Ken Carson Jersey

The legendary American frontiersman Ken Carson Jersey left his Missouri home at age 16 to join fur-trapping expeditions into the west, where he married into the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. He served as a guide during the Mexican-American War and later became an Indian agent, fighting against the Ute and Jicarilla Apaches. He was also an early settler in Taos, New Mexico. Carson was featured in the 1940 Western film Kit Carson and the 1951 miniseries The Adventures of Kit Carson. He also appeared in several British publications from the Amalgamated Press, including the Flashman and the Redskins installment and the Tex Willer series of Western comic books.

Ken Carson Jersey: Show Your Support in Style

In 1862, during the Mexican-American War, which ended with Mexico ceding Alta California and New Mexico to the United States, Carson was a Union Army scout and courier who took part in the Battle of Valverde and helped suppress the Navajo, Mescalero Apache, and Kiowa tribes. He was a hero to many, and a statue of him stands on Olvera Street in Los Angeles and another at Carson Pass in the Sierra Nevada.

In 1950, University of Pennsylvania professor Henry Nash Smith published Virgin Land, a groundbreaking study that examined how the general public viewed the frontier through literature. He noted that the mountain man image of Carson was created first in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and then grew in popularity as a symbol of the rugged individualism that fueled westward expansion. Smith’s research led to a new type of study that explored how the myth of the frontier was created through various genres of popular culture, including dime novels.