So, surrounded by his friends, facing the impending end with his customary bravery, Kit Carson passed away. There was a struggle and a fatal hemorrhage. "Doctor--compadre,--adios!" he cried. "This is the last of the general," said his friend. So passed one of the last of the great Westerners.
It was nearly time now for all the old mountain men to put up the rifle. The day of the plow was following hard upon them.
Pray remember always this date of 1834. It is writ in few histories. It marks the closing scenes of the fur trade, the waning of the wild West, the beginning of the new day. In 1834 the preliminary survey of civilization had been practically completed.
One of Carson's daughters, after a sad life story, is said to have died in New Mexico, in an insane asylum, in 1902.
V. Chapter III, Vol. III; Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri. The Oregon trail was then a plain highway.
In spite of the Gallatin map, two years earlier. V. Chapter IV, Vol. III; "Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri."
The beginning of the New Mexican branch of the Long Trail, later to become famous in the cattle trade.
To-day we think in straight lines. We believe, ignorantly, that our forefathers moved directly westward from their former homes. We do not ask how they did it, but think that in some way they must have done so. Dwellers in Chicago think of New York, and it means New York in a straight line due east. They think of California, and it implies a straight line due west. To us of to-day all railroads run without curves, and are governed only by time-schedules, which annually grow shorter. Geography is well-nigh a lost art. Indeed, there is but little use for it, since the time-tables of the great railways answer all our questions so conclusively. To-day it matters not to us what may be the course of a journey; the sole question is as to the time that journey will require. The railroad men do our thinking for us. We do not concern ourselves with how those good, but somewhat old-fashioned folk, our ancestors, got about in a country that once was large. We care not at all for matters of down-stream or up-stream.
In a general way, therefore, we are prone to believe that the way from the Alleghanies to the Missouri was in a straight line. It was not so. We think that the way to the Rockies and across them was equally straight, because the railways now make it so easy. Yet as a matter of fact the railways proceeded, without much difficulty as to exploration, to lie sure, for nothing new was left for them to discover, yet in hesitating and halting steps westward, shortening the old trails, destroying the old history, wiping out the old geography of the West.