A Right Fine Life: Kit Carson on the Santa Fe Trail
Mr Workman was right fond of saying Franklin’s gonna be a boomtown Outfitting wagon trains could soon be a right prosperous enterprise But rigging out other folks for adventures sure weren’t my idea of living The first real mountain men I laid eyes on worked on the wagon trains as guides and buffalo hunters Some were tough old buzzards with long tangled beards Others weren’t much older than me I repaired their gear while they spun their far-fetched yarns They showed me how to make a sheath for a skinning knife and a possibles bag for squirreling away any such thing as might come in handy I made myself a fancy one from scraps with my name tooled on the flap I put a flint and a bit of iron a button an old needle a length of string and a sliver of soap inside
I’m ready to be a mountain man I announced That’s a hoot little Kit they laughed Ha Youngun said Gabe Ya have pluck But I don’t reckon you’d last a day in the wild without a prodigious amount of luck They whacked each other on the back laughing fit to be tied If it’s luck that’s needed I reckon I can make me some danged luck I mumbled
Just shy of my seventeenth birthday I crossed the Missouri River by moonlight With Pappy’s old gun Deadeye over my shoulder my possibles bag and just the clothes on my back I started out cross-country eighty miles to Fort Osage
