David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  Despite documented evidence to the contrary, some researchers believe Crockett remained with Jackson’s army for several more weeks and did not return home until late January 1814. That was not the case. Crockett’s first term of enlistment officially ended on Christmas Eve 1813. Records show that he served three months and six days at eight dollars per month pay, plus allowance for use of his horse, and travelling expenses.16 The total due Crockett came to $65.59.

  With his pay tucked away in his woolen hunting shirt, Crockett mounted up and turned northward to Tennessee and to his home. Polly and the boys, Wesley and William, were waiting, and so was his daughter, Margaret, or “Little Polly,” just a year old. All the way back on that long ride, Crockett had to wonder if the girl would even remember him.

  SEVENTEEN

  “ROOT HOG OR DIE”

  CROCKETT CLEARLY REALIZED that the war against Great Britain and their Indian allies was far from over. Despite a joyous reunion with family at Kentuck, in January 1814, he knew he could not stay long. In only nine months he would be off again for another round of fighting. Still, this interlude gave him time to get reacquainted with Polly and their three children. He also put in some crops, laid in a stack of firewood, and tended to repairs on the family’s cabin. And, of utmost importance, with no officers around barking orders, he also was allowed the luxury of hunting anytime he pleased.

  Crockett had to have been happy to sleep with Polly in his arms, teach his boys how to hunt, and play with his little girl. He wore clean clothes, ate three meals a day, and enjoyed the occasional horn of whiskey while sharing accounts of fighting Red Stick warriors with General Jackson. Almost twenty-eight, he already possessed a storehouse of memories and a growing repertoire of story material. In his accounts, he sometimes interjected his homespun, self-effacing humor.

  While Crockett enjoyed his respite at home away from the death and destruction of war, Jackson and his troops continued to pursue and battle the Creeks until their deathblow, on March 27, 1814. Consequently, Crockett missed taking part in the most decisive engagement of the entire Creek campaign. On that date, Jackson and his Tennessee militia, augmented with regular infantry and a contingent of Cherokees and allied Creeks, crushed the hostile Red Sticks at Tohopeka, a fortified stronghold at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in the heart of Creek country.1 The battle raged all day, but the Creeks, behind the breastworks, could not stem Jackson’s forces.

  One of the first soldiers to scramble over the wall into the village was a bold lieutenant from Tennessee named Sam Houston. He was an adventurous young man who had run away from home at sixteen and was adopted into a Cherokee chief’s family. Houston spent a year living with the Cherokees, who gave him the name Colonneh—“the Raven.”2 In 1813, Houston was teaching in a log schoolhouse not far from the Tennessee town of Maryville, where he was known to have purchased powder and shot for his Indian friends. Badly in debt and pleased his beloved Cherokees had allied with the United States in the fight against the British and the Creeks, Houston received his mother’s blessing and joined the army. He left with the gold ring and musket she gave him and a silver dollar enlistment bonus in his pocket.3

  At Horseshoe Bend, Houston was shot in the groin with an arrow, which he asked a fellow lieutenant to remove. When the man tried but failed, Houston brandished his sword and bellowed out a threat, causing the perplexed officer to rip out the barbed arrow and along with it a hunk of flesh and a torrent of blood. Ordered by Jackson to remove himself from the battle, Houston soon took up a musket and returned to the fray, only to be struck twice by bullets to his shoulder and arm. Despite the loss of blood, Houston somehow survived, but the wound from the arrow never completely healed and bothered Houston for the rest of a long and illustrious life.4

  As doctors worked on Houston at Horseshoe Bend, the volunteers and regulars fought on until they had slaughtered almost the entire enemy force. No quarter was asked for and no quarter was given. The Red Sticks fought on in desperation. Finally, the killing stopped at nightfall, with more than nine hundred Creeks dead on the ground or floating in the river. Jackson’s victorious combined force, including friendly Creek and Cherokee allies, amounted to about seventy dead and two hundred wounded.5 Jackson ordered his slain soldiers to be sunk in the river so they could not be scalped. In the meantime, some of the victorious troops sliced off the tip of each dead Creek’s nose to keep an accurate body count, while others cut long strips of skin from the backs of the corpses to be dried and made into bridle reins.6

  The Battle of Horseshoe Bend earned the dubious distinction as the most devastating defeat of native people in the history of North America. “The carnage was dreadful,” Jackson, not known for his sympathy for Indians, wrote on April 14 to his wife, Rachel, at the Hermitage. He went on to describe the engagement as “this day that has been the hot bed of the war, and has regained all the Scalps, taken from Fort Mims.”7 Jackson and his soldiers had not forgotten the cry “Remember Fort Mims!” Likewise, the Creek people never forgot Horseshoe Bend, where they had felt the brutal blade of “Sharp Knife.”

  Over a month later, on May 28, as a reward for his success against the Creeks, Jackson was commissioned a major general in the regular army of the United States and made commander of the Seventh Military District, which included Tennessee, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Territory.8 Meanwhile, many of the surviving Red Sticks found sanctuary in Spanish Florida or blended into the rest of the Creek population. Bands of starving Creeks surrendered throughout the spring and summer of 1814. One of those who personally surrendered to Jackson was the Creek leader Chief Red Eagle. Surprisingly, Jackson was so impressed with his courage and acceptance of defeat that he pardoned him and turned him free. Red Eagle, living by his Christian name William Weatherford, became a respected gentleman planter in what soon became Alabama, and in his later years occasionally visited Jackson at the Hermitage, where they discussed racehorses and their former days as opposing warriors.9

  Most Creeks, however, did not fare as well as Red Eagle. On August 9, 1814, Jackson forced the Creeks to sign a treaty at Fort Jackson. In punishment for daring to oppose the invasion of their ancestral lands, Jackson ordered the Creeks to cede half of their tribal domain—23 million acres in all—in southern Georgia and the eastern Mississippi Territory to the United States.10 In this same pact the Creeks also agreed to vacate the southern and western regions of what became Alabama, where, within five years after the treaty was signed, white settlers had taken over the entire region. This extreme act of retribution applied not only to Red Sticks but also to the entire Creek Nation, even those Indians who had fought on Jackson’s side. “What Jackson had done had the touch of genius,” noted the historian Robert Remini. “He had ended the war by signing a peace treaty with his allies! Jackson converted the Creek civil war into an enormous land grab that insured the ultimate destruction of the entire Creek Nation.”11

  The Treaty of Fort Jackson was the end not just of the Creek Nation but of all other southeastern Indian tribes. For although the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws also fought for the United States against the renegade Creeks, these tribes, too, were soon pressured to give up their lands. Within twenty-five years they would be gone from their ancestral homes. A long-established way of life for these tribes ended as white newcomers steadily settled the rural lands of the South.

  “Jackson’s demands were extortionate and a shameful betrayal of his former Creek allies,”12 wrote John Finger in his chronicle of Tennessee. “Of the thirty-five chiefs who finally signed the infamous Treaty of Fort Jackson, only one was a former Red Stick. Millions of acres of prime agricultural land—cotton land—now became available to white settlers and speculators. Frontiersman everywhere cheered Old Hickory for his feats on both the battlefield and the council ground.”

  Jackson’s victory ceased hostilities in only one theater of the War of 1812. Land and sea battles continued elsewhere, and in late August, a British expeditionary force brazenly marche
d unopposed into Washington, D.C. President James Madison and his apparently imperturbable wife, Dolley, had to flee the White House, which the invaders set ablaze along with the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and most other public buildings, as well as a number of private residences.13

  Andrew Jackson had hated Great Britain ever since he was a boy during the Revolutionary War and was slashed on his head and hand by a Red Coat sword after refusing to clean a British officer’s muddy boots.14 While Washington, D.C., smoldered, Jackson put out a call for new Tennessee volunteers to help drive the British from Florida, where they planned to incite and equip surviving Red Sticks and other Creeks who refused to accept the punitive treaty Jackson had concocted. “I owe to Britain a debt of retaliatory vengeance,” Jackson wrote to his wife. “Should our forces meet I trust I shall pay the debt—she is in conjunction with Spain arming the hostile Indians to butcher our women & children.”15

  At Kentuck, Crockett caught wind of the latest call to arms. “Soon after this, an army was to be raised to go to Pensacola, and I determined to go again with them,” Crockett later wrote, “for I wanted a small taste of British fighting, and I supposed they would be there.”16

  Repeating the scenario when he first enlisted, Crockett had to deal once again with Polly and fend off her tearful pleas for him to stay. “Here again the entreaties of my wife were thrown in the way of my going, but all in vain; for I always had a way of just going ahead, at whatever I had a mind to.” A neighbor who had been drafted came to Crockett and offered $100 if Crockett would go in his place, but in a show of noble cause, Crockett turned the man down.17 “I told him I was better raised than to hire myself out to be shot at; but that I would go, and he should go too, and in that way the government would have the services of us both.”

  Once again, Crockett said his sad good-byes to Polly and the children, and rode off for his second hitch as a soldier. Brig. Gen. John Coffee asked all volunteers from West Tennessee to assemble at Camp Blout near Fayetteville, the seat of Lincoln County, where the Crocketts had briefly lived. On September 28, 1814, Crockett reported to the first muster and signed up for a six-month enlistment in Capt. John Cowan’s company of Tennessee Mounted Gunmen. This time, Crockett entered as a noncommissioned officer with the rank of third sergeant.18

  In about a week, Gen. Coffee had gathered a thousand volunteers and was ready to move south to join Gen. Jackson and face the British at Pensacola. But there was one problem—no food. As happened continually through the Creek campaigns, Coffee was forced to report to Jackson, “I have been detained by the contractors for want of traveling rations.”19 Finally, in early October, the brigade was supplied and followed the trail south. They crossed the Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River near Melton’s Bluff and then passed through the Choctaw and Chickasaw country.

  Crockett’s outfit tried to catch up with the main army but remained at least two days behind. In early November, the troops reached a place known as Cut Off, near the juncture of the Tombigbee River with the Alabama River, only to find out that there was no forage available for their mounts.20 They left their horses and some guards and covered the last of the journey on foot. “It was about eighty miles off,” noted Crockett, “but in good heart we shouldered our guns, blankets, and provisions, and trudged merrily on. About twelve o’clock the second day [November 8], we reached the encampment of the main army, which was situated on a hill, overlooking the city of Pensacola.”21 Because Crockett’s commanding officer, Maj. Russell, was well liked by Gen. Jackson, the tardy troops’ arrival “was hailed with great applause, though we were a little after the feast, for they had taken the town and fort before we got there.” Without permission from federal authorities, Jackson had invaded and temporarily seized Pensacola. His soldiers faced feeble Spanish resistance and the British detachment beat a retreat to the warships moored offshore in Pensacola Bay. In one stroke, and with just a few men lost, Jackson had eliminated the threat of British intrigue in Florida and scattered the remnants of the Red Sticks. After sloshing through palmetto-studded wetlands swarming with mosquitoes and snakes, the Tennesseans were ready to explore Pensacola, its narrow streets filled with mulattoes, runaway slaves, and Creoles. Brothels and drinking houses offered rum, smoked mullet, turtle, and oyster suppers.

  “That evening we went down into the town,” recounted Crockett, “and could see the British fleet lying in sight of the place. We got some liquor, and took a ‘horn’ or so, and went back to camp. We remained there that night, and in the morning we marched back towards the Cutoff. We pursued this direction till we reached old Fort Mimms, where we remained two or three days.”22

  Jackson had scattered a large number of his troops at garrisons throughout the Mississippi Territory. By mid-November, he issued new orders, while en route to Mobile, placing Maj. Uriah Blue, of the Thirty-ninth Infantry, in command of the West Tennessee Mounted Gunmen.23 This included William Russell’s outfit in which Crockett served as one of the sergeants. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Jackson was off for Mobile, and from there he would head west to Louisiana and victory on January 8, 1815, when he pummeled a force of 5,300 crack British soldiers commanded by Maj. Gen. Sir Edward Pakenham at the Battle of New Orleans. The battle left massive British casualties including Pakenham, while just thirteen Americans died in the fighting. Jackson had already built a substantial reputation with his big win at Horseshoe Bend. However, the victory at New Orleans—a battle ironically fought almost two weeks after a peace treaty ending the war had been signed—meteorically elevated Old Hickory to national prominence, his election as president coming thirteen years later. Even the newspapers of the northeastern cities gave Jackson high marks for his stunning performance in Louisiana.

  There would be no glory for Crockett and his comrades-in-arms, relegated to mopping-up actions in the backwash of the war. The remainder of Crockett’s service in the war mostly entailed scouting for any lingering Red Sticks and foraging for food. Supply shortages continued to be the biggest problem facing the field commanders, and that most certainly included Maj. Blue and his new regiment of 1,000 mounted gunmen, who became stuck at Fort Montgomery waiting for provisions. Finally, the frustrated Blue ordered the regiment to march in spite of having only insufficient rations of flour and beef. The troops soon came upon cattle left to roam after their owners were massacred. Crockett and some other soldiers killed several beeves and provided enough meat to keep the regiment on the move. At the camp they set up on the Escambia River almost twenty-five miles north of Pensacola in the outback of the Florida Panhandle, boats brought them what Crockett described as “many articles that were both good and necessary; such as sugar and coffee, and liquors of all kinds.”24

  Maj. Russell took his company northeast along the Escambia and Conecuh rivers. From there he sent out sixteen scouts, including Crockett, along with some Chickasaw and Choctaw warriors to hunt down hostiles hiding in the dense mangroves and swamps. Crockett wrote that they “came to a place where the whole country was covered with water, and looked like a sea.”25 Surrounding the band of men were millions of acres of wetlands and cypress swamps teeming with alligators and snakes. The scouts did not hesitate but plunged into the brackish water “like so many spaniels, and waded on, sometimes up to our armpits, until we reached the pine hills…. Here we struck up a fire to warm ourselves, for it was cold, and we were chilled through by being so long in the water.” Later that same night, their Indian spies reported they had found a Creek camp. The Choctaws and Chickasaws painted their bodies and faces in preparation for battle, as was their custom. “They then brought the paint to old Major Russell,” related Crockett, “and said to him, that as he was an officer, he must be painted too. He agreed, and they painted him just as they had done themselves.”

  Along the way, the Indian spies came across two Creeks and killed them. When Crockett and the others got to the scene, the Choctaw scouts had already cut off the dead Creeks’ heads and were “counting coups,” by striking the severed heads with wa
r clubs. “This was done by everyone of them; and when they had got done, I took one of the clubs, and walked up as they had done, and struck it on the head also. At this they all gathered round me, and patting me on the shoulder, would call me ‘Warrior—warrior.’” After they scalped the heads they pushed on to the Creek camp in a thick cane brake where they “took two squaws, and ten children, but killed none of them, of course.”26

  Besides a few minor skirmishes and taking a few prisoners, who were promptly scalped by the Choctaws and Chickasaws, the main activity, as always, was finding something decent to eat. “At the start we had taken only twenty days ration of flour, and eight days rations of beef,”27 wrote Crockett. “We were, therefore, in extreme suffering for want of something to eat, and exhausted from our exposure and the fatigues of our journey. I remember well, that I had not myself tasted bread but twice in nineteen days.” Several men accompanied by their Indian allies rode point to find provisions while the army kept on the move. Crockett did his part to fend off starvation. “As the army marched, I hunted every day, and would kill every hawk, bird, and squirrel that I could find. Others did the same; and it was a rule with us, that when we stop’d at night, the hunters would throw all they killed in a pile, and then we would make a general division among all the men.”

  Crockett was convinced that he had to take control of the dire situation when, one day while searching the camp for food for a sick soldier, he came across two of his officers eating broiled gizzards after they had divided the turkey flesh among their men. “And now seeing that every fellow must shift for himself, I determined that in the morning I would come up missing; so I took my mess and cut out to go ahead of the army. We know’d that nothing more could happen to us if we went than if we staid, for it looked like it was to be starvation any way; we therefore determined to go on the old saying, root hog or die.”28 This adage went back to early settlement days, when hogs were commonly turned loose to forage for themselves rather than being fed. It came to stand for frontiersmen who were often in dire straits and also had to root around for whatever they could find to survive. For a man like Crockett, it was a phrase that stood for self-reliance.