Two centuries after his birth, Kit Carson's name is found throughout the West -- from Colorado's Kit Carson County and Kit Carson Peak, to Nevada's Carson Valley, Carson River, and state capital, Carson City, to California's Carson Pass, Carson Spur and Kit Carson Lodge along Highway 88 near Kirkwood.

"Kit Carson was well known in his own time," says Guy Rocha, former Nevada State Archivist and a longtime Nevada historian, "and he was revered by most Americans."

Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson was born on Dec. 24, 1809, in Madison County, Ky., and grew up in Missouri. At 16, he joined a wagon caravan to New Mexico, where he would learn the art of beaver trapping.

"He's definitely one of the most famous, in terms of being part of exploratory parties," says David Antonucci, a Tahoe historian who has written about the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics and Mark Twain's travels at Tahoe, "one of the first Easterners to come out into California, even before the gold rush."

In 1829, Carson joined a trapping party into Apache territory, where he killed his first American Indian. He spent the 1830s traveling the West as a trapper, but with the beaver population declining, silk hats replacing beaver fur in American fashion, and an economic depression in the late 1830s, trapping was no longer a viable career, so he worked for a time as a hunter for William Bent in Colorado, supplying Bent's Fort with meat.

"I guess you could sum it up by saying, during his life, wherever the action was, he was, in the West," says Antonucci. "He was one of these larger-than-life characters that embodied the Western spirit."

In 1842, Carson returned to Missouri, where he met John C. Frémont on a Missouri River steamboat. This chance meeting would lead both Carson and Frémont to fame as Western explorers.

The Frémont expeditions

Born in 1813, John Charles Frémont grew up in South Carolina. When Frémont was a teenager, Joel R. Poinsett, a prominent Charlston statesman, became his patron. Poinsett was the first U.S. minister to Mexico (while there, he found the colorful tropical flower that would later bear his name in America), and became the secretary of war under President Martin Van Buren.

In 1838, Poinsett appointed his protégé, Frémont, to the newly organized Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, where Frémont learned much about topography and mapping north of the Missouri River. In 1841, Frémont married Jessie Benton, the young daughter of a Missouri senator.

"John C. Frémont's father-in-law was Thomas Hart Benton, U.S. senator from Missouri," says Rocha. A proponent of American expansionism, Sen. Benton appointed his new son-in-law to survey the Oregon Trail and the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1842.

In command of his first expedition at the age of 29, Frémont hired as a guide 33-year-old Kit Carson. Joining them was German topographer Charles Preuss, whose scientific eye for detail complemented Frémont's idealism and leadership, and Carson's experience as a frontiersman. That first expedition reached the Continental Divide, where Frémont climbed to the summit of a nearby mountain peak, which today bears his name.

In 1843, Frémont, Carson and Preuss undertook a second expedition -- this time past the Great Salt Lake and into the Oregon Territory. That winter, the group traveled south from Oregon, east of the Sierra Nevada, past Pyramid Lake, until they reached a river that they would name after Carson.

"They found the Carson River route that goes up to what is now called the Carson Pass area, up near Red Lake and Red Lake Peak," Rocha says. "At that juncture, which would have been in February of 1844, Frémont in his journals said that he and Charles Preuss, the cartographer, saw this big lake." The lake would later become known as Tahoe, with Frémont and Preuss being the first white men to document it. But that was only a brief stop in their journey.

"They did a pretty amazing thing," says Antonucci. "They crossed the Sierra in February of 1844, during the middle of winter, which was considered a suicide mission. The Washoes, which were helping to guide them, had told them, 'You're not going to make it,' and once Frémont decided to ascend the Sierra, the Washoes deserted the party."

"Then they went over the route into the San Joaquin Valley," Rocha says, "in the vicinity of what's now called Carson Pass. ... The experts think that they crossed closer to where Red Lake Peak is. Nearby, but not right at that spot where Highway 88 goes through." They eventually reached Sutter's Fort in Sacramento, then traveled to Southern California and made their way back through Las Vegas and Colorado, where Kit Carson remained. Frémont returned to Washington, D.C., to write about their adventures.

"It was a scientific expedition as well as a military expedition," Rocha says. "They had an eye on this part of the world. It was claimed by Mexico. They were trespassing. But they already had an idea that the United States was going to, at one time, take this from Mexico -- the concept of 'Manifest Destiny.' So, that's what the purpose of this expedition was: to know more about this area, with the design that the United States, at some point, was going to take it over. And, of course, it did within a very few short years."

Mexican-American War

In the summer of 1845, Frémont again joined Kit Carson for a third expedition, this time through Nevada's Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada. Frémont and Carson crossed the Sierra into Mexican-owned California through a pass north of Tahoe where, one year later, the Donner party would become trapped in a blizzard.

"In California, he and Frémont were involved in the Bear Flag Revolt -- in the overthrow of the Mexican government," Rocha says. "What Thomas Hart Benton had hoped to see came to pass, and they were instrumental in doing that."

At the same time, the U.S. declared war on Mexico, eventually taking over all of the West, from Texas to California. Commodore Robert F. Stockton, the American naval commander in California, made Kit Carson an officer, and Carson served as a courier, carrying messages from Frémont and Stockton back to Washington, D.C., and returning to California with messages from the president.

Weary of his repeated travels from one end of the continent to the other, Kit Carson settled in Taos, New Mexico, and took up ranching. In 1853, says Rocha, "he conducted a sheep drive, and there was a tremendous market for them in the state of California." Carson herded his sheep across Colorado, Wyoming and Nevada, and followed the river that had been named for him a decade earlier.

"By that time it was well known as the Carson River," says Rocha. "Then he went up through what is today Hope Valley and perhaps what is now Carson Pass, and took them into Sacramento and sold them. He made a lot of money on that."

The living legend

"He was mentioned prominently in the writings of Frémont, and later, other writers cast him in the role of an Indian fighter -- which he had done -- in some historic novels," Antonucci says, "and that's kind of where his reputation got built. There was a lot of legend associated with him."

In the 1850s, Carson worked as a scout, helping the U.S. Army hunt Indians in the Southwest. When the Civil War began in the 1860s, Carson joined the New Mexico infantry to support the Union. Carson later fought the Navajo for the U.S. Army in New Mexico, and other hostile Indian tribes in Texas.

"A lot of what he accomplished wasn't inflated. Kit Carson did a lot of things to explore frontier North America," Rocha says.

Kit Carson died in 1868 of an aortic aneurysm. He is buried at his former home in Taos, New Mexico, where today his house is a museum and national landmark.

"Carson City, Carson Valley, Carson Pass ... those were all derivative names," Rocha says, "all going back to the fact that Kit Carson came through here. His name is all over."

Even if people don't remember the legend of the fur trapper, trail guide, Union soldier and Indian hunter of the old West, at least they will remember his name.