American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett

by Buddy Levy

  One day in 1778 a small band of marauding Creeks happened upon the first David Crockett’s homestead in Carter’s Valley. As Crockett wrote in his Narrative, “By the Creeks my grandfather and grandmother Crockett were both murdered, in their own house” (near present-day Rogersville, Hawkins County, Tennessee). David and his wife were at home, along with boys Joseph and their youngest, James, and all were unprepared for the stealth and speed of the attack.

  A rifle shot shattered Joseph’s arm, and James, who was deaf and mute and less able to flee or defend himself, was abducted. James lived with the Indians for nearly twenty years until he was, according to Crockett, discovered by brothers William and John and subsequently “delivered up” from his bondage and “purchased from an Indian trader.” Having spent nearly two decades with the Indians, for years afterward James attempted, without luck, to relocate gold and silver mines he had visited while blindfolded. Brother John Crockett was away at the time of the attack, working as a backwoods ranger scouting frontier outposts. He later fathered David Crockett.7

  For his part, John Crockett’s life was marred by failed attempts and tough luck, land speculation that garnered him nothing, and, more than once, bankruptcy. Some of his tendencies—recurring poverty among them—he would pass to his son, David. But the elder Crockett was a man of solid character and an honest, hardworking nature. In 1780 he married Rebecca Hawkins, a young Maryland woman who came to the Holston Valley with her father, Nathan.8 Almost immediately the Revolution took him away from home; he joined up with the Lincoln County militia to serve as a frontier ranger. By October 1780 he returned in time to join a group called the “over-mountain men.” In his Narrative David Crockett remembers it this way: “I have learned that he was a soldier in the revolutionary war, and took part in that bloody struggle . . . in the battle at King’s Mountain against the British and the tories.”

  These brave men slung their muskets over their shoulders and struck out into the mountains, joining army regulars to contest a force of nearly 1,100 soldiers under the command of British Major Robert Ferguson, who had selected the high promontory of King’s Mountain for protection. The “over-mountain men” stormed in, trouncing Ferguson’s force, slaughtering 150 and holding 810 captives. The defeat proved a turning point, undermining British efforts to control the Carolinas and scuttling a plan to attack Virginia.9

  The war subsided, and in the next few years John Crockett remained near home, focusing on his family and a variety of jobs in addition to farming, including serving as a magistrate or constable in Greene County. Unlike many backwoodsmen inhabiting the territories, both John and Rebecca could read and write at least rudimentarily, an advantage in signing documents and keeping the legal details involved in court or office work in order.10 And they concentrated, as most pioneer families did of necessity, on growing their family. By 1786 they had moved to a homestead at the confluence of the Nolichucky River and Limestone Creek, a plot of ground and dreams called “Brown’s Purchase,” originally “bought from the Indians by Colonel Jacob Brown of South Carolina for as much merchandise as a single pack-horse could carry.”11 They grew patchy parcels of corn, raised a few cattle and the odd hog, hoping in this way to eke out subsistence in relative safety, the continuing Indian attacks and skirmishes taking place more to the north and east of them, at least for the time being. There was also the comfort of a few friendly neighbors, their cabins and outbuildings flanking Limestone Creek and the meandering Nolichucky. The makeshift community included former Wataugans who had relocated there in a defiant act of self-government, untrusting of the far-off seats over the mountains in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia.12 The Crocketts and their neighbors were cash-poor and frayed from warring with Indians and the British, but they remained guardedly optimistic that their tenuous land claims and speculations would yield wealth and prosperity if they could hold on to them long enough. The Land Ordinance of 1785, which was intended to create new states from the western lands while simultaneously eradicating its indigenous populations, would allow the claimholders to resell and profit from the land.13 In fact, the ambitious group went so far as to write a temporary constitution for a state they named Franklin, but this dream dissolved in 1789, when North Carolina resumed control, ceding its western territories to the centralized government. 14 By the time Tennessee finally became a state in 1796, John Crockett had suffered a host of troubling debts and setbacks, including a failed gristmill venture he’d entered into with a man named Thomas Galbreath. They built the mill on adjacent Cove Creek and had high hopes for its success—only to see worse luck follow bad: a violent flash flood washed the entire project downriver before it was finished. David Crockett later recalled, “They went on very well with their work until it was done, when there came the second epistle to Noah’s fresh, and away went their mill, shot, lock, and barrel. I remember the water rose so high that it got up into the house we lived in, and my father moved us out of it, to keep us from being drowned.”

  Two other significant recollections of David Crockett’s early home life underscore his fledgling fascination with the potential disaster that loomed just off the front porch of any farmstead. His earliest remembrance was of a near-death experience involving water, perhaps in part explaining what became a lifetime ambivalence toward the element. Crockett was just a toddler when he and his four older brothers were out playing along the stream; the older boys then hopped into John Crockett’s canoe and pushed out into the current. Perhaps because he was so small, they left David on shore and paddled away. David realized immediately that none of them knew how to handle a boat, for it was headed backward toward a raging waterfall. A local field worker noticed their predicament and sprinted downstream after them, tearing off his clothes as he went. “When he came to the water he plunged in, and where it was too deep to wade he would swim, and where it was shallow enough he went bolting on; and by such exertion as I never saw at any other time in my life, he reached the canoe, when it was within twenty or thirty feet of the falls.” The man managed to pull the boat ashore, doubtless saving the boys’ lives.

  Not long after this experience, another incident occurred that impressed itself indelibly into the young boy’s memory. His uncle Joseph Hawkins (his mother’s brother) was out deer hunting during the autumn when he saw movement in the brush. Hawkins turned, watched quietly, and when it moved again he leveled and fired into the grape bushes. As it turned out, the movement had been of an unfortunate neighbor out picking grapes, and Hawkins had shot him right through the body. “I saw my father draw a silk handkerchief through the bullet hole, and entirely through his body; yet after awhile he got well, as little as any one would have thought it. What become of him . . . I don’t know; but I reckon he did’ent fancy the business of gathering grapes in an out-of-the-way thicket soon again.”

  His prospects flushed downstream in the flood, resilient John Crockett moved again, this time about thirty miles away to a 300-acre plot of ground on the main wagon road between Abington, Virginia, and Knoxville. It was time to try his hand at yet another opportunity: running a roadhouse/tavern. A good deal of foot and wagon traffic passed through, and it seemed potentially profitable. So, working tirelessly, John Crockett (with help from his ever-expanding family, which would eventually total six sons and three daughters, in that order) dug himself a foundation into the banks near a small spring and erected a six-room, rough-hewn log building that would be both the Crockett home and an accommodation for weary travelers.15 It was subsistence living at best, with outdoor privies, the tavern itself weather-beaten, leaking both air and water, the insides musty and smoky and filled day and night with a rough lot of crude, hard men, drovers and their bedraggled families. Oxen, mules, and horses milled about, snorting, standing or shifting in their own leavings. The road accommodated a constant stream of teams traversing the frontier from east to west and back again, taking livestock, animal skins, and hard-wrought produce to market in the east, and returning with more refined goods like r
ugs and furnishings. The Crocketts would run this roadhouse for over two decades, finally following David’s trail heading west. According to Crockett, his father’s tavern

  was on a small scale, as he was poor; and the principle accommodations which he kept were for waggoners who travelled the road. Here I remained until I was twelve years old; and about that time, you may guess, if you belong to Yankee land or reckon, if like me you belong to the back-woods, that I began to make up my acquaintance with hard times, and a plenty of them.16

  Even with grown sons pitching in, making ends meet proved impossible for John Crockett, who had recently lost his 300-acre parcel to a 400-dollar debt and was forced to sell out at public auction for a paltry forty dollars.17 William Line, who bought him out, apparently allowed John Crockett to retain his tavern, but the setback forced the elder Crockett to begin the rather common practice of hiring out his sons as “bound boys” to teamsters moving along the busy overland supply line. Benjamin Franklin was bound out to service at the age of twelve to an older brother, an unsuccessful venture that led to his eventually setting off on his travels alone.18 On the frontier the arrangement served a dual purpose—a family could rid themselves of one hungry mouth while also garnering the scant wages of the bound boy on his return. So it was that John Crockett struck up just such a deal with a Dutchman named Jacob Siler, who was driving a herd of cattle to Rockbridge, Virginia, and needed an assistant.

  Young David Crockett headed north in his new capacity as servant boy, scared and homesick, having never been away from home before, just twelve years old, and accompanied only by a complete stranger he’d never laid eyes on until the evening before. It was winter, deathly cold, with snow swirling and drifting across the road. They straggled along for what seemed endless days, traveling by foot more than 200 miles in two weeks, the young boy trudging along with a heavy heart but duty bound to his father and his new Dutch master. Siler paid him five or six dollars for his work, which Crockett would later describe as “bait” to get him to stay on. He also assumed it would be his father’s bidding:

  I had been taught so many lessons of obedience by my father, that I at first supposed I was bound to obey this man, or at least I was afraid to openly disobey him; and I therefore staid with him and tried to put on a look of perfect contentment until I got the family all to believe I was fully satisfied.19

  Crockett illustrated his ability to play a role, and also that his charisma, if still unpolished, could work to his advantage. For weeks he assumed the guise of contented servant, convincing the family that he was happy, while planning to steal away, knowing that Siler had taken advantage of him by forcing him to stay on against his will after they’d successfully delivered the cattle. Crockett seemed to grasp intuitively that he would need to be industrious and manipulative to survive on the road.20 One day, while playing with some other local boys along the roadside some distance from Siler’s house, Crockett recognized a group of passing wagoners as friends who sometimes stopped by his father’s tavern. He made himself known to an older gentleman, told him of his forced predicament, and begged to return to his own family. The wagoner, a Mr. Dunn, agreed to take Crockett along as well as protect him if the youngster would meet them down the road the next morning.

  Crockett rolled up his scant belongings, tucked them under his head, and attempted to sleep, but slumber proved evasive:

  For though I was a wild boy, yet I dearly loved my father and mother, and their images appeared to be so deeply fixed in my mind, that I could not sleep for thinking of them. And then the fear that when I should attempt to go out, 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.21

  Finally he could stand it no longer and rose, slinking into the darkness hours before sunrise. He broke a trail through eight inches of new snow, guessing his way to the main road as he fought a blinding blizzard. “I had not even the advantage of moonlight, and the whole sky was hid by the falling snow, so that I had to guess at my way to the big road, which was about a half-mile from the house.” He endured seven freezing miles through knee-high drifts, but he was comforted by the snowfall: “My tracks filled so briskly after me, that by daylight, my Dutch master could have seen no trace which I left.”

  Crockett eventually stumbled upon the wagoners, who appeared as a blurry mirage, feeding their horses and preparing for the journey. The horses huffed thick plumes of steam, their nostrils edged with frost. The young boy went inside, warmed himself by the fire, ate a hearty breakfast, and departed with the wagoners and his savior, Mr. Dunn. Crockett began to dream again of home, poor as it was, and his family. The wagoners plodded slowly along the road and he “numbered the sluggish turns of the wheels, and much more certainly the miles of travel,” until he determined to set out on his own on foot, for he believed he could travel twice as fast as the wagons. Crockett continued, gaunt and famished, for days until he was finally overtaken by a man leading a horse, who kindly offered him a ride. The man chaperoned him to within fifteen miles of his home. After crossing the Roanoke, they parted ways and Crockett trudged the final fifteen miles home, arriving by evening, frail and shivering, but happy to be among his own folk after nearly two months. As it turned out, the homecoming was short-lived, and little did he know that his time on the road was its own kind of learning that would come to serve him well.

  Crockett settled into a fairly routine life—playing along the riverbanks and in the woods with local children and his siblings, getting his first taste of hunting as he pegged squirrels and foxes with rocks or slingshots. A hard worker, he would split wood rails for fences, swinging a hefty ax or wedge and maul, and help around the tavern in whatever way his father asked. He helped build things, repaired broken wagon wheels and buggies, and learned to work with leather and wood and steel. After work and supper he would sometimes steal into the shadowy corners of the tavern and listen to the brawling, hard-drinking teamsters tell tall tales of life on the road. He observed real, raw human behavior. Such storytelling, coupled with his time outside and out on the trail, was his earliest education in managing the unrelenting fact of frontier life.22

  The following fall his father arranged for David and his brothers Wilson, William, Joseph, and John to enroll in a small country school. David’s parents, having the bare bones of learning, understood that a formal education offered a chance for their children to succeed beyond their current station, even though enrolling more than one would have come at some financial cost, or at the very least, trade in board and lodging.23

  But the sedentary world of the schoolroom never sat well with David, whose personality drew him outside toward the next adventure. Like his father, who occasionally used canings to solve disciplinary transgressions, young David was hot-tempered. His first stint at formal schooling proved brief and volatile:

  I went four days, and had just began to learn my letters a little, when I had an unfortunate falling out with one of the scholars—a boy much larger and older than myself. I knew well enough that though a school-house might do for a still hunt, it wouldn’t do for a drive, and so I concluded to wait until I could get him out, and then I was determined to give him salt and vinegar.24

  Young Crockett lay in wait for him by the roadside. When the boy wandered along, Crockett bushwhacked him, scratching his face and tearing at him “like a wild cat.” Fearing the repercussions from an angry schoolmaster, Crockett hid out for days, pretending to go off to school each morning, then lying out in the woods all day until school was over. Then he would return home with his brothers, who agreed to keep his hooky-playing a secret from their father. Eventually, the schoolmaster sent a note home to John Crockett inquiring why David was absent. Crockett’s father read the note and, as he had been “taking a few horns” of whiskey, “and was in good condition to make the fur fly,” he broke into a rage, lighting after young Crockett with a hard length of old hickory.
Crockett recalled:

  We had a tolerable tough race for about a mile; but mind me, not on the school-house road, for I was trying to get as far t’other way as possible. And I yet believe if my father and the schoolmaster could have both levied on me about that time, I should never have been called on to sit in the councils of the nation, for I think they would have used me up.25

  Never before had he seen his father so angry, “puffing and blowing as though his steam was high enough to burst his boilers.”

  After narrowly escaping his father, Crockett sneaked to a house of an acquaintance, Jesse Cheek. Here he hired on, along with one of his brothers, to help Cheek as he headed out on a cattle drive. Crockett figured both home and school were too hot to return to for some time, so off he went on the excruciatingly long “drove,” passing through Abingdon, and then through Lynchburg and Charlottesville, until they arrived in a town called Fort Royal, nearly 400 miles away, where Cheek sold his cattle. Crockett started homeward again with a new companion, and they alternately rode and tied a single horse, but Crockett soon found that this man did far too much riding and not enough walking, leaving him impatient to cut out on his own. The man gave him four dollars for his expenses on the 400-mile journey, with which Crockett bought some provisions and hoofed along the road, tired and lonely, part of him thinking that enough time had passed to allow his father’s (and the schoolmaster’s) rage to cool, part of him still not certain.