DAVID CROCKETT
SCOUT

[DAVY HAD A CHANCE TO FIGHT THAT MUST HAVE SATISFIED HIM]

David Crockett

SCOUT

SMALL BOY, PILGRIM, MOUNTAINEER,
SOLDIER, BEAR-HUNTER, AND CONGRESSMAN

DEFENDER OF THE ALAMO

BY

CHARLES FLETCHER ALLEN

FRONTISPIECE BY

FRANK McKERNAN

“The fittest place where man can die is where he dies for man”
—M. J. Barry.

PHILADELPHIA & LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

FIFTEENTH IMPRESSION

PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To

EDITH SQUIRE ALLEN

GUARDIAN, COMRADE, AND KINDLY LIGHT

[PREFACE]

The story of David Crockett stands apart from all others in our history—a nebulous collection of traditions about a great array of facts. To the unnumbered thousands to whom his name is familiar he is often as unreal as the hero of a mediæval romance or of Scandinavian mythology. This book will follow his history with close attention to dates, and without recognition of the impossible legends of many writers. To accomplish this has required much reading and research, much weighing of evidence, and the help of others. The portrait of David Crockett, now for the first time published, is after the original in the Alamo, painted by the famous artist Chapman while Crockett was a Congressman. It is a picture that reveals the secret of his success in winning friends and fame.

For the use of the picture thanks are due to Mrs. Rebecca Fisher, of Austin, Texas, the venerable President of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and to Mrs. Marie B. Urwitz, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the same Society. For other favors acknowledgment is made to Miss Jennie Moore, of Flag Pond, Tenn.; Prof. Eric Doolittle, of the University of Pennsylvania; Judge W. T. Rogers, of Denver; Mr. and Mrs. Mark F. Postlewaite, of San Antonio, Texas; and to Richard A. Paddock, for much information in regard to Reelfoot Lake.

It is hoped that this unpretentious volume may help to a better understanding of the life and motives of a man whose footsteps went into no dark places, and who died an honor to his race and his countrymen—a hero sans peur et sans reproche.

Charles Fletcher Allen.

Denver, Colorado, June 2, 1911.

[CONTENTS]

David Crockett

[I.]
THE YOUNG FRONTIERSMAN

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.

As the boy grew older, he lost the instinctive sense of fear that was perhaps a part of his natural heritage; for the cry of the Banshee had filled the souls of his Irish forebears with terror in their lowly cabins across the seas. Something of the daring of Sir John and of Richard his son, of the Hawkins kin—slavers, freebooters, sea-scourges, admirals—had come to him on his mother’s side, and now, too, the fighting blood of his father’s race began to show. Davy was scarce six years old when four of his brothers, and a boy named Campbell, left him on the shore of the Nolichucky while they put out into the river in the rude boat that was used in crossing the stream. Had it not been for the bravery of a man named Kendall, who saw their danger, the five boys would surely have gone over the falls a little way below, which would have meant certain death. Davy seems partly to have realized their danger, but said he was too fighting mad at being left behind to care what happened to them. When they were safe again, his greatest satisfaction was in telling them that the scrape they had been in was what they had earned for not taking him along.

Like every boy of the frontier, Davy was quick to idealize the great flintlock rifles, powder-horns, and other implements of the hunter. He loved to watch his father mould bullets from the well-nigh priceless supply of lead, or cut and grease “patches” for loading. The boy would sometimes shoulder a stick and imagine himself a hunter, stimulated perhaps by the loan of a powder-horn and a hunting-knife. All this was evidence of what was working in his mind.

An old man who knew the boy and always called him the “Corkonian” said that “the only diff’ betwane a crowbar and a gun is thot the gun do have a hole in it, and a stock.” The hunter’s rifle was made from a bar of iron weighing about the same as a crowbar, from eleven to fifteen pounds being the usual weight of the gun. From this it is easy to see that the small boy of 1795 could not take a very active part in the hunting that furnished the greater portion of the supply of food for the pioneer and his family.

In talking with General Grant, who had suggested a way in which the reserves might be of use while not needed at the front, Abraham Lincoln once said: “Oh, yes; I see that. As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he can hold a leg for the one that does.” A five-year-old boy might not be able to hunt and kill deer, but he could “hold a leg.” The boy of to-day can go forth with a four-pound “twenty-two” with less fatigue than his grandfather felt in handling a rifle when ten years older. At the age of fifteen a boy might learn to shoot, but he was hardly able to range the mountains for game.

It was on a day in August, when Davy was six years old, that his father and his uncle took him with them on a hunting trip into the dark forests of pine on the northern slopes of the Bald Mountains. They were gone but a single day, but every moment was a revelation to the little fellow. They were looking for wild turkeys, and had bagged several when they came to an opening surrounded by maples, beeches, and other deciduous trees. The grass was fresh, and a dozen sorts of flowers were under their feet as they tied their single horse, on which Davy rode with the game.

The men were talking of the West, and as they pointed out across the peaceful land of the Chickasaws, the boy heard often the names of the great rivers, the Tennessee, the Holston, the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. The spirit of unrest that was in their hearts was already in his own, and from that day the Nolichucky was no longer satisfying to him; he wanted something bigger.

In the faint echoes of ringing steel and bloody threats that came from the cities of the Old World, those August days, there was somewhat that excited the natural restlessness of the pioneer. The events in France were terrible and momentous. On the 20th of the month before, the “black-browed Marseillaise,” the Reds of the Midi, had finished their long march from the shores of the Mediterranean, and had entered Paris, six hundred strong, armed with forks and scythes and pikes, and singing the song of Rouget de Lisle that forever afterwards was to be the War Hymn of Unrest. The few who had left for the New World had not been missed in the ranks of the starving people of Europe’s overcrowded streets and lands. The “black chaos of insurrection” had burst upon the last defenses of the French king, and it may have been while the three looked westward to the promised land that the Swiss Guards—hunted like wild beasts—died to the last man in the Place de Grêve. The time for blood-letting had come to France, and the whole world was in a ferment that was soon to set the red men of America in battle against the aggressions of the colonists. There could never have been peace in the Old World until the opening of the New, and that also meant war to the knife.

From then until he went forth into the strange places of the east, Davy grew in thought and stature and in the knowledge of common things, but without any education other than that obtained by the use of sharp ears and keen sight. When he was seven or more, the whole Crockett family moved to a place about ten miles north of Greenville. From the habit John Crockett had, of going from one place to another, it seems that he depended mostly upon game and pelts for a living. He could not have been much of a farmer, in a country where land had to be cleared before crops could be raised.

It was while in Greene County that Joseph Hawkins, brother of Davy’s mother, shot a man while hunting, having mistaken him for a deer. The man was gathering wild grapes, and as he reached for the clusters above him, Hawkins thought he saw the moving ears of a deer. As all kinds of game were common in such a place, and hunters were scarce, he took a careful aim, and shot the grape-gatherer through the chest. The man finally recovered from the effects of the wound, but Davy tells that he saw his father draw a silk handkerchief through the bullet-hole and through the man’s body. Such accidents were less frequent in those days, when the human target might be one of a party of Indians skulking in the thickets. In such a case the hunter would be tomahawked and scalped before he could reload—or bound fast, and he might be tortured to death later.

A Chicago paper obtained a list of one hundred and thirteen men who were killed in the year 1910, through such mistakes and careless handling of guns. In war, the killed are far less in number than the wounded, but in 1910 only eighty-seven were wounded as against one hundred and thirteen killed. This shows that the hunters who do the killing are much more careful in their aim than in finding out what they have for a target. It is a pretty sure thing that the immediate scalping of such blunderers would save one hundred lives every year. Davy Crockett’s father used to tell him, when he began to use a rifle, “Look mighty hard before you shoot: it may be a man you see, but you can always get a man.”

From Greene County John Crockett moved, after a year or so, to the mouth of Cove Creek, some twenty-five miles below the mouth of the Limestone.

[II.]
THE START FOR VIRGINIA

The mill on Cove Creek—Swept away, “lock, stock, and barrel”—The Crockett family keeps moving—Andrew Jackson and the corn-thief—“A boy’ll be after trouble before his ears are dry”—The empty cupboard—’Lasses-b’ilin’s, bean-stringin’s, butter-stirrin’s—Bobtail pigs and bawling calves—Davy is sent to Virginia on foot with Jacob Siler—He gets homesick, and longs to see his family—Good friends come to his aid, and he returns home.

It would appear that John Crockett had some funds upon moving to Cove Creek, for he at once began the building of a mill, in partnership with a man named Galbreath. They had about finished the mill—undoubtedly a primitive affair—when trouble came.

Over all the flanks and summits of the Appalachian range the snow lay deep in the shelter of the pines. It was the accumulation of the long winter, compact, and covered with a glaze of ice. All through the winter the creek on which the mill was built flowed quietly in its course, held in check by the icy rein of the zero weather. But the stream grew deeper and swifter as the days advanced, and when the swamp-apple and the wild cherry were like woodland fairies in their robes of tender pink and creamy white, when the rumble of the partridge’s wings was heard and the violets were scarfs of blue flung here and there, the south wind swept along the range with lowering clouds, the heavens were opened, and the rain began. In “the twinkling of an eye” the stream they had relied upon to run their mill swept every vestige of their labor out of sight, “lock, stock, and barrel,” as Crockett described the disaster.

Few men care to build upon the scene of ruined hopes, and John Crockett moved on again. We follow him next to a place on the road that was frequented by travellers between Virginia and Nashville. Here he kept an inn for the wayfarer—a poor kind of an affair, where only such people as wagoners were likely to halt. They were as rough as the roads over which they came, and in feeding such guests there was small profit. The Western settlers were always ready to take arms against any authority that held too tight a rein, and each man was as quick to show fight in his own behalf. In his later years, David Crockett remembered the little tavern between Jonesboro and Knoxville as a place of “hard times, and plenty of ’em.”

It was there that Davy first saw Andrew Jackson, who was afterwards his leader in the Creek War of 1813. Already the renown of the State’s Attorney had become a household subject in Tennessee. Jackson feared no man, and brought to justice the most defiant of the mountaineers. The men of that day had a habit of settling their differences out of court, which caused many to die “with their boots on.” Much the same system even now prevails in some parts of Kentucky and Tennessee. To those who have deplored the passionate natures and the crimes of the foreign element in our country, it may be said that the most lawless and cruel of our citizens are primitive Americans, the feudists of the Dark and Bloody Ground and the Big Bend State. The reason why Jackson had most of the court cases in those days was because they were criminal suits, and to him, as public prosecutor, came the duty of conducting them.

One day there stopped at the Crockett tavern a man from the head of the Limestone, who had come down the Nolichucky with a load of corn that he had stolen from a neighbor. Of this he openly boasted, and he defied any one to interfere with him. John Crockett told him he did not care to take stolen corn as payment for feeding him and his horses, and asked him to go; but the unwelcome guest said he should stay as long as he liked. The next day, towards dark, appeared a number of horsemen, who had been belated by a storm in the mountains. Among them was Andrew Jackson, and there were also two or three constables and prisoners on the way to Knoxville. Then in his twenty-seventh year, Jackson was an ideal leader of men. More than six feet tall, slender but muscular, the glance of his dark blue eyes meant more than verbal threats. To him, John Crockett told the story of the vainglorious thief. Jackson told the man that he was under arrest, whereupon the latter at once became violent and threatening.

The room of the tavern in which the wagoners spent the spare hours was large and dingy, built of logs, and had been the scene of more than one desperate quarrel. There were enough bullet-holes in the logs to prove it.

Jackson whispered to a constable, and under the directions of the latter every one left the room except Jackson and the thief. Ten minutes afterwards the latter came out of the room, without his rifle or knife, and sullenly left the place. The horses and the wagon-load of corn were left behind, and were afterwards turned over to the man from whom they had been stolen. Davy, who was a lad of eight or nine years at the time, had been terrified by the threats of the corn-thief, and always wondered at the quiet way in which Andrew Jackson had disposed of him.

The small boy’s days are short, but full of zest. Having as yet no conscience, or at least a dormant one, he feels no regrets for his misdeeds, but sleeps the sleep of the just, and wakes with all his faculties for mischief whetted. Where “two or three are gathered together,” there is always danger in the air. Davy had brothers whose experiences gave him a good start, and he “profited by their example.” Up to the age of five, when he danced with rage on the banks of the shore where he had been left alone, he tells us that he never had worn any breeches. From this we infer that as he was easy to overhaul in flight, and was without any protection from the usual application of punishment, he had to grow and be clothed before he became a serious source of trouble. An Irishman fresh from the Old Sod will tell you that “a boy’ll be after huntin’ trouble before his ears are dry.” And once started, he never quits.

In Davy’s time there were no jam closets for him to rob, for the cupboard was always empty, except for the great loaves of bread that were baked from corn and rye. Everything being devoured as fast as it was cooked, none of the boy’s time was taken up with watching the pantry, and his time was his own. If there happened to be such neighborhood events as corn-huskin’s, ’lasses-b’ilin’s, log-rollin’s, bean-stringin’s, or butter-stirrin’s, which still prevail in the mountains, there was a respite for his victims. Upon one occasion, when his parents had gone to a corn-husking, Davy and one of his brothers, with another boy, rounded up all the hogs that were fattening on beech-nuts in the woods, penned them up, cut off their tails, and let them go. It was some weeks later when their villainy was detected. They were forced to confess that they were guilty, and that the tails had been roasted in hot ashes and eaten. Such mild pastimes as robbing birds’ nests were diversified by practical jokes on the travelling public, and many a beating fell to the lot of the Crockett boys. One of the tricks they played was to take the calves away from their bovine mothers after dark. This meant all-night bawling, and human wakefulness, until the cows were united with the lost offspring. If Elisha had lived in the Tennessee mountains, the bears would have been busy all the time.

When Davy was twelve, in 1798, he had become a strong and useful lad, with a fully developed conscience. The wishes of his parents were the only law he had known, and when at last the time came when his father said to him, as Saul to him of old, “David, go, and the Lord be with thee,” he went forth as a pilgrim. It is not certain with what words he was sent forth, but he seems to have made no appeal from the bargain that sent him four hundred miles over the mountains, on foot, in the keeping of a stranger. Perhaps he had come to know that his father found it hard to feed so many mouths. At any rate, he took up the long march with an old German, Jacob Siler, who was bound to Virginia with a herd of cattle, where he proposed to remain. How many have read with sympathy and keen appreciation Davy’s simple story of his departure “with a heavy heart,” perhaps never to return!

Siler treated the boy kindly, and paid him five or six dollars for his help. When he reached the end of his journey, he tried to persuade Davy to stay with him. At first Davy thought it his father’s wish that he should remain, so for some weeks he tried to be content; but the yearning to see his family again was strong within him. One day, as he was playing in the road, there came along three familiar faces, those of a man named Dunn and two sons, each with a good team. The sight of them was like a sight of home, for they were bound to Knoxville, and the way led past the lowly Crockett inn, and Davy was soon telling his plight to sympathetic listeners. As his disappearance in the daytime would soon be known and might result in his being brought back, they told him that if he could get to the place where they were to put up for the night, seven miles away, they would take him home. All the tiresome journey there, Davy had come on foot, and at the prospect of riding all the way back, heaven opened before him.

To his delight, he found that the “good old Dutchman and his family” had gone to a neighbor’s. Davy’s own story of what followed is this:

“I gathered my clothes and what little money I had, and put them all together under the head of my bed. I went to bed early that night, but I could not sleep. For though I was a wild boy, yet I dearly loved my father and mother, and I could not sleep for thinking of them. And then the fear that I should be discovered and called to a halt filled me with anxiety: and between my childish love of home, on the one hand, and the fears of which I have spoken, on the other, I felt mighty queer.”

It was three hours before daylight when Davy crawled out of his bed. He got away from the house without waking any one, and found it snowing hard, eight inches having already fallen. In the absence of moonlight, it was a difficult matter to reach the main highway, half a mile off; but once in that, he steered his way towards the place appointed, guided by the opening made through the woods. He was two hours trudging through snow up to his knees, and as his tracks were covered as fast as they were made, the Siler family must have wondered at his disappearance.

Davy found the Dunns up and feeding their teams, and was kindly received. As he warmed himself by the fire, he forgot his struggle with the storm in his thankfulness for their goodness and help. As soon as breakfast was over, the wagoners set out, and the boy found himself counting the seemingly endless miles of the homeward journey. When they reached the Roanoke valley, his desire to get home was too great for him to endure the slow progress of the loaded wagons. He could travel twice as fast afoot, so at the house of John Cole, on the Roanoke, he thanked his kind friends for what they had done for him, and started out alone on what must have been a tramp of three hundred miles.

He was near the first crossing of the river in a few hours, and dreaded it, as he would have to wade or swim to the other side, in water that was very cold. Then he heard the clatter of horses’ feet behind him, and a cheery hail from a man who was returning from where he had sold some stock. He had an extra horse, saddled and bridled, and as he had also a soft spot in his heart for boys, in a moment Davy was mounted, as proud as a king. In this way he travelled until within fifteen miles of home, when he went his way on foot, full of gratitude towards the stranger for his goodness towards a “poor little straggling boy.”

[III.]
DAVY TAKES TO THE WOODS

Davy is welcomed home—A school-house in the mountains—He makes an enemy—Wildcat style of fighting—Davy takes to the woods—John Crockett cuts a stout hickory switch—Davy is off for Virginia again—He goes to Baltimore—The clippers and the privateer—Prevented from sailing for London—He leaves his self-appointed guardian and starts for home—He crosses New River through slush ice—The trail in spring—A strange boy at the family table—“It’s Davy come home!”

Davy reached his father’s inn the same night, and his welcome may be imagined. It was late in the fall, and he lived at home until the red flames of the sumac and the poison oak were again fiery spots and streaks upon the hills. Then John Crockett took it into his head to send the boy to a school near-by. A rude log cabin, with benches hewn from logs and a floor of earth, offered its single room to those who came. A great slab of wood, three feet wide, and standing on hickory stakes, reached across the room, and was used as a table for the scholars. “Readin’, spellin’ an’ cipherin’” were the principal studies. Writing, of course, was taught, but the quill pens and poor ink they had to use were as hard to get as was paper, and the blackboard seldom made a penman of an awkward lad.

On the fourth day Davy spent in school he had an altercation with a boy larger and older than he. When the children were dismissed, Davy hid in the bushes and waited for his enemy. As the boy was passing the ambush, Davy “set on him like a wildcat, scratched his face to a flitter-jig, and made him cry for quarter in good earnest.”

Young Crockett was now in a bad fix, for he knew there was a flogging in store for him. The next day, and for several days, he left home in the morning, ostensibly for school, but spent the time in the woods, until the children went home. His brothers attended the same school, but he had persuaded them to say nothing of his “playing hooky.” When the schoolmaster wrote to John Crockett, telling him of Davy’s absence, the whole story came out.

“I was in an awful hobble,” Davy wrote of this, “for my father was in a condition to make the fur fly. He called on me to tell why I had not been to school. I told him that I was afraid to go, for I knew I should be cooked up to a cracklin’ in no time. My father told me, in a very angry manner, that he would whip me an eternal sight worse if I didn’t start at once to school.”

While Davy was begging not to be sent back, the elder Crockett was cutting a stout hickory switch, and from past experience the boy knew what this meant. At his father’s first move towards him, he broke into a run. The chase lasted a mile, when the boy dodged aside into the bushes, and his father then gave up the hunt. Davy had been careful to lead off in a course away from the school-house, having a keen idea of his fate if both the teacher and his father should get him at the same time.

Fearing to return, Davy kept on for several miles and put up for the night at the house of a man who was about to start for Virginia with a drove of cattle. The boy at once hired out to go with him, and before starting one of the older Crockett boys joined them. Thus was Davy again a pilgrim, with a journey of nearly four hundred miles before him. The trail they followed was probably about the same as the route of the Norfolk & Western Railroad of the present time, through Abingdon, Wytheville, and Blue Ridge Springs, to Lynchburg, passing south of Hanging Rock, to which place Davy had travelled the previous year. From Lynchburg the drove went on to Charlottesville and Orange Court House, up the headwaters of the Rapidan, again through the Blue Ridge Mountains, to Front Royal, on the Shenandoah River, where the stock was sold.

Davy and a brother of the man with whom he had started out, with a single horse for the two, now took the homeward trail. They were together three days, travelling with so little rest that the boy finally told the man to go ahead, and that he would come when he got ready. He bought some provisions with four dollars that the man had given him for the four hundred miles’ journey, and plodded stolidly along until he met a wagoner who lived in Tennessee, and who intended to return after his trip was finished. He was bound for Winchester, not very far away, and as he was a jolly sort of fellow, Davy gladly accepted his offer to take him along. Two days later they met Davy’s brother and the rest of the former party, but Davy refused to go with them. He says that he could not help shedding tears, as he watched his brother disappear, but the thought of the schoolmaster, and of his angry father with the big hickory switch, was too potent.

At Gerardstown, Virginia, Davy worked for twenty-five cents a day for a man named John Gray. Adam Myers, the wagoner, was engaged all winter in hauling loads to and from Baltimore. When spring came, Davy had money to buy decent clothes, and something like seven dollars besides. He took it into his head that he would go with Myers to Baltimore, to see what kind of place it was, and how people lived there. This came near being Davy’s last trip, for on reaching Ellicott’s Mills he had perched himself on top of the barrels of flour that made the load, when the horses ran away at the sight of a road gang with wheelbarrows. The frightened animals turned short about, snapped the pole and then both axle-trees, and nearly buried the boy in the falling barrels. Escaping with nothing more serious than bruises, the two went on with a hired wagon, and soon arrived in Baltimore.

At this place Davy Crockett nearly became a sailor. The harbor was full of shipping, gay with flags and the glories of fresh paint, loading and discharging the riches of all nations. There were never such ships as the Baltimore clippers. Their memory lives in the hearts of every true sailor—

The Flying Cloud and the Cockatoo,
The Southern Cross, the Caribou,
The Polar Bear and the Northern Chief,
The Yankee Blade and the Maple Leaf.

The names of the vessels in the good old clipper times were those that set a boy’s heart to thumping, and the sight of a great full-rigged ship sweeping out to sea was enough to make sailors of farmers’ sons. It was the spring of 1800, and in the port there was a vessel flying the English flag, and then called the Polly. As much of Davy’s time as possible was spent on the wharves, and finally he took courage and went on board a vessel about to clear for London. She was a Yankee ship, for in those days every vessel that flew the Stars and Stripes, from Eastport to Savannah, was a Yankee. Seeing the boy gazing about the decks and aloft, one of her men began talking with him. The Polly being at a wharf near-by, it was not long before Davy heard the history of the old privateer, which had sailed from Baltimore in 1778, and before her return in November had fought with and captured three British armed merchantmen: the Reindeer, four hundred tons and fourteen guns, with a cargo worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; the Uhla, of same tonnage and ten guns, and a hundred thousand dollar cargo; and the Jane, of the tonnage and armament of the Reindeer, and with a cargo also worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. One-third of all this treasure was the share of the Government. Before the Polly was unlawfully seized in a neutral port and handed over to the English, she had captured nearly thirty prizes, in many cases fighting desperate battles for the mastery.

The master of the ship either took a fancy to Davy or thought that he might prove useful, for before the boy’s second day in Baltimore had passed, he had arranged to go to London as cabin-boy. But when he returned for what spare clothes he had on shore, and told Myers of his intent, the latter refused to give him either his money or clothing, and swore that he should not go. He kept watch over him, prevented his going to the ship, and started back with him as soon as ready, giving him no chance to escape. As he had become very harsh with Davy, threatening him with his whip, the boy left him one morning before daylight. Davy had not a cent in his pockets, but he resolved to go ahead and trust to Providence. This trait was the prominent feature of David Crockett’s nature: he made up his mind, and went ahead; it was hard to turn him, and he went at everything “hammer and tongs.”

As the historian contemplates the spectacle of this penniless thirteen-year-old youngster bravely facing towards his home, four or five hundred miles away, it is but natural to wonder what would have become of him if he had sailed for London. He might have become a famous sailor, a reckless privateer, or a merchant with ships in every sea. Up to this time Davy had had no schooling, except the four days at the place to which he had been afraid to return. Many a boy of the present time is graduated from a high school at fourteen, but Davy Crockett did not know a single letter of the alphabet. As it was, however, the Fates had no idea of sending him to sea, and while the great ship was beating her way along the Atlantic coast, he was resolutely facing west.

It was more than a year and a half before Davy was destined to see his home again. Working for two or three employers, after reaching Montgomery Court House, he saved up a little money and finally made another start for Tennessee. For eighteen months he had worked for a hatter who failed before paying his wages, and it was a poor and half-clothed stripling that was now returning, with a better record, but in no better luck, than the Prodigal Son. At the crossing of the New River, only forty miles on the old trail he was now retracing, he found high water and stormy weather. No one would row him across, and in his impatience he disregarded all warnings, hired a canoe, and put out into the stream. He finally reached the other side, the boat half full of water, and his clothing soaking wet and freezing upon his back. After going up the river for three miles, he found a warm shelter and food.

As Davy finally went down the old road into the Tennessee valleys, the woods were full of wakening life. The tender green of the beech and maple shimmered on every slope. Beside his path the arbutus showed its pink-white petals, and the azaleas and June-berries, full of bloom, were eagerly sought by droning bees. The spring wind sang in every pine, and the breath of the hemlock and the balsam was like a rare perfume to the homesick boy.

In Sullivan County he encountered the brother who had in vain begged him to return home. Perhaps Davy still dreaded the sight of the old school-house, for it was some weeks before he left this brother’s cabin and sought his father’s. He had travelled all day, and as he drew near to the wayside inn he saw the teamsters caring for their horses and covering the wagons for the night. He noticed that the poles of some of the wagons pointed eastward, while the others showed that the loads were on the westward journey. The latter were the ones that looked good to Davy, who had had enough of wandering in the East.

His heart seemed in his throat as he saw his sisters and brothers going in and out, and he feared at any moment to see his father with the seasoned hickory, or perhaps old Kitchen, the schoolmaster, looming over him like an inexorable fate. He hung about unseen until the jangle of a horse-shoe and a poker called all hands to supper. When they were plying knife and fork, he slipped in and took a seat quietly at the long table. A great pewter platter was heaped with chunks of boiled meat; another was filled with corn on the ear, and still another with potatoes with their jackets on. Bowls of gravy, and bread, broken into pieces as the loaves went round, completed the bill of fare. White bread was hardly known in the mountains, corn and rye, or “rye and Indian,” seeming to answer every demand of the wayfarer. In those times some taverns had menus to suit the purse and fastidiousness of the traveller. For “Corn-bread and common doin’s” the charge was fifteen cents, but for “White bread and chicken fixin’s” the bill was two bits, or twenty-five cents.

Davy tackled the platters as they went the rounds, but in spite of his hunger, he was conscious that there were sharp eyes awake to the fact that a strange boy was at the table. His eldest sister had ceased eating in the intentness of her gaze. He was so much larger than when he had left home, that she was full of doubt, but at last, as her eyes met Davy’s squarely, and his face became red with blushing, she sprang from her seat at the table, and screaming, “It’s Davy! It’s Davy, Mother! It’s Davy come back!” she threw her arms about his neck, clinging to him with tears of joy running down her face. This was his restoration to those who loved him, and whose reception of the wanderer so touched his boyish heart that he humbled himself before them, no longer fearing that they had forgotten him during the long and weary time he had spent away from them.

Davy was now a strong and healthy youngster almost fifteen years old, with much worldly wisdom, but unable to read or write.

[IV.]
THE INDIANS’ VISIT

Davy pays his father’s debts—The old man’s tears—Gets a suit of clothes—Calf love—Barks up the wrong tree—Finds another girl—Sweet plugs and snuff as evidences of affection—He is gaily deceived, and wants to die—Pretty Polly Finlay—Davy marries at last—Other events of the times—Moves to Lincoln County in 1809—Another move—Red Eagle and the Creeks—Three hungry braves—Tecumseh and Big Warrior—The Earthquakes of 1811.

The next year of Davy’s life was one of hard work and no pay. He had been at home but a short time when his father told him that if he would work for six months for a man named Abraham Wilson, Wilson would in return give up a note of John Crockett’s for thirty-six dollars. As a reward, Davy could thereafter work for himself, without waiting to become of age. The boy fulfilled the compact without missing a day, in a place where some of the roughest of the settlers made a practice of meeting to drink and gamble. At last the note was his, and the joy of his father at its surrender was Davy’s recompense.

It was always a satisfaction to Davy Crockett to know that his father was a man who honestly tried to pay his debts. The son appears to have had the same spirit. When he asked to be given work at the home of “an honest old Quaker, John Kennedy,” he found that the man held another note of his father for forty dollars. Davy was offered the note for another six months’ work, and with a keen desire to do his duty, and to ease his father’s burdens as much as he could, he disregarded his newly acquired right to work for his own account, and started in. At the end of the time he received the note, borrowed a horse, and went home for a visit.

“Some time after I got there,” Davy afterwards said, “I pulled out the note and handed it to my father, who supposed Mr. Kennedy had sent it for collection. The old man looked mighty sorry, and said to me that he had not the money to pay it, and didn’t know what he should do. I then told him I had paid it for him, and it was then his own; that it was not presented for collection, but as a present from me. At this he shed a heap of tears; and as soon as he got a little over it, he said he was sorry he could not give me anything, but he was not able, he was too poor.”

For two months, after going back to the Quaker’s, Davy worked to get something decent to wear. The last good clothing he owned had been left with Adam Myers, together with his seven dollars of hard-earned cash, when he had quit that troublesome person, a few days out from Baltimore. This was nearly three years ago, so it is easy to imagine the boy’s shabby appearance. About the time when Davy was able to spruce up and aspire to polite society of the kind about him, he fell in love with the Quaker’s niece, who had come on a visit from North Carolina, and who was much older than he. All the symptoms of what the mountaineers called “calf love” were forthcoming. He couldn’t keep out of the girl’s sight, yet nearly choked when he tried to talk to her. When he had reached the proper state of desperation, he acted with his usual headlong energy, and told the young lady that he would die without her. He says that the girl listened kindly enough, but told him that she was to marry a son of the Quaker.

Davy concluded that his troubles were mostly due to his lack of learning. He was now in his seventeenth year, with a record of four days at school. He soon arranged with the old Quaker’s son, who kept a school a mile or so away, to work for him two days in the week, for board and tuition, and go to school the other four days. This plan was followed for six months.

“In this time,” says Davy, in his later account of his boyhood, “I learned to read a little in my primer, to write my own name, and to cipher some in the first three rules of figures. And this was all the schooling I ever had in my life.”

Davy had now grown to be a stout young fellow, and as he had learned to use a rifle with great accuracy he became a successful hunter. This was to a great extent a warrant for his plans for securing a wife, and he laid siege to the heart of a pretty young girl whom he had known since his early days. His courting was done without the knowledge of the Quaker, with whom he was now living. In the evening, when all were asleep, Davy would let himself out of the up-stairs window, by means of a sapling, and ride ten miles to the girl’s home, always returning before daylight. She at last agreed to marry him, and the day was set.

Lovers were not then given to sentimental tokens of affection. A plug of sweet tobacco, or a bladder of snuff, for dipping, was quite the thing to show the state of a young man’s feelings. Flowers were nothing but “yarbs,” and the present of a bouquet of may-flowers or laurel-blossoms would have caused inquiry as to his sanity. The mountaineer took no more notice than the Indians of the beautiful things in nature.

A few days before the expected wedding, Davy set out, as he told his employer, for a hunt, deer being then numerous. Instead of hunting, he went to a shooting-match on the way to the girl’s home. Making a deal with another rifleman, who must have had a little money, they took chances in the shoot for a beef, and when it was over, Davy had won. After selling the prize, the partners each had five dollars, and with that in his pocket, and his head above the clouds, the boy went to claim his bride. Two miles from the girl’s home her uncle lived, and there he found her sister. As soon as he began to talk with her, he saw that something troubled her, and then the whole pitiful story came out: the girl had played with him, and was to be married the next day to another man. For a time Davy was speechless. His pride was hurt, and he turned homeward his “lonesome and miserable steps,” like a wounded animal, stricken with mortal pain. He was thought to be sick for several weeks, for he was too proud to tell his trouble, and in his story of suffering there is ample evidence of the strength of his attachment to those whom he loved.

For some time Davy was too low-spirited to care for anything, even hunting; but one day he took his rifle and set out for the woods. On his way home, he stopped at the cabin of a Dutch widow, whose daughter, he says, was “as ugly as a stone fence.” It was this girl, however, who pointed out to him how great a mistake he made in “mourning over the loss of a single fish, when the sea was full of others as good.” She told him of a pretty Irish lass who was to be at a reaping bee in a few days, and induced him to come, too. By the end of the evening the charms of Polly Finlay took possession of his thoughts and Davy found life more worth living. As in so many cases, the course of true love did not run smooth, for the girl’s mother had selected another suitor for her daughter, and she bitterly opposed Davy’s suit.

After some weeks of courting, Davy won the girl’s heart, but when he went to ask for his bride, the old lady ordered him out of the house. With the girl’s consent and the tacit permission of her father, the young man secured the services of a justice to marry him on the following Thursday, and made arrangements to have his wife received at the tavern kept by his own father. In Ellis’s story of Crockett’s life, he quotes the following from the records of Weakley County, Tennessee:

Davy Crockett, with Thomas Doggett, security, binds himself in a bond of twelve hundred and fifty dollars, to Gov. John Sevier, Aug. 1, 1806, to marry Polly Finlay.

No record of this kind really exists, as Weakley County was not organized until 1823.

We do not know what the wedding fee was in those days, but it was probably in the shape of worldly goods of small value. As all sorts of pelts were used for currency, we may imagine Davy paying the justice in coon-skins or muskrat hides.

To obtain a horse, Davy had agreed to work six months, board and lodging free. By giving up his rifle, he came into possession of the animal before the time was up, and when he went to the Finlay cabin, he was able to tell the young woman that he would come for her on the day set, with a horse, saddle, and bridle. When the day came—a Thursday—Davy went to the Finlays’, accompanied by two brothers and a sister, a brother’s wife, and some others, and found a number of neighbors there waiting for the wedding.

Mrs. Finlay was up in arms, but Davy rode up to the door, and asked the girl, if she was ready, to “light on the horse he was leading.” He was displaying his usual determination, which ended in winning the day. After the bride had taken her seat on the led horse, and the party was about to leave, a parley was brought about by the girl’s father; the old lady melted at the thought of her girl being married away from home, and the wedding took place without further opposition.

What ceremonies the outsiders observed, Davy never related. He says that they were treated as well as could be expected. They were not subjects for a charivari, but it is likely that the free use of gunpowder, liquor, and vocalized mountain air must have made the night one to be forever remembered by the two young people who were made man and wife.

The next day Davy and his bride went to the Crockett tavern for a visit. The young wife’s going-away dress was a dark blue homespun, and at her throat was a scarlet kerchief that had been brought from Baltimore by her mother. She is said to have been a very pretty girl, with warm gray eyes and a tender smile. The girl’s parents gave them their blessing, together with two cows and two calves, and when the kind old Quaker, John Kennedy, had arranged for a credit of fifteen dollars at the store, they were able to get what they most needed for the cabin they had rented in the vicinity of John Crockett’s inn. Polly was skilled in the use of the loom, and for some years they managed to make a living on the rented land. The homestead system was not then in practice, and the settler was called a squatter, and seldom had any other tenure than the pleasure of the land-owner.

About the time Davy and his wife were making their new home pleasant, Lewis and Clark were returning to Washington from their expedition to the Pacific coast; Napoleon was forming his Confederacy of the Rhine, and becoming the terror of all Europe; and the alleged conspiracy of Aaron Burr was discovered and frustrated, though Burr still had the support of Henry Clay, who claimed him to be innocent. Two months after Davy’s wedding, Napoleon made his triumphant entry into Berlin, and was at the summit of his career. The insolence of English naval officers in disregarding the rights of American seamen found fruit in the War of 1812. Yet the most dramatic events of modern times scarcely drew the attention of the people of the western slope of the mountains. Only when some painted prophet from the tribes of the north or those with whom the French or the Spanish intrigued, went through the border-lands, leaving a trail of unrest and superstitious passion behind him, did the pioneers think of war. The Creeks and the Chickasaws had been peaceful for many years, but among the former tribe and its confederates a faction of the dissatisfied was slowly gaining ground. So little fear of the Indians prevailed that Davy Crockett did not hesitate to move from Jefferson County, to the region about fifty miles west of Lookout Mountain, near the Elk River, where there were all kinds of game, though bears were not as numerous as in the northwestern part of Tennessee. When Davy moved to this new home in Lincoln County, in 1809, he had two boys, both under two years of age. His wife’s father, with his own horse, helped the family in moving.

Davy again moved in 1810, this time to Franklin County, settling ten miles below Winchester. Deer were abundant, wild turkeys were found in every forest, and it was an easy matter to supply food for his family. At times some of the Creeks strayed up from the Coosa country across the Alabama line, and were always treated with courtesy. But after Davy’s last shift, the Alabama Indians were not always friendly. The United States Government had secured a right-of-way for a highway across Alabama into the Tombigbee region, into which the settlers had begun to go in great numbers. The sight of such an influx of whites had alarmed the Creeks, and Red Eagle, or Weatherford, was the leader of those who now planned to go to war, if necessary, for the preservation of their ancient hunting-grounds. Red Eagle was hardly one-fourth Indian, his father having been a Scotch trader, his mother the Creek princess Sehoy, the daughter of a Scotchman named McGillivray. Red Eagle was also known as Weatherford, after his father, Charles Weatherford.

Soon after Davy Crockett settled in Franklin County, there came to his cabin three Creeks, whose manner was not to his liking. They were evidently “spying upon the land,” and one of them, who wore a head decoration made of twenty or thirty silver florins, asked for food.

“Injun hungry, Injun heap hungry! Walk long time, no eat. White man make ’um supper!”

Davy went into his cabin, conferred with his wife, and soon reappeared with a large piece of corned beef, which he intended to boil in the kettle that hung from a tripod of stakes in front of the door. The braves took a look at the meat, held a short consultation, and their leader spoke again:

“Salt meat no good. White man eat ’um, Injun no eat ’um.” Then he pointed to a fine fat calf that was the pride of the family, and said:

“No eat ’um corn’ beef. Injun kill ’um calf. Eat ’um calf!”

Davy shook his head in refusal of the plan proposed, and reached for his rifle, which was always at hand. The Indian spokesman thereupon made another suggestion:

“Kill ’um calf: white man half—Injun half,” right hand across his body—“Injun half.”

While the Indians were making this effort at compromise, with nothing to lose in any event, Polly Crockett untied the calf, led it into the cabin, and shut the door. The three braves went scowling away.

During the year 1811 the great chief Tecumseh, acting as an agent of the British, travelled from the lake region to Florida, where he succeeded in persuading the warlike Seminoles to promise help in fighting the whites. On his way south, he visited the Chickasaws in western Tennessee, and although these Indians did not listen with favor to his plans, his visit created an uneasy feeling among the few settlers in their country. In October, Tecumseh, with thirty naked braves, marched into the Tookabatcha town, while Colonel Hawkins was holding a Grand Council for the purpose of placating the war party among the Creeks. As long as Colonel Hawkins remained, Tecumseh was silent, but after his departure, the renowned chieftain soon won the majority of the Creek nation to his side.

It was in October, 1811, that Tecumseh resumed his journey to the north, with the assurance of Red Eagle’s readiness to make war when the time should be ripe. In November, the next month, the battle of Tippecanoe was fought, and General Harrison defeated the Indians, who were commanded by Elskwatawa, the Prophet, brother of Tecumseh.

Before leaving the Creek country, Tecumseh quarrelled with the chief Big Warrior, who refused to join in his schemes. Tecumseh told him, so the tradition runs, that when he reached Detroit he would stamp upon the ground and all the houses in Tookabatcha would fall to the ground. Some writers, mentioning this threat, seem to be in doubt regarding the promised earthquake, but on the midnight of December 15, 1811, after the arrival of Tecumseh in the north, earthquakes along the Mississippi valley suddenly began. The town of New Madrid disappeared, the face of the country was much changed, and what is known as Reelfoot Lake, fifty miles long and very wide, was formed close to the main river. Of this lake there is more to tell in a later chapter.

[V.]
DAVY IS A SCOUT

Farmer and trapper—Tall Grass and his boys—The blow-guns of the Chickasaws—Loony Joe—Little Warrior starts trouble, and punishment follows—Davy dreams of higher things—The Spanish at Pensacola aid the British and the hostile Indians—Hurricane Ned brings news from Alabama—The Red Sticks—The massacre at Fort Mims, and the call to arms—Davy becomes a scout under Jackson—Gets his dander up—The independence of the mountaineer volunteers.

The year of 1811 was a busy one for Davy, who was then coming twenty-five. He was still boyish and rather awkward in some ways; but with the rifle, and in securing pelts of the most valuable sorts, he had few rivals.

Shot-guns, or scatter-guns, were not much used in hunting. Powder and lead were the most precious of all the pioneer’s possessions, and nothing smaller than a wild turkey was considered worth the cost of a shot. For that reason, small game was always abundant and almost fearless in the presence of the hunter.

One autumn morning Davy was talking with Tall Grass, a Chickasaw, who had two of his boys with him. They were from ten to twelve years old, and each carried a reed blow-gun nearly ten feet long. Davy had heard of these weapons of the Chickasaws, and he asked the boys to show him how they were used. They all started for the woods a mile away, where small game was plenty.

In a swampy spot the logs lay here and there across the ground, as the result of a cyclone or wind-storm in the years gone by. In the Northern States such a place would be called a “windfall”; in Tennessee it was called a “harricane.”

The boys went ahead, their reeds at tilt, like spearmen of feudal days. Each carried small darts, tipped with steel, with thistle-down tied at the opposite ends. A rabbit flashed from under a bush as they advanced, and stopped fifty feet away. The older boy slipped a dart into his reed, brought it to a steady aim, filled his lungs and cheeks, and put all his young strength into the puff that sent the twelve-inch arrow on its course. The rabbit leaped from its mound of moss, and fell struggling with the dart in its side. A partridge that perched in the limbs of a hickory came tumbling down when the younger boy tried his skill. With dignified pride, Tall Grass said to Davy:

“Some day big chiefs!”

The boys soon secured all the game they could carry, Tall Grass not offering his aid, and the party started to return. Suddenly a terrifying yell rang through the woods, startling the Indians until they saw a grin on Davy’s face. The noise of feet was heard, and there soon appeared what was intended to represent a warrior in full attire, with paint, turkey-feathers, bow and arrows, scalping-knife, and moccasins. As the strange creature came closer, the Indians saw that it was a white boy, evidently half-witted. He had trailed them all the way, and had sounded his war-cry in what seemed to him the fittest spot for dark and bloody deeds. Tall Grass gave him a disgusted glance and turned away.

“Heap fool!” was all he said.

The boy was allowed to go back with them, and was shown the use of the blow-gun. He afterwards made one, and became of some use in hunting small game, but he never could get rid of the notion that he was an Indian warrior. He was known as Loony Joe.

Some weeks later the Creek chief, Little Warrior, who had gone north with Tecumseh, returned to Alabama with his thirty braves, of the war faction of their nation. In the Chickasaw country, not far north of where Davy lived, they murdered several families of settlers in cold blood. The leaders of the Creek nation, which was at peace with the whites, answered the demands of the United States Government by hunting down and killing the whole party. Justice was satisfied, but the war faction of the Creeks grew fiercer and angrier with each rising sun. The Alabamas, an associated tribe, became especially truculent, and killed one of the mail-carriers employed by the Government. When Big Warrior sent a Creek messenger to the same tribe, inviting their chiefs to a council, they murdered his envoy, and a desultory war began.

The danger of an Indian uprising became imminent during 1812, and after the United States had formally declared war against Great Britain, on June 18th, every pioneer looked to his rifle and supply of ammunition. While Tecumseh’s messengers were distributing the calendars of red sticks to the Creek chieftains, the British warship Guerrière was taking New England sailors from the decks of American vessels in sight of New York City. England was landing supplies and agents at Pensacola, for use among the restless Indians, the Spanish acting as go-betweens. Uncle Sam was surrounded by the growling dogs of war, without a friend in the world.

While thus the clash of arms drew near, Davy still hunted and farmed and trapped on Bean’s Creek, adding to his fame as a rifleman, and, as he said when he had become known in Congress, “laying the foundation of all his future greatness.” We should not blame him for his overestimate of his own importance, when the flattering attentions of great men, who were equally great politicians, had been thrust upon him. If he at one time seriously thought that he might become President, only his lack of education made his imaginings unjustifiable in a nation that has so often chosen its leaders from the humble cabins of the poor.

Every day the two parties among the Alabama Indians became more truculent, and frequent encounters ended in bloodshed. In the spring of 1813, the prophet Francis (made to order and ordained by Tecumseh), Peter McQueen, and High-Head Jim began a predatory warfare upon the peaceful Indians and half-breeds, who had good houses and farms. With more than three hundred followers, the hostile leaders set out for Pensacola with their plunder. Under Colonel Caller, assisted by so many lieutenant-colonels, majors, and captains, that his force was like Artemus Ward’s regiment of brigadier-generals, a force of two hundred American volunteers overtook the Indians at Burnt Corn, sent them flying, and proceeded to divide the plunder left by the enemy. Before they had finished this, the Indians attacked them in turn, having rallied when no longer pursued, and the volunteers were driven back and dispersed. As they are not known to have lost more than two of their number, they do not seem to have been very desperate fighters.

When Hurricane Ned, an old hunter of Hurricane Fork, brought the news of this to Franklin County, he predicted an attack by the Creek war party, who were being urged by British agents to paint themselves for battle. Red Eagle would have temporized with his chieftains, but they seized his children and his negro slaves as hostages while he was away from home, so he prepared, perforce, to strike a decisive blow at the progress of civilization. The red sticks were thrown away day by day, until but few were left. When the last was gone, and the tom-toms were beating, the frenzied braves smeared themselves with vermilion till their naked bodies were like flames of fire. The white settlers and the friendly Indians flocked to the various forts, hastily built of logs. In Fort Mims three or four hundred men, women, and children, with about two hundred volunteers sent as a garrison by General Claiborne, came together in the middle of August.

About the 27th of the month, a badly scared negro returned to Fort Mims from a hunt for stray cows. He had seen the woods full of Indians, apparently covered with blood. Their red skins being ominous of trouble, Major Beasley, who was in command, sent out scouts to the place where the negro had been. The scouts failed to find Red Eagle and the thousand braves with him, and the negro had a close escape from being flogged for lying. Two days later two other negroes claimed to have seen the Indians, and were whipped. One of them was still triced up when the bell called the people of the fort to dinner. As they went their way, Red Eagle and his savages crept from their hiding-places, and were within a hundred feet of the gates before they were discovered. Then it was found that the gates were blocked by drifted sand and could not be closed. For some hours the battle raged, and before sunset all but twenty or thirty of the people in the fort had been killed and scalped. A few had escaped through the stockade, and some had been spared as slaves. After in vain trying to stop the fury he had fanned to action, Red Eagle rode away from the scene of butchery, and when he returned, on his fine black horse, more than five hundred lay dead and mutilated within the fort. No half-way position was now possible, and until the end of the war he was active and aggressive.

The whole western slope of the mountains now awoke to the danger. Calls for men were answered by North and South Carolina and Georgia, and Tennessee, whose volunteers for the defense of New Orleans had recently been recalled from Natchez, also took up the gage of battle. All her people agreed that Andrew Jackson should be the one to lead the volunteers into Alabama, but he was in bed, suffering from a wound in his left shoulder, caused by two slugs from the pistol of Thomas H. Benton, in a free-for-all fight. The two men were afterwards reconciled and became friends, but Jackson could never wear one of his heavy epaulets for any length of time.

While Jackson is generally spoken of as a great Indian fighter, he was not at this time entitled to such a reputation. A few years before he had been chosen Major-General of Volunteers, but most of his actual fighting had been with his personal and political foes. He had killed Charles Dickinson in a duel for slurs upon Mrs. Jackson, and had ridden full tilt at Governor Sevier with the intention of running over him.

Before Jackson could take the saddle, a rally was held at Winchester, ten miles from Davy Crockett’s. As Davy there enlisted as a volunteer, it will be worth while to hear what he had to say upon the subject.

“I, for one, had often thought about war, and had often heard it described; and I did verily believe that I couldn’t fight in that way at all; but my after experience convinced me that this was all a notion. For, when I heard of the mischief that was done at the Fort, I instantly felt like going, and I had none of the dread of dying that I had expected to feel. In a few days a general meeting of the militia was called, for the purpose of raising volunteers; and when the day arrived for the meeting, my wife, who had heard me say I meant to go to the war, began to beg me not to turn out. She said she was a stranger in the parts where we lived, had no connections living near her, and that she and our little children would be left in a lonesome and unhappy situation if I went away. It was mighty hard to go against arguments like these; but my countrymen had been murdered, and I knew that the next thing the Indians would be scalping the women and children all about there, if we didn’t put a stop to it. I reasoned the case with her as well as I could, and told her that if every man would wait until his wife was willing for him to go to war, we would all be killed in our own houses; that I was as able to go as any man in the world, and that it was a duty I believed I owed to my country. Seeing that I was bent on it, all she did was to cry a little, and turn about to her work. The truth is, my dander was up, and nothing but war could bring it right again.”

When the militia was paraded at Winchester, volunteers were called for, and Davy was one of the first to step forward. In a short time a company was raised, officers were chosen, and they arranged to make a start on the Monday following. The company were all mounted, and when the day came Davy said farewell to his wife and his little boys, and rode away to the rendezvous. From there the command went to Huntsville, Alabama, forty miles south, then on to Beaty’s Spring, where they were joined by other mounted men, until they mustered thirteen hundred. Davy’s company was one that stuck together, under the same leader, Captain Jones, until they returned to Tennessee. Jones was later sent to Congress.

Davy’s experience as a scout now began. Major Gibson, who was about to go into the Coosa country to get information about the Indians, asked Captain Jones to let him have two men who could be relied upon as woodsmen and riflemen. The Captain called Davy, who was now twenty-seven, and strong and healthy, with a full beard. Davy expressed his willingness to join the scouting expedition, if he might choose his own mate. This being granted, he picked out a friend named George Russell. When Gibson saw Russell he said he hadn’t beard enough to suit him; he wanted men, not boys. At this Davy’s dander was up, and he told the Major that by this rule a goat would have the call over a man; that he knew what sort of a man Russell was, and that he was not likely to be left behind on a march. Seeing Davy’s warmth, the Major relented and took them both.

The temper of the Western volunteers recalls Maclay’s story of the backwoodsman who took part, on board of the Hyder Ally, in Cape May Roads, in the fight with the General Monk. He stood near Lieutenant Barney in the action, picking off the enemy with the same deliberation with which he reloaded under a sharp fire. His Buck County blood was up, but his curiosity was not asleep; twice he turned to Barney to ask the same question:

“Say, Cap, who made this gun I’m using?”

Resenting such a breach of naval decorum in a marine, Barney answered him roughly, ignoring the question. But as it was again asked, he sharply inquired his reason for wanting to know.

“W-a-al,” replied the man, with the drawl peculiar to the mountaineers, “this ’ere bit of iron is jes’ the best smoothbore I ever fired in my life.” With the mountaineers’ independence, Andrew Jackson had strenuous dealings before the end of the Creek War.

[VI.]
FOLLOWING INDIANS

Scouting in the Cherokee country—The Red Sticks on the move—A scared darky comes into camp on the run—Davy makes a sixty-mile ride—Colonel Coffee shows scant appreciation of Davy’s efforts—Old Hickory in command of a hungry army—Burning Black Warrior’s town—The cane-brake and the hogs—More news of the Red Sticks—The Battle of Tallushatchee—One hundred and eighty-five Indians slain—A squaw kills Lieutenant Moore with an arrow.

Evidently in those days there was no superstition about the number 13, for the party with which Davy set out the next morning was of thirteen men, including Major Gibson. The first day they reached and crossed the Tennessee at Ditto’s Landing, and camped seven miles south, guided by an Indian trader. The next day the Major took seven of the men, giving Davy charge of those remaining, with orders to meet him at night fifteen miles beyond the house of a Cherokee named Brown. On the way Davy induced a half-breed, Jack Thompson, to follow the party and come to the place where the Major was to meet them. They travelled through a rather barren country, sometimes across prairie-like land where wild flowers were abundant and beautiful. In the low places were cane-brakes, often fifteen to twenty feet high. The scouts avoided the open spaces, fearing both Indians and snakes, which sometimes crippled or killed a horse.

Night came on without the Major appearing, and Crockett’s squad camped among the trees, away from the Indian trail. The hoot of an owl came floating through the silence of the evening, and was at once answered by Davy. It was the signal of the half-breed, who soon afterward came into the gleam of their fire. The morning broke, and there was still no news of the other party of scouts. As usual, Davy decided to go ahead, and passed through a Cherokee village, twenty miles farther south, reaching the house of a squaw-man, named Radcliff, in time for dinner. This man they found badly scared. He told them that ten painted Creeks had left the place during the forenoon; if they learned that he had fed the scouts, they would kill his whole family and burn the house. When dinner was over, Davy found that a few of his men wanted to turn back; they said that the party was too small to venture into the Creek country, just before them. But Davy knew that some of the men would stand by him, and he determined to go ahead. When he started on the whole party went along, for the few who wished to go back were afraid to do so alone. Soon after dark they reached a camp of some friendly Creeks. It was a strange condition of affairs, when some of the Indians of this tribe could be trusted, while others were slinking through the woods, smeared from head to foot with vermilion, and fierce for blood.

The moon was at its full, and for a while Davy and his men tried their skill with the bows and arrows of the Indian boys. While they were doing this, a scared negro who had joined them during the day warned them that the Red Sticks were likely to surprise them, but they made light of his fears. They tied their horses ready to mount at a second’s notice, and lay with their guns by their sides. They had scarcely dozed when a cry like that of an angry panther rang through the night. The negro shouted that the Red Sticks were coming, and every one stood at bay. Then an Indian appeared in the bright moonlight, with the news that the war party had been crossing the Coosa all day at the Ten Islands, on their way to fight Jackson’s army, then gathering at Fayetteville, in Tennessee.

In a few minutes every Indian in the camp had fled, while Davy and his men “put out in a long lope” on the back trail, to give notice to the force they had left at the landing, sixty-five miles away. At the Cherokee town they found great fires blazing, but no Indians. Radcliff and his family had disappeared. At daylight they came to Brown’s house, where they ate hurriedly and then pushed on. Having crossed the Tennessee, they reached the volunteers’ camp, and reported to Colonel Coffee. To Davy’s disgust, the Colonel seemed to place little confidence in the story he had to tell, so far as the imminence of danger was involved. The little band of scouts had ridden their tired horses sixty-five miles in eleven hours by moonlight, and had forded the river, and they were disgusted by their reception. Davy said that he was burning inside like a tar-kiln, and wondered that the smoke was not pouring out of him as he withdrew.

The next day the Major came into camp with a similar report, which set Colonel Coffee into what Davy called “a fidget.” He at once threw up breastworks twelve hundred feet long, and dispatched a messenger to hurry up Jackson’s army. It always rankled in Davy’s memory that the word of a common soldier and scout could be so lightly held, while the Major’s report was never doubted for a moment. Davy had much to learn in a world where so many unjustly receive pay and praise for work that is done by obscure toilers. The forty thousand French who lay dead or dying that week before the walls of Leipzig are nameless now, but Napoleon is not forgotten. Davy’s sense of the unfairness of Fame may be the reason for his later enmity towards Andrew Jackson. When, years afterward, he told of the forced march that brought Old Hickory and his troops to the support of Coffee, he called the General “Old Hickory Face.”

Still suffering and weak from his wound, Jackson arrived at Huntsville with his command the next day, October 11, 1813. The men were wearied with the forced march, and their feet were blistered and lame, so they went to their tents while the volunteers kept watch for the enemy. Although now in charge of at least two thousand men, Jackson was without supplies, and at this time Major Reid, of his staff, wrote to a friend:

“At this place [Thompson’s Creek, on the Tennessee] we remain a day to establish a depot for provisions; but where these provisions are to come from, God Almighty only knows. I speak seriously when I declare that we may soon have to eat our horses, which may be the best use we can put a great many of them to.”

Of Davy’s movements between October 11th and the following month, we have no account, but he could have played only a minor part in the waiting game that took place. But one day in November, Coffee, with eight hundred volunteers, including Davy’s company, went west to Mussel Shoals, where they crossed the Tennessee, losing some of their horses in the dangerous and rocky fording. From there the expedition struck south, crossing the Warrior River, to Black Warrior’s town, near the present site of Tuscaloosa. Here they found some corn and a lot of dried beans, but no Indians. They burned the town, and turned back to meet the main army at the place where Davy and his scouts had waited in vain for Major Gibson, in October. The next day the supply of meat gave out, and Davy went to Coffee and asked permission to hunt while the march progressed. He says Coffee told him he might do so, but to take good care of himself. Within an hour he found a freshly-killed deer, skinned and still warm. He knew that an Indian must have fled at his approach, and, even under the conditions, had scruples against taking the meat. What he tells of this is so typical of his character that it should be repeated:

“Though I was never much in favor of one hunter stealing from another, yet meat was so scarce in camp that I thought I must go in for it. So I just took up the deer on my horse before me, and carried it on till night. I could have sold it for almost any price I would have asked; but this wasn’t my rule, neither in peace nor war. Whenever I had anything, and saw a fellow-being suffering, I was more anxious to relieve him than to benefit myself. And this is one of the secrets of my being a poor man to this day. But it is my way; and while it has often left me with an empty purse, which is as near the devil as anything else I have ever seen, yet it has never left my heart empty of consolations which money couldn’t buy, of having sometimes fed the hungry and covered the naked.”

Davy kept enough of the deer for his own mess, and gave the rest away. Most of the men were living on parched corn.

The day after, they made camp near a large cane-brake. In these brakes, the cane, of which the scientific name is Arundinaria Macrosperma, is an arborescent grass, dying down in the winter, but growing to a height of twenty feet, in some places, during the summer. Into this brake, impassable except for paths made by cattle and swine, Davy went with his rifle after meat. In a short time he found a number of hogs, and as he shot one of them the whole drove started towards camp. The roar of guns and the squealing of the hogs sounded like an Indian massacre. Most of the hogs and a fat cow were the results of his activity, and for these an order on Uncle Sam was given the people of the Cherokee town where they stopped the next day. Before night they met Jackson’s army, and turned south with them. At Radcliff’s place they found his two big half-breed sons, and, having learned that he had sent the runner who had so alarmed the camp with the news of the Red Sticks’ approach, they forced them to serve as soldiers, to repay Radcliff for what was intentionally a false alarm.

At a place named Camp Wills, Coffee was made a General, and other promotions were announced. The next point reached was Ten Islands, on the Coosa River, and here they heard of a gathering of Red Sticks at a town ten miles distant. Jackson sent nine hundred men, under General Coffee, to attack them. Part of the force was made up of friendly Cherokees, under their chief, known as Dick Brown. To prevent being mistaken for the enemy, these Indians wore white feathers and deer-tails on their heads.

At daybreak, Colonel Allcorn, with the cavalry, in which Davy served, went to the right of the line of march, while Coffee and Colonel Cannon kept to the left, soon enclosing the town completely with a cordon of horse and foot. The Indians discovered their approach, and manifested their defiance with yells and frantic beating of their drums. As they refused to come out, Captain Hammond and two companies of rangers advanced to bring on the action. The Indians seem to have believed this small force to be all with whom they had to deal, for, as Davy says, they soon came at them “like so many red devils.” As the rangers fell back, the main army line was reached, and the fight was on. The Creeks fired a volley and ran back to their huts. Slowly the cordon of soldiers closed upon them, and one of the most desperate Indian fights of history took place. The Red Sticks asked no quarter, firing from the shelter of their cabins until they were shot dead by the soldiers who came to their doors, or charging with shrill war-cries between the impassable walls of gleaming rifles that surrounded them. Refusing quarter even from the Cherokees, whom they had known as friends before, they fought till they could no longer lift their guns or draw their knives in a last effort.

According to Crockett’s story of the affair, the squaws rushed through the hail of bullets to ask for mercy. Many of them were accidentally shot in the houses with the men, but that was unavoidable. Every brave was killed, and eighty-four women and children were taken prisoners. General Coffee counted one hundred and eighty-six dead Indians, while of his own force but five were killed and forty wounded.

The difference in the mortality between the two sides is remarkable. The red man never knew how hopeless a battle he fought with the Juggernaut of Civilization. All his savage energy could avail against the pioneer no more than the throne of Hardicanute, on Britain’s shore, could turn the wild and angry waves of the North Sea.

During the fight, many of the Creeks took refuge in one of the houses of the town. As the soldiers closed in, a squaw who sat in the doorway with a bow and arrow put her feet against the bow, placed an arrow, pulled with all her might, and killed Lieutenant Moore, outright. The act so enraged the soldiers that she was riddled with bullets, and the house, with the forty-six Indians in it, was burned. A boy of twelve, who had been wounded, was seen by Davy so near the burning house that he was being scorched by the heat; yet this brave lad made no sound, nor did he ask for help.

Though they had gained a decisive victory, the soldiers were in terrible straits for food, and when everything in sight had been eaten, they learned that “Hunger is sharper than the Sword.”

[VII.]
HARD FIGHTING

The friendly Indians besieged at Talladega—Jackson sends them help—The attempted ambush—“Painted scarlet, and naked as when they were born”—The battle of Talladega, and the bleaching skulls—Mutiny of the volunteers—Davy goes home when his time is up and reënlists—The Indian victory at Enotachopco Creek—Davy is in a furious fight—One hundred volunteers killed or wounded—English Intrigue at Pensacola—Davy’s visit to that place—Many stirring adventures in the Escambia River country—Davy is hungry enough to climb a tree after a squirrel—With powder and lead he buys corn from an Indian—Home at last.

Early in November, 1813, Jackson built a fort at Ten Islands, on the north shore of the Coosa River, and many refugees came within its stockades. It was called Fort Strother, after the owner of the place on which it stood. On the 7th of the month an Indian runner arrived with bad news from the friendly town of Talladega, where a small fort had been built. One hundred and fifty peaceable Creeks were besieged by more than a thousand Red Sticks and their allies. The latter had given the fort three days to surrender, and relied on thirst and hunger to bring their intended victims to terms. The runner who came to Jackson is said to have disguised himself as a hog, in order to escape in the woods near-by. Jackson resolved to save the friendly Indians at any risk. Their faithfulness could not be unrewarded. They had refused all attempts to turn their allegiance, and when the enemy tried to induce them to help whip Jackson’s army and secure the booty that might be expected, they were repulsed with scorn. Just after midnight Jackson began crossing the river with two thousand men, of whom eight hundred were mounted. He relied upon the arrival of General White, with his men, to protect Fort Strother.

It was sun-up of the 8th when the little army came in sight of Talladega, and deployed to right and left, for the purpose of surrounding the hostile Creeks. Only through the bravery of the beleaguered Indians were the companies under Major Russell and Captain Evans saved from an ambush. As they drew near to the fort, the friendly Indians within shouted in welcome:

“How do, brother? How do?”

This they kept up till Major Russell had passed the fort and was headed for the brush-covered creek behind it, where the enemy waited to surprise him. The friendly Creeks tried in vain to call him to a halt, and at last two of them leaped from the walls, ran to his horse’s head, and pointed out the danger. At once the hidden warriors fired on them, and, to quote Crockett’s description of the event, “They came forth like a cloud of Egyptian locusts, screaming as if all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head. They were all painted scarlet, and were as naked as when they were born.”

Leaving their horses, Russell’s men made for the fort. As the cordon of soldiers rushed to enclose them in an ever-narrowing ring of fire, the ill-fated Red Sticks fell in heaps. Many of them were armed only with bows and arrows—futile weapons, even against flintlock guns. Four hundred painted braves fell before the survivors broke through the line of drafted militia and escaped. When Davy returned that way, a year afterward, he saw the bleaching skulls scattered about like gourds upon a winter field.

At Fort Strother, after returning from Talladega, the volunteers, whose sixty days were long elapsed, asked to go home for fresh horses and clothing, but Jackson, who felt that he needed every man, refused permission. White had failed him, following orders from General Cocke, and the situation was a bad one. The volunteers were within their rights, but the General was determined, and as they prepared to leave, he covered with cannon, and the guns of his other troops, a bridge that must be crossed on leaving camp. Of this affair a dramatic account is given in Eggleston’s history of the war. He tells us that behind the cannoneers with matches lit, their general gave the malcontents a few seconds in which to go back, with the promise of shot and shell if they refused; and then, the story runs, the mutineers gave in and asked for terms.

Davy Crockett says that the discontented volunteers, with flints picked and guns primed, marched across the bridge, amid the clicking of the gun-locks of the militia, some of whom had run at the battle of Talladega. He says they were determined to fight their way, or die together. The merits of this affair are in dispute, but Davy and his company returned to Tennessee, where many reënlisted after a time. It may be set down for certain that from that day Davy was no friend of Jackson.

When Davy returned to the Creek country, he went to serve the balance of six months, although his term of two months had expired. Jackson now had less than a thousand whites, with about two hundred and fifty Cherokees and friendly Creeks. One of the companies was made up of officers whose men had gone home. Major Russell was in command of a body of scouts, of whom Davy was one.

It is strange that such a small force could not be supplied with provisions. It seems to have been in no way backed up by the Government. But in the East matters had not gone well. Perry’s victory and other naval successes had not made the New Englanders any more loyal. Their pockets had suffered, and the prizes won in privateering were only a partial salve for their losses. The war with the Alabama nations was not regarded as a matter of importance on the Atlantic coast.

It was from the ranks of the ill-fed volunteers of Kentucky and Tennessee that victory was to come. The battle of New Orleans was fought after the conclusion of peace, but the capture of that city by Pakenham would have meant more war. Jackson knew the danger of Indian victories, and with his hungry and ragged troops and scouts fought regardless of odds. Davy Crockett was one of the men who learned to know what hunger was, but he was eager to be in the hottest of the trouble, and never had enough.

In January, 1814, Jackson’s little army pushed on to the Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa River, and camped in a hollow square, with every prospect of being attacked by hostiles, who were in great numbers in the vicinity. Two hours before dawn, the pickets were heard firing. Throwing brush on the camp-fires, the volunteers waited for the attack, expecting to see the Indians by the glare of the flames; but the Creeks kept out of sight, and were themselves aided in aiming by the light in the camp. Four whites were killed and a number wounded, and although several charges were made, Jackson found it necessary to retreat. The dead were burned, to prevent their being scalped, and the force fell back to the Enotachopco Creek. Some historians have called this affair a victory!

When the army was about to cross the creek, the savages fell on the rear guard, which Colonel Carroll was commanding. On the right flank Colonel Perkins was in charge, and on the left Colonel Stump. Carroll did his duty bravely, but the other Colonels fled and their men followed them. As Stump rode frantically past Jackson, the General tried to cut down the coward with his sword, but missed him. Colonel Carroll was thus left with only twenty-five men, and was in danger of being cut to pieces by the yelling and triumphant warriors.

Then the scouts under Russell, with the aid of the artillerymen, who had only one six-pound cannon, sprang to the aid of the rear guard, and [Davy had a chance to fight that must have satisfied him]. While the artillerymen were dragging the piece up the bank of the creek and loading it with grape, Davy’s company, led by old Major Russell, rushed across the stream and attacked the left flank of the Indians, who outnumbered the whites ten to one. Constantine Perkins and Craven Jackson, of the cannoneers, at last swept the ranks of the savages, huddled in the narrow descent to the creek, with a hail of grape. Then the scouts fell on the demoralized enemy, who took to the woods, and Jackson’s army was saved. One hundred and eighty-nine dead Indians were counted after this fight, and twenty volunteers were killed and seventy-five wounded.

It is worth while to consider the iron tenacity of Old Hickory, in the face of such disastrous losses. Practically without an army, and with no supplies for the friendly Creeks, he renewed his appeals to the people of Tennessee and Kentucky, and hopefully awaited their response. Every day of delay made the danger greater, for the Creeks were constantly securing firearms and powder and lead from the British agents at Pensacola.

The spectacle of the English unloading guns and scalping-knives for the savages at a Spanish port has always been miserable to look upon. But in 1865, after the surrender of Lee had ended the Civil War, twenty-five cases of Colt’s Navy revolvers, received via London, were taken from the warehouse of the Confederate Agent at St. George’s in the Bermuda Islands, sold to an American, and sent to New York on the bark Palo Alto. The Southern army had Hartford revolvers, via England and the blockade, with which to fight the brothers of the men who made them. Until the United States Government prohibited the shipping of beef to Nassau, Bermuda, and Havana, there was a supply sent to the Confederates through the blockade, as best it could be, by New York dealers. There is no use in the pot calling the kettle black.

As the volunteers returned to their homes, they stirred the hearts of their neighbors with the story of Jackson’s bravery and self-sacrifice, and the indifference of the people turned to enthusiasm. Before the end of February, Coffee returned to Alabama with two hundred of his old brigade, and there soon followed him two thousand men from Western Tennessee, and two thousand more from the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. Every man was a rifleman. The Choctaws also offered the stubborn General all the warriors of their tribe to fight the Creeks.

After serving about four months instead of the two for which he at first volunteered, Davy Crockett returned to his home, and for some time he was busy in providing for the comfort of his family. After the battle of Tohopeka, in March, 1814, in which Jackson completely routed the hostile Creeks, the victorious General made plans for an attack on Pensacola, which port the British fleet was using as if it were under the “gridiron” flag. Davy has said of this time: “I determined to go again with them [to Pensacola] as I wanted a small taste of British fighting, and I supposed they would be there.” It was in vain that Polly Crockett begged him to change his mind. Under the command of Major Russell, he crossed the Tennessee at Mussel Shoals, and at the junction of the Alabama and the Tombigbee Rivers, was two days behind the main army of General Jackson. Here they found the horses of the army, and left their own, as forage was not to be had nearer to Pensacola. With their guns, blankets, and provisions, they made the march of nearly eighty miles in two days, and came in sight of the town and of the British fleet, which lay off the port.

It was now November of the year 1814, and as Jackson had made terms with the Indians, and had occupied Pensacola, he marched his army to New Orleans, where the British were defeated in the following January. As Crockett was now at liberty to go home, he did so, but he was a long time getting there.

A careless reading of his story of this period of his adventurous life is utterly confusing, but with a better understanding of his meaning, the account is a logical one. Davy called things as he was accustomed to hear them called, and when he speaks of the Scamby River, meaning the Escambia, or calls the Conecuh, the Conaker, he gives the best proof that in his relation he was not indebted to the imagination of an educated and inventive editor. In Eggleston’s intensely interesting history of the Creek War, the author tells us that after his treaty with the Creek nation, August 14, 1814, General Jackson went back to The Hermitage, because his work was done, and that for a year Red Eagle, the vanquished chief, was his guest. But from Hickory Grove, the place of the treaty, Jackson must have gone to Pensacola, which he occupied November 7, 1814; and as he fought the battle of New Orleans in January, 1815, it is a cause for wonder that any historian should make a statement so far from facts known to the ordinary schoolboy.

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?”

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.”

The illustrations on the preceding page show the two sides of a coin struck in the days of the Bank war, and the legends and designs of this curious token are from the partisan phrases of the enemies of Old Hickory.

For two years Davy remained at the Bean’s Creek home, where a girl baby was added to his family. Then came a turning point in his career—the death of Polly Crockett. At the age of about twenty-seven, the little wife whom Davy had loved, as he says, “almost enough to eat her,” passed into the far unknown. She had fulfilled the duties of the true woman, and brought her children into the world and cared for them while their father fought back the terror of the scalping-knife and tomahawk.

The year 1817 came in as the first in which the armies of the world were not to cut each others’ throats, or do battle to the death. The phantom of Napoleon had risen to confound the pampered sovereigns of the world, and to lead to bloody graves the youth and strength of Europe. Out of the temporary tyranny of the Little Corporal had come the Louisiana Purchase, that was to change the history of our own country. Twenty-eight years of war was past, and Napoleon was now quarrelling with his jailer at St. Helena! At least, the dethroned Emperor could remember with satisfaction his words after he had sold the Louisiana territory to the United States:

“I have given England a rival who, sooner or later, will humble her pride.”

His prophecy was coming true. Endless caravans of prairie schooners were wending their way to the West, and on a single turnpike fifteen thousand wagons paid toll in 1817. In Pittsburg there were less than ten thousand people, and Chicago was yet unknown. Everywhere in the valleys of the great rivers, and out upon the rolling plains from whence their waters came, the log cabin or the sod-house arose as if by magic. A single room, a door with latch and string, and perhaps a window of paper rubbed with oil, were what the settler pictured in his dreams of a future home. The first steamboat upon the Mississippi, at St. Louis, was a harbinger of the new dispensation, the era of steam. The spirit of progress let no man rest, and from each new Indian purchase to the next, the pioneer went on, unsatisfied.

Davy Crockett was now thirty-one, a “rough backwoodsman,” unable to write, but strong and brave. His brother and his wife had come to live with Davy, and to help in caring for his two boys and the baby, but he felt the need of a real home. At last he married the widow of a volunteer killed in the Creek War. Between them they had five children to begin housekeeping with. Davy’s second marriage was a wise step, and he never regretted it. Having thus provided himself with a helpmeet, he was at liberty to indulge the restless strain in his blood by an excursion into Alabama, with three neighbors. Why he did so is not of record, but he had been farming for nearly three years, and evidently wanted a change.

Crossing the Tennessee, the four men went to where Tuscaloosa is now situated. One of the party, named Frazier, was bitten by a copperhead snake in crossing a swamp, and was left at the house of a settler whom he had known before the war. The others made camp and hobbled their horses for the night. The job was not a good one, or some one maliciously cut the ropes, for in the night the bells of the ponies were heard, showing that they were moving about and uneasy. At daylight Davy set out to bring them in, carrying his rifle, which he says was a very heavy one. At every place where he found settlers, he heard that the horses had passed along, but no one had tried to stop them. After going nearly fifty miles, across swamps and streams, through cane-brakes and over mountains, he gave up the chase and stayed that night at the first house he could find. He started to retrace his steps the next morning, but by noon he was too sick to keep on. His rifle was heavier than ever, his head was aching with a fierce pain, and in the midst of the wilderness he lay down, beside the “trace,” to see if rest would help him.

A little after noon several Indians found him, and offered him some ripe melons. He could not eat, and when the Indians signed to him that he would die under such conditions, he fully agreed with them. They told him that there was a house only a mile and a half away, and he tried to reach it. He “reeled like a cow with the blind staggers,” and finally hired one of the Indians to carry his gun for a half a dollar. Reaching the house, Davy was dosed with hot drinks and put to bed. The next day, although he had a high fever and was half delirious, he persisted in going on with two of his Tennessee neighbors who had come along. They were bound to the place where the horses had escaped, and Davy took turns at riding behind the men until the old camp was reached.

His comrades were still there, and as Davy grew worse, they took him to the house of a man named Jesse Jones, and went on with the two men who had brought him back. For two weeks Davy was very ill, most of the time unconscious. Despairing of his recovery, Mrs. Jones gave him a whole bottle of “Bateman’s Drops,” the only medicine she had in the house. He tells us that the result was a profound sweat, which lasted till morning. Then he awoke, and asked for water, nearly frightening the kind woman to death, for she had expected him to die without recovering consciousness. The crisis being over, he slowly recovered, and when able to leave, hired his passage with a wagoner who came along, and who lived twenty miles from Davy’s home on Bean’s Creek.

When he hove in sight of his humble dwelling, on a borrowed horse, he was welcomed as one from the dead. The men who had first set out with him had returned with the report of his death, and his wife had sent for his money, rifle, and other effects. The men had brought his horse home, having found all the stray ponies together.

Another year passed at the same place; then he concluded that it was too unhealthful there, and decided to go eighty miles north and west, into the newly-purchased Chickasaw lands. The place where he built his fourth cabin, in 1818, was at the head of Shoal Creek, near the divide between the Duck and Elk Rivers. He at first started out to explore the country for some distance, but was taken sick, and had to remain near the creek until he recovered. Before that time, he concluded to try the place as a cure for the fever and ague contracted in Alabama. Shoal Creek was but a little way from the eastern border of the Chickasaw land purchase. In many respects it was like the No Man’s Land of Texas, without defined limits, laws, or courts. Many outlaws moved in, and started to run things to suit themselves. To protect their rights and properties, the law-respecting men came together, selected magistrates, and gave it out that punishment would be the lot of those convicted of wrong-doing.

It was probably 1820 when this was done, and Davy Crockett was chosen to act as a Justice of the Peace. He set about his duties without misgiving. In civil actions, he heard the evidence and ordered judgment, or dismissed the action, as the evidence seemed to warrant. The constable who assisted in these matters was able to make out the necessary execution papers, or writs, and nobody questioned their validity. Sometimes the prisoner brought before Davy would be a man who had been marking his neighbor’s hogs. Proof of guilt was followed by a whipping and orders to leave the place. In the Far West, this “marking” is called brand-blotting, and the cattle-thief, or rustler, seldom gets into court, or even is buried on the lonely prairie where he meets his fate.

When matters had gone along in this way for some time, the Legislature of Tennessee made a new county, named Giles, containing six hundred square miles, and including that part of the Purchase where Davy lived. In commissioning Justices of the Peace, all those who had been acting as such were duly appointed. When he was furnished with books of record and the usual blanks for his proceedings, Davy awoke to the knowledge of his inability to read or write well enough to act. But with the help of his constable, who seems to have signed for him in any emergency, the new Squire managed for a while, and in the meanwhile diligently used his time in improving his handwriting, until at last he was able to do his part of the work. If he was a poor scholar, he had a keen sense of right and wrong, and disregarded all the cobwebs with which lawyers delight to obscure the spectacles of the learned judges before whom they plead. Red Eagle, or Weatherford, three-quarters a white man, and one of the craftiest and wisest of the nation he ruled, would never learn to read or write, believing these accomplishments would cloud his perception of affairs about him. He was a great orator, and could make a better speech than Davy Crockett ever learned to make.

As Davy had never read a page of a law-book before becoming a Squire, he relied on common sense in his decisions, and they were never appealed from. The sense of his responsibility and importance in the community in which he lived added to his dignity and self-possession, and he no longer resembled the awkward and boyish scout from Bean’s Creek. That there was something about him that people admired is plainly shown, for the honors that he bore were almost invariably thrust upon him, not sought after. It is not known with what motive he was asked by Captain Matthews, a well-to-do neighbor, to run for the office of Major of a certain regiment, the Captain being out for the Colonelcy. Davy at first refused, but finally he allowed his name to be used, and with his family attended a barbecue given by the Captain at his home. The principal part of the affair was, of course, the serving of the meat of an ox roasted whole, and the generous dispensation of such beverages as the country afforded; but there was also a corn-husking on the Captain’s place, and the young fellows and the shy damsels who expected to pay the usual penalty for finding a red ear of corn, were with the older people from far and near. In the midst of the frolic, a friend told Davy that the Captain’s son had decided to run for Major against him. Davy went to the Captain and asked what it all meant. It seems likely that the decision of his son must have been a surprise to the Captain, but he said the story was true, though the young man dreaded to run against Davy Crockett, preferring almost any other opponent.

This was enough to get Davy’s dander up. He told the Captain to tell his son not to worry, for Davy Crockett was going to run against his father for the office of Colonel. The two men went into the midst of the company, and the Captain, mounting on a wagon, announced that Crockett was to be his opponent in the election of a Colonel. That there was something of the “real old Southern gentleman” in the make-up of the Captain showed in this frank introduction of the man who was to run against him. As soon as the Captain had climbed down, Davy mounted the wagon, and explained why he had decided to try for the office of Colonel, instead of Major. He said that as he had the whole family to run against, he thought he might as well “levy on the head of the mess.” Another man offered for the office of Major, and both he and Crockett were elected by good pluralities over the Captain and his son.

Davy was now becoming a man of weight in the county, and even beyond its borders. Politics then was the same keen game as it is to-day, a little cruder, perhaps, but not more scrupulous. The leaders were looking for men who could get votes, and in Davy they saw great promise. He was asked to run for the Legislature, and in February, 1821, he agreed to. As the election was not until some months later, he took a drove of horses to North Carolina, and was gone three months. As soon as he returned he began an active campaign, in those days called “electioneering.” He says that he found the people expected him to tell them about things of which he knew nothing. His ideas of government and constitutions were scarcely nebulous, and it behooved him to listen to the words of wisdom that fell upon his ears. Like many wise men and judges, he knew enough to “reserve his opinion,” and to follow the example of the Tar Baby, who “kept on sayin’ nothing.” The Assembly district comprised two or three counties, and it required much travelling to cover the field. The most trying event in Davy’s history was undoubtedly his coming before the Duck River people at the time of the big squirrel hunt and barbecue.

From all parts of the district the squirrel-hunters came, with the best rifles the world had ever seen. When Davy was chosen by one of the two sides he received the best possible advertisement. The hunt lasted two days, and only the scalps were needed in the count, the squirrels being eaten by the hunters. The nuts were yet unripe, but the corn had suffered from the little animals’ greed, and they were fat and saucy. Black squirrels, gray squirrels, foxies, red squirrels, all helped to swell the count. Davy killed a large number in the way by which he had made a reputation: he “barked” them by shooting between the squirrel and the limb on which it sat, generally killing it without a scar. When the scalps were counted it was found that Davy’s side had won, and their opponents furnished the materials for the barbecue, and provided music for the dancing that followed.

All day great fires had been kept going in long pits dug in the ground, hard, dry beech and maple being used for fuel. On the next morning, the last day of the hunt, half of a fatted ox or deer was placed over the coals of each pit on an iron rod or a green sapling, and slowly roasted, being carefully watched, seasoned, and basted with fat. When everything was ready, the meat was cut from the bones by skilful carvers, and the hungry crowd was served. There is no sauce like hunger, and no meat like that roasted over a bed of hardwood coals. After the feast, came the dancing. But between the barbecue and the time for the “Virginny Reel” and “Money Musk,” with the hoedowns, pigeon-wings, and other rural embellishments, the people had to be amused, and Davy was called on for a speech. What he thought and did in this crisis is best told in his own words:

“A public document I had never seen, nor did I know there were such things; and how to begin I couldn’t tell. I made many apologies, and tried to get off, for I know’d I had to run against a man who could speak prime, and I know’d, too, that I wasn’t able to shuffle and cut with him. He was there, and, knowing my ignorance as well as I did myself, he also urged me to make a speech. The truth is, he thought my being a candidate was a mere matter of sport, and didn’t think for a moment that he was in any danger from an ignorant backwoods bear-hunter. I found I couldn’t get off, and so I determined just to go ahead, and leave it to chance what I should say. I got up and told the people I reckoned they knowed what I had come for, but if not, I could tell them. I had come for their votes, and if they didn’t watch mighty close I’d get them too. Then I tried to speak about something else (about government), until I choked up as bad as if my mouth had been jammed and crammed chock full of dry mush. There the people stood, listening all the while, with their eyes, mouths, and ears open, to catch every word I would speak.

“At last I told them I was like a fellow I had heard of not long before; he was beating on the head of an empty barrel near the road-side, when a traveller, passing along, asked him what he was doing that for? The fellow replied that there had been some cider in that barrel a few days before, and he was trying to see if there was any then; he said if there was, he couldn’t get at it. I told them there had been a little bit of a speech in me a while before, but I believed I couldn’t get it out.”

Having in this way set the crowd to roaring with laughter, Davy told them a few stories, then took the first chance to say that he was as dry as a powder-horn. A great cheer rose as he led the way to the stand where rum, apple and peach brandies, cider, and buttermilk were to be had.

Then came the country dances, the name being a popular rendering of the French term contre-danse, and the figures the same as might have been seen—before the Revolution—in the gay court of Louis the Fourteenth; as Davy, thoroughly at home, took his part in the extravagant features of the frolicsome reels and riotous quadrilles, he made votes by the hundred, and when the day of the election came about he had two-thirds of all those cast.

[IX.]
A CABIN IN THE WILDERNESS

Davy builds a mill and distillery—Along Shoal Creek—A tidal wave in politics—Another one in Shoal Creek leaves Davy without a dollar—The year 1822 sees Davy seeking a new home on the Obion River—Encounter of his party with floods—The story of the flat-boat’s trip up the Obion—Davy builds a cabin in the wilderness—A great day for deer—The passing of the red man—Davy returns to the Obion with his whole family—Risks his life for a keg of powder at Christmas time—He is now loaded for bears.

While Davy Crockett was rapidly becoming known to the people of his State, he was planning to increase his income by building a large distillery, and a mill for grinding corn, with an addition for the manufacture of powder. He had saved enough money partly to pay for it, and built it in a great measure with his own hands. After the mill began its output, Mrs. Crockett acted as miller when Davy was absent. She is said to have been able to lift the bags of corn about, as well as the men who brought them could. The tourist to-day will look in vain for the site of the mill. Where the great wheel turned slowly beneath the weight of the waters of the creek, and the rumble of the millstones startled the traveller with the sound of distant thunder, the rhododendron now opens its gorgeous buds, and the laurels cover the waste places with a measureless profusion of delicate flowers. Among the hemlocks close to the quiet stream, the thrush and the cat-bird sing their liquid scores, and the redbird and the scarlet tanager vie with the Kentucky and blue-winged yellow warblers in the glory of their April dress. All things are changed in these old places of the world, until we climb the mountains to its top, and see the far blue ranging crests that blend at last with gentle skies, unchanging and unchanged.

When Davy set out for Nashville, to take his seat as a member of the Legislature, he had finished his mill, but still owed for labor and material. The mill was worth three or four thousand dollars, and besides that, he owned several able-bodied slaves, and more than the usual stock of goods and chattels. He saw prosperity and honors assured, and his soul was full of faith in the future. The Legislature that came together after the elections of 1821 was composed of the class that represented the men of the frontier, rather than the aristocracy that had hitherto monopolized both the wealth and the honors of the State.

In the same year, William Carroll, who had so bravely commanded the rear guard of Jackson’s forces at Enotachopco Creek, was a candidate for the Governorship. He represented, as did Davy, the men who paid rentals to monopolists, and taxes to the State that favored the wealthy in the filling of remunerative offices. When Carroll’s enemies accused him of having let his note go to protest, they threw a boomerang that slew them in its sudden homeward flight; for Carroll’s friends made it known that he had lost everything in going security for them in dire financial straits. His opponent, Ward, was cold and unapproachable. To him a man from the cane-brakes or the windowless cabins of the mountains was little better than the savages just beyond. In Phelan’s history of Tennessee, there is mention of a sarcastic letter printed in the Nashville Clarion over the signature “A Big Fish.” In this the supposed Big Fish, or Big-Bug, as the aristocrat was then often called, gave the reasons why he could not vote for Carroll. He said that Carroll was born of poor parents, and had never learned the rudiments of Latin and Greek; as a boy and a young man, he had plowed and reaped and cleared the land; he had always been handy at log-rollings, country weddings, and huskings; he had gone to the wars, instead of staying home to save the wealth that was needed for the Governor’s position; he could not support the dignity of the great office with fine dinners, splendid carriages, liveried servants, and state balls; he was too ready to shake hands with the ragged soldier because they had fought on the same fields. A man who was not above such low-born loons was not fit to command the votes of the educated and the men of the higher classes.

Carroll received forty-two thousand votes, while his austere and wealthy rival had but eleven thousand. On the same popular tidal wave, Davy Crockett was carried to Nashville as a representative of his neighbors in the recent Purchase from the Indians, and in the atmosphere that prevailed in the halls of state he believed he had found his place.

Davy had hardly been sworn in as a member of the Legislature when bad news from home reached him. A freshet had swept away his mill, and his distillery was worthless without the corn that was ground by it. When he had served through the session, he rode home, sold all that he had, and paid every dollar he could realize to his creditors. He was left with nothing but his household “plunder,” as he termed it, and the times were hard. The “Loan Bank” scheme that was to provide a currency and credit for development of the State had become a failure. There was nothing to do, in such times, but to live by the sweat of the brow. His wife stood bravely by him, and he gave up all he had, and “took a bran-fire new start.”

He was now thirty-six, and his oldest boy was sixteen. With this son and a young man named Abram Henry, Davy started in the spring of 1822 to look at the Obion River region, then reputed to be full of game. It was a long tramp across an unsettled country, nearly one hundred and fifty miles in a bee-line, and the three led a single horse which carried their scanty outfit of food, blankets, and ammunition. There were many streams to cross, including the Tennessee. In what is now Carroll County they struck the head of the south fork of the Obion River, and this they followed to a place about ten miles south of where the small settlement named after Crockett now is situated. Here they found themselves in a wilderness, abounding with game. The three nearest cabins were seven, fifteen, and twenty miles distant. The one seven miles away was that of the Owens family, and it was on the other side of the Rutherford Fork of the Obion, a tortuous stream, then in flood and over its low banks for half a mile on either shore. The water was chilly, the depth uncertain, and the crossing difficult and full of danger.

There was nothing to do but to take to the water, and after hobbling the horse, so that he could graze till they returned for him, they went at it “like so many beavers.” When the water was too deep to go ahead, Davy felt the way over the shallower bottom by using a pole. His boy often had to swim beside them, and progress was slow. When the river channel was reached, they found that a tree had fallen and lodged in a pile of flood-trash near the middle of the main stream. The water was deep at this place, and there was no way of crossing without some kind of a bridge. A large buttonwood tree stood upon the near side of the river, and the two men began cutting it down with Davy’s tomahawk. They managed to do this so that it fell above the flood-trash, and when it had been washed against it the bridge was ready.

“When we got over this,” says Davy, “it was still a sea of water as far as the eye could reach. We took into it again, and went ahead for about a mile, hardly ever seeing a single spot of land, and sometimes it was very deep. When at last we came in sight of land, and got out, it was but a little way before we saw the house, which was more pleasing even than the sight of land. I felt mighty sorry when I would look at my boy, and see him shaking like he had the worst kind of an ague, for there was no time for fever then. As we got near the house, we saw Mr. Owens and several men that were with him, just starting away. They saw us, and stopped, but looked much astonished until we got up to them, and I made myself known. The men who were with him were the owners of a boat which was the first that ever went that far up the Obion River, and some hands they had hired to carry it about a hundred miles further up, by water, though it was only about thirty, by land, as the river is very crooked.”

The whole party then went back to the Owens cabin, where Mrs. Owens won Davy’s gratitude by taking charge of the shivering boy. A great fire blazed in the fireplace, and before that they dried themselves. After supper, leaving his boy with Mrs. Owens, Davy and the others went on board of the boat, and stayed all night. It was a flat-bottomed boat, drawing but a foot or so of water. The cabin, or deck-house, was of light material, furnished with bunks, and stored with the freight that would be injured by rains. The other freight was lashed on deck, and the load was all that was safe to carry. This boat was carrying flour, sugar, castings, coffee, salt, and other goods needed on the frontier, and was to go as far as McLemore’s Bluff. This was in Carroll County (as now named), and the crew were to be paid five hundred dollars bonus if they landed the freight at that point. It was to be a proof that the river was navigable thus far, though it seems that a flood was first necessary.

In the morning Davy went with the boat, to help get it by a place on the river where a “harricane” had blown trees across it, making it hard to get through. They found that the water had gone down, and had to wait for a rain. The next day it rained “rip-roariously,” as Davy tells us, but yet not enough. While waiting, Davy and the boatmen crossed the Fork, and in a short time “slapped up a cabin” on a spot selected by him. Here Davy procured four barrels of meal, one of salt, and ten gallons of spirits, in payment for which he was to help get the boat to McLemore’s Bluff. Henry and the boy were left in the new cabin, after a deer had been killed for them, and other supplies provided.

The day after the cabin was built, Davy started out with his rifle for a hunt. Within a few minutes he had killed a fine buck, and hung him up. He started to go back to the boat for help in bringing him in, but on the way he struck the trail of a number of elk and went after them. In a short time he saw two deer, large bucks with immense antlers. He dropped one, and then shot the other, which would not leave the one first killed. Hanging the two out of reach of bears and wolves, Davy kept after the elk till evening, when he gave up the chase, being four miles from the cabin, and “as hungry as a wolf.”

As he set out for the river, on his way back, he killed two more bucks. Dressing these in the usual way, with the skins on, he hung them up and kept on. Before he got to the river, just at sundown, he killed another buck, making six since morning. At last he reached the lower edge of the “harricane,” and was disappointed at not finding the boat there. He had not expected it could be taken through that day. When he fired his rifle as a signal, the answer came from up the river. He then knew that he had to crawl and climb through the “harricane,” in which all kinds of berry-bushes and vines were growing. A fat coon would have had a hard time in getting through after him, he tells us. Finally he got to a place where a skiff came for him. He says that he felt as if he needed sewing up all over, thanks to the brambles and the briers along his trail, and he was so tired that he could scarcely work his jaws to eat.

The next morning four of the deer were secured and taken on board, and the voyage proceeded. Pushing, and hauling with ropes, it took eleven days to reach the Bluff, from which point Davy and a young man named Flavius Harris went back to his cabin in the skiff, given to them by the boatmen. They at once cleared a field, in the usual rough way, leaving the charred stumps standing, and planting among them. Davy put in enough corn to do for the winter, but had no time for fencing. It was late spring, and he was anxious to return for his family. While thus planting and planning, Davy killed ten bears and “a great abundance of deer,” repaying the Owens family many times over for their kindness to him and his boy. In these weeks of hard work the only white faces seen were those of the Owenses, and once in a while those of men looking over the country.

There were many Indians in the timber, and sometimes they came to Davy’s clearing, and watched with vague forebodings the gleam of the axe and the tender green of the springing grain. Their traditions were full of the untrammelled freedom of the wilderness, of the plentiful supplies of game and mast, of rivers alive with fish, on whose banks the beaver and otter were scarcely afraid of those who wore the splendid peltries of their kind. When they turned from the scene towards the solitude of the wilderness, their hearts were sad, for the knell of their race resounded through their ancient temples, built by the Great Spirit, whose aisles were rows of stately oak and pine, whose arches of living green were hung with golden blossoms of the tulip-tree and the fiery clusters of the trumpet-vine. There was no sentiment in the heart of the pioneer, who classed the Indian, the wolf, and the moccasin of the steaming swamp, as equally worthy of extermination.

When the corn had started, Davy made his way back to Shoal Creek, and from there to Nashville to attend a special session of the Legislature. With his three dollars per diem in his pocket, he returned to the scene of his disasters, and as soon as possible started with all his family for the clearing on the Rutherford Fork of the Obion, where Harris was working out his own salvation with axe and fire, while keeping the “varments” out of the Crockett corn. It was some time in the fall of 1822 that the wearied family came in sight of the rude cabin that was to be their home. Most of them had tramped the one hundred and fifty miles across the trackless land, for upon the horses were loaded the household effects and wearing apparel that Davy still owned. The loom, the wooden trencher, spare clothing, table utensils, and a few rude dishes were about all that the pioneer thought necessary in these days, always excepting the priceless ammunition and the guns.

The small clearing of six to eight acres that Davy had made, a quarter of a mile east of the Fork, could only partly feed so many mouths, and the task of supporting his family would have been desperate, had it not been for the supply of game that could always be counted upon. The river and the lakes were full of fish, and when the meat for the winter had been cured or salted down, there was always a good chance of getting more if needed. When Davy had harvested his crop of corn, in the last of October, 1822, he set out for the usual fall hunt. The buffalo had already disappeared from that vicinity, and he never saw one of these ponderous animals until he was on the way to the Alamo, in the last year of his life. Of all other wild “varments,” as he termed them, the woods were full.

When Christmas approached Davy’s supply of powder ran low, and he determined to cross the Fork and go to the home of a brother-in-law who had settled six miles west, and who had brought with him a keg of powder for Davy. The river was full of slush ice, and was out of its banks, as when Davy first saw it, but the determination to have powder for the usual Christmas fusillade, and the fact that they were out of meat, overruled his wife’s argument that they might as well starve as to have him drown or freeze. With his gun and hunting tools, and a few extras in the way of clothing, he started through the deep snow that had fallen, and waded across half a mile of flooded ground, until the main channel was before him. This he crossed on a log that lay from bank to bank, but farther on he came to a slough which was wider than the river itself, though he had always been able to cross it on another log. This was entirely under water, but he recognized its location by the sapling that stood beside it. By cutting another long sapling and lodging it against the first, he managed to use the submerged log as a bridge, and reached an island, now under water in the slough. Again wading for a long distance, he crossed another slough part way on a floating log, but fell off it when it turned over with him. He waded out of the water, which was nearly up to his head, and when he got to solid ground, put on the dry clothing which he had held, with his rifle, above the water. He says that after he had done this and had hung the wet clothing on the bushes, he had no feeling in his flesh. He tried to run to warm himself, but could scarcely move his feet.

When he got to his brother-in-law’s cabin, he thought the smell of the fire the best thing he had ever known. The next morning was piercing cold, and he stayed there to hunt, killing two deer for the family. The third day he decided to return, hoping that the ice had frozen so as to help him cross the still places in the sloughs. But time after time he broke through, and when he reached the sloughs and the river he had to go through the same performance as he had when he first crossed them—a feat made even harder by having to cross first with his gun, and then go back for the powder-keg. The ice had been broken as if a bear had gone across, and he at once fresh primed his gun, so that he was ready to “make war upon him,” if he appeared. When Davy reached his home, he was hailed as one risen from the dead. He learned that the ice had been broken by a man sent after him by his distressed wife, who had given up hope of his ever returning. He concludes this incident by saying: “I wasn’t quite dead, but mighty nigh it; but I had my powder, and that was what I went for.” This impatience at delay was one of Davy’s traits. He might easily have managed to subsist until the falling of the water, or until the ice was strong enough to bear him, but he couldn’t wait. It is a sure thing that he celebrated Christmas with a part of the dearly-earned powder.

[X.]
THE ELECTION

Hunting in the “harricane”—His dream of a big black “nigger”—His dogs bark up the wrong tree—A bear as big as a bull—Davy’s trip to Jackson—Meets some former comrades-in-arms—His name again suggested for the Legislature—He becomes a candidate in hunting coat and coon-skin cap—He is elected a member from his new district—Votes against Jackson’s friend for United States Senator—Old Hickory puts a mark opposite Crockett’s name—In the next election Davy is defeated by Jackson’s influence—Returns to farming again.

Davy Crockett in his time was celebrated as the greatest bear-hunter that ever lived. The story of one of his hunts was probably read by almost every man, woman, and child, of his generation, in Tennessee. His own version is by far the best, and is now given word for word as he wrote it. First let the reader understand that Davy’s cabin was near the Rutherford fork of the Obion, on the east side, and just below the “harricane,” where either a great wind-storm or a not uncommon earthquake had laid most of the timber flat. East of the cabin, five or six miles, was the middle or main fork of the Obion. A look at the map will show very nearly the location of his home. The hunt began the morning after he had secured his precious keg of powder. Davy’s story is as follows:

“That night there fell a heavy rain, and it turned to sleet. In the morning all hands turned out hunting. My young man and a brother-in-law who had lately settled near me went down the river to hunt for turkeys, but I was for larger game. I told them I had dreamed the night before of having had a hard fight with a big black nigger, and I know’d it was a sign I was to have a battle with a bear; for in a bear country, I never know’d such a dream to fail. So I started to go above the harricane, determined to have a bear. I had two pretty good dogs and an old hound, which I took along. I had gone about six miles up the river, and it was then about four miles across to the main Obion; so I determined to strike across to that, as I had found nothing yet to kill.

“I got on to the river, and turned down it; but the sleet was still getting worse and worse. The bushes were all bent down and locked together, so that it was almost impossible to get along. In a little time my dogs started a large gang of old turkey gobblers, and I killed two of the biggest sort. I shouldered them up, and moved on, until I got through the harricane again, when I was so tired that I laid my gobblers down, to rest, as they were confounded heavy, and I was mighty tired.

“While I was resting, my old hound went to a log and smelt it awhile, and then raised his eyes towards the sky and cried out. Away he went, and my other dogs with him, and I shouldered up my turkeys again, and followed on as hard as I could drive. The dogs were soon out of sight, and in a very little time I heard them begin to bark. When I got to them, they were barking up a tree, but there was no game there. I concluded that it had been a turkey, and that it had flew away.

“When they saw me coming, away they went again, and, after a little time, began to bark as before. When I got near them, I found they were barking up the wrong tree again, as there was no game there. They served in this way three or four times, until I was so infernal mad that I determined, if I could get near enough, to shoot the old hound at least.

“With this intention, I pushed on the harder, till I came to the edge of an open prairie, and, looking on before my dogs, I saw in and about the biggest bear that ever was seen in America. He looked, at the distance he was from me, like a large black bull. My dogs were afraid to attack him, and that was the reason why they had stopped so often—that I might overtake them. They were now almost up with him, and I took my gobblers from my back and hung them up in a sapling, and broke like a quarter horse after my bear, for the sight of him had put new springs in me. I soon got near to them, but they were just getting into a roaring thicket, and so I couldn’t run through it, but had to pick my way along, and had close work at that.

“In a little while I saw the bear climbing up a large black oak tree, and I crawled on till I got within about eighty yards of him. He was setting with his breast to me, and so I put fresh priming in my gun and fired at him. At this he raised one of his paws and snorted loudly. I loaded again as quick as I could, and fired as near the same place in his breast as possible. At the crack of my gun, here he came tumbling down; and the moment he touched the ground I heard one of my best dogs cry out. I took my tomahawk in one hand and my big butcher-knife in the other, and ran up within four or five paces of him, at which he let my dog go and fixed his eyes on me. I got back in all sorts of a hurry, for I knowed that if he got hold of me, he would hug me altogether too close for comfort. I went to my gun and hastily loaded her again, and shot him a third time, which killed him for good.

“I now began to think about getting him home, but I didn’t know how far it was. So I left him and started; and in order to find him again, I would blaze a sapling every little distance, which would show me the way back; I continued this until I got within a mile of home, for there I knowed very well where I was, and that I could easily find my way back to my blazes. When I got home, I took my brother-in-law and my young man and four horses, and went back. We got there just before dark, and struck up a fire and commenced butchering my bear. It was some time in the night before we finished it; and I can assert, on my honor, that I believe he would have weighed six hundred pounds. It was the second largest I ever saw. I killed one, a few years afterwards, that weighed six hundred and seventeen pounds.

“I now felt fully compensated for my sufferings in going after my powder; and well satisfied that a dog may be doing a good business, even when he seems to be barking up the wrong tree.”