Kit Carson

Kit Carson ran away from a Missouri saddle-making apprenticeship at 16 to join a wagon train to Santa Fe, and spent the next two decades as a trapper, hunter, and guide across the Rocky Mountain West, building the kind of practical geographic knowledge that could not be learned from any map because no accurate map yet existed. That knowledge made him indispensable to John C. Frémont, who hired Carson to guide three major expeditions through the 1840s that mapped routes through the Rockies and into California and helped draw thousands of settlers west along trails Carson had scouted in person.

Carson's frontier reputation turned him into a dime-novel hero in his own lifetime, and when the Civil War reached New Mexico Territory he accepted a commission in the Union Army, rising to brigadier general. In 1863 and 1864 Carson led a campaign against the Navajo on orders from General James Carleton, systematically destroying crops, orchards, and livestock across Navajo territory to starve resistance into surrender. The campaign forced roughly 8,000 Navajo men, women, and children on the Long Walk, a journey of some 300 miles to internment at Bosque Redondo, where hundreds died of disease, exposure, and starvation over the following four years.

Carson died in 1868, not long after the Navajo were finally permitted to return to a portion of their homeland under a new treaty. The "frontier hero" image that followed him through dime novels and later Hollywood films has, in the decades since, been weighed openly against the Bosque Redondo campaign, which the Navajo Nation itself still marks each year as one of the most devastating chapters of its history.