September of 1829 found Kit Carson back again in New Mexico. It took the party nine days to ride from Los Angeles to the Colorado River. Thence they seem to have descended the Colorado to tidewater, to have crossed over to the Gila, and to have ascended the Gila to San Pedro. There was some more horse stealing, a little exchange on both sides between the whites and Indians in this line. The whites needed horses, for they had no other meat. Yet in some fashion they won up the Gila River to the copper mines of New Mexico; which, we may see, was ground already known to Carson. Here they cached their furs, since these would be contraband under the Spanish law, nearly all of these wanderings having taken place in the Spanish territory that was the western goal of the early commerce of the prairies.
In time the party turned up at Santa Fé, reaching that city in April, 1830, where the leader, Young, disposed of his furs, the net result for eighteen men during a term of one year being twenty-four thousand dollars. Kit Carson was now twenty-one years of age, and he was fully initiated in his calling. We can not appreciate these journeyings except by taking an accurate map of the great Western country, and following, finger by finger, along stream and across mountain, the course of the early voyagers.
This, however, is but the beginning. In the fall of 1830 the noted Western fur trader, Fitzpatrick, organized a strong party, and it was matter of course that Carson would find his way into it. This band visited the Platte River, whose long southern arm reaches so deep down into the heart of the Rockies. Thence, along good beaver waters, they moved over to the Green River, Pacific waters, also historic in the fur trade. We find them later in Jackson's Hole, east of the range, even today the center of a great game country. Thence they moved west to the Salmon River, into a country still one of the wildest parts of America; and there, much as a matter of fact, they joined others of their party, who had started out slightly in advance of them, and "for whom they had been looking," as one chronicler naïvely advises us. It was a search and a meeting in the heart of a wilderness many hundreds of miles in extent.