page_title: Kit Carson
section_title: Personal description
hierarchical_section_title: Kit Carson / Personal description
caption_attribution_description: Early photo, possibly the first, of Kit Carson
context_page_description: Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson, was an American frontiersman. His career as a frontiersman involved four chief occupations: mountain man, guide, Indian agent, and officer in the United States Army. He helped to open the American West to settlement. In his day, he was a celebrity known far and wide in the United States. In modern America, he is remembered as a folk hero.
  Carson began his adult life in 1829 as a mountain man. He trapped beaver about ten years for the fur trade. During these years, Carson became an "Injun killer" — he was forced to kill many Native Americans to protect himself from attack, theft, and murder. Carson became known as one of the greatest of "Injun killers" through novels, newspaper accounts, and other media. When the fur trade died out in the 1840s, Carson looked for other work.
  In 1842, Army officer John Charles Frémont hired Carson to guide him on three separate expeditions into the West. All three expeditions involved mapping and describing remote and uncharted areas of the West. These expeditions were hugely successful. Frémont's reports to the government made Carson a frontier hero, and were read by many Americans.
context_section_description: Carson was described by his contemporaries as a "small, stooped-shoulder" man with brown to red hair, blue eyes, and a strong but spare frame. He was said to be about 5 foot 7 inches. He was a modest gentleman. Most of his contemporaries were astonished that such a slight, inconspicuous man had accomplished so much among the Native Americans and wild animals on the western frontier.
caption: Early photograph (possibly the first) of Kit Carson. He is wearing a beaver hat.
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