Almost of necessity, under these circumstances, any bright, active boy would become a skilful marksman.  A small garden was cultivated where corn, beans and a few other vegetables were raised, but the main subsistence of the family consisted of the game with which forest, meadow and lake were stored.  The settler usually reared his cabin upon the banks of some stream alive with fishes.  There were no schools to take up the time of the boys; no books to read.  Wild geese, ducks and other water fowl, sported upon the bosom of the river or the lake, whose waters no paddle wheel or even keel disturbed.  Wild turkeys, quails, and pigeons at times, swept the air like clouds.  And then there was the intense excitement of occasionally bringing down a deer, and even of shooting a ferocious grizzly bear or wolf or catamount.  The romance of the sea creates a Robinson Crusoe.  The still greater romance of the forest creates a Kit Carson.  It often makes even an old man’s blood thrill in his veins, to contemplate the wild and wondrous adventures, which this majestic continent opened to the pioneers of half a century ago.

Gradually, in Kentucky, the Indians disappeared, either dying off, or pursuing their game in the unexplored realms nearer the setting sun.  Emigrants, from the East, in large numbers entered the State.  Game, both in forest and meadow, became scarce; and the father of Kit Carson, finding settlers crowding him, actually rearing their huts within two or three miles of his cabin, abandoned his home to find more room in the still more distant West.

Christopher was then the youngest child, a babe but one year old.  The wilderness, west of them, was almost unexplored.  But Mr. Carson, at his blazing fireside, had heard from the Indians, and occasionally from some adventurous white hunter, glowing accounts of the magnificent prairies, rivers, lakes and forests of the far West, reposing in the solitude and the silence which had reigned there since the dawn of the creation.

There were no roads through the wilderness.  The guide of the emigrants was the setting sun.  Occasionally they could take advantage of some Indian trail, trodden hard by the moccasined feet of the savages, in single file, through countless generations.  Through such a country, the father of Kit Carson commenced a journey of several hundred miles, with his wife and three or four children, Kit being an infant in arms.  Unfortunately we are not informed of any of the particulars of this journey.  But we know, from numerous other cases, what was its general character.

It must have occupied two or three weeks.  All the family went on foot, making about fifteen miles a day.  They probably had two pack horses, laden with pots and kettles, and a few other essential household and farming utensils.  Early in the afternoon Mr. Carson would begin to look about for a suitable place of encampment for the night.  He would find, if possible, the picturesque banks of some running