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.