On the boat I met Kit Carson. He was returning from putting his little daughter in a convent school in St. Louis. I was pleased with him and his manner of address at this first meeting. He was a man of medium height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a clear, steady blue eye and frank speech and manner--quiet and unassuming. Carson, then a little less than thirty-three years of age, was already a national character. The association which began at that time lasted to the end of the Mexican War. Washington, a city which saw many strange spectacles, had a novel sight on the June day of 1847 when Kit Carson entered it with letters from Frémont. In various phrase, this is the substance of what the newspapers of Washington, New York, and Boston said: Here is the man who has blazed paths for the Pathfinder from the mouth of the Missouri to the Golden Gate; who, in 1846, guided General Stephen W. Kearny's column of the Army of the West through New Mexico to the Pacific; who, when Kearny was surrounded and besieged by the Mexicans, brought Commodore Stockton's forces to the rescue; and who has just ridden from Los Angeles, nearly 4,000 miles, with a military escort for the first 1200 miles of the way, eluding or fighting Mexicans and Indians, as circumstances dictated, carrying to President Polk and to War Secretary Marcy the story of the conquest of California and of the raising of the Stars and Stripes along the Pacific coast. A little knowledge of history, coupled with even a smaller amount of historical imagination, will enable us to picture the sensation which Carson and his story caused at the Capital. Polk, Webster, Clay, and the other statesmen who met him were impressed with his quiet dignity, his candor and the absence of swagger in his demeanor. No longer could Congress listen with the old-time seriousness to the tales of the alleged Sahara barrenness of the western plains, for Frémont's story, just published in its first instalment, told of streams, of occasional tracts of timber, and of vast herds of buffalo. And here in Washington was the man who had piloted Frémont on his expeditions. From this time dates the decline of the myth of the Great American Desert, which the reports of Pike and of Long and Irving's chronicle of the overland march of the Astorians projected across the map of the second quarter of the nineteenth century from the western border of Missouri to the Sierra Nevada. With their imperialist notions, Senators Benton, Cass, and Douglas saw in Carson the advance courier of manifest destiny.