David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  After several days of finding no quarry, Crockett began to weaken. “We all began to get nearly ready to give up the ghost, and lie down and die.” He brought back some small game, and two turkeys. They also found a bee tree loaded with good honey and used their tomahawks to open the tree. Crockett found a bear, but without dogs he could only watch it disappear in the trees. Soon after that he shot a large buck deer and got the dressed venison back to camp just in time. William Russell was just about to shoot his own horse to feed the men when Crockett appeared with fresh meat. Crockett and his friend handed out all the meat and the honey.29 Later Crockett swapped some of his powder and bullets with an Indian in exchange for two hatfuls of parched corn, which he brought back to the other soldiers.

  By late December 1814, several weeks before Jackson’s appointment in New Orleans, Crockett and his fellow troops were headed home. Their time was up and the war was close to ending for them and everyone else. When they reached the Coosa River near Fort Strother, they met troops from east Tennessee on their way to Mobile. In the ranks Crockett found his younger brother, John, as well as some old neighbors and friends he had not seen in years.30 It was, in fact, a sweet reunion. They gave Crockett plenty of provisions for himself and his horse and he stayed with them for a night before they continued on to Mobile.

  “Here I had enough to go on, and after remaining a few days, cut out for home.” And with that, David Crockett’s time as a soldier came to an end, and not a day too soon.

  EIGHTEEN

  CABIN FEVER

  WHAT SOME PEOPLE called America’s “Second War of Independence” ended in a blaze of glory, and soon led to a surge in national pride that swept the country. The peace agreement with Britain signed at Ghent in Belgium in 1814, followed early the following year by General Jackson’s anticlimatic but stunning victory at New Orleans, lifted American’s spirits and marked a time of significant change as the nation came of age. “Never did a country occupy more lofty ground,” noted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in 1815. “We have stood the contest, single-handed, against the conqueror of Europe; and we are at peace, with all our blushing victories thick crowding on us.”

  In the last days of January 1815, as David Crockett returned from the war, he had no thoughts of “blushing victories.” He could not have known that the nation had been set on a course of transformation from an undeveloped country of frontiersmen and small farmers, like him, into an economic power. Crockett’s vision of the nation and beyond was limited to his own domain. Like the other soldiers he had served with, he only cared about getting home to Tennessee. The sight of a curl of wood smoke rising from the chimney at his cabin on Bean Creek in Franklin County had to have been a sight to behold for war-weary Crockett. He was anxious to be back with Polly and his children and he was determined not to leave his family again.

  “I found them all well and doing well,” Crockett recounted of his homecoming, “and though I was only a rough sort of a backwoodsman, they seemed mighty glad to see me, however little the quality folks might suppose it. For I do reckon we love as hard in the backwood country, as any people in the whole creation.”1

  Crockett had been home for a few days and was only beginning to tell stories of his latest experiences when he received official orders to report back for duty. His enlistment had not been completed, and he was still subject to military recall until March 27. The new orders directed Crockett’s outfit to return to Mississippi Territory and proceed to the country between the Black Warrior and Cahaba rivers to scout for any remaining hostile Indians. Crockett had no intention of obeying. “I know’d well enough there was none, and I wasn’t willing to trust my craw any more where there was neither any fighting to do, nor any thing to go on.”2

  Instead of dutifully packing up and heading out for yet a third time, Crockett solved the problem by using a common legal procedure—paying someone to serve as a substitute. Crockett offered the balance of his army wages to a young man who was eager to go and fight Indians. In the past, a neighbor wanted to pay Crockett to go to war in his stead, and Crockett flatly refused, but it seems he had had a change of heart. The substitute went off to serve out the rest of Crockett’s enlistment, and when he returned Crockett noted that “sure enough they hadn’t seen an Indian any more than if they had been all the time chopping woods in my clearing.”3

  Later, Crockett received a discharge certificate signed by Brig. Gen. John Coffee in Nashville on March 27, 1815. It read: “I certify that David Crockett a 4th Sergt. in my brigade of Tennessee Volunteer Mounted Gun-men, has performed a tour of duty of six months service of the United States—that his good conduct, subordination, and valor, under the most trying hardships, entitle him to the gratitude of his country, and that he is hereby honorably discharge [sic] by his general.”4 For his six months and two days of service, Crockett received $66.70, from which he paid off the young man who served out the final weeks of the enlistment. It is unknown if listing his rank as Fourth Sergeant when he started at the higher rank of Third Sergeant was a clerical error, or if a demotion was light punishment for Crockett’s inclination to do as he pleased.

  “This closed out my career as a warrior, and I am glad of it,” Crockett wrote about that time of transition, “for I like life now a heap better than I did then; and I am glad all over that I lived to see these times, which I should not have done if I had kept fooling along in war, and got used to it…. The battle at New Orleans had already been fought, and treaties were made with the Indians which put a stop to their hostilities.”5

  Yet the peace that Crockett was just beginning to enjoy was short-lived. Death—his constant companion during his time as a soldier—had followed him home and, in the early spring of 1815, arrived at his cabin door. That March, Polly Crockett took to her bed gravely ill. Her health rapidly declined, and, after a painful struggle, Polly died. She was only twenty-six years old. No records have been found indicating the cause of death or the exact date that Polly passed away at the Bean Creek cabin. Medical care was limited and life expectancy short on the frontier. For many years, complications from childbirth were said to have brought about Polly’s death, based on the erroneous belief that daughter Margaret was not born until after David came home from the Indian Wars in 1815. But Margaret’s birth date was November 25, 1812, which meant the little girl was twenty-eight months old at the time her mother died, thus eliminating childbirth as her cause of death. Others have theorized that it could have been one of several maladies that plagued the frontier, including typhoid fever, dysentery, smallpox, streptococcal infections, pneumonia, or malaria, which also beset Crockett in the years to come.6

  Another possibility for Polly’s death was a mysterious torment known as milk sickness. Also called “sick stomach,” “puking illness,” and “the slows,” milk sickness followed frontier migration patterns and for a time was rampant in Tennessee.7 It was only many years later, through the advancement of modern medicine, that it was determined that milk sickness was a vegetable poisoning caused by tremetol, an alcohol found in the white snakeroot plant.8 Grazing cattle or deer feeding in the woods ate the plant, and humans acquired the disease by drinking the milk or eating the flesh of affected animals. In a matter of days the victims showed symptoms—abdominal pain, vomiting, extreme constipation, and fatigue. Soon those stricken fell into a stupor, quickly followed by coma and death.

  Polly’s death devastated Crockett. He had seen death up close many times during his service in the recent war, but he could not have been prepared to witness the passing of the woman he so dearly loved. “I met with the hardest trial which ever falls to the lot of man,” he later wrote of that sad time. “Death, that cruel leveler of all distinctions…entered my humble cottage, and tore from my children an affectionate good mother, and from me a tender and loving wife.”9

  Crockett, never a particularly religious person, did, on occasion, make reference to a higher power. Polly’s death was one of those times. “It was the doing of the Alm
ighty, whose ways are always right, though we sometimes think they fall heavily on us; and as painful as it is even yet the remembrance of her sufferings, and the loss sustained by my little children and myself, yet I have no wish to lift up the voice of complaint.”10

  Polly’s corpse was washed and dressed in the best frock she had. David fashioned a coffin, and he dug a grave on a hillside near their homestead at Kentuck. He piled some fieldstones to mark the place. For about 140 years only the remnants of that stone cairn indicated the site of Polly’s grave. In 1956, in the wake of the revival of interest in all things Davy Crockett caused by the Walt Disney television shows, the Tennessee Historical Commission, with public donations, erected a granite monument with the inscription:

  Polly Finlay [sic] Crockett

  Born 1788 in Hamblen County

  Married to

  David Crockett

  Aug. 12, 1806

  Mother of

  John Wesley Crockett—1807

  William Crockett—1809

  Margaret Finley Crockett—1812

  Died 1815

  Almost twenty-nine years old and trying to scratch out a living on a badly neglected farm, Crockett found himself alone with three small children, John Wesley, seven; William, six; and Polly, going on three. It was far from an enviable position, or, as Crockett put it, “my situation was the worst in the world.” He turned to his brother, John, the younger brother David had met near the end of the war when he was on his way home. John had married the former Sally Thomas in Jefferson County in 1812, and by the time Polly died they had moved to Franklin County.11 It is likely that Sally helped nurse and tend to Polly in her final days.

  “I couldn’t bear the thought of scattering my children,” wrote Crockett, “and I got my youngest brother, who was also married, and his family to live with me. They took good care of my children as they well could, but yet it wasn’t like the care of a mother. And though their company was to me in every respect like that of a brother and sister, yet it fell far short of being that of a wife. So I came to the conclusion it wouldn’t do, but that I must have another wife.”12

  Crockett had no time for long courtships or wooing coy damsels. He was driven by a practical need to find a dependable helpmate so he could earn a living and, most importantly, feed his family. Crockett did not wait long to look for a new wife, and he did not have to go very far to find one. He was well aware that his neighbor, the war widow Elizabeth Patton, was as likely a candidate as any women in Franklin County. She and her son, George, and daughter, Margaret Ann—close to the age of Crockett’s two eldest children—lived on what Crockett described as “a snug little farm” just west of his Kentuck on Bean Creek.13

  Born in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on May 22, 1788, Elizabeth was one of the eight children—two sons and six daughters—of Robert Patton, a native of Ireland, and his wife, Rebecca. The Pattons were prominent Presbyterians and donated land for the Patton Meeting House, one of the earliest churches established west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As the owner of a thriving plantation with more than a thousand acres of prime farmland on both sides of the Swannanoa River, the Pattons were considered well-to-do and of considerable wealth. It was also well known around the county that Elizabeth had $800 in gold, a considerable sum in those times.14

  Elizabeth married her cousin James Patton, son of her father’s brother, and they moved to Tennessee, where George and Margaret Ann, nicknamed Peggy Ann, were born. Crockett was acquainted with James Patton, a Tennessee Volunteer killed at the Battle of Talladega in 1813, where Crockett had also fought against the Red Sticks.

  Elizabeth needed a husband and Crockett needed a wife. “I began to think, that as we were both in the same situation, it might be that we could do something for each other,” Crockett explained.15

  Nothing at all like Polly Crockett, Elizabeth was described as large, sensible, and practical. It was said she had a good business mind and was someone with regular habits. It seemed little, if any, great passion would mark David and Elizabeth’s relationship, but it also seemed that the Pattons’ 250-acre farm and gold coin sweetened the idea of marriage for Crockett. “I soon began to pay my respects to her in real good earnest; but I was as sly about it as a fox when he is going to rob a hen-roost,” Crockett noted. “I found that my company wasn’t at all disagreeable to her; and I thought I could treat her children with so much friendship as to make her a good stepmother to mine, and in this I wasn’t mistaken, as we soon bargained, and got married, and then went ahead.”16

  On May 21, 1815, Crockett was elected a lieutenant in the local county militia, and his marriage with Elizabeth took place sometime that summer, just a few months after Polly’s death.17 Decades after the nuptials, an amusing story surfaced about the wedding ceremony. It had been passed down through the family of Richard Calloway, a Franklin County magistrate and a Crockett friend who was called upon to perform the wedding ceremony in the Patton home, filled with neighbors, friends, and kinfolk of the bride and groom, including their children. Just as the bride was due to make her entrance, a grunting pig that had slipped through an open door burst into the room, causing much laughter and commotion. Crockett rose to the occasion and, with his foot, ushered the porcine intruder out the door while exclaiming, “Old hook, from now on, I’ll do the grunting around here.”18

  True to his promise, Crockett did do the grunting. Only months after the wedding, while the combined family of five small children was just getting comfortable with their new living situation, Crockett was stricken with an illness. It was not milk sickness or cholera or smallpox. It was something altogether different. Crockett showed all the symptoms—restlessness, irritability, and an uncontrollable need to open the cabin door and run. Elizabeth and the brood of children were about to learn that there was no real cure for what took hold of the man: cabin fever.

  Crockett had caught it and he could not shake it.

  NINETEEN

  A TINCTURE OF LUCK

  THE INK SIGNATURES scrawled on their marriage contract had barely dried when David surprised his new bride with news of a honeymoon. The only problem was that Elizabeth was not invited to come along. This was to be a hunting expedition, a purely male endeavor, and Crockett would have three of his male neighbors for companions. Besides, the time had come to seek new land for settlement.

  It was not as though Crockett had worn out his welcome in Franklin County. On the contrary, he had become a significant figure in his own community as well as in all the surrounding districts. At the camp meetings—popular and boisterous outdoor religious revival events—he was often one of the main attractions because of his engaging personality and ability as a storyteller. Camp meetings were as much social gatherings as spiritual events, and they usually lasted several days, bringing together people from far and wide. Crockett would stand under the shelter of a brush arbor, belt out a few hymns, and endure the fiery sermons of roving circuit preachers exhorting the faithful to either get right with the Holy Ghost or face the wrath of a furious God. That still left plenty of time for him to entertain the attendees with colorful stories of fighting Indians and hunting bears in the deep woods, while perhaps sneaking in a few horns of stump liquor when no one was looking.

  David found that he was a natural-born crowd pleaser so well liked that his former comrades had made him Lieutenant Crockett in the militia of Franklin County, the first of several elections Crockett would eventually win over the course of the next eighteen years.

  One of his supporters in the militia election was Jacob Van Zandt Jr., the same age as Crockett and one of his frequent companions on foraging hunts during the Creek War, when they supplied fresh meat for their fellow soldiers.1 Jacob came from a well-known and admired Franklin County family, headed by his father, Jacob Van Zandt Sr., a native of Holland who came to America and served as captain with the North Carolina militia in the Revolutionary War. The elder Van Zandt took part in the Battle of Cowpens and by 1800 had settled with his wife, Catherine Moo
n Van Zandt, in Tennessee.2 The Crockett family was held in such high esteem by the Van Zandt clan that when Jacob Sr., made out his last will and testament, he requested David and his younger brother John to act as two of the witnesses at the signing of the document. Van Zandt’s generous gifts of slaves and land to his kin did not become public until 1818, when the old man died, a few years after the Crockett family had left Franklin County. However, the signing of the will occurred on October 9, 1815,3 a significant date because not long afterward Crockett kissed his wife and five children good-bye—an act he had repeated many times before and would continue to perform until his own death—and headed south out of Tennessee into country that would become central Alabama. Crockett had seen plenty of what seemed like good land during his travels in the war, and since much of this land was opening to public domain it seemed a good idea to have a look.

  In his Narrative, Crockett identifies his trio of fellow hunters only as neighbors named Robinson, Frazier, and Rich, probably because when Crockett wrote the book he had forgotten their first names.4 He did not forget the journey, however, which provided plenty of excitement and more chances for Crockett to prove his mettle.