American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett
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He soon fell in with a wagoner named Adam Myers, heading north toward Geraldstown. It was the wrong direction, but the man assured Crockett that after he finished his business he would return south to Tennessee. Within a couple of days they met up with his brother again, who pleaded with Crockett to head back home immediately. Crockett pondered this, but soon thought better of it:
I thought of the schoolmaster and the race with my father, and the big hickory he carried, and of the fierceness of the storm of wrath that I had left him in, and I was afraid to venture back; for I knew my father’s nature so well, that I was certain his anger would hang on him like a turtle does to a fisherman’s toe, and that, if I went back in a hurry, he would give me the devil in three or four ways. . . . That promised whipping, it came right slap down on every thought of home. I finally determined that make or break, hit or miss, I would just hang on to my journey.26
So began Crockett’s earliest tendencies to light out, to keep moving, to live by his own devices in the woods from day to day. It may well have been at this early juncture that his famed motto began to form in his head. “Be always sure you’re right—then go ahead!”
TWO
Runaway
FEAR OF PARENTAL AND SCHOOLMASTER WRATH led Crockett on a two-year odyssey and rite of passage into adulthood. By accident, circumstance, and providence, young David Crockett had found relative independence on the open road. The period conjures Mark Twain’s unforgettable characters Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer; Crockett relied on his guile and savvy to survive alone, living from one adventure to the next. He was also beginning to understand how to use his burgeoning charisma and personality to influence people and orchestrate their feelings toward him. To survive the rigors of the road, a young boy needed to be smart, industrious, resilient, and something of an actor, and all these traits—plus others like ambition and pride—began to germinate in the youngster.1 Though he started for home, little did he realize how many adventures, miles, and years lay between his wandering feet and the home in Tennessee that was never far from his mind and heart.
He hired on with a man named John Gray, for whom he labored in the fields, planting grain, plowing and assisting in various chores around the farm for twenty-five cents a day.2 He liked the feeling of freedom and independence that having his own money gave him, and he saved all he could for the next three years as he toiled the road like a grown-up teamster, but he was often duped or cheated by older and more authoritarian men, and the pay never amounted to much. The work began to strengthen him physically and mentally, giving him the taut and sinewy limbs and powerful torso that he would later use to his advantage hunting for food and furs and fighting in the military.
As it happened, Adam Myers began making pretty regular runs between Baltimore and Geraldstown, and more than once Myers asked young David Crockett if he would like to come along. At last, having earned enough money for some decent clothes, Crockett determined that a trip to an exotic place might be interesting, “to see what sort of place it was, and what sort of folks lived there.”3 It was the spring of 1800, and Crockett had never been to a real city in his life, or to the seaside. Before they departed, Crockett squared with Gray, then handed over to Myers his only seven dollars, what amounted to his entire life savings, a risky but not uncommon means of banking for a lad unaccustomed to carrying his own money around.
They obtained a wagonload of flour and proceeded on the road, Crockett anxious and excited to be going somewhere new but also busy at his tasks tending horses and stock. At Ellicott City, a mill town on the outskirts of Baltimore, a noisy roadside work crew spooked Myers’s team. The horses reared, kicking and neighing, breaking the wagon-tongue off and galloping down the road, the flour barrels bouncing and exploding into a cloud of fine powdery dust. Amazingly, when all the dust and flour had settled, Crockett stood unhurt on the roadside comprehending how close he had just come to being dragged behind the wagon and “ground fine as ginger.” He understood at that moment the fickle nature of providence, and he recalled it with playful metaphor: “This proved to me,” he later mused, “that if a fellow is born to be hung he will never be drowned; and, further, if he is born for a seat in Congress, even flour barrels can’t make a mash of him.”4
They managed to locate another wagon and salvage the rest of their load, and Crockett and the disgruntled wagoner limped on to Baltimore. While Myers had the runaway wagon repaired, Crockett walked down to the wharf. For the first time in his life he gazed on great merchant ships, their sails flapping in the briny sea breeze, and heard the eerie creaking of the massive wooden hulls and salty ropes as thick as his waist lashed to the docks. Crockett must have faced the ocean in disbelief, for he had never conceived such things to be found in nature, or to be made by man. His imagination leapt at the possibilities, and he became so curious that he stepped aboard the nearest ship, marveling at the slow sway underfoot. An old and wizened captain met him and inquired whether he wished to accompany the ship to London, for the captain could use a boy like him, with his chipper, easygoing nature and road-hardened toughness. Though he possessed no nautical experience, the adventurous young Crockett delighted at the chance, for by now he was “pretty well weaned from home”5 and open to the idea of new adventure.
He set off to gather his clothes, provisions, and money from Myers, but enthusiasm turned to fear when Myers flatly refused to let him have any of them, threatening to whip him and confine him if Crockett did not obey. The stern and tyrannical wagoner thus changed the course of Crockett’s history, for the boy had been only minutes away from becoming a mariner bound for England. At the same time Crockett learned that trust is illusory on the frontier. Looking over his shoulder at the magnificent ships bound for faraway lands, Crockett could only do as he was told and bide his time until another opportunity presented itself. He put it like this: “I determined to throw myself on Providence, and see how that would use me.”6
Back on the road with the wagoner, Crockett “resolved to leave him at all hazards,” and before dawn one morning he rounded up what few clothes he had and took off on foot, hungry and penniless, toward Tennessee. He wandered for days, sleeping in vacant barns and hay sheds, under the eaves of outbuildings, always slinking out before dawn, afraid of being caught by the owners or overtaken by Adam Myers himself. One day he happened on another wagoner, a man named (by absolute coincidence) Henry Myers. He appeared kind, and inquired about Crockett’s situation, which brought the tough youngster to tears despite his attempts to shore up. The weight of his loneliness and all his troubles bore down on him. “For if the world had been given to me, I could not, at that moment, have helped crying.”7 Through a storm of sobs Crockett told the kind Henry Myers about being deceived and ill treated in Baltimore, and how he had been left “without a copper to buy even a morsel of food.”8
The tale enraged Henry Myers, who swore loud at the scoundrel for mistreating a young boy in this way, and he vowed to backtrack, find Adam Myers, and force him to return Crockett’s money. Though he feared the eventual run-in, Crockett was bolstered by his new ally’s size and passion: “My new friend was very large, stout-looking, and resolute as a tiger . . . and swore he would have my money, or whip it out of the wretch who had it.”9 They did confront Adam Myers, who blamed Crockett for attempting to shirk his duties and run off with a ship’s captain bound for London. Then he admitted, reluctantly, that he had spent all of Crockett’s hard-earned seven dollars. Pressed by the large and angry man, Adam Myers offered to pay Crockett back when they returned to Tennessee, and at this promise Crockett felt reconciled.
Crockett left with his new ally Henry Myers, and they traveled south together for several days. Crockett again became impatient at their progress and determined to strike out alone, on foot. But before he left, while they were all convened at a roadhouse, Myers told a small assemblage of men Crockett’s tale, how he had recently been treated, and how he would be passing penniless through “a land of strangers, where it was not e
ven a wilderness.”10 They passed around a money purse and handed Crockett the collection of three dollars.
That sum held out as far as Montgomery, Virginia, where he worked for a month for a man named James Caldwell at a shilling a day. Crockett then hired on with a hatter, Elijah Griffith, agreeing to work four years for him. After eighteen long months, Griffith fell deep into debt and fled the region, leaving Crockett broke and destitute once more.11 A grim pattern seemed to be developing, and the perceptive youngster knew he had to break the cycle. Life on the road had taught him much, but it was not a life he wished to live permanently. Crockett worked as he could to properly clothe himself and garner a small purse, and then, weary and lonely, he cut out for home.
He arrived finally at the banks of the New River and found the water roiling with whitecaps, the froth so high that no one would risk taking him across by boat. He persuaded some folks to let him borrow a canoe, which he claimed he could navigate. Lashing his bundle of clothes firmly to the seat, he put in to the roaring, churning river, which “was a mighty ticklish business.”12 Crockett turned the canoe into the wind and waves, breakers flooding over the bow, and fought upstream nearly two miles before he could land. By the time he struck shore he was soaked to the core, the canoe half-filled with water, his hands nearly frozen to the paddle. He was so overjoyed at having made the crossing alive that he scarcely felt the cold. He plodded along for three miles until he found a house and a fire to warm him, and took “a leetle of the creater, that warmer of the cold, and cooler of the hot.” It was perhaps the young man’s first taste of spirits, and he did not find unfavorable the taste and effect.13
Warmed and fed, the pleasant burn of whiskey in his belly, he slogged on until he reached the home of his uncle Joseph in Sullivan County, Tennessee. Ironically he happened across the same brother who had accompanied him on the cattle drive of three years before.14 After they had spent a few weeks together, David Crockett struck out for home, alone once more.
Crockett kept on until he reached his father’s tavern late in the evening.15 He humbly inquired whether he might stay the night, and as it was a roadhouse, he was allowed. Then, much like Huck Finn, he decided to play a trick on his family, keeping his identity hidden to see if anyone would know him. He had been gone for so long and had grown so much that his family did not recognize him at first, partly because Crockett remained in the dimly lit corners and hardly spoke to anyone. When they were all called to supper and seated at the table, Crockett’s eldest sister finally recognized him. She sprang up, seized him around his neck, and exclaimed, “Here is my lost brother!” Crockett’s own response had a Huck Finn-like sheepishness: “The joy of my sisters and my mother, and indeed of all the family, was such that it humbled me, and made me sorry that I hadn’t submitted to a hundred whippings sooner than cause so much affliction as they had suffered on my account.”16
Crockett was now sixteen, and his increase in size and age, coupled with his father’s elation at his unexpected return, safeguarded him against his “long dreaded whipping.” Crockett would later recall in his Narrative, “But it will be a source of astonishment to many, who reflect that I am now a member of Congress—the most enlightened body of men in the world—that at so advanced an age . . . I did not know the first letter in the book.” With all his travel and work experiences, by pioneer standards he was already a man, yet he couldn’t even write his own name.17
THREE
The Dutiful Son Becomes a Man
DAVID CROCKETT’S HOMECOMING heralded growth and change, the arrival of a more devoted and responsible, even dutiful, son, a young man with a budding sense of self and an understanding of the importance of how others perceived him. He viewed his father as an honest if unlucky man and endeavored to help him as much as he could. A strict paternal system of order by necessity ruled the frontier, and although by most measures David Crockett was already himself a man, he would remain under his father’s command and tutelage until he moved out and started his own family. Also, throughout his life David Crockett illustrated judiciousness, a fair-minded personality reflected in his decision making. Arriving home after such a long absence, he still felt duty-bound to his father.
During David’s years away his father had continued to buy on credit, ending up indebted to others more frugal or fortunate. As a result, he had creditors all over the county. John Crockett viewed his son’s return as an opportunity to help him repay at least a couple of these debts, after which time he would consider them even and turn his son loose. David remembers the deal they struck: “He informed me that he owed a man, whose name was Abraham Wilson, the sum of thirty-six dollars and that if I would set in and work out the note, so as to lift it for him, he would discharge me from his service, and I might go free.”1
Crockett tore into this new responsibility with tenacity and the vigor he had learned in all his odd jobs away from home. He toiled tirelessly, working every single day straight for the entire half-year period. Impressed by this work ethic, Wilson asked Crockett to stay on, but Crockett declined, finding Wilson’s place and company shady. “It was a place where a heap of bad company met to drink and gamble, and I know’d very well if I staid I should get a bad name, as nobody could be respectable that would live there.”2 Already he was concerned with his reputation, and was developing a sense of what others thought of him and his associates, and how this reflected on one’s character. He had seen and heard things on the road, in the dark and musty taverns and seedy road-houses from Tennessee to Baltimore and back again, that none of his brothers or friends had witnessed—tough characters and rude talk, boozing and carousing and brawling—and he understood already, if only viscerally, that he was destined for much more.
Instead of taking the offered job, he hired on with an honest Quaker farmer named John Kennedy to eradicate another debt of his father’s, this one for forty dollars. Crockett seemed bent on making up for any anguish or trouble caused by his running away, and showed an inclination to better himself. He finished the work, then borrowed one of his employer’s horses and rode the fifteen miles to his father’s place to deliver the paid note to him. At first John Crockett grew shamed and confused, assuming that it was the debt he still owed Mr. Kennedy being presented to him for collection, and he explained that, as usual, he hadn’t the money to pay. David then told his father that the note was not a debt, but rather the amount paid in full, and that he offered it as a present to him. “At this, he shed a heap of tears; and as soon as he got a little over it, he said he was sorry he couldn’t give me any thing, but he was not able, he was too poor.”3
But there was one thing that his father could give him, and had already promised him, and that was his freedom. David Crockett recollects no words that passed between them on the subject, but with his father’s debt paid he turned proudly away from his house and boyhood home and went back to the Kennedy place. A transformation had occurred: David Crockett had grown up, a rite of passage he earned by facing rather than running from hardships and oppression. He was now free to do as he pleased, to go wherever he wanted. His inquisitive mind longed for more than the open road. But he needed to get himself flush, having spent the last year or so working off his father’s debts. “I went back to my old friend the Quaker, and set in to work for him for some clothes . . . my clothes were nearly all worn out, and what few I had left were mighty indifferent.” 4
Crockett understood that to improve himself he needed to look respectable, and that the young ladies around the county would not be interested in a threadbare ragamuffin. He had seen enough girls and women in his travels, plenty to have piqued his natural curiosities. During Crockett’s two-month tenure at the Quaker’s farm, Kennedy’s niece, a young woman from North Carolina, came to visit. Crockett was immediately smitten, and his first crush gave way to full-fledged infatuation, such that he recalled it with a heightened sense of melodrama: “And now I am just getting on a part of my history that I know I can never forget. For though I have heard people t
alk about hard loving, yet I reckon no poor devil in this world was ever cursed with such hard love as mine has always been, when it came on me.” After several stammering attempts he managed to speak to the Quaker’s niece, and she was at least momentarily willing to listen to the stuttering young man. The hyperbole of young love was evident in Crockett’s dire assessment of the situation: “I told her that she was the darling object of my soul and body; and I must have her, or else I should pine down to nothing, and just die away with the consumption.”5
The girl was honest, and informed the poor lovesick suitor that she was already engaged to her cousin, one of the Quaker’s sons. Crockett was devastated, his response typical of a youth’s first love affliction. “This news was worse to me than war, pestilence, or famine.” But the insightful young man determined something else at this moment of defeat. He somehow likened his failure to win her heart the result of his own character flaw, and knew he had to make something of himself in the world, but he felt inadequately prepared. He mused, “All my misfortunes growed out of my want of learning.” By luck, Kennedy had a married son, a schoolteacher, who lived but a mile away, and Crockett struck a deal to go to school four days a week and work two to pay for his learning and boarding. He applied himself for six months, “learning and working back and forwards,” until he could read in his primer, write his own name, “and cypher some in the three first rules in figures.”6 This was all the formal schooling Crockett ever had in his life, though he remained an astute student of human nature and would continue to improve his reading and writing by himself. He grew restless and desirous of the opposite sex, reasoning that a spouse would somehow complete his metamorphosis into manhood. As he put it, “I concluded I couldn’t do any longer without a wife; and so I cut out to hunt me one.”