Carson was now living in a West experiencing sudden and general change. The old West was nearly gone, and all its ancient ways. The government at Washington was familiar with the doings of this quiet little man of New Mexico, and it was suggested that he would make a good Indian agent for the district of New Mexico. Witness, therefore, the last stage of Kit Carson’s career, that of counselor and guide to those savage peoples whose enemy and conqueror he had been. At this time the Utes and the Jicarilla Apaches were rebellious, and one of Carson’s first acts was to ride two hundred and fifty miles into the Ute country. He led the forces that broke up the coalition between the Utes and the Apaches. It was Carson, old Indian fighter, who was one of the first to say that the Indians must be “rounded up and taught to till the soil.” This was his belief even at the time when he acted as guide for Colonel St. Vrain and his New Mexican volunteers, in the expedition that routed the Indians at the Saugache Pass. The Indians that had feared Carson in the past came at length to trust him, and indeed to love him. He was known as “father” by many a warlike tribe. Thus he became the friend of the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes and the Kiowas, peoples scattered over a wide range of country. Behold now, therefore, our trapper, guide and scout fairly settled in life. Remember also that he was not the guide of Frémont in that last fatal, starving expedition when, blundering foolishly once more into the wilderness of the Rockies in the winter-time, and undertaking the wild project of crossing eight feet of snow with a pack-train, that officer once more came near paying the penalty of his ignorance by his own life and the lives of all his party. It was Bill Williams who was guide this time, a Bill Williams that had not been trapping on the Del Norte for years, and who might have been forgiven memory less keen than had been Carson’s when he saw the two little peaks, far away in the Coast Range, in that other starving march of this same leader. It was to Taos that the enfeebled survivors of Frémont’s disastrous expedition found their way in search of help. If Kit Carson reproached his former “leader” it is not on record. Never was there a leader whose follies won him greater praise. Later in his life, leaving the United States service as Indian agent, Carson was made colonel of a regiment of New Mexican volunteers, during the War of the Rebellion. He was brevetted brigadier-general of volunteers. In the closing years of his life he was known as “the general” among his friends, just as he was always known as “father” among the Indians who dwelt about him.