In short, Kit Carson and his kind had really explored the West, and by 1842 had rendered it safe for the so-called “exploration” that was to make its wonders public. It is Kit Carson who might better have the title of “pathfinder.” Yet this was something to which he himself would not have listened, for well enough he knew that he was not the first. Ahead of him were other apostles of the fur trade, so that even Kit Carson took the West at second hand, as later we shall see. He would not have vaunted himself as knowing very much of the West. Yet even to-day men of the East are exploring the West, and writing gravely of their “discoveries.” Five feet six, with twinkling blue-gray eyes, a large and well-developed head, with hair sandy and well brushed back, Kit Carson at his best was the reverse of impressive. He was simple, peaceable and quiet in disposition, temperate and strictly moral in a time and place where these qualities made one a marked man. Yet throughout the length and breadth of the Indian country this little man was more feared, single and alone, than any other trapper or Indian fighter in all the West. He was respected as well as feared. One who knew him well said: “Carson and truth mean the same thing. He is always the same, gallant and disinterested. He is kind-hearted and averse to all quarrelsome and turbulent scenes. He is known far and wide for his sober habits, strict honor, and great regard for truth.” One of Carson’s historians describes him as five feet nine inches in height, as weighing one hundred and sixty pounds, and as having a “dark and piercing eye.” This “dark and piercing eye” is something that, as we have noted, the average writer on Western themes and Western adventures will not willingly let die. As a matter of fact, however, we are to believe that our hero was a much smaller man than this description makes him out to be, and that, though of well-developed and compact frame, he was by no means of imposing presence. We shall do better with his raiment, for here we take hold upon the characteristics of the West at its most romantic time. In the garb habitual with him for more than half his life, Carson was clad in a fringed buckskin shirt, with leggings of the same material, also befringed. The shirt was handsomely embroidered with quills of the porcupine, and as much might be said for the moccasins that protected his feet. His cap was of fur, sometimes of fox skin, sometimes of ’coon skin, mayhap in days of great prosperity, of otter.