Carson, Christopher Houston

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Christopher Houston Carson
    Place of Birth
    Burial Place
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Spouses
    3
    No. of Children
    10
    Family
    Lindsey Carson (father), Rebecca Robinson (mother), Waa-nibe, Singing Grass (first wife), Unnamed (second wife), Josefa Jamarillo (third wife)
    Occupation
    Military
    Other
    Other Occupation
    Guide
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Catholic (Roman or Irish)
    Political Parties
    Republican
    Military
    Union Army

    Christopher Houston Carson (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    The freckle-faced Carson was short, weighing only 145 pounds in his prime, and was both bow-legged and pigeon-toed, the very opposite of his image in dime novels. Although he was not pious like Jed Smith, he was unlike most mountain men in that he was temperate in the use of alcohol and profanity, although he was addicted to tobacco. He was soft-voiced, reticent, and genuinely modest in contrast to such braggarts as Jim Bridger. Handicapped as he was by small stature and illiteracy, Carson was universally respected by Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, and Indians and loved by many of them because of his strong character. He was not a leader in the ordinary sense but an exemplar. His honesty, loyalty, courage, decency, and sense of duty--in short, his personal integrity--so elevated him in public esteem, even during his lifetime, that he became and has remained the equal of Daniel Boone as an American frontiersman, almost sans reproche. The one black mark on his record remains his execution of three civilians, on Frémont's orders, in California in 1846.
    Richard H. Dillon, "Carson, Kit," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-00152.html.
    Chicago Style Entry Link
    Roberts, David. A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Fremont, and the Claiming of the American West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. view record
    How to Cite This Page: "Carson, Christopher Houston," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5331.