At the age of sixteen, Carson ran away from his job as an apprentice at a saddlery in Missouri and joined a party of traders heading down the Santa...
Kit Carson: Larger-Than-Life American Hero
read more
Kit Carson
A Pioneer Lost His Land
Charles Autobees’ homestead didn’t fit the rules. Charles Autobees was a mountain man and trapper, who plied that trade starting at age 16. He...
Kit Carson and the Conquest of California
The true story of how the trailblazer became the spearpoint of empire All Images Courtesy True West Archives Unless Otherwise Noted Kit Carson...
The Iron Horse and Kit Carson
While innumerable stories about trains, train robberies and the famed trailblazer appeared in True West during its 70-year history, they were rarely...
Kit Lit & Fit
I am proud and excited to report we are publishing a very cool original article based on a chapter in Paul Andrew Hutton’s next book (page 24). As...
The Long Walk
The forced relocation of the Navajo. In 1861, the United States was in a virtual war with the Indians of New Mexico. Plans called for them to be...
Not What He Expected
A stunning description of frontiersman Kit Carson. Kit Carson was one of the most famous men in America in the 1840s, renowned for his exploits on...
A Different View of Kit Carson
The Navajo experience was tragic… Kit Carson is remembered as one of the premiere frontiersmen of the West. But Navajo and some Apache think of him...
Life on the Santa Fe Trail
It wasn’t only the Indians who made life precarious for the travelers on the Santa Fe Trail. The country was literally crawling with rattlesnakes,...
The Seekers
It has become somewhat of a tradition at True West magazine to do a mountain man on the December cover. In the past two decades we have run at least...
Ewing Young
When the free trappers banded together for self-preservation, they usually elected a partisan or captain to act as leader. He was usually a man with...
The Bear Flag Revolt They declared the creation of the California Republic. Sporting a battle flag with a picture of a grizzly bear on it, the rebels began calling themselves Bear Flaggers...
In the spring of 1846 Captain John C. Fremont and Kit Carson were on another of their famous mapping expeditions in the Far West with a 60-man...