h useful and interesting data, most unfortunately, Kit Carson
considers that they are uninteresting minutiae which have pertained to
the every-day business of his life and no persuasion can induce him to
enter upon their relation. Not so when he is entertaining some of the
brave chiefs of the Indian nations whose friendship he has won by his
brave deeds. If they are his guests, or he himself theirs, then their
delight to hear kindles a pride in his breast to relate. He knows that
he will not, by them, be called a boaster.

Before quitting the mountains, Kit Carson married an Indian girl to
whom he was most devotedly attached. By this wife he had one child,
a daughter. Soon after the birth of this child, his wife died. His
daughter, he watched over with the greatest solicitude. When she
reached a suitable age, he sent her to St. Louis for the purpose of
giving her the advantages of a liberal education. Indeed most of Kit
Carson's hard earnings, gained while he was a hunter on the Arkansas,
were devoted to the advancement of his child. On arriving at maturity
she married and with her husband settled in California.

The libertine custom of indulging in a plurality of wives, as adopted
by many of the mountaineers, never received the sanction, in thought,
word or action, of Kit Carson. His moral character may well be held up
as an example to men whose pretensions to virtuous life are greater.
Although he was continually surrounded by licentiousness he proved
true to her who had first gained his affections. For this honoring of
virtue he is indebted in a measure to the present sway which he holds
over the western Indian races. While their chiefs are seldom men of
virtuous act or intent, they are high in their appreciation of, and
just in their rewards to those whose lives are patterns of honor
and chastity. The Indian woman, concerning whom no truthful tale of
dereliction can be told, when she arrives at the requisite age, is
invested with great power in her tribe. One of their ancient customs,
well authenticated, was to honor the virtuous women of their tribe
with sacred titles, investing them, in their blind belief, with power
to call down the favor, in behalf of the people, of their Manitou, or
Great Spirit. But every woman who aspired to this honor, was required
upon a certain day in the year, to run the gauntlet of braves. This
was sometimes a terrible scene. All the warriors of the tribe, arrayed
in their fiercest war