Birthplace in Tennessee—His Irish Blood—Summer-time in the Great Smokies—The Indian signal fires—Little Davy gets fighting mad—His love of weapons—In the Bald Mountains—Davy’s aspirations—John Crockett moves again.
The antecedents of Davy Crockett are Irish, although his mother was Rebecca Hawkins, a native of Maryland, and probably of English descent. After the execution of King Charles I, in the seventeenth century, many Irishmen were transported to North America as rebels, and there sold into a state of slavery among the English colonists. Many of them were sent to Virginia and to the Somers or Bermuda Islands, and in Sir J. H. Lefroy’s “Memorials of Bermuda” occur the names of James Sheehan and David Larragan as two of the slaves bought and sold in those islands. As we might expect, the same records often make mention of the unruly and riotous nature of the Irish rebels, and of the complaints of those who thought the colony might well be rid of them. It was the blood of the fighting race that told, and one by one the slaves became freemen, to follow every bugle-call or rolling drum that has led into the storms of shot and shell on our country’s battlefields.
David Crockett’s grandparents left Ireland for America after the birth of William, their oldest son, and it is supposed that John Crockett, another son, and the father of David, was born during the voyage. The family, which eventually included four boys, settled in Pennsylvania. Here John Crockett lived as a farmer for some time, removing while still a young man to Lincoln County, North Carolina, and afterwards to the Tennessee mountain country. His parents, displaying the same restlessness that characterized the career of David, came into what is now Hawkins County, Tennessee, and settled near the site of the present town of Rogersville. It is not unlikely that the county took its name from the family to which Rebecca Hawkins belonged.
The Creek Indians had now begun to feel the pressure of immigration into their sacred hunting-grounds, and were at all times dangerous, frequent encounters occurring between them and the settlers. Both of Davy’s grandparents were killed during an Indian foray, near the Holston River, in Hawkins County. In this bloody affair their son Joseph had his arm broken by a bullet, though he finally escaped. His brother James, who was deaf and dumb, remained a prisoner for more than seventeen years. It was without doubt due to his being deaf and dumb that he was finally heard of and identified by Davy’s father and uncle William, who paid some sort of a ransom and obtained his freedom. He lived for many years in Cumberland County, Kentucky.
Davy Crockett was the fifth of six sons, and there were three sisters, besides, or nine children in all, in the family of John Crockett. In his own story Davy makes little use of the names of his relatives, and although some of them are known, they are not material to this narrative.
Davy Crockett was born on the 17th of August, 1786. At this time, the “Gateses, Lees, and rough Yankee Generals,” as Carlyle styled them, had returned to their own shores, and were striving to form a permanent union of the States. The courts of the Old World were vying with each other in extravagance and riotous living.
But the Great Smoky Mountains were full of peace, and from the Unaka range to the far blue crest of the Cumberlands the troubles of the far-off world were but echoes faintly heard. The new and short-lived State of Franklin was a year old, and John Crockett, veteran of the Revolution, was content to work there from dawn till dark, that his children might be fed and housed. The mountains were full of game, corn could be raised when the ground was cleared, and the autumn yielded bountiful stores of nuts, wild grapes, berries, and apples, until from one source or another the cabin was filled with winter supplies; yet somehow there always seemed to be insufficient for the long months before the anemones and azaleas came again beside the leaping brooks or under the tender green of the wakening trees.
The log cabin of the Crockett family stood where the Limestone Creek joined the Nolichucky River, ten miles north of the great bend in the Bald Mountain range. There the rocky summits, angling abruptly about the watersheds of Indian Creek, are like fortifications of the Titans, crowned with battlements of the Appalachian range, whose peaks stand more than six thousand feet above the sea—higher than any others east of the Mississippi. From the rocky escarpments, between the black forests of pine and hemlock, shone the signal-fires of the Creek and Chickasaw, and from unseen nooks between their giant flanks the thump-thump-thump of the tom-tom caused the pioneer to look to his stockades and his flintlock guns.
The fierce ebb and flow of war that had given Kentucky the name of “the Dark and Bloody Ground” had now and then swept over parts of Tennessee—the massacre at Fort Loudon was a red spot upon the pages of her history; but the rivalries of the English, French, and Spanish had promoted Indian raids in the disputable regions of the Ohio and the Mississippi, rather than in the lowlands of the western part of this state and in the Alabama plains. What Tennessee was spared in earlier days she knew in the Civil War in 1861 to 1865, when from Knoxville to Donelson and Shiloh, and from Lookout Mountain to the Cumberland Gap, her fields were filled with unknown graves and the wreck and misery of a terrible conflict.
It was not until many years after the birth of Crockett that it became safe to travel the rugged roads between Virginia and North Carolina and the Nashville country. In the twenty or more trips that Andrew Jackson made between Jonesboro and Nashville in the days when he was foremost in the practice of the law, he had many a close call in Indian fights. More than a score of times he came upon the bodies of men, women, and children, robbed and slain and scalped. Little Davy, listening at nightfall beside the river, hearing above its murmur the hoot of the owl in the dismal trees, the howl of the wolf on the mountain-top, or the panther’s anguished cry, floating out of the vague unknown, would make good use of his sturdy little legs until he was safe at his mother’s side.