rison. Not a tree
or stump was left, within musket shot of the house, behind which an Indian
could secrete himself.

Almost of necessity, under these circumstances, any bright, active boy
would become a skilful marksman. A small garden was cultivated where corn,
beans and a few other vegetables were raised, but the main subsistence of
the family consisted of the game with which forest, meadow and lake were
stored. The settler usually reared his cabin upon the banks of some stream
alive with fishes. There were no schools to take up the time of the boys;
no books to read. Wild geese, ducks and other water fowl, sported upon the
bosom of the river or the lake, whose waters no paddle wheel or even keel
disturbed. Wild turkeys, quails, and pigeons at times, swept the air like
clouds. And then there was the intense excitement of occasionally bringing
down a deer, and even of shooting a ferocious grizzly bear or wolf or
catamount. The romance of the sea creates a Robinson Crusoe. The still
greater romance of the forest creates a Kit Carson. It often makes even an
old man's blood thrill in his veins, to contemplate the wild and wondrous
adventures, which this majestic continent opened to the pioneers of half a
century ago.

Gradually, in Kentucky, the Indians disappeared, either dying off, or
pursuing their game in the unexplored realms nearer the setting sun.
Emigrants, from the East, in large numbers entered the State. Game, both
in forest and meadow, became scarce; and the father of Kit Carson, finding
settlers crowding him, actually rearing their huts within two or three
miles of his cabin, abandoned his home to find more room in the still more
distant West.

Christopher was then the youngest child, a babe but one year old. The
wilderness, west of them, was almost unexplored. But Mr. Carson, at his
blazing fireside, had heard from the Indians, and occasionally from some
adventurous white hunter, glowing accounts of the magnificent prairies,
rivers, lakes and forests of the far West, reposing in the solitude and
the silence which had reigned there since the dawn of the creation.

There were no roads through the wilderness. The guide of the emigrants was
the setting sun. Occasionally they could take advantage of some Indian
trail, trodden hard by the moccasined feet of the savages, in single file,
through countless generations. Through such a country, the father of Kit
Carson commenced a journey of several hundred miles, w