DAVY CROCKETT, THE HERO OF THE ALAMO
MOST of the great men in the new West a hundred years ago were born poor; but few were ever as poor as little Davy Crockett. His father seemed to be unable to get along well and was always in debt. When Davy was still a lad he was hired out for twenty-five cents a day, but he did not receive the pay himself; it was given to his father.
Once a drover to whom Davy’s father owed money hired Davy to help drive cattle from the Crocketts’ log cabin in East Tennessee over the mountains to a place in Virginia, four hundred miles away. Though Davy had had a poor place to live, it made him homesick to stay away from there long. He knew what that lonely man meant when he wrote, while a stranger in a foreign land,
“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”
The drover wanted Davy to stay and work for him in another part of the country, but he did not treat the boy very well, thinking that a twelve-year-old lad four hundred miles from home could not help himself. But that hard-hearted man did not know Davy Crockett. The boy found a man who was going in a wagon to a place within a hundred miles of his home in Tennessee. Davy planned to meet this man very early one morning, about seven miles from where he worked.
The lad did not sleep much that night, and at four o’clock next morning he was on his way to keep his word, though he had to wade seven miles through the deep snow in a blinding blizzard. He met the man with the wagon and was soon happy in being headed for home. The roads were rough and the heavy cart jolted over logs and stumps. The boy could not stand it, not because it was rough, but because they went so slowly. He soon got off to walk the two or three hundred miles that remained. But after he had hurried on foot a hundred miles or so, he saw, to his great joy, a drover whom he recognized, for the man had stopped at his father’s log tavern in Tennessee. The drover took him about a hundred miles on his way, but turned off before reaching the place where Davy lived. The boy had to walk on quite a distance farther, swimming rivers and wading swamps. He did not mind that, for his heart was light—he was going home! He had a happy time telling the family—Davy had seven brothers and sisters—all about his strange journey over the mountains and back.
