Before quitting the mountains, Kit Carson married an Indian girl to whom he was most devotedly attached.  By this wife he had one child, a daughter.  Soon after the birth of this child, his wife died.  His daughter, he watched over with the greatest solicitude.  When she reached a suitable age, he sent her to St. Louis for the purpose of giving her the advantages of a liberal education.  Indeed most of Kit Carson’s hard earnings, gained while he was a hunter on the Arkansas, were devoted to the advancement of his child.  On arriving at maturity she married and with her husband settled in California.

The libertine custom of indulging in a plurality of wives, as adopted by many of the mountaineers, never received the sanction, in thought, word or action, of Kit Carson.  His moral character may well be held up as an example to men whose pretensions to virtuous life are greater.  Although he was continually surrounded by licentiousness he proved true to her who had first gained his affections.  For this honoring of virtue he is indebted in a measure to the present sway which he holds over the western Indian races.  While their chiefs are seldom men of virtuous act or intent, they are high in their appreciation of, and just in their rewards to those whose lives are patterns of honor and chastity.  The Indian woman, concerning whom no truthful tale of dereliction can be told, when she arrives at the requisite age, is invested with great power in her tribe.  One of their ancient customs, well authenticated, was to honor the virtuous women of their tribe with sacred titles, investing them, in their blind belief, with power to call down the favor, in behalf of the people, of their Manitou, or Great Spirit.  But every woman who aspired to this honor, was required upon a certain day in the year, to run the gauntlet of braves.  This was sometimes a terrible scene.  All the warriors of the tribe, arrayed in their fiercest war costume and armed at every point with lance, bow and arrow, knife, tomahawk, etc., were drawn up under command of the principal chief, in single line.  At the head of this line was placed a kind of chaplet, or crown, the possession of which by any woman was supposed to confer the power of necromancy or magic, rendering her able to heal diseases and to foretell events.  The line having been formed, all of the young maidens of the tribe were drawn up in a body at the further extremity and any of them who aspired to the possession of the chaplet was at liberty, having first uncovered her back and breast as far as her waist, to march before the line of warriors within ten paces of their front and, if she lived to reach it, take possession of the crown.  On the other hand, it was the duty of any warrior, who knew aught by word or deed against the virtue of the advancing maiden, to kill her upon the spot.  If one arrow was shot at her, the whole band instantly poured a flight of arrows into her bare and defenceless bosom