This narrative source is a Wikipedia article which mentions Matthew Kinkead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Carson#cite_note-0 It accompanies a photograph of Kit Carson (as a Brigadier General) for sale on Ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com:80/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130247527252&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:US:1123 "Born in Madison County, Kentucky near the city of Richmond, Carson was raised in the country near Franklin, Missouri, where his family moved in 1811 when he was about one year old. Carson's father, Lindsey Carson, was a farmer of Scots-Irish descent, who had fought in the RevolutionaryWar under General Wade Hampton. There were a total of 15 Carson children: five by Lindsey Carson's first wife, and ten by Kit's mother, Rebecca Robinson. Kit was the eleventh child in the family. The Carson family settled on a tract of land owned by the sons of Daniel Boone, who had purchased the land from the Spanish prior to the Louisiana Purchase. The Boone and Carson families became good friends, working, socializing, and intermarrying. Carson was eight when his father was killed by a falling tree while clearing land. Lindsey Carson's death reduced the Carson family to a desperate poverty, forcing young Kit to drop out of school to work on the family farm, as well as engage in hunting. At age 14, Kit was apprenticed to a saddlemaker (Workman's Saddleshop) in the settlement of Franklin, Missouri. Franklin was situated at the eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail, which had opened two years earlier. Many of the clientele at the saddleshop were trappers and traders, from whom Kit would hear their stirring tales of the Far West. Carson is reported to have found work in the saddle shop suffocating: he once stated "the business did not suit me, and I concluded to leave". At sixteen, Carson secretly signed on with a large merchant caravan heading to Santa Fe; his job was to tend the horses, mules, and oxen. During the winter of 1826-1827 he stayed with Matthew Kinkead, a trapper and explorer, in Taos, New Mexico, then known as the capital of the fur trade in the Southwest. Kinkead had been a friend of Carson's father in Missouri, and he taught Carson the skills of a trapper. Carson also began learning the necessary languages and became fluent in Spanish, Navajo, Apache, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute. During the American Civil War he helped organize New Mexican infantry volunteers, which saw action at Valverde in 1862. Most of his military actions, however, were directed against the Navajo Indians, many of whom had refused to be confined upon a distant reservation set up by the government." Dick Kinkead 2562