For ten charges of powder another hatful was bought, and tied up in Davy’s hunting-shirt. He said that fifty silver dollars would not have bought it. After much tramping, going out of the way to get rations, and leaving as many as thirteen horses played out in a single day, they reached Fort Strother, on the Tennessee, where there was at last plenty of food. Here it was that the volunteers going to New Orleans were met, among them Davy’s younger brother.
From there Davy went directly home to his family. “I found them all well, and doing well,” he says, “and although I was only a rough backwoodsman, they seemed mighty glad to see me, however little the quality folks might suppose it. For I do reckon we love as hard in the backwoods country as any people in the whole creation.”
[VIII.]
BEAN’S CREEK
Two years on Bean’s Creek—A new girl in the family—The death of Polly Crockett—Some years of peace—The prairie schooner and the steamboat make their appearance—Davy marries again—He makes another excursion into Alabama, and nearly dies of fever—Saved by a whole bottle of Bateman’s Drops—Returns home and moves to Shoal Creek—Becomes a magistrate of Giles County, and learns to write—Elected Colonel of a regiment of State militia—Davy enters the political field—Squirrel hunts and barbecues—He makes his first stump speech—Elected to the State Legislature and becomes the Honorable David Crockett.
Of the period of his life described in the preceding chapter, Davy afterwards said, “This closed my career as a warrior, and I am glad of it, for I like life a heap better now than I did then; and I am glad all over that I lived to see these times, which I should not have done if I had kept fooling along in war, and got used up at it.”
He then goes on to say something of the political situation when he was writing his book, and this, though irrelevant, will be quoted as a good specimen of his style of writing, and his determined opposition to the proceedings of the Jackson administration, nearly twenty years later.
“When I say I am glad, I just mean that I am glad that I am alive, for there is a confounded heap of things that I a’nt glad of at all. I a’nt glad, for example, that the ‘Government’ moved the deposits [here he refers to Jackson’s war on the United States Bank], and if my military glory should take such a turn as to make me President after the General’s time, I’ll move them back. Yes, I, the ‘Government,’ will ‘take the responsibility,’ and move them back again. If I don’t, I wish I may be shot.”