But however primitive Kentucky may have been there were apparently too many settlers to please the elder Carson; for a year after the birth of Kit, he packed his effects upon the backs of his horses, and with his family took up the trail for the more distant west. They crossed the Mississippi and settled in that vast country later ceded by Napoleon to the United States, and then known as Upper Louisiana. Here Kit grew up among the wild spirits of the border, accustomed to the idea of danger and renowned even in his boyhood as a rifle shot, a hunter and the possessor of invincible resolution. He served two years as apprentice to a saddler; then the stories of the Santa Fé trail, the dangers and wonders thereof, appealed to him so strongly that he joined a party about to start over it. This was the day when vast herds of buffalo roamed the great plains, when the Rocky Mountains were almost a thing of fable. And at the age of eighteen we find Kit Carson in the Mexican city of Santa Fé, with the whirl of the wonderful southwest all about him. The fur trade was approaching its height and the commerce of the prairies had centered about the town. To it came all the wonderful characters of the border, and from it started more expeditions than from any other city in the west. Young Carson fell in love with the wild country; with rifle, hatchet and knife, he penetrated the hills to the north and there fell in with Kin Cade, an old mountaineer who taught him much of the lore of the West which afterward proved so useful to him. Later, Kit joined the train of a trader going back to Missouri. The Santa Fé trail was a thousand miles long, and through a savage region of wolves and Indians, and waterless deserts. But Kit did not mind this; he liked the toil of it and the danger. But, half-way over the trail, the thought came to him that he was going back “East.” At a ford on the Arkansas River they encountered another band of traders on their way to the west; Kit joined them and returned to Santa Fé. Reaching the fur market once more, Young Carson engaged with a Colonel Trammel, who was leading a trading expedition southward to the rich mines of Chihuahua. Having learned Spanish from Kin Cade, he was now to serve as interpreter. Returning from this venture he went to Taos, a trapper’s town about a hundred and fifty miles north of Santa Fé. Here he met the trapper, Ewing Young, for the first time, and was engaged as a camp cook. But Young was not long in seeing the qualities of his youthful recruit, and when he took up his march for California, where we find his party in the first chapter of “In the Rockies with Kit Carson,” Kit was a full fledged trapper.