cruel, but the fact that they did not receive any aid from the soldiers was devastating. Not every person was in condition to trek 300 miles. Many began the walk exhausted and malnourished. Others were not properly clothed and were not prepared for such a long journey.

Neither sympathy nor remorse was given to the Navahos. They were never informed as to where they were going, why they were being relocated, or how long it would take to get there. One account passed through generations within the Navahos shows the attitude of the U.S. Army as follows:

It was said some Indians were on the Long Walk with their daughter who was pregnant and about to give birth. The girl got tired and weak and couldn't keep up with the others or go further because of her condition. So, her parents asked the Army to hold up for a while to let the woman give birth, but the soldiers wouldn't do it.

They forced the family to move on, saying that they were lagging behind the others. The soldiers told the parents that they had to leave their daughter behind. "Your daughter is not going to survive, anyway. Sooner or later, she is going to die," they said.

 "Go ahead," the daughter said to her parents, "Things might work out all right with me." But the poor girl was mistaken. Not long after they had moved on, the Indians heard a gunshot from where they had been a short time ago. When the Indians got to the reservation, several of them took their own lives. I figure they didn't have any options.

The Dimestore novels would have you believe that Kit Carson was a great man. Few people ever knew the real Kit Carson. In time, he mellowed and even took an Arapaho wife. He never wrote about her because he didn't want to be known as a squaw-man, but he treated Indians differently in his later years.

Carson lived to the age of fifty-eight and then went to meet his maker. I assume the meeting took place in the pits of hell.

As bad as Carson was, he was not as bad as Steven Meeks. Meeks was a fur trader turned Indian hunter. He was paid one-hundred dollars for the scalp of a male Indian, fifty dollars for a female, and twenty-five dollars for each child.

The Navaho said white men only kept one promise. They promised to take our land and they did.

This was the west for the Navaho Indians, a great tribe that was forced off their land.

To be continued . . .