Although more than forty-two years have passed since Carson's death many of his acquaintances are still living in various parts of the West. In talks which I have had with some of them in the past year or two they revealed him on a side which the historical and fiction writers never disclosed. As a youth on the plains I caught a glimpse of him in the last year of his life, and as he had always been a hero to me as a boy beyond any other frontier character, I was surprised at the absence in his appearance of everything traditionally associated with the aspect of an Indian fighter. Although he was still alert and resolute, his face had the kindly look which reminded me of Father De Smet, the head of the mission among the Flatheads on the Bitter Root River, in Montana, whom I had met shortly before that time. "One of my most vivid recollections of Carson," says Major Rafael Chacon, of Trinidad, Colorado, who was an officer in his company of scouts in the campaign of 1855 against the Utes and Apaches, and who was a captain and later on a major in the First Regiment of New Mexican Volunteers in the Civil War, of which Carson was the colonel, "was of one day in 1862 in Albuquerque, when I saw him lying on an Indian blanket in front of his quarters, with his children gleefully crawling all over him and taking from his pockets the candy and the lumps of sugar which he had purchased for them. Their mother, his second wife, Dona Josefa Jaamillo, to whom he was ardently devoted, he called by the pet name of Chipita." Jacob Beard, eighty-two years of age, of Monrovia, California, who became acquainted with Carson at Taos in 1847, says one of his most pleasant memories is of the day in 1852 when, while working on a ranch near San Francisco, he met Carson, who had just reached that city with a great drove of sheep which he and a few men had conducted from New Mexico, nearly a thousand miles over deserts, across swift and dangerous rivers, and through wild mountain passes, a large part of the course being infested by Indians. "Kit, on seeing you I feel homesick," he exclaimed, "and I think I ought to go back with you." Carson became sympathetic at once, and said: "Well, Jake, we have only one life to live, and in living it we should make the most of our opportunities." Beard added, in telling this to me: "That settled the matter. I returned to the ranch, adjusted my affairs there, saddled my mule, caught up with Carson's party, went back to New Mexico, and lived there for many years afterward."