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leave would be shot and that if they returned, they would “be received with a volley of bullets.”
    Carson knew his threat would not stop the Indians indefinitely, but it would buy time. At the darkest point of that night, he took a young Mexican runner aside and instructed him to run as fast as possible to Rayado and return with soldiers. Their lives depended on him, he whispered. The boy was long gone by sunrise. It was said that young runners could cover more than fifty miles in a day. Almost a full day passed before the Cheyennes reappeared. They were wearing their war paint. As their braves approached, Carson warned them that a scout had been sent ahead for help. If they attacked, he admitted to them, the Cheyennes would suffer large casualties but eventually they would win. He knew that. But he had many friends among the soldiers and they would know which people had committed this crime “and would be sure to visit upon the perpetrators a terrible retribution.”
    Indian scouts found the boy’s footprints, but with his long lead time they knew he couldnot be caught. Reluctantly, the war party withdrew. Two days later an army patrol under the command of Major James Henry Carleton arrived to escort Carson’s party safely to Rayado.
    As ruthlessly as Kit Carson often fought against the Indians, he also fought for them. In the early 1850s, he became the Indian agent—the government’s representative to the tribe—for the Mohauche Utes, or Utahs, and several Apache tribes. While the Apaches continued to fight, initially the Utes remained at peace with the white man. Carson worked for the best interests of the tribe and at times fought doggedly with officials in Washington. He even requested permission to live with the Utes on their reservation, which was denied. Utes came almost daily to his ranch for food and tobacco, which he had paid for himself and happily supplied to them. He was so respected by the tribe that he became known as “Father Kit,” and General Sherman once remarked, “Why his integrity is simply perfect. They [the Utes] know it, and they would believe him and trust him any day before me.”
    Unfortunately, when many Utes died from smallpox after receiving blankets from the government’s Indian supervisor, the tribe joined the Apaches on the warpath. Eventually this uprising was smothered, but Carson’s relationship with the tribes of New Mexico never completely recovered. The days when the Indians had freely roamed the plains were ending. During the gold rush, more than a hundred thousand people flocked to the West, and the Indians were pushed off their traditional lands onto reservations. Carson watched this clash of civilizations from his ranch and eventually began to believe that the two peoples could not live together peacefully and that it was best for the Indians to live far away from the white settlers.

In 1868, Carson led a delegation of Utes to Washington, where he negotiated the “Kit Carson Treaty” that guaranteed peace, territory, and government assistance to the tribe.
    By 1860, the issue of slavery had raised passions in the West, although in that region slaves were mostly Mexican and Indian. While many people in New Mexico sympathized with the Confederacy, Carson remained loyal to the Union. When the Civil War began in 1861, he was appointed a colonel in the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry. Years earlier, young Kit Carson had walked into the wilderness to live by wit and skill, and finally civilization, or at least the shadow of it, had caught up with him. He moved his family to Albuquerque and went to war.
    Carson’s first engagement was the 1862 battle of Val Verde, in which both Union and Confederate troops suffered large casualties but neither side declared victory. After two days’ hard fighting, the Union troops withdrew and the Rebels made a wide swing around the garrison at Fort Craig and proceeded up the Rio Grande toward Albuquerque and Santa Fe. After that