Journal-Advocate (Sterling)

What should we call that 14er above Crestone?

- Allen Best mostly tracks Colorado’s energy and water transition­s, sometimes taking time out to study history, at Bigpivots.com.

My hike up Kit Carson Peak in June 2000 began with great ambition and ended with confusion. Confusion remains now, almost 24 years later, if in a different way. We’re not sure what to call the 14,167-foot summit in the Sangre de Cristo Range.

My 12 hours above treeline that day left me hypoxic, my brain suffering from too little oxygen. I insisted that the route down took us the west side of Willow Lake, but my companions knew better.

Now I contemplat­e what to call Kit Carson from the floor of the San Luis Valley. A proposal before the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board would have us call it Frustum Peak. A frustum is a flat-topped cone or pyramid.

Still others prefer Crestone, as was considered — but rejected — by a federal board in 2011. Two other 14,000-foot peaks, Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle, lie a short distance away. Three 14ers named Crestone? One stone too many. Other names may yet be considered.

Colorado also has a town and a county named Kit Carson, but neither is up for change as they are not on federal land.

The state advisory board members will resume their discussion on Jan. 24. They will also review alternativ­es to Garfield County’s Dead Mexican Gulch, Jefferson County’s Redskin Creek and Redskin Mountain, and Montezuma County’s Negro Draw.

Whatever they recommend will be just that. The U.S. Board of Geographic Names has final authority for names on federal lands as Colorado seeks to cleanse its geographic drawers of names with tawdry historical footnotes. Earlier this year, the 14er west of Denver gained a new name, Blue Sky. It had been called Evans, after the territoria­l governor in 1864 who seemingly turned a blind eye to the Sand Creek Massacre.

Christophe­r Houston “Kit” Carson has a more confused and interestin­g story. Born in Kentucky, reared in Missouri, he fled an apprentice­ship in leathermak­ing for western adventures. As a fur trapper, he was quite successful. He survived.

Like other trappers, he found friends — and foes — among the native Americans, taking two of them as spouses. One called it quits, putting his belongings outside their teepee, as was the custom.

Taos was his favored home. His remains are buried there along with those of Josefa, his final wife. They both died in southeaste­rn Colorado, at Boggsville, near today’s Las Animas. By then, he was General Carson in the U.S. Army.

Consult “Blood and Thunder,” by Hampton Sides, for an immensely rewarding read about Carson. Sides acknowledg­es the complexiti­es of Carson and other frontiersm­en. “The mountain men lived with Indians, fought alongside and against them, loved them, married them, buried them, gambled and smoked with them,” he writes.

Trappers unwittingl­y left a more damning legacy.

“As the forerunner­s of Western civilizati­on, creeping up the river valleys and across the mountain passes, the trappers brought small pox and typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath they whispered the coming of an unimaginab­le force, of a gathering shadow on the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way.”

That is the conundrum of Carson. It‘s also the question many of us ask ourselves. Will we leave the world a better place — or worse? Or both?

While in the U.S. Army, Carson was responsibl­e for corralling the recalcitra­nt Navajo, who had long been feared by Spanish, Hispanic and Anglo settlers because of their persistent raiding and sometimes killing. He complained to superiors about the lack of provisions for the Navajo as he marched them to an encampment in eastern New Mexico. Once there, a third died.

Afterward, although gravely ill, Carson accompanie­d Ute

leaders to Washington, D.C. at their request to represent them in meetings with President Ulysses Grant and others.

His story was complicate­d.

Carson was mythologiz­ed in his own time. Today, we tend to idealize Native Americans even while we fail, in some important ways, to pay them their due, such as their water rights in the Colorado River Basin.

A former newspaper columnist in Colorado Springs responded to my rumination­s on Facebook with this: “In our re-naming craze, we should not name anything after humans any more. It turns out that all humans put their pants on one leg at a time.”

Conquerors generally name things in their own honor. Sometimes, we do honor the vanquished. To honor Utes, among Colorado’s 14ers we also have Antero, Shavano, and Tabeguache. We have none to honor Navajos, who call themselves Diné. If they emphatical­ly dislike Kit Carson, so far they have not proposed an replacemen­t.

We already have a Conundrum Peak, near Aspen.

I suggest Complicate­d Peak.

Mount Confusion could work, too.

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