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these men.
    Crockett became a symbol of the spirit of Texas and America, a man who willingly gave his life for freedom. His last known words, written to his daughter weeks before his death, have often been quoted: “I am rejoiced at my fate. I would rather be in my present situation than be elected to a seat in Congress for life. Do not be uneasy about me, I am with my friends … Farewell, David Crockett.”
    His son John Wesley Crockett served two terms in Congress and finally was able to pass an amended version of the land bill that his father had initially introduced. Like so many others, he spent years trying to uncover the facts of his father’s death—but in his lifetime no reliable witnesses stepped forward.
    More than one hundred twenty years later, the larger-than-life character Davy Crockett, the King of the Wild Frontier, was introduced to a new generation of young people in a television series—coonskin cap, tall tales, and all—that captivated the nation and had millions of Americans singing his praises, saluting his courage, and romanticizing the frontier way of life.

KIT CARSON
    Duty Before Honor
     

 
    Many years later, in the warmth of his own memories, Kit Carson would describe what happened at the rendezvous in Green River as an “affair of honor.” Although few mountain trappers took much note of the year, Carson put it at the summer of 1835. For those men, who mostly lived in small roaming bands, a rendezvous was an important event. Hundreds of mountain men and natives from local tribes would camp together for a month or, as he wrote in his autobiography, “as long as the money and credit of the trappers last” to trade goods and tales. Coffee, sugar, and flour, then considered luxuries, sold for two dollars a pint, and ordinary blankets for as much as twenty-five dollars apiece. There were daily contests, including shooting, archery, and knife and tomahawk throwing; there was fiddling and dancing; there was drinking and revelry; and, naturally, there was gambling and brawling. The laws of these camps were whatever the strongest men could enforce, and arguments often were settled with rifles at twenty paces. Among the people at this particular meeting on the Green River in Wyoming was an especially disagreeable French Canadian trapper named Joseph Chouinard, who was said to be “exceedingly overbearing” and who, “upon the slightest pretext … was sure to endeavor to involve some of the trappers in a quarrel.” Other trappers avoided him, until one day he violently grabbed a beautiful young Arapaho woman named Singing Grass. Holding tightly on to her arms, he began kissing her and rubbing himself against her.
    That was finally enough for Kit Carson. He was small in stature, no more than five feet four, but large in courage. Brandishing his hunting knife, he warned Chouinard to let go of the Indian woman. “I assume the responsibility of ordering you to cease your threats,” he said, “or I will be under the necessity of killing you.”
    It was a challenge Chouinard could not turn down. He released the girl and angrily walked off toward his own lodge. Minutes later, the two men faced each other on horseback, as knights had done hundreds of years earlier. The French Canadian carried a rifle; Kit Carson was armed with a single-barrel dragoon pistol. At the mark, they raced toward each other. When they were only a few feet apart, both men fired; Carson’s shot rippedinto Chouinard’s right forearm, throwing off his aim so that, as Carson later recalled, “[H]is ball passed my head, cutting my hair and the powder burning my eye…. During our stay in camp we had no more trouble with the bully Frenchman.”

Kit Carson earned his reputation among mountain men when he stood up to the bully Chouinard at the 1835 rendezvous, as seen in this 1858 woodcut.
    As the trappers cheered him, Carson walked off with Singing Grass.
    Christopher Carson was born in Madison County, Kentucky, on Christmas