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Kit
 As thousands of Forty-niners streamed west, many carried
with them the explorer John C. Frémont's official reports of his
expeditions into the Rockies in the early 1840s, which
portrayed his scout, Kit
Carson, as fearless, chivalrous, and resourceful. But these reports
paled in comparison to the sensational "dime novels" about Carson
written by people who had never been west themselves, and certainly had
never met the former mountain man.
 "He was one of the first legends in his own time, a case
where people had their image of what a Westerner was, that sometimes
didn't square with the real thing. Kit Carson was up at a Fort Laramie.
Somebody came over and said, 'I hear you're Kit Carson; is that right?'
And, he was kind of a laconic man, he said, 'Yeah, I am.' And the
person from the East looked him up and down and compared him to what he
had read, and he goes, 'No , I don't think you really are Kit Carson.'"
Dayton Duncan
The real Carson knew enough not to gamble his future on
finding gold. Instead, he bought some 6,500 sheep from the Navajos at
fifty cents a head and began driving them toward the gold fields, where
he hoped to sell them for more than ten times that amount. Even here,
his fame preceded him. When he drove his sheep onto a ferry boat on the
Green River in Wyoming, the boatman refused to let him pay.
 "They let him trail his six thousand five hundred sheep
across for free -- that's quite a savings -- in order that they could
name it Kit Carson's Cut Off, cause they figured if people heard about
that, that's the one they would take, and they'd make a lot of money
off his name."
Dayton Duncan
Soon there would be Carson Lake, Carson River, Carson Pass,
Carson Sink, Carson City -- and more. The old scout was philosophical
about it all. Someone once showed him the cover of a particularly lurid
book about himself and asked about the story it contained. "It may be
true," he answered, "but I ain't got any recollection of it."
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