David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  “We set out for the Creek country, crossing the Tennessee river; and after having made a day’s travel, we stop’d at the house of one of my old acquaintances, who had settled there after the war. Resting here a day, Frazier turned out to hunt, being a great hunter; but he got badly bit by a very poisonous snake, and so we left him and went on. We passed through a large rich valley, called Jones’s valley, where several families had settled, and continued our course till we came near to the place where Tuscaloosa now stands.”5

  Black Warrior’s Town, located on what the white settlers called the Black Warrior River, would not become Tuscaloosa until 1819, taking its name from tushka, meaning warrior, and lusa, meaning black, the name of the old Choctaw Chief Tuskalusa, who was defeated in battle by Hernando de Soto in 1540.6 Crockett had been to this place before, when he was a soldier and his outfit had looted stores of corn and beans from the deserted Creek settlement before burning it to ash.

  Crockett and the two remaining hunters hobbled their horses for the night and stretched out for a rest. During the night, Crockett heard the bells on the horses as they freed themselves from the loose ties and took off, probably headed back to where they had started. At first light, Crockett started in pursuit of the horses on foot, carrying his rifle. For hours he looked everywhere, wading creeks, sloshing through swamps, and pushing through thick brush. At each cabin he came to along the way, Crockett was told the horses had been seen passing by, but at the end of the day there was no further sign of them. He doubled back to the last cabin he had passed and spent the night.

  “From the best calculation we could make, I had walked over fifty miles that day; and the next morning I was so sore, and fatigued, that I felt like I couldn’t walk any more,”7 Crockett wrote in his Narrative. “But I was anxious to get back to where I had left my company, and so I started and went on, but mighty slowly, till after the middle of the day. I now began to feel mighty sick, and had a dreadful head-ache. My rifle was so heavy, and I felt so weak, that I lay down by the side of the trace, in a perfect wilderness too, to see if I wouldn’t get better.”

  Although Crockett did not say so in his autobiography, he had been stricken with malaria, and would suffer from its effects for the rest of his life. Malaria did not exist in the Americas until the 1500s, but that changed with the coming of Spaniards and their African slaves; soon the disease spread throughout the hemisphere. The bite of infected female mosquitoes transmitted the infectious disease, which made it especially dangerous in the American South, where consistently warm temperatures allowed mosquitoes to breed year-round. Throughout the 1700s malaria struck many settlers in the southeast, causing a Scots-Irish pioneer to say that Virginia had so much malaria it was “only good for doctors and ministers,” while a German immigrant noted, “They who want to die quickly go to Carolina.”8 Malaria moved westward with the white settlers into Tennessee and all across the Mississippi Valley. Twice the capital of Alabama had to be relocated because of outbreaks of malarial fevers in the early 1820s.

  Luckily for Crockett, a pair of Indians—probably friendly Choctaws—came across him as he lay sweating and trembling from chills and fever on the side of the trail. They offered Crockett some ripe melon, but he was far too ill to eat. The Indians knew what the white man was facing, and they told him the hard truth. “They then signed to me, that I would die, and be buried; a thing I was confoundedly afraid of myself.”9 Crockett asked them to take him to the nearest house, and by signing they agreed. “I got up to go; but when I rose, I reeled about like a cow with the blind staggers, or a fellow who had taken too many ‘horns.’”

  He paid one of the Indians a half-dollar to carry his rifle and go with him. After they had traversed about a mile and a half, they came to a cabin. Crockett felt that he “was pretty far gone.” The people there were kind and put the stricken man to bed. “The woman did all she could for me with her warm teas, but I still continued bad enough, with a high fever, and generally out of my senses.” The next day two neighbors that Crockett knew from back home happened by, and they managed to get the sick man on a horse and take him back to the campsite where he had left the other two hunters, Robinson and Rich. The ride only worsened Crockett’s condition, and by the time he was returned to his camp he could not sit up.10 “I thought the jig was mighty nigh up with me, but I determined to keep a stiff upper lip,” Crockett wrote. “They carried me to a house, and each of my comrades bought him a horse, and they all set out together, leaving me behind.”

  Crockett had been left at the home of a man named Jesse Jones, who, along with his wife, cared for the stricken man as if he was their own son. About the Jones family, Crockett later wrote that they “treated me with every possible kindness in their power, and I shall always feel thankful to them.”11 Without the attention he received at this modest frontier cabin, Crockett surely would have perished. For five days he was unconscious, and for at least two weeks he remained in a state of delirium. Finally, out of sheer desperation, Mrs. Jones poured an entire six-ounce bottle of Bateman’s Drops down Crockett’s throat. This was a drastic step. This patent medicine—it had been around since the 1720s—usually was taken in small doses of only a few drops at a time. The main ingredients were opium, aniseed, and camphor, and if swigged indiscriminately Bateman’s Drops could be toxic, if not lethal. The desperate Mrs. Jones had no other choice. She reasoned that Crockett was bound to die anyway, so why not take a gamble.12

  “She gave me the whole bottle, which throwed me into a sweat that continued on me all night,” recalled Crockett, “when at last I seemed to make up, and spoke, and asked her for a drink of water. This almost alarmed her, for she was looking every minute for me to die. She gave me the water, and, from that time, I began slowly to mend, and so kept on till I was able at last to walk about a little.”

  Gradually, Crockett’s health returned, and even though he was not fully recovered, he reached a point where the malaria did not seem debilitating. He had to get moving, so when a waggoner happened by the Jones cabin, he asked if he could hitch a ride as far as the man’s house, which Crockett found out was just twenty miles from his own place. “I still mended as we went along, and when we got to his stopping place, I hired one of his horses, and went on home. I was so pale, and so much reduced, that my face looked like it had been half soled with brown paper.”13

  At the Crockett home, Elizabeth and the children grew more worried with each passing day. There had been no word at all from Crockett, and they were prepared for the worst. Robinson and Rich, her husband’s two friends, had returned weeks before, trailing three horses they found on the way; they were the same ones Crockett had been searching for when he was stricken with malaria. Perhaps out of embarrassment for leaving Crockett behind, when the two men brought Crockett’s horse to Elizabeth they said that her husband had met his death during the expedition.14 They told the stricken woman that they had come upon some men who watched Crockett draw his last breath and then buried him.

  Elizabeth had already been widowed by war and understood the realities of life and death on the frontier. Yet she was not fully convinced that her highly resourceful husband was really dead. The practical Elizabeth wanted proof, so she hired a man to retrace Crockett’s journey. She directed the man to look for her husband and find out the truth of the matter. If David had left any money or personal effects behind, Elizabeth told the man to fetch them home to her and the children. The hired man was still on the trail and missed meeting up with Crockett before he slipped back into Franklin County.

  Likely Elizabeth thought she was looking at an emaciated ghost when she discovered David standing in the doorway of the cabin. Her astonishment had to have been overwhelming. That all changed in an instant when David smiled, and her lost husband walked back into her life.

  Almanac cover, 1854. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

  PART III

  TWENTY

  “ITCHY FOOTED”

  CROCKETT HAD SURVIVED
yet another brush with death. Finding himself “still in the land of the living and a-kicking,” he wisely recuperated at his cabin on the Rattle Snake Spring Branch of Bean’s Creek. Like other denizens of the frontier, Crockett had little knowledge of what was going on in the rest of the nation at the time. The only news that interested him was anything that had a direct impact on his own family’s daily life. For most of the winter of 1815 and well into the summer of 1816, as his recovery from the bout with malaria progressed, he tended to family and farm. The youngsters were glad to have their father back with them, and Elizabeth kept him healthy and happy while she put up with a hot summertime pregnancy.

  On September 16, 1816, Elizabeth gave birth to a healthy son, whom they named Robert Patton Crockett—the first in a new “crop” (Crockett’s word) born to her and David.1

  The same week of Robert’s birth, while David and his neighbors quaffed celebratory horns of liquor, others were at work acquiring more Indian land for white settlement. Andrew Jackson and fellow federal treaty commissioners David Meriwether and Jesse Franklin used threats, coercion, and bribery to grab up more enormous land grants from the Cherokee and Chickasaw tribes.2 During negotiations, the Cherokee leaders implored Jackson to reduce the size of the land cession but he refused to budge and overcame all resistance. Jackson told them that the price the Cherokees paid by giving up land had to be great if their tribe wanted a lasting relationship with the United States. The treaty with the Cherokees, who surrendered millions of acres in return for a series of monetary payments, was signed on September 14, 1816, at Turkey Town.3 The treaty also promised peace and friendship between the Cherokee Nation and the United States forever. Jackson’s memory must have soon failed him, for in a letter to newly elected President James Monroe written just a year later, he noted: “I have long viewed treaties with the Indians an absurdity not to be reconciled to the principles of our government.”4 Jackson’s outspoken contempt for Indian treaty rights was not motivated only by an insatiable hunger for more land. It would be too simplistic to conclude that Jackson was simply a greedy “Indian hater.” His attitude toward Indians was patronizing and paternalistic. Jackson believed that, like the scores of slaves laboring on his plantation, Indians were childlike creatures in need of guidance from a father figure. He rationalized that he had their humanitarian interests in mind and that the treaties he negotiated and policies he later enforced were beneficial to Indians and protected them from the white population.

  Jackson’s treatment of Indians was not exclusive to any one tribe but to all Indians, as the Chickasaw tribe soon learned. They fared no better than the Cherokees. On September 20, in signing the treaty at the Chickasaw council house in northern Mississippi, Jackson promised the tribe less than $200,000 in exchange for millions of acres of Chickasaw lands, or almost a quarter of the amount taken from the Creeks at Fort Jackson a few years earlier. As a Jackson biographer succinctly noted, “It was a formidable purchase.”5

  Jackson was not finished. On October 24, 1816, the Choctaws ceded their land east of the Tombigbee River in return for an annual payment of $16,000 for twenty years and $10,000 in merchandise.6 All of this pleased Jackson, but still he wanted more Indian lands open to white settlement, and he would not stop until that desire was fulfilled. But before he put together another army, including many Tennessee volunteers, to sweep into Florida to punish the Seminole tribe hiding there and wrest the territory away from the Spanish, Jackson looked to some personal interests.

  During 1817 and 1818, while pulling together his Florida invasion force to burn Seminole villages, Jackson, his friend John Coffee, and several Tennessee cronies joined land speculators snapping up newly opened parcels of property, including former Creek lands in the future state of Alabama.7 Although he was widely considered by most white citizens as a national hero after his spectacular defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson had no wish to provide any fodder for his political foes. To avoid even the slightest criticism for buying land at government auctions, Jackson emphasized that he was not motivated by personal gain but only wished to encourage settlement to protect the frontier. Few people ever questioned Jackson on this point, but instead held him in even higher esteem for defeating the Indian menace and making valuable land available for settlement.

  One of the Tennesseans most pleased with the promise of new land was Crockett. Growing aware that so-called civilization was creeping in around him, Crockett was primed and ready to explore new territory, and the recent treaties gave him ample reason to do so. That autumn of 1816, news of the various Indian treaties was better medicine than an entire case of Bateman’s Drops. No tribal claims remained to delay expansion, leaving the door to the West wide open.

  By late autumn, Crockett—despite flare-ups of malaria—was dead-set on moving his family out of Franklin County. “The place on which I lived was sickly, and I was determined to leave it,” Crockett wrote. “I therefore set out the next fall to look at the country which had been purchased of the Chickasaw tribe of Indians. I went on to a place called Shoal Creek, about eighty miles from where I lived, and here again I got sick. I took the ague and fever, which I supposed was brought on me by camping out. I remained here for some time, as I was unable to go farther; and in that time, I became so well pleased with the country about there, that I resolved to settle in it.”8

  After he fought off another bout of the recurrent malaria, Crockett rode far to the northeast to spend the winter of 1816–1817 with some of his kinfolk just three miles below the Kentucky border.9 David’s uncles William, Robert, Joseph, and James Crockett had lived for many years in the Wolf River area on the Cumberland Plateau of what eventually became Fentress County, Tennessee. The brothers had moved there not long after the deaf and mute James, affectionately called “Deaf and Dumb Jimmie,” was ransomed from a Cherokee trader after being held captive for seventeen years. Uncle Robert later moved north to Cumberland County, Kentucky, where he died an old man and left his land and several slaves to his children, including a son also named David Crockett.10 Robert’s last will and testament was read March 2, 1836, only four days before his famous nephew was killed in battle at the Alamo.

  Uncle Jimmy resided only a few miles north of the settlement of Sand Springs—which later became the county seat of Jamestown—in a house owned by the illustrious Conrad “Coonrod” Pile.11 A salty old Longhunter who settled in the area in 1791, Pile had a dozen children, including a daughter, Delila, married to William Crockett, another of David’s uncles, who lived in the small settlement of Boatland on the Obey River.12 A center for boat building, Boatland was where flatboats came up the Obey, also called the Obed by later mapmakers, to take on loads of turpentine and tar bound for Nashville and other markets. David spent the winter in a beach flat near Boatland, getting reacquainted with relatives and picking up boat-making skills that he later would put to use.

  He also hunted with Coonrod Pile, a man twenty years Crockett’s senior who long before had found a location to his liking at the Three Forks of Wolf River. Coonrod chose the site because of the cool, clear spring water flowing near his camp, where he cooked game on a hot stone, drank from a turtle shell, and slept inside a cave on a bed of dry leaves and grass. He kept a fire burning at the cave entrance day and night to discourage wild critters from visiting. It was said that he feared neither man nor beast but was deathly afraid of lightning; if a big storm approached, he ran to his cave as quickly as he could. By the time Crockett met the old man, Coonrod had amassed a sizable fortune manufacturing guns, maintaining tollgates on a turnpike road, and overseeing his sizable farmlands. Coonrod lived in a large log house with no windows and only one door that opened by his bedside. Next to the bed, he kept a rifle at the ready and a pitchfork with sharpened prongs.13

  Almost a century after Crockett and Coonrod hunted the river bottoms and hollows, another famous Tennessee marksman emerged from the Pall Mall Valley—Alvin C. York.14 York became the most famous American solider in World
War I after he won the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German position, killing 28 German soldiers and capturing 132 others. Best known as Sergeant York, this farm boy from the Valley of the Three Forks was Conrad Pile’s great-great-grandson. He grew up hearing tales of both his illustrious ancestor and David Crockett. “I think we had just about the best shots that ever squinted down a barrel,” York wrote in his war diary. “Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett used to shoot at these matches long ago. And Andrew Jackson used to recruit his Tennessee sharpshooters from among our mountain shooters.”15

  As would be revealed many years later, Crockett’s brief stay at Boatland had a far-reaching impact on other impressionable young men. Yet in early spring of 1817, Crockett’s focus returned to the new lands that waited to the west. He bid good-bye to family and friends on the Wolf River and at Boatland and made the long ride home to begin preparing his family for another move.

  Before leaving Franklin County, Crockett went to the hillside not far from Kentuck for one more visit at Polly’s grave, marked by the cairn of rocks. He pulled some weeds, doffed his hunter’s hat, and mumbled a few words. Then he and his family—on horseback and piled into wagons—went to Shoal Creek.

  Many years later, James Burns Gowen, a hunting companion and neighbor when David, Polly, and their babies made their first move west, described Crockett as “an itchy footed sort of fellow who went bear hunting with a knife, bagged a covey of wild turkey with a single shot, went Indian hunting with Andrew Jackson and finally got himself elected to Congress.”16

  By 1817 Crockett had hunted Indians with Jackson, but he probably had not yet killed a bear with a knife, and he never did bag a bunch of turkeys with just one shot. Crockett would go to Congress some years away. However, Gowen’s finest description of Crockett was as “itchy footed,” as true as anything that had ever been said about the man.