The earliest description of Crockett represents him to be “a wiry little fellow, athletic, with nerves of steel.” Even in childhood he was given to fierce encounters, yet he was of an open and generous disposition. He grew up practically without care, his father, if truth be told, being a man of somewhat gross and drunken habits. Davy finally, at the mature age of thirteen, forsook the paternal roof and set out in the world for himself.
He chanced fortune with drovers, driving cattle to the eastward, and learned to be hostler and general utility man, becoming acquainted with the trail that ran between Abingdon, Witheville and Charlottesville, Orange Court House and other points in Virginia. He worked for a few months as a farm hand in Virginia. He wandered into Baltimore, with wonder noticed the shipping there, and came near becoming a sailor, but was rescued from that fate. Buffeted by fortune from pillar to post, he worked one month for a farmer at a wage of five dollars. He went apprentice to a hatter and worked for eighteen months for nothing, at the end of which time the hatter unfortunately failed in business.
Poor Davy spent two years in these wanderings, and was fifteen years old when all at once he again dawned upon the paternal grounds in eastern Tennessee. These two years had been spent in considerable physical discomfort and anguish of spirit, and the journey home was accomplished only after many dangers and difficulties. Crockett admits that at this time he did not know the letters of the alphabet. His father, shiftless as ever, had been lavish with his promissory notes. He offered Davy his “freedom” if he would work six months for a neighbor to whom he had given a note for forty dollars. Davy generously did so, and capped it off by working another six months and taking up another one of his father’s notes, for thirty-six dollars. This last he was not obliged to do, yet in spite of these bitter surroundings, there had flowered in the young savage’s heart a certain feeling of family honor.
Now all at once the boy backwoodsman became conscious of his own infirmities. He went to school six months, the only schooling he ever had in his life. He learned to write his name, to spell to some extent, to perform a few simple sums in arithmetic. Twice blighted in love at eighteen years of age, he married a pretty little Irish girl, a daughter of a neighboring family. “I know’d I would get her,” says he, “if no one else did before next Thursday.”
Crockett was married in his moccasins, leggings and hunting shirt. His bride was dressed in linsey-woolsey. There was no jewelry. The table on which the wedding feast was spread was made of a single slab. The platters were of wood, the spoons of pewter and of horn. In his own abode, as he first entered it, there was no bed and not a chair, a knife or a fork. Yet, after the expenditure of fifteen dollars, which he borrowed, Crockett and his wife “fixed the place up pretty grand,” and found it good enough for them for some years. Here two boys were born to them.
At the ripe age of twenty years, that is to say in the year 1806, Crockett considered it necessary for the betterment of his fortunes that he should remove farther toward the West, this having been the universal practice of his kind. He journeyed for four hundred miles through the Western wilderness, taking his family and household goods with him. Their transportation, as we are advised, consisted of one old horse and two colts. These animals were packed with the household goods. In the wild journey down the Holston the family, children and all, camped out, enduring the weather as best they might. At last they came to a halt on Mulberry Creek, in Lincoln County, in what they took to be the Promised Land. The soil was generously rich, game and fish were abundant, the climate was all that could be asked. Crockett built him a cabin, and here he lived for two years, much as he had lived in eastern Tennessee. Then, in the easy fashion of the time, he moved once more, this time settling in Franklin County, on Bear Creek, still in the wilderness.
Here we find him living in 1813, at which time the call went out for volunteers to serve in the Creek War under General Jackson. Without much ado, Crockett said good-by to his family, joining those wild irregular troops who, amid countless hardships, plodded up and down the region of Alabama and Georgia, meeting the southern Indians, destroying them wholesale or piecemeal as the case might be. Crockett marched, counter-marched, acted as spy and hunter, doing his full share of the work.
All the time he was rising in the esteem of his fellow men. He was now a tall, large-boned, muscular man. His hair, we are told, was sandy, his eyes blue, his nose straight, his mouth wide and merry; and so we see Davy Crockett the grown man. Never having known anything but hardship all his life, he has none the less never known anything but cheerfulness and content. The apt jest and catching story are always ready on his lips. He is the life of the camp-fire. Gradually he forges to the front. The qualities of leadership begin to appear.
In all these rude military experiences, although Crockett does not fancy the revolting scenes which in some instances he witnesses at the Indian killings, he shows the ardent nature, the fighting soul. Hence he respects the fighting man and pays his obedience to General Jackson. There is no hint of that fatal falling out between the two men that later is so suddenly to terminate Crockett’s ambitions.
In 1822, after his return from this petty war, Crockett’s fortunes once more needed mending, and the remedy, of course, was to move again. He had previously explored nearly all of Alabama, and later investigated southern Tennessee, finally locating on Shoal Creek, in Giles County. Crockett’s faithful wife, the little Irish woman, had died, and he, ever ready to console himself, now married a widow of the neighborhood, an estimable woman, who added two children to his already growing family. This second wife appears to have been a dignified and able woman. Little is known of her, and she seems to have lived the life of the average frontier woman, patiently and uncomplainingly following her lord and master in all his enterprises and his wanderings. Two pack-horses still served to transport all the family goods on this latest journey.