It was in November that Davy and his regiment set out for Tennessee. Just how long the trip lasted, we do not know, but before it ended they met volunteers from the Tennessee mountains bound to New Orleans. Among them was a younger brother of Davy’s, as well as many of his old neighbors. The regiment to which Davy belonged seems to have gone to Fort Montgomery, near Fort Mims, and then towards Pensacola, and back and forth between the Choctawhatchee and Escambia Rivers, intent, for the most part, on getting something to eat. Some of their adventures are of interest, but must be referred to without any attempt to fix their dates. Davy tells them as they happen to come into his head, and his book was written twenty years after.
On reaching the Escambia, they found a flooded country, and waded a mile and a half in cold water up to their shoulders. Reaching the high land and yellow pine timber, they were drying themselves when their spies came “leaping the brush like so many old bucks,” with the news that they had found a hostile Creek camp. After the braves and Major Russell had been suitably decorated with war-paint they set out for the place, but before they reached it, two of their Choctaw scouts treacherously killed two Creeks whom they had met. The fight was thus prevented, as the firing alarmed the Creek camp, and the hostiles made good their escape. Davy’s party found that the scouts had already cut off the heads of the Creeks, and each warrior in turn walked up to the heads and struck them with a war-club. Davy says that after he had done this, the Choctaws danced about him, struck him on his shoulders, and called him “Warrior! Warrior!”
Soon after this they found a Spaniard and his wife and four children killed and scalped, and Davy says the sight made him feel “ticklish.”
After scouting about between the Escambia and the Choctawhatchee, the regiment divided, a part going to Baton Rouge, where they joined Jackson on his way to New Orleans. From now on, Davy was looking out for his stomach, hunting everything alive along the trail. Hawks, squirrels, small birds, gophers, and even wood-rats, were thrown into one pile each night by the hunters, and then divided.
One evening Davy came in without fur or feather for the pile; but there was a sick man in his mess, and Davy intended to feed him, even if he himself went hungry. He found Captain Cowen, his commander, broiling a turkey gizzard, and was told that the turkey had been killed by Major Smiley, and divided among the sick. Davy went straight to Smiley’s camp-fire, and he, too, was broiling a turkey’s gizzard. Davy told the Major that it was the first time he had heard of a turkey with two gizzards, but it ended with the sick man going hungry.
The next morning, Davy and his mess went on ahead, desperate with hunger. There appears to have been no attempt to preserve military discipline. For three days they went without food, and were ready to “lie down and die.” At last they came to a wide prairie, crossed it, and found a large creek and wooded bottom-lands. Then a squirrel was seen, and Davy shot him, but the stricken animal managed to get into a hole in the tree, thirty feet from the ground. Davy climbed the tree, without a limb to help him, and fished the dead creature out of the hole. He says that showed how hungry he was. Shortly after he and the man with him shot two more squirrels, and also started up a flock of wild turkeys, finally killing two of them. The hunters then raised a shout, and were soon joined by the rest of their party, when they cooked the game and ate it, without salt or bread. The next day a relief corps came back with a small quantity of flour and other food from Fort Decatur, and some bee-trees were also found, the honey making some of the men sick.
Reaching Fort Decatur, the company could get no more than one ration of meat, and no bread. Davy, who never spared himself, crossed the river and went to Black Warrior’s town, where he tried to buy food. Taking off his large hat, he offered an Indian a silver dollar if he would fill it with corn. The Indian had no corn, but he told Davy of another of the tribe, who had some left. When the latter was asked to sell part of his precious store, he refused silver.
“You got some bullet?” he asked.
Davy produced ten bullets, for which he got his hatful of corn.
The Indian weighed the matter in his mind, and asked again, “You got some powder?”