David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  “I willingly engaged to go with him, and asked him to let me choose my own mate to go with me, which he said I might do,” Crockett related. David picked George Russell, the son of Major William Russell, the veteran settler Crockett knew from back home on Boiling Fork.14 When Crockett called eighteen-year-old George Russell forward, however, Gibson seemed displeased with the choice and said that he was looking for a man, not a boy. “I must confess I was a little nettled at this,” wrote Crockett, “for I know’d George Russell, and I know’d there was no mistake in him; and I didn’t think that courage ought to be measured by the beard, for fear a goat would have the preference over a man. I told the major he was on the wrong scent; that Russell could go as far as he could, and I must have him along.” Gibson reluctantly went along with Crockett’s choice.

  The next morning the scouting party, made up of Major Gibson, Crockett, Russell, and ten others, left camp and crossed the Tennessee River at Ditto’s Landing. They went deep into unfamiliar country and after a day or so divided into two separate parties. Crockett and the five others riding with him encountered mixed-blood settlers and friendly Creeks wearing white plumes or deer tails in their hair, a scheme devised by General Jackson to let his men know which Indians were friendly and which were the enemy Red Sticks.15

  When the scouts came across a lone Indian runner, he told them that he had seen a large war party crossing the Coosa River headed toward General Jackson and his troops. Crockett and his men raced by the light of the moon to Colonel Coffee’s new camp back at Ditto’s Landing on the south side of the Tennessee River. A breathless Crockett reported to the colonel with news of the enemy war party, but Coffee did not seem to give it much credence. Coffee’s reaction did not sit well with Crockett, but the next day, when Major Gibson finally showed up with his party, Crockett again told Coffee the story he had related the night before. This time Coffee accepted the junior officer’s report about the enemy party and quickly issued orders for countermeasures to be taken. “When I made my report, it wasn’t believed, because I was no officer,” lamented Crockett. “I was no great man, but just a poor soldier.”16 This incident in the field influenced the way he viewed commissioned military officers from that time on.

  An account of life at Camp Coffee in mid-October 1813, which was written just prior to the Civil War, presents an interesting description of Crockett:

  There they were, twenty-five hundred of them, in the pleasant autumn weather, upon a high bluff overlooking the beautiful Tennessee, all in high spirits, eager to be led against the enemy. There were jovial souls among them. David Crockett, then the peerless bear-hunter of the West…was there with his rifle and hunting shirt, the merriest of the merry, keeping the camp alive with his quaint conceits and marvelous narratives. He had a hereditary right to be there, for both his grandparents had been murdered by the Creeks, and other relatives carried into long captivity by them…. No man ever enjoyed a greater degree of personal popularity than did David Crockett while with the army; and his success in political life is mainly attributable to that fact. David met with many messmates, who spoke of him with the affection of a brother, and from them I have heard many anecdotes, which convince me how much goodness of heart he really possessed. He not infrequently would lay out his own money to buy a blanket for a suffering soldier; and never did he own a dollar which was not at the service of the first friend who called for it. Blessed with a memory, which never forgot any thing, he seemed merely a depository of anecdote; while at the same time, to invent, when at a loss, was as easy as to narrate those, which he had already heard. These qualities made him the rallying point for fun with his messmates, and served to give him the notoriety which he now possesses.17

  Those times spent “overlooking the beautiful Tennessee, all in high spirits” were brief for Crockett and his comrades. Most of the time they stayed in the field, snooping for Red Sticks, pillaging Indian dwellings, and building temporary stockades. While on mounted patrol, countless times they forded the Tennessee and the Coosa, as well as many other rivers and creeks. The volunteers traversed ancient Indian trails, such as the Black Warriors’ Path, beginning at Melton’s Bluff not far from land that Jackson owned.

  With Colonel Coffee, soon to be made a brigadier general, in the lead, Crockett and the hundreds of other Tennessee Volunteers followed the trail to the confluence of the Mulberry and Sipsey forks of the Black Warrior River, where they burned down Black Warrior Town after first looting the Creeks’ stores of corn, beans, and dried beef. The food did not last them long, and the men did not seem to forage well, so again Colonel Coffee gave Crockett permission to find some game.

  “I turned aside to hunt, and had not gone far when I found a deer that had just been killed and skinned, and his flesh was still warm and smoking,” Crockett wrote of that hunting trip. “From this I was sure that the Indian who killed it had been gone only a few minutes; and though I was never much in favour of one hunter stealing from another, yet meat was so scarce in camp, that I thought I must go in for it. So I 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 any thing, and saw a fellow being suffering, I was more anxious to relieve him than to benefit myself. And this is one of the true secrets of my being a poor man to this day.”

  Crockett distributed the deer meat to his grateful friends, who had long grown tired of eating mostly parched corn. A short time later, he flushed a gang of feral hogs from a canebrake and quickly shot one in its tracks. Some other militiamen were close by and heard the commotion. “In a few minutes, the guns began to roar, as bad as if the whole army had been in an Indian battle,” Crockett recalled. He shouldered his dead hog back to camp and when he got there found many other hogs and “a fine fat cow.”18 That evening, and for several more to come, no one went to sleep hungry.

  By November 1, 1813, Brig. Gen. Coffee and his brigade of cavalry and mounted riflemen established a new camp on the Coosa River. The following day, Coffee ordered nine hundred mounted dragoons and some seventy Cherokee warrior allies to attack and destroy the nearby Creek village of Tallushatchee, where a large number of Red Sticks were known to be living. Crockett rode in the ranks of the attack force.19 On the morning of November 3, the sleeping village was completely encircled by troops, and, at one hour after sunrise, the attack was launched. Coffee’s surprise attack worked. Although the Creeks fought with great valor, the American force overpowered and viciously killed as many as possible, including men, women, and children. It was a sight that Crockett never forgot. His descriptions of the horrific scene at Tallushatchee are some of the most harrowing in his entire Narrative. Crockett wrote of seeing as many as forty-six Creek warriors seek cover in a house.

  We pursued them until we got near the house, when we saw a squaw sitting in the door, and she placed her feet against the bow she had in her hand, and then took an arrow, and raising her feet, she drew with all her might, and let fly at us, and she killed a man…. his death so enraged us all, that she was fired on, and had at least twenty balls blown through her. This was the first man I ever saw killed with a bow and arrow. We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six warriors in it. I recollect seeing a boy who was shot down near the house. His arm and thigh were broken, and he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him. In this situation he was still trying to crawl along; but not a murmur escaped him, though he was only about twelve years old. So sullen is the Indian, when his dander is up, that he had sooner die than make a noise, or ask for quarters.

  From the start of the assault until the last Red Stick was slaughtered, at least 186 Creeks were killed and about 84 more taken prisoner, mostly women and children. The total losses from Brig. Gen. Coffee’s brigade were 5 men killed and 41 wounded.20

  After burning down the town, Coffee’s brigade returned to the camp at Ten Islands, w
here General Jackson had arrived and was there to greet them. Besides words of praise for their victory, Jackson had little else to offer the weary men. The contractors hired to feed the army failed to deliver fresh provisions, and the troops had eaten only half rations for several days. Hoping to find some overlooked food caches, the tired and famished troopers returned to the destroyed Creek village the next day. The scene sickened Crockett.

  Many of the carcasses of the Indians were still to be seen. They looked very awful, for the burning had not entirely consumed them, but gave them a terrible appearance, at least what remained of them. It was, somehow or other, found out that the house had a potato cellar under it, and an immediate examination was made, for we were all hungry as wolves. We found a fine chance of potatoes in it, and hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.

  Crockett’s descriptions of the scene at Tallushatchee show him repulsed by the slaughter. The story, as he told it, unfolds without sentiment or hyperbole. The details and facts speak for themselves but are far from colorless. And that is what would be expected from any good storyteller, even one horrified by what he had witnessed.

  SIXTEEN

  RIDING WITH SHARP KNIFE

  ONLY A FEW MONTHS after enlisting as a Tennessee Volunteer, Crockett had to have realized that he was a hunter, not a soldier. That is not to say he failed to carry out his soldierly duties or refused to participate in assaults on Indian villages. He held his own in any skirmish or full-blown battle with Creek Red Sticks.

  If confronted or challenged, Crockett never cowered or backed down from man or beast. Anyone armed only with a knife willing to fight a fully-grown bear to the death may have exhibited a great deal of recklessness but certainly had no coward in him. And that was just the point. Crockett was much more comfortable hunting and killing wild game than he was hunting and killing human beings. The role Crockett liked best during his military stint was the same one he preferred as a civilian, that of hunter-gatherer. And if Andrew Jackson or his underlings had just figured that out, a major morale problem could have been avoided when, by the winter of 1813, soldiers were so hungry and tired they were on the brink of all-out mutiny.

  Throughout the entire campaign against the Creeks, Jackson’s greatest threat did not come from the outmanned and poorly armed Indians but from critical supply shortages and desertions by troops unhappy with both the lack of decent rations and the terms of their enlistments. Napoleon, who was simultaneously fighting and losing his own war in Europe, famously once said that an army marches on its stomach, meaning any army’s success depends not on courage or logistics but on adequate food. When preparing to invade Russia, the biggest obstacle Napoleon faced was not firepower and fortifications but food: it was difficult to find, and the winter was particularly cruel. Andrew Jackson was no Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet he managed to avoid ultimate defeat, like the one that awaited Napoleon in 1815.

  In early November 1813, Jackson, trying to keep morale high, praised his troops’ resounding victory at Tallushatchee. Upset that his victorious soldiers had been forced to eat potatoes soaked with human flesh, he finally recognized that nourishing rations and forage were as important as powder and lead. But until contractors, hampered by low water in the Tennessee River, could find a way to provide fresh provisions, there still was a war to wage. To keep their minds off food, Jackson busied the troops with establishing another camp close to Ten Islands on the Coosa River.1 It was named Camp Strother, after Maj. John Strother, the chief topographer and surveyor for General Jackson.2

  At Camp Strother on November 7, a lone Indian runner emerged from the night shadows to tell Jackson of a large number of allied Creeks besieged by at least 1,100 Red Sticks in full war paint at Talladega, thirty miles to the south.3 The messenger had made a daring escape by covering himself with a hog’s skin and, in the darkness of night, got down on his hands and knees, grunting and rooting, and crawled through the hostile camp past guards who thought he was a hog looking for food.4 Fortunately, he shed his clever disguise before he got to Camp Strother, or he would have been taken for a tasty pig and picked off by Crockett or another hungry sharpshooter.

  Armed with this fresh intelligence about the enemy, Jackson—his arm still in a sling from the slug that smashed through his shoulder while he caned Thomas Hart Benton—called for his senior officers and drew up a battle plan. Just after midnight, a force of 1,200 infantry and 800 cavalry forded the Coosa River and started for Talladega.5 Crockett, cradling his rifle and astride his horse, was among them. By the following evening the long column drew near the sleeping village.

  As morning broke, Jackson and his officers positioned the troops and started the attack, using tactics employed a few days earlier at Tallushatchee. The results were the same, with even more Creeks killed. Crockett was right in the middle of the action and later remembered the Red Stick warriors “rushing forth like a cloud of Egyptian locusts, and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head.”6

  War cries quickly turned to screams of agony as the warriors fell under withering fire from all sides. “We fired and killed a considerable number of them,” wrote Crockett. “They then broke like a gang of steers, and ran across to our other line, where they were fired on again; and so we kept them running from one line to the other; constantly under a heavy fire, until we had killed upwards of four hundred of them.”7 American losses amounted to 15 killed outright and 86 wounded. Among the dead were a few commissioned officers and a young man named James Patton, who had a wife and two small children and lived less than a mile from Crockett’s Kentuck home. “We buried them all in one grave, and started back to our fort; but before we got there, two more of our men died of wounds they had received; making our total loss seventeen good fellows in that battle.”8

  Early on in the campaign against the Creeks, Jackson acquired a reputation for toughness among his soldiers. Some of them said that he was “as tough as hickory,” and it took no time for the name “Old Hickory” to stick.9 After the fight at Talladega and for many years to follow, another sobriquet seemed even more appropriate for Jackson. This new nickname came from the Creeks and also was used by the Cherokees and other tribes to describe him. The called him “Sharp Knife,” or sometimes “Pointed Arrow,” because of his keenness for killing their people. A few years after the Creek campaign, when Jackson invaded Florida, the terrified Spanish called him “the Napoleon of the woods.”10 All of the monikers fit Jackson as perfectly as his snug regulation moon-shaped officer’s hat, or chapeau de bras.

  Back at Camp Strother after his latest victory at Talladega, “Sharp Knife” and his exhausted and half-famished troops found that additional provisions still had not been delivered. While contractors in Knoxville continued to search for a route to reach the troops, starvation threatened, and there were murmurs of growing discontent from suffering soldiers throughout the camp.

  “I have been compelled to return here for the want of supplies, when I could have completed the destruction of the enemy in ten days,” a frustrated Jackson complained in a letter to one of the contractors. “I find those I had left behind in the same starving condition with those who accompanied me. For God’s sake send me with all dispatch, plentiful supplies of bread and meat. We have been starving for several days and it will not do to continue so much longer. Hire wagons and purchase supplies at any price rather than defeat the expedition.”11

  To stay occupied, the soldiers fortified their camp with protective palisades and blockhouses, and by mid-November Camp Strother was upgraded a notch and became Fort Strother. Facing almost certain famine, with still no real relief in sight, the men mostly stayed in their huts and tents when not on a guard or work detail. The large hog pen remained empty. For some sustenance, soldiers chewed on old boiled beef hides and supped on bitter
broths of stewed acorns and mashed hickory nuts.12 Any scraps of dried meat they managed to finagle were so salty it only made their constant thirst that much worse. Whiskey rations were long gone, and tobacco was difficult to come by. To add to their misery, the temperatures were dropping by the day.

  “The weather also began to get very cold,” wrote Crockett, “and our clothes were nearly worn out, and horses were getting very feeble and poor. Our officers proposed to Gen’L Jackson to let us return home and get fresh horses, and fresh clothing, so as to be better prepared for another campaign.”13

  Jackson refused to let the men go home, which resulted in a near mutiny. Many years later, Crockett—no longer a lowly private—took a few liberties with the facts when relating the story of “Old Hickory Face,” as Crockett later called his former commanding general.14 Crockett claimed to have been a participant in the mutinous activity against Jackson, but it is doubtful he was. He described the mutiny as a success. In fact, Jackson actually triumphed after he called the mutineers’ bluff and rode out before them, brandishing a musket and personally threatening to shoot the first soldier who dared desert the ranks and go home. He stared down the whole brigade just as he done years before with Russell Bean.

  “In the end Jackson was compelled to accede,” Jackson biographer H. W. Brands wrote of the aborted mutiny.

  The general could threaten to blow mutineers to kingdom come, but neither his threats nor his cannons could put food in the men’s mouths or clothes on their backs. In the weeks after the showdown he quietly discharged the most malcontented, judging their departure good riddance, and he allowed the others, including Crockett, to take a few weeks to refresh, restock, and get ready for the final offensive against the Red Sticks.15