Born in Kentucky ten months later than Lincoln, and seventy-five miles east of Lincoln's birthplace, Kit Carson, at an early age, was carried to Missouri by his parents. He received little school education, but learned to ride, to handle a rifle, and to trap bear and beaver on that borderline of civilization. He was set to work at a trade which had no attractions for him; and his imagination was fired by the tales of the strange and stirring scenes and deeds in the vast expanse off toward the sunset that came to him through passing hunters and traders. The _Missouri Intelligencer_, a weekly newspaper published in Franklin, on the Missouri River, in its issue of October 12, 1826, tells the sequel:
Notice is hereby given to all persons that Christopher Carson, a boy about sixteen years old, small for his age, but thick-set, with light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin, Howard County, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler's trade, on or about the 1st of September last. He is supposed to have made his way to the upper part of the state. All persons are notified not to harbor, support, or assist said boy, under penalty of the law. One cent reward will be given to any person who will bring back the said boy.
Six years earlier than this, on the banks of the Missouri, and a hundred miles east of Franklin, died Daniel Boone. In the retrospect, Carson's name naturally associates itself with Boone's. On a broader field, in the face of obstacles and perils equally formidable, with a greater variety of resources, and with a far readier adaptability to rapidly changing conditions, Carson continued the rôle of empire-builder which Boone had begun.
In 1826, the only States west of the Mississippi were Missouri and Louisiana, and these, with the Territory of Arkansas, contained not much more than a third as many inhabitants as a single city of that region, St. Louis, has in 1910. Our present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California, with parts of Colorado and Wyoming, belonged to Mexico, and, with Mexico, had just broken away from Spain. Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with large portions of Wyoming and Montana, were in controversy between the United States and England, and were to remain in that condition for twenty years longer. West and southwest of the Missouri, and on its upper waters for hundreds of miles east of that river, roamed some of the most warlike and powerful Indian tribes of North America. Except that, in the interval, the capital of the southwest territory had swung from Madrid, Spain, to Mexico, no perceptible change had taken place on the western frontier since the days, twenty years earlier, when Lewis and Clark explored the region from the mouth of the Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia; or since Captain Zebulon M. Pike, seeking the sources of the Red River, entered Spanish territory unawares, in the southern part of the present Colorado, and was carried a prisoner before Charles IV's governor-general at Santa Fé. In no age or land did adventure ever offer a more attractive field to daring and enterprise than that which spread itself out before young Carson at the moment when, fleeing from the little saddler's shop, he plunged into the current of the stirring life off to the westward.