by Buddy Levy
The night fell fast under the canopy of cane and Crockett stumbled along, bashing his shins on fallen logs and falling into clefts in the earth left by the quakes. He forded a wide cold creek, then broke from the stream bank to scale a severe incline, clawing his way up the hillside. When he made the summit, he located his dogs and found they had treed the bear in the fork of a tall poplar. It was so dark that all he could see was the outline of a large lump in the fork of the tree, and aiming by guess-work, he fired. He missed, but the bear obliged by venturing out onto a limb where Crockett could see him better and he reloaded fast and fired again. He didn’t see the bear drop so he began a third reloading. Suddenly there was the bear, down on the ground with the dogs all about him in a snarl of teeth and claws. Crockett was too close for comfort, so he pulled out his big butcher knife as protection and waited while the roaring roll and tumble of flesh and fur went on and on, his one white dog showing as an occasional flash amid the brown and black of the bear and other dogs, the whirl of animals coming at times within a rifle length of Crockett.
Finally the dogs forced the bear into a large crevasse in the earth and Crockett could tell “the biting end of him by the hollering of my dogs.” He pushed his rifle into the crack, felt around, and when he thought he had it pressed against the bear’s body he fired, but he only wounded its leg, and the bear, injured and enraged, broke from the hollow and went another round with the dogs before they drove him back into the crevasse again. After spearing the bear with a long cut pole, Crockett determined to risk crawling in after him, hoping the bear would remain still long enough for him to “find the right place to give him a dig with my butcher.” He sent the dogs in first to keep the angry bear’s head occupied, and he snuck around behind, placing his hand bravely on the bear’s great rump, feeling for the shoulder. “I made a lounge with my knife, and fortunately stuck him right through the heart; at which he just sank down.”
Crockett quickly got out of the crack, and when his dogs backed out too, bloody and panting, he knew the bear was finished. It had been a tremendous fight, and now Crockett had the difficult task of getting the massive animal out of the hollow, which he managed with great effort, dragging the bear a few feet at a time until he had him up on the ground and could butcher him. Exhausted, Crockett slumped on the ground to sleep, but his fire was too feeble to warm him, and he was wet through from sweat and the river he’d crossed. Soon he was shivering and shaking, his teeth chattering, his core body temperature plunging dangerously low. He tried to find dry wood to burn but it was all green or wet, and he knew he was in trouble. He began leaping and hollering in the air, hurling himself “into all sorts of motions,” but hypothermia began to set in: “for my blood was now getting cold, and the chills coming all over me.” At last he was so spent that he could barely stand, and he understood that he absolutely must get warmer or else he would perish:
So I went to a tree about two feet through, and not a limb on it for thirty feet, and I would climb up it to the limbs, and then lock my arms together around it, and slide down to the bottom again. This would make the insides of my legs and arms feel mighty warm and good. I continued this till daylight in the morning, and how often I clomb up my tree and slid down I don’t know, but I reckon at least a hundred times.7
His ingenuity having kept him alive, Crockett hung his bear and headed back to camp, where his boy and McDaniel were very happy to see him. They ate breakfast, and Crockett told them about the tough night he’d been through. Then he led them back to retrieve the big bear. McDaniel wanted to see the crack where Crockett had slain the bear with only his knife, and after he looked it over he came out shaking his head and exclaimed that he’d never have gone in there with a wounded bear, not “for all the bears in the woods.” McDaniel would certainly have told that story at taverns, and to visitors, time and time again.
They concluded this hunting trip by bagging a few more bears, then salting and loading all the meat on their five pack horses and heading home. McDaniel went home with meat enough for the year, and that fall and winter Crockett counted fifty-eight bears that he and his hunting partners had brought in. In spring, the bears out of hibernation, he went out again, and in just a month he bagged forty-seven more, boasting a historic count of 105 bears in less than seven months, a number that would be considered illegal and “game hoggery” by modern standards but was perfectly acceptable and plausible at the time. Though Crockett, like many hunters and in keeping with the tall-tale tradition, sometimes lapses into hyperbole, his legendary abilities as a hunter are confirmed by a host of his contemporaries.8
Sated emotionally with his best hunt ever, Crockett returned to his barrel-stave project in mid-January 1826. In his absence his hired hands had been productive, piling the two flatboats with some 30,000 staves, which Crockett figured would turn a healthy profit in New Orleans. The flatboats were large and unwieldy rectangular craft, fashioned of rough-hewn wood and finished with a central cabin where those off duty could sleep or eat out of the weather. They were basic, utilitarian boats often made for single trips, as they could be easily dismantled at the end of a run, their lumber sold along with whatever cargo they carried.9 Men navigated the sluggish boats as well as they could, standing on top of the cabin, in the bow, and along the sides and rowing with long, sweeping strokes. Crockett had no nautical experience, but the lure of profit drove him even into the unknown, mysterious element of dangerous waters, and when the boats were completely loaded and tied down and some provisions stored, he and his crew boarded and pushed off into the Obion. Everything seemed to float smoothly until they converged with the great, churning Mississippi, at which point Crockett discovered that “all my hands were bad scared, and in fact I believe I was scared a little the worst of any; for I had never been down the river, and I soon discovered that my pilot was as ignorant of the business as myself.”
The river was bigger than any of them had imagined, the deep water dark and eerily powerful. Soon the boats yawed and spun uncontrollably, and Crockett lashed them together, hoping to steady them. This made the boats “next akin to impossible to do anything with, or guide them right in the river.” The awkward tandem drifted sideways in the river, and Crockett discovered to his dismay that they could not even intentionally land the boats, or even run them aground, though he tried to do so more than once. They were at the absolute mercy of the river.
Just before nightfall, some Ohio river boats passed and recommended, against Crockett’s wishes and instincts, that they float on through the night. All night long they made futile attempts to land, as people along the shore communities would run out with lanterns swinging, shouting directions that the inept boatmen were unable to follow. Eventually they came to a tight turn in the river called the Devil’s Elbow, which Crockett allowed was perfectly named: “If any place in the wide of creation has its own proper name, I thought it was this. Here we had about the hardest work that I ever was engaged in, in my life, to keep out of danger; and even then we were in it all the while.”
Finally Crockett threw his hands up in futility and quit trying to land, resigned to just float along, come what may. He went below into one of the cabins and rested, thinking and reminiscing. “I was sitting by the fire, thinking on what a hobble we had got into; and how much better bear-hunting was on hard land, than floating along on the water, when a fellow had to go ahead whether he was exactly willing to or not.”
Crockett’s boat rode behind, and about that time he heard men scurrying on the deck above, their voices crying out hysterically as they heaved and pulled, and then the boat slammed violently into the head of a “sawyer,” a bobbing sunken tree that impaled the boat. The current instantly sucked the first boat down, and feeling his own boat swamping, Crockett scrambled for the hatchway but water poured through in a thick cold current “as large as the hole would let it, and as strong as the weight of the river could force it.” The boat flipped over sideways, “steeper than a housetop,” and the main hatch offered no esc
ape.
Crockett remembered another small hole in the side, which was now above him, and he clawed for that. It was too small to crawl through but he thrust his arms and face out and hollered for his life. Water had filled the cabin and now crept up almost to his head when some of the deck-hands heard him screaming and leapt to grab his arms.
I told them I was sinking, and to pull my arms off, or force me through, for now I know’d well enough it was neck or nothing, come out or sink. By a violent effort they jerked me through; but I was in a pretty pickle when I got through. My shirt was torn off, and I was literally skin’d like a rabbit.
As it turned out, Crockett was well pleased to get out any way he could, because the moment they pulled him out, the craft went entirely under. They all managed to jump to a foundered mass of logs. It was the last he would see of his boats or his staves. He and his crew remained on the logjam through the night, shivering in what little clothing they had on. All else, including Crockett’s would-be fortune, had been lost. They were marooned at a place called “Paddy’s Hen and Chickens,” just above, and within sight of, the bustling city of Memphis. Crockett later remembered that deep in that night, shaking with cold and now penniless and destitute, he did not feel sorry for himself: no anguish, despair, or self-pity. Rather, a curious kind of calm, a surreal contentedness, washed over him as he sat stranded on the island: “I felt happier and better off than I ever had in my life before, for I had just made such a marvelous escape, that I forgot almost every thing else in that, and so I felt prime.”
Early the next morning a passing boat recognized their distress and sent a skiff for them, where they found the men tired, wet, cold, and hungry, the cantankerous and revitalized David Crockett sitting buck naked on his shredded shirt. News of the men had traveled downstream, and their sinking stave boats were spotted plummeting headlong down the river, and when the rescue skiff arrived at the docks in Memphis, curious onlookers were on hand to see what all the hubbub was about. Among the throng was a man named Marcus B. Winchester, a prominent Memphis businessman who owned department stores and would later become post-master of Memphis during the Jackson administration. Winchester kindly took the distressed travelers to one of his stores, where he clothed the men, and then he offered to host them in his home, where his wife gave them much needed food and drink.10
Warmed, fed, clothed, and happy to be alive, Crockett and his men hit the town, partying all night long, sharing horn after horn and telling tales of their travels and near-death adventures, Crockett the most vociferous and animated of the group, and certainly the best storyteller. Small crowds gathered at each tavern they visited, and Crockett held forth, cheers and laughter going round with each unbelievable tale. Marcus Winchester took keen note of the attention Crockett received, impressed with the way people gravitated toward him and responded to him.
Winchester was so taken with Crockett that the next day he took him and his crew again to his store and outfitted them with shoes, hats, and enough clothes for their return upriver, and he even decided to give Crockett some money, urging him to run again for Congress and promising to back him if he did so. Crockett sent most of his men home, and took just one comrade downstream by steamer to Natchez, to see if by some miracle they might recover their rogue flatboat, which had actually been spotted some fifty miles downstream. Crockett noted that “an attempt had been made to land her, but without success, as she was as hard-headed as ever.” She would remain so, and though Crockett made a strong effort, the boat was never recovered.11
As was often the case with Crockett, once disaster was averted, he emerged stronger and more vital than before. In this case, he had become something of the darling of Memphis, with stories circulating about the larger-than-life bear hunter who washed up naked and bleeding on the shore. Major Winchester observed this growing notoriety and reiterated that he would back Crockett in the upcoming congressional election of 1827, providing him with campaign money as needed to make a second run against Alexander. So, though he had lost his entire entrepreneurial enterprise, he finally returned to his Elizabeth and his family in good old Gibson County, sometime in the early part of the summer of 1827, with quite a story to tell. Instead of having his tail between his legs, he arrived spry and sassy, flush with some hard grit in his pocket and a new benefactor down in Memphis, a thriving and politically influential river town in the huge Ninth Congressional District.12
Elizabeth and the young Crocketts would have been happy to see the truant patriarch, but the reunion was tempered with the news that he needed to get right out on the campaign trail for the upcoming elections, to be held in August. If Crockett knew that it would be a difficult task to unseat an incumbent as strong and savvy as Alexander, he did not let that challenge dampen his spirits or his conviction, and in fact he appears to have been bolstered by a new positive attitude after surviving yet another close call, this time at the providence of the mighty Mississippi River. Not only did Winchester agree to provide campaign support and a loan to Crockett, he also made frequent business trips down in Crockett’s region, and the two would meet and socialize. Winchester promised to talk Crockett up to his influential friends, a fact about which Crockett felt no compunction; it was simply the way politics worked.
My friend also had a good deal of business about over the district at the different courts; and if he now and then slip’d in a good word for me, it is nobody’s business. We frequently met at different places, and, as he thought I needed, he would occasionally hand me a little more cash; so I was able to buy a little of ‘the creature,’ to put my friends in a good humour, as well as the other gentlemen, for they all treat in that country; not to get elected, of course—for that would be against the law; but just, as I before said, to make themselves and their friends feel their keeping a little.13
Crockett benefited from other social factors as well. The price of cotton, which he used as an excuse in his loss to Alexander two years before, was now back down to earth at $6 per hundredweight, so Crockett cleverly keyed on this fact, plus the very real situation of occupant dispossession in the Western District as a result of extensions to the North Carolina warrants. Crockett harnessed his campaign simply: he would run “against the tariff and for a congressional solution to the land problem.” 14 To help things even more, two other candidates entered the skirmish: John Cooke and General William Arnold, and their presence could potentially take some of the vote away from Adam Alexander, especially the addition of Arnold from Jackson, who took his open animosity against the incumbent to the forum of public debate, undermining some of Alexander’s credibility.15
Crockett had three recent campaign races under his belt, and he had learned from each one, so that he came to the summer of 1827 as a seasoned campaigner with a firm command of his public persona. His strategy this time around was simple: he would give the voters what they wanted to hear, and he would most importantly give them what they wanted to see—a real-life backwoodsman who was a mouthpiece for them, who shared their dreams and aspirations but also their frustrations and concerns, a thighslappingly funny storyteller who lived “out amongst ’em.”
His first challenge was to deal with the loud-mouthed and long-winded John Cooke, who launched an aggressive personal attack on David Crockett’s character traveling all about the district and publicly reviling Crockett as an adulterer and a drunk, and generally trying to undermine him as indecent.16 Crockett responded by fighting fire with fire (in much the same way politicians use mud-slinging commercials today), casting equal and worse aspersions against Cooke, most of them utter fabrications, but who cared? He was having a good time trading lies with Cooke, stooping to his level and then crawling even lower. Cooke decided to ensnare Crockett in his egregious lies by attending a political rally with his own witnesses in support, and, after one of Crockett’s lengthy tirades, coming forward and exposing him publicly as a liar. Thus caught in the act and exposed by his witnesses, Cooke reasoned, the disgraced Crockett would wither away and
perhaps even withdraw from the race.
The plan backfired in Cooke’s face like a ten-pound cannon. At the event, Crockett rose to speak with unusual bluster, laying on outrageous falsehoods even thicker than usual. Now an expert at timing, Crockett let the air grow still and pretended to be finished, feigning a move to take his seat but then pausing, clearing his throat, and stepping up again. He wished to add one last comment. At length he informed the gathering that his opponent was among them, and planned to expose him as a liar; he’d even brought his own witnesses with him for the purpose of doing so. Crockett grinned his patented wildcat smile and pointed out that the witnesses were entirely unnecessary—they could all be witnesses, for he was quite happy to admit that he’d been telling lies. What choice did he have? His opponent had started the fight by slurring him with slander and outright lies, and so, to keep things fair and even, he had responded with lies. In fact, truth be told, they were both liars!17
An informer had obviously tipped Crockett off, and the result was devastating for Cooke, who never even had an opportunity to respond, so uproarious was the laughter from the crowd. Crockett was the hero of the day, and Cooke could only burn with indignation as the crowd rallied around their man, David Crockett. Cooke soon withdrew his name from the running, claiming that he was morally superior and could not in good conscience serve a constituency that would cheer an acknowledged liar. Cooke felt the embarrassment for a long time, and could see that he was outgunned, for “two years later he rejected an opportunity to face Crockett in a rematch.”18 Using his trademark humor, and embracing his role as a trickster, Crockett had single-handedly dispatched one of his opponents by simply being funny and, ultimately, truthful.