False Alarm.

Kit Carson had left his home in Missouri when only a boy and he
was now in the prime of a vigorous young manhood. The years since
he turned his back upon his old home had been busy and eventful
ones and now, as is often the case with those placed as was he, he
longed to visit the scenes of his childhood, and to meet and shake
the hands of those of his old friends who were still among the
living.

In the spring of 1842, Carson went eastward with a train of wagons,
carrying goods to the States. When the borders of Missouri were
reached, he bade his companions goodbye and made his way back to
his old home. His experience was touching. His parents were dead,
the old building which would ever linger in his memory, had tumbled
down and nearly every one whom he met was a stranger. The cheeks
of the hardy mountaineer were wet with tears, and with a sigh, he
turned his face away forever.

Carson had never seen a large city, and he made his way to St.
Louis, where he spent more than a week in sight seeing. Before the
end of that time, the old yearning for the mountains, prairies and
streams of the West came back to him, and he engaged passage on a
steamer up the Missouri.

On the same boat John C. Fremont was a passenger. He was two years
younger than Carson and had been commissioned Second Lieutenant
in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, in 1838. Four years later
he projected a geographical survey of the entire territory of the
United States from the Missouri River to the Pacific.