Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Crockett took pride in his war service, even if later he glossed over his desertions and exaggerated his participation, to the extent of claiming he had been in battles fought while he was home between enlistments. Certainly it was important enough to him that in his later autobiography he devoted even more space to it than to his youth, giving a third of those precious 211 pages over to his war exploits, real and fabricated. He had seen new country, much of it unsettled and ripe for men like himself to exploit. He had seen and served with Andrew Jackson and taken some measure of the man, most of it favorable. He had seen and shot at an enemy. He knew the face of battle. It was a fitting climax to the schooling of a frontiersman, and like so much else, self-taught. Yet even now, as he chained himself once more to the ceaseless routine of the soil and the care of his family, the real education of David Crockett was only just begun.

  2

  BOWIE

  1796-1820

  …an extended and organized system of enterprise, of ingenuity, of indefatigability, and of audacity…

  BEVERLY CHEW, AUGUST 1, 1817

  Thousands of men like David Crockett, coming home that spring of 1815, experienced only the fringe of the War of 1812 without seeing a real battle. Two such, brothers, trudged westward across the bayous and prairies of Louisiana toward Opelousas. From earliest youth they did everything together, as their father had before them with his own twin brother. In fact, they belonged to a family whose males knitted themselves so closely together in everything that any woman marrying one might have felt more like a visitor than a hostess in her own home. They felt a loyalty to the family that was intense beyond almost every other consideration. But that was natural: They were Scots, and the clan was in their blood.

  If Crockett did not even know with certainty where his father had been born, these brothers at least had inklings of their tribe's origin. More than two centuries before, in 1581, King James VI of Scotland granted a tenement and garden in Cowper to his master of the wine cellar, Jerome, who probably traced his surname back even farther to the ancient Mac Ghille-bhuidhe. By Jerome's time, however, it had been shortened simply to Bowy and was pronounced to rhyme with the French Louis.1 Like so many Scots, Jerome called his son James for his king, a name repeated generation after generation until John Bowie crossed the ocean to Maryland in about 1705 and settled on the Patuxent River in Prince Georges County.

  Being a generation earlier than the Crocketts, the Bowies missed the traditional migration of the Scots-Irish, but still they moved. John's grandson James Bowie left home when he was about twenty-one and settled in South Carolina in 1760, married, and soon moved on to Ebenezer, Georgia, near the Savannah River. He was probably a squatter for his first year or two. There in 1762 his wife bore him twin sons, Rezin Pleasant and Rhesa, with two more children to follow, but then in September 1766 he petitioned the colonial administration for 300 acres on the north side of the Ogeechee River. As the family grew, he petitioned for additional land, and by 1772 his holdings had increased to 750 acres. His livestock throve to the extent that he registered an earmark for his cattle and pigs, a slash on the left ear and a hole in the right. His standing in the community grew apace, making him a magistrate for Richmond County by the time of the Revolution. His sons could write at least their names, if they did not read and write anything more.2

  When Georgia joined the other twelve colonies in revolt, the twins, Rezin and Rhesa (despite their almost Arabic sound, the names were in fact Scottish in derivation), were just thirteen and far too young to serve, but their father, James, enlisted. Eventually, as the conflict lingered on and shifted to the south, the boys grew into the war. In 1779, now seventeen, Rezin joined Col. Francis Marion's mounted partisans and with them attacked Savannah on October 9. The attack failed, and a British saber slash nearly cost Rezin Bowie his hand, leaving him prostrate in a prison-camp hospital for some time. Elve ap Catesby Jones, a girl of Welsh background, joined the volunteer nurses tending the American wounded, and soon found herself devoting more than normal care to young Bowie. For his part the nurse attracted him despite her abrupt and candid manner. Behind her uncultured exterior—she was illiterate and unable to do more with a pen than make her mark—lay a powerful intellect. Scarcely more than two years later, with the war not yet over, they married, and in 1784, after independence, his service earned him a grant of 287.5 acres in Washington County, where the couple began housekeeping.3

  The young Bowies added to their new farm and their family. Their first children, twin girls, died while yet infants, but in 1785 they welcomed John, the first of many sons. As his family grew, so did Rezin's aspirations. After daughter Sarah came in 1787, he turned his gaze toward new land in that part of western North Carolina soon to become Tennessee. They made the long trek nearly three hundred miles northwest, almost to the Kentucky border, to Summer County. Near Elliott Springs he bought a few hundred acres, where Elve gave birth to daughter Mary in 1789 and Martha two years later. Then on September 8, 1793, came another son, a second Rezin Pleasant. With his family growing, the father Rezin acquired another 640 acres on Station Camp Creek two months after his new son's birth, but after another two months sold it all and decided to move thirty miles north, across the Kentucky line to Logan County. There with his wife, four children, five horses, and three black slaves, he settled 200 acres on Terrapin Creek.4

  The Bowies did well in Kentucky. Within a year of landing in Logan, Rezin more than doubled his string of horses, including a breeding stud. He acquired a small herd of twenty-three cattle and increased his slave holdings to eight to help work the property. He paid taxes, secured the surveys and permission to build the inevitable mill on the creek, and before long the wagon path crossing his property to the creek became known as Bowie's Mill Road.5 Elve had a third son there in the spring of 1796. Inevitably with the Bowies there had to be a James sooner or later, and this boy was the one.6

  The family prospered and grew in the ensuing years. They added another 200 acres to their holdings. Yet another son, Stephen, came the year after James, and Rezin's brothers Rhesa and John moved to Kentucky.7 Indeed, not only did the Bowies expand but so did Logan itself—and that presented a problem. Rezin senior may have enjoyed the company of other Logan settlers like Adam and Margaret Kuykendall or the Smiths, whose infant son Benjamin fort Smith was only a few weeks older than James,8 but he did not care for the growing population. Like so many of his wandering kind he craved the wilder regions on the outer edge of the frontier. His son John was already old enough to recognize that his father was “passionately fond of the adventures and excitements of a woodsman's life.”9 Rezin Bowie must have seen the handbill.

  There were already stories of wonderful new lands to be had just for the asking. In 1795 the Treaty of San Lorenzo adjusted major differences between the United States and Spain, and the Spaniards, who owned the vast Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River, decided to invite American settlers into the region. The very year of James Bowie's birth, they distributed handbills throughout the Ohio River Valley settlements, offering liberal grants and no taxes to those who would come to their part of the New World. The only requirement was that settlers convert to Catholicism. The Bowies resisted the temptation at first, but so many others rushed west, ignoring the religious requirement, that in 1798 Madrid halted the immigration temporarily. It soon commenced again, however, and in October 1799 the best known of all Kentuckians, Daniel Boone, crossed the great river. The Spaniards made him an empresario, his task to persuade others to follow—and follow they did.

  A generation later Tocqueville marveled at the exodus. “At the end of the last century a few bold adventurers began to penetrate into the Mississippi valley,” he wrote. “It was like a new discovery of America; soon most of those who were immigrating went there; previously unheard of communities suddenly sprang up in the wilderness.” And there one could find what he called “democracy in its most extreme form.” In those new lands, “in some sense improvisations of
fortune, the inhabitants have arrived only yesterday in the land where they dwell. They hardly know one another, and each man is ignorant of his nearest neighbor's history.”10

  It was that kind of solitude, that sort of “extreme” democracy, that Rezin Bowie could not resist.11 On February 19, 1800, he sold his Logan County property, packed his family, including brothers Rhesa, John, and the youngest David, and their sister Elsie, and set off west to pick up the old road that led from Nashville, Tennessee, northwest through Kentucky to the Ohio River.12 When they reached Livingston County on the river, the Bowie clan apparently liked what they saw and briefly changed their minds about Missouri. They settled on a parcel of land in Livingston, but scarcely had the family gotten settled before they moved again, this time probably by “broad horn,” one of the self-made flatboats that took tens of thousands down the rivers to new land. With them they took all the seed needed to plant a new crop, several hundred seedlings for fruit trees, and perhaps even some livestock. If not sold before the journey, their eight slaves went with them.13 Just where the Ohio flowed into the Mississippi, at a spot known as Bird's Point, they made landing and came ashore onto an extensive alluvial plain called the Tywappity Bottom. They found an area scarcely settled, no more than forty or fifty families scattered about, and many of them congregated in the small village of Ze-wa-pe-ta some thirty miles north. In 1789 the Spaniards had opened a river road—designated El Camino Real, or royal highway—that passed through the bottom and ran south to New Madrid and north to St. Genevieve. The bottom itself constituted a dividing line between the Cape Girardeau District to the north and the New Madrid District to the south, and in August 1800 the Bowies wasted little time in establishing themselves.14

  They selected a plot beside the Marias des Peches in the New Madrid District and immediately began building two cabins, one for Rezin's family and the other for his brothers and sister. Other than Charles Findlay and Abraham Bird, who had been there two years, their only neighbors were the honeybees and the mosquitoes, and the deer, turkey, beaver, and even bears that inhabited the dense and seemingly impenetrable forests that lined the bottom.15

  Rezin cleared fifty acres and started the family planting turnips and laying out and planting an orchard of eight hundred or more fruit trees. He applied to Henry Peyroux, commandant of the New Madrid District, for a formal concession of land and got it on December 19, allowing him a total of 380 arpents, the French measurement equivalent to just more than five-sixths of an acre.16 Here they would stay for two years, and here James Bowie undoubtedly placed his earliest recollections. As a child of four growing to six, his work was slight. There was abundant time for play in those foreboding woods that seemed always to hold more lure than fright for the Bowie men. All around him were associations from the now gone Apple Creek band of the Shawnee. Their old abandoned encampments dotted the bottom. The name “Tywappity” had probably been left by them, but if so this oddest of all place names in the Missouri country was so old that its origin or meaning had been completely lost.17 There was time to be spent learning, for Elve had acquired enough literacy by now to teach her children the alphabet. Thanks to the Spanish stipulation of Catholicism, there were no Protestant congregations in the Tywappity. Still, like many of the other Protestant settlers, the Bowies evaded the conversion requirement, though if and when they attended a church service it was Catholic, and they developed a comfortable tolerance for the faith. At home Rezin was a Presbyterian, naturally, and Elve a very devout Methodist, and she took on herself the religious instruction of her children.18

  Rezin Bowie prospered in Missouri, for there was some money to be made from clearing and selling the extensive timber that covered so much of the land.19 He became close to Abraham Bird, who would marry his sister Martha a few years later. Brother Rhesa took out a claim of his own, as did David, and their sister Elsie married a local man. Rezin was often in New Madrid to act as witness for the transactions of his friends and neighbors as they sold property to new arrivals. It was the success of Logan County all over again, and therein lay the problem.20 In the short span of two years, Tywappity lost that frontier edge that Bowie craved. Rezin was thirty-eight now. He had always liked being on the road. In March 1802 he went back to Logan County on business, but that hardly satisfied his itch for new vistas.21 His oldest son, John, was seventeen, nearly a man, and though his youngest, David, born in Missouri, was an infant, still Rezin could feel the onset of middle age.22 It was time for one more move.

  International events reached deep into the North American continent. The concession that Rezin got on October 1, 1800, was one of the very first acts of a new administration, for that very day Spain agreed to return the Louisiana Territory to France by the Treaty of San Ildefonso. No doubt it took months for the news to reach the Tywappity, and in any event it meant little or no difference in life for the settlers in that stretch of the domain. Awaiting a transfer of officials that never came, Spanish administrators continued to run the region. However, the return of French rule to the Lower Mississippi promised a regime friendlier to American settlers, if only because they had been common allies against Britain in the last war, and France was at war with the British even now. Besides, there was already a sense of inevitability about the spread of settlement westward across the continent. The Bowies themselves were a part of the vanguard that crossed the Mississippi, if only by a few miles. If someday all of this vastness would be a part of the United States, then the first on the scene stood to gain the most.

  Rezin may have anticipated the move as early as April 6, 1802, when he gave Abraham Bird his power of attorney to act for him in the sale of some of his land to neighbor Charles Findlay. The sale of part of the Marias des Peches land came in October, and Rezin was in New Madrid on business as late as November 16, but within a few weeks, or months at the most, even though he still owned at least one parcel that he held for another six years, he quit Missouri for good.23

  The Bowies no doubt built another broad horn, or else paid for a passage on a downbound flatboat, this time on a several days' voyage of 350 miles south to the bluff city of Natchez. Across the river lay the Territory of Orleans, all of later Louisiana except that part south and east of the Mississippi then known as the Isle de Orleans, in which lay the city of New Orleans, and Spanish-held West Florida. Thirty miles west of Natchez a stream called Bushley Bayou flowed northeasterly into the Ouachita River. There Rezin applied for and received a grant of eight hundred arpents near a place called Big Prairie on the bayou, and that summer began once more the business of making a success in the wilderness.24

  It was 1803, and even as President Thomas Jefferson was in the act of purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France, Rezin erected a whisky distillery on the Bushley.25 Over the next several years he acquired more property, sold a parcel to his son-in-law Bird who had moved south, and sold another to his brother John, for once more the whole extended family were a part of the move. Young Rezin, though a mere fifteen years old in 1808, got 640 acres on the Ouachita nearby.26 With the perennial shortage of hard currency that always plagued the frontier, they established credit with the local traders.27

  Following the purchase and the beginning of American administration, the Bushley Bayou land became a part of Rapides County, though the French practice of calling such jurisdictions parishes was so habitual with the largely Creole population that in practice the word “county” was almost never used. No sooner did his address officially change, however, than Rezin decided to switch it again. His brother Rhesa had gone on south into Opelousas Parish, settling on a bayou near the town of Opelousas itself, and in 1809 Rezin's family followed. By now the parish had been renamed St. Landry, and there Rezin settled at last and for good. He planted cotton on the broad prairies, cut timber to send south to the boatyards at New Orleans, and distilled his whiskey to ship along with the lumber.28

  Now at last the Bowie clan began to disperse, though they all remained in Louisiana. Brother John J. Bowie acqui
red more property not far from Bushley Bayou at a place called Sicily Island, in what in 1808 became Catahoula Parish.29 Though he was no more than twenty-six years old, he was by now known as John senior, to distinguish him from Rezin's son John, now John junior, who was in fact only a year younger. John Junior, too, stayed in Catahoula, and so did a cousin named Rhesa.30 Not only did the Bowies stick together; their penchant for repeating the same names and their proliferation of sons caused no little confusion.

  Around 1812 Rezin and Elve laid out a claim for 640 arpents on Bayou Vermilion in Attakapas Parish just south of Opelousas, and there he continued the timber-cutting business, at the same time selling the remainder of his Catahoula property to his brother John.31 The boys were more than old enough to take a real part in the work now, especially Rezin junior, James, and Stephen. The older two grew up inseparable, typical of their clan. Their inclinations and interests were much they same. Both loved all manner of outdoor sport, especially riding and hunting with their hounds, even after bear. They grew up tall and muscular, with James now sixteen and Rezin three years older. Rezin especially was keenly intelligent, hazel-eyed, with chestnut hair. If James did not completely share his brother's intellect, still his was an agile and inventive mind, and both boys were said to take after their mother, Elve, as had their older brother John. Only Stephen seemed less gifted intellectually, though some thought him the handsomest of them all.32 What education of the formal variety they got came from her, largely self-taught herself. From their father they learned the example of ingenuity, hard work, and the instinct to exploit the frontier's abundant opportunity.