Much of Carson's work as agent has been overlooked because of the focus on his mountain man explorer or blood and thunder image. This was a significant period for him as well as the region, which experienced a large folk migration of Hispanos into Indian lands, as well as the Colorado gold rush and its impact on the tribes. Carson's view of the best future for the nomadic Indian evolved. By the late 1850s, he recommended, to make way for the increasing number of white settlers, they should give up hunting and become herders and farmers, be provided with missionaries to Christianize them, and move onto reserves in their homeland but distant from settlements with their bad influence of ardent spirits, disease, and unscrupulous Hispanos and Anglos. Carson predicted, "If permitted to remain as they are, before many years they will be utterly extinct."