Kit Carson: The Man of The West | The Great Man Podcast Episode #11

-He and his family often feared attacks on their cabin from Native Americans.

-Nietzsche said that a man can only become a man when his father dies

-When Carson's father, a farmer, died in 1818, Carson did his best to help out his mother, who had 10 children to raise on her own. He knew that he wouldn't be able to receive an education because of this. Carson never learned to read, he was actually ashamed of it.

-Carson was apprenticed to a saddlemaker in Franklin, Missouri, at age 14, but he longed for freedom and adventure. In 1826, Carson fled Franklin, breaking his contract with the saddlemaker. He headed west on the Santa Fe Trail, working as a laborer in a caravan of merchants.

-Many frontiersman taught Kit how to be a trapper and fur-trader, this would be something he would pursue for the next 15 years

-Carson started working as a mountain man when he was 20 years old. Along with well-known mountain men like Jim Bridger and Old Bill Williams, he traversed numerous regions of the American West. In Taos during the winter of 1828–1829, he worked as Ewing Young's cook.

-He went on Young's 1829 trapping excursion with him. Carson's formative years in the mountains are attributed to Young's leadership and the venture's experience.

-The group entered Apache country along the Gila River in August 1829. The assault on the expedition was Carson's first exposure to physical conflict. Young's party continued on to Alta California; they traded and trapped in California from Sacramento in the north to Los Angeles in the south; and in April 1830, after having trapped along the Colorado River, they made their way back to Taos, New Mexico.

-As a mountain guy, Carson's life was not simple. He had to keep the beavers he caught from traps for months at a time until the annual Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, which was held in remote locations around the West, such as the banks of the Green River in Wyoming. The needs of an independent life, such as fish hooks, wheat, and tobacco, were purchased with the money earned in exchange for the pelts.

-Carson had to tend to his wounds and take care of himself because there was little to no medical access in the various areas where he worked. Indians and white people occasionally fought. The deer skins that Carson wore back then were stiffened from being exposed to the elements for a while.