In the spring of 1832 Carson’s party moved to the Laramie River; moved again to the headwaters of the South Fork of the Platte, and caught beaver and fought Indians for a few months; from the Laramie to the Bayou Salade, or Ballo Salade, as it was sometimes spelled in those days. These operations were carried on in the heart of the most dangerous Indian country of the West. Heretofore it had been the custom of the trappers to go in parties of considerable size, so that they might successfully meet the Indians, who even thus made affairs dangerous enough. The quality of Carson’s spirit may therefore be seen when we discover him, with only two companions, breaking away for a solitary beaver hunt in the mountains in the heart of the range. Yet these three were fortunate, and returned to Taos in the fall of 1832 well laden with furs. At Taos, Carson met Captain Lee of the United States Army, a partner of that Bent who founded Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas. Captain Lee had a cargo of goods that he wished to take to the rendezvous of the trapping bands for that year. Kit joined him for the time, and in October of 1832 they pushed on, traveling part of the time on the old Spanish trail to California. They reached the White River, the Green River, the “Windy” River, and here, as though by special plan, they met their band of trappers, erected their skin lodges, and passed the winter. Kit joined the Fitzpatrick party for a time in the next spring, but after his own restless fashion broke away again, with only three companions. In the summer of 1833 we find the four on the Laramie River, doing independent trapping and taking their chances as to Indians. It was about this time that Kit had his historic adventure with two bears, which chased him up a tree, and which he repelled by beating them over the noses with a branch broken from the tree. The ever-wise biographer Abbott, who gravely informs us that Crockett killed “voracious grizzly bears” in the cane-brakes of Tennessee, with equal accuracy advises us that the “grizzly bear can climb a tree as well as a man.” Herein we find some mystery about Carson’s bear adventure. Carson as a hunter would have been the first to know that a grizzly bear can not climb a tree unless it be a horizontal one. There is no doubt, however, that some such adventure took place with some sort of bears, and that Carson saved his leggings if not his life by a knowledge of the tenderness of a bear’s nose.