Crockett picked up his powder keg and hunting tools and left. When he reached the water, it was a sheet of ice as far as he could see. He carefully stepped into the freezing river. The combination of frigid air and icy water took his breath away, but he plodded ahead, perhaps wondering if he had made the right decision. Just as he started walking, the thinner ice along the bank broke through. Although shivering and numbed, Crockett plodded forward, using his tomahawk to break up the ice in his path until he reached a place where the ice was thick enough to hold him. He pulled himself out of the stream and his soaked buckskins immediately turned to ice. After walking a short way, the ice broke again, and the swiftness of the current was so fast no more ice would form. Summoning every bit of strength left in his ice-covered body, Crockett kept moving forward. Frostbitten and bordering on delirium, he somehow managed to keep the powder keg and his rifle out of the water. “By this time I was nearly frozen to death, but I saw all along before me where the ice had been fresh broke, and I thought it must be a bear struggling about in the water,” Crockett recalled. “I, therefore, primed my gun, and, cold as I was, I was determined to make war on him, if we met.”17
Invigorated by the notion that a bear might be nearby, Crockett staggered on through the freshly broken snow. “I followed the trail till it led me home, and I then found it had been made by my young man that lived with me, who had been sent by my distressed wife to see, if he could, what had become of me, for they all believed that I was dead.” As soon as Crockett stumbled through the cabin door, Elizabeth and their children swarmed around him, sobbing tears of joy and rejoicing that he was alive and had once again bested death. “When I got home I wasn’t quite dead, but mighty nigh it; but I had my powder, and that was what I went for.”18
Crockett took a few horns and collapsed into bed. During the night a heavy rain came and turned to sleet, but “in the morning all hands turned out hunting,” he recalled. Some of the hunters left Crockett’s cabin determined to find turkeys along the river, but Crockett wanted larger game. “I told them, I had dreamed the night before of having a hard fight with a big black nigger, and I knowed it was a sign that I was to have a battle with a bear; for in a bear country, I never know’d such a dream to fail.”19
Crockett set out with his hounds looking for bear. This time he found much more than he expected, and this January 1823 hunt became one of Crockett’s favorite stories. The episode was described with great relish and flair in the Narrative.
According to Crockett, he set out along the Rutherford Fork of the Obion River near Reelfoot Lake and quickly bagged a pair of fat turkeys. Lugging the birds over his shoulder, he pushed on but was “infernal mad,” with his hounds continually “barking up the wrong tree” when he encountered “about the biggest bear that was ever seen in America.”20 The bear looked “like a large black bull” and was so intimidating that at first even his dogs were afraid to attack. Eventually they took off after the bear. They chased him into a thicket and up a large black oak tree. Crockett took the turkeys from his back, hung them on a sapling, and “broke like a quarterhorse after my bear.” Cradling his rifle, he climbed through brambles and vines to within about eighty yards of the tree.
With the bear facing him, Crockett primed his gun and fired. The bear raised a paw and snorted as Crockett reloaded and fired once more. The big animal tumbled from the tree and immediately one of Crockett’s best hounds cried out in pain. Without hesitating, Crockett charged with his tomahawk in one and butcher knife in the other. When he drew near, the bear released the dog and focused his attention on the approaching man. Crockett, seeing his wounded dog had crawled off, raced back to his rifle. He loaded the weapon a third time, turned, and fired, this time killing the bear.21
Crockett blazed a trail to his cabin with his tomahawk and recruited one of his brothers-in-law, probably Abner Burgin, and Flavius Harris to help him retrieve the meat. They returned to the kill site with the four horses necessary to carry the dressed meat home.
“We got there just before dark, and struck up a fire, and commenced butchering my bear,” recalled Crockett. “It was some time in the night before we finished it; and I can assert, on my honour, that I believe he would have weighed six hundred pounds. It was the second largest I ever saw. I killed one, a few years after, that weighed six hundred and seventeen pounds…. We got our meat home, and I had the pleasure to know that we now had plenty, and that of the best; and I continued through the winter to supply my family abundantly with bear-meat and venison from the woods.”22
The hunts continued all winter. Crockett had gunpowder to spare. With the coming of the New Year, volleys of celebratory rifleshots fired into the darkness echoed through the harricanes and canebrakes and never sounded better.
TWENTY-FIVE
A FOOL FOR LUCK
THE WINTER HUNTS were so successful that by early 1823 Crockett had accumulated enough animal skins from all the game killed out in the harricanes to warrant a trip to Jackson, situated along the Forked Deer River. On a clear day in February, he and John Wesley secured the pelts and furs on a packhorse and began the forty-mile trek to the town, originally named Alexandria, that had been renamed in honor of Old Hickory, and served as the county seat of Madison County, after the former president.1
Once they arrived, the Crocketts sold the pelts and then bought sugar, coffee, salt, lead, gunpowder, and other staples. They found supper and lodging for the night. Before departing for home, Crockett bumped into some old friends from the Creek War and made time to “take a horn” with them in a nearby tavern.2 While engaged in storytelling, Crockett was introduced to Dr. William Edward Butler, on whose land the new county courthouse now sat, and early settlers Major Joseph Lynn and Duncan McIver. Crockett found them “all first rate men” and was told that all three were under consideration as candidates for the next legislative session. When one of them suggested, perhaps with tongue firmly planted in cheek, that Crockett think about running for another term in the General Assembly, he guffawed and pointed out that he now lived “at least forty miles from any white settlement” and had no thought of continuing in politics.3 The conversation turned to other matters, probably bear hunting, and presently Crockett said his good-byes and he and his son returned home.
Only a week or two later, Crockett was surprised when a passing hunter stopped at his dogtrot cabin and offered congratulations on his decision to run for office. Crockett figured the fellow was joking, but then the hunter pulled out a creased copy of the Jackson Pioneer, which carried the paid announcement of Crockett’s candidacy for the Tennessee state legislature. Crockett immediately thought of his tavern meeting with the three men and figured the bogus story was all their doing. “I said to my wife that this was all a burlesque on me, but I was determined to make it cost the man who had pout [sic] it there [,] at least the value of the printing, and of the fun he wanted at my expense.”4
Crockett did not ask the newspaper to retract the announcement but instead found another hired man to help Betsy and, as he later wrote, “turned out myself electioneering.” He quickly found that his reputation preceded him. Wherever he went, people knew about the great bear hunter and the “gentleman from the cane.” His growing popularity convinced the trio of Butler, Lynn, and McIver not to dilute their strength by running against each other as well as Crockett. During a strategy meeting, they determined that of the three of them, Butler, considered the founder of Jackson and a well-connected town commissioner, had the best chance of defeating Crockett. When he was told that his lone opponent was Butler and that the other two had dropped out of the running, Crockett admitted that he faced a worthy adversary. Butler was wealthy, articulate, educated, and, most importantly, was married to one of Andrew and Rachel Jackson’s nieces.5
“The doctor was a clever fellow, and I have often said he was the most talented man I ever run against for any office,”6 admitted Crockett. Indeed, Butler had graduated from medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and served
as a distinguished officer with General Jackson during the War of 1812.
The campaign strategy Crockett came up with played on what were perceived as his weaknesses and Butler’s strengths. Crockett capitalized on his reputation as a hunter and self-effacing backwoods character who had much more in common with the hearty pioneer stock that made up much of the electorate than did the aristocratic and refined Butler.
One of Crockett’s favorite ploys, developed early on in his political career, was to campaign in a buckskin-hunting shirt with two large pockets. In one pocket he kept a big twist of tobacco and in the other a bottle of liquor. “When I met a man and offered him a dram, he would throw out his quid of tobacco to take on, and after he had taken his horn, I would out with my twist and give him another chaw,” explained Crockett. “And in this way he would not be worse off than when I found him; and I would be sure to leave him in a first-rate good humor.”7
Throughout the campaign, Crockett and Butler remained cordial and respectful. When Crockett was on the stump in Jackson, he received an invitation to dine at the Butler residence, a much larger and elegant home than the Crockett cabin. When he arrived for dinner, Crockett was so impressed with a luxurious carpet covering most of the floor that he refused to tread on it and spent the evening stepping around it and keeping his feet on the rungs of the chair. Later, at one of the rallies, Crockett drew on this episode and talked of Butler’s lavish home and a carpet that was nothing like the bearskins that adorned most cabin floors. “Fellow citizens, my aristocratic competitor has a fine carpet, and every day he walks on finer truck than any gowns your wife or your daughters, in all their lives, ever wore.”8
As the campaign progressed, two more candidates—Messrs. Shaw and Brown—entered the race, but Crockett and Butler remained the front-runners. During months of traveling from one small settlement to the next and making joint appearances, the candidates became well acquainted with each other’s standard speech. Crockett cleverly seized on this at one of the many stops and instead of giving his talk last as he always preferred, he agreed to speak first and allow Butler to have the last word. Crockett rose and proceeded to deliver Butler’s stock speech almost verbatim, which, of course, left the flustered doctor scrambling for something else to say when his turn came to speak.9
All of the shenanigans and outlandish speeches paid off for Crockett. When the votes cast in the two-day-long August 1823 election were tallied, the two minor candidates managed to get only a few votes, but Crockett was at the top and beat Butler by a 247-vote majority.10
“This reminded me of the old saying—‘A fool for luck, and a poor man for children,’”11 Crockett observed. The hackneyed adage may have had a ring of truth, but luck rarely comes to fools. Crockett was no fool. He was a risk taker who never let his rifle get out of reach. He became the epitome of a man who could lick any problem with his own two hands and his wits. Crockett was one of the first politicians to perfect the tactic of “branding” opponents as being “too elite” to connect with and represent the general populace. That was why he appealed to the hardscrabble folks living on the frontier in the nineteenth century.
Crockett certainly did not know it at the time, but with his victory in 1823 he was well on his way to becoming a folk hero in a nation that had heroes, such as George Washington, but no genuine folk heroes. There were plenty of mythologized heroes from the past, and the Founding Fathers, including some who were still alive, were admired and respected but not, other than Washington, the stuff of legend. Even the admirable Daniel Boone, who had died an old man just a few years before in Missouri, seemed distant and removed, particularly since he much preferred solitude to the legend that overshadowed him. Andrew Jackson and other notable political leaders of the were the objects of hero worship in many circles, but people—especially the so-called common man—saw something else in the brash yet unpretentious David Crockett of Tennessee. The common man was on the rise, as Jackson’s political success revealed, and Crockett also had all the makings to become one of America’s first heroes for the masses.
Although he clearly grasped how his homespun demeanor appealed to people, hero worship was not Crockett’s immediate agenda in September 1823 when he made his return to Murfreesboro for the Fifteenth General Assembly. He took his seat as the duly elected state legislator now representing the five counties of Carroll, Humphreys, Perry, Henderson, and Madison. The entire western region was expanding quickly, and by the close of the second session Crockett’s own legislative district would swell to a total of eleven new counties with the addition of Gibson, Fayette, Dyer, Tipton, Haywood, and Hardeman.12 Throughout the first session, which concluded in late November 1823, as well as during the second session, lasting only a month in September–October 1824, Crockett continued his “squatter’s rights” crusade. His primary focus remained helping West Tennessee settlers buy land at a reasonable cost.
During both sessions, he took an active role in various committee assignments and on many issues, including a vote against using prisoners as laborers. Many of the convicts were debtors, a group that obviously had Crockett’s sympathy. Although he stood in opposition to a proposal to prohibit “tippling houses,” he endorsed another measure banning the retail sale of spirits on election day, an odd stance given Crockett’s generous use of whiskey as a vote-getting device. In the second session, he introduced a measure to improve the navigation of the rivers of the Western District and sponsored other bills promoting marriage with widows, opposing divorce in general, and banning the archaic custom of dueling, an activity not foreign to Crockett’s former commander, Andrew Jackson.13
Jackson had steadily become the most powerful political force in Tennessee, and it was during the initial legislative session in the fall of 1823 that Crockett had his first public sparring match with some of Jackson’s most ardent supporters over the election of the next U.S. senator from Tennessee.14
Incumbent U.S. senator John Williams was intent on running for a second six-year term. Jackson, however, a longtime political foe of Williams dating back to the Creek War, when Colonel Williams served with Sharp Knife, wanted Williams gone. So did the political machine grooming Jackson for a run for the presidency of the nation in 1824. Another election victory for the most vocal of Jackson’s critics would seriously harm his image and prospects nationally. As time for the election neared and no strong candidate to stand against Williams had emerged, Jackson reluctantly agreed to become the spoiler and run for the Senate. Jackson won the October 1 election and then promptly resigned, having managed to keep Williams from returning to Washington.15 It did not go unnoticed that one of Williams’s vocal supporters had been State Assemblyman David Crockett, who had recently beaten one of Jackson’s relatives in an election.
“I thought the colonel [Williams] had honestly discharged his duty, and even the mighty name of Jackson couldn’t make me vote against him,” Crockett wrote several years later when he and Jackson, by then president, were at loggerheads and bitter enemies. “I never would, nor never did, acknowledge I had voted wrong; and I am more certain now that I was right than ever. I told the people it was the best vote I ever gave; that I had supported the public interest, and cleared my conscience in giving it, instead of gratifying the private ambition of a man.”16
Crockett gutted out the rest of the first legislative session, working as hard as he could on a myriad of proposed legislation and making more friends as well as enemies, such as James K. Polk, who pushed for the sale of public lands to finance universities.17 Crockett opposed Polk on this issue, firmly believing that universities were the realms of the upper classes and that subsidizing land-grant institutions did not help the poor and the squatters in his ten-county district. To Crockett and others like him from the backcountry, formal education was not nearly as important as the experience a man could garner from everyday life on the frontier.
Without fail, Crockett always took up for the settlers; he believed they suffered at the hands of land speculators.
This was duly noted in the Nashville newspapers in September 1824, when Crockett attempted to stop a proposed land practice that was damaging to the hardworking occupants of land controlled by speculators and greedy owners. This measure called for selling off large tracts of vacant state lands for cash, a move that meant Crockett’s poor constituents would be priced out of contention. He believed that he, and others like him who had the courage and fortitude to seek out and open new lands for their families, had just as many rights as, if not more rights than, outsiders who wanted to buy large acreages.
Crockett demanded that squatters be given a fair opportunity to purchase the land. He openly condemned the speculators and accused them of “pretending to be great friends to the people in saving their land” when they actually “had gone up one side of the creek and down another, like a coon, and pretended to grant the poor people great favors in securing them occupant claims—they gave them a credit of a year and promised to take cows, horses, &c., in payment. But when the year came around, the notes were in the hands of others; the people were sued, cows and horses not being sufficient to pay for securing it.” Crockett compared these warrants to “counterfeit bank notes in the hands of the person who obtained them, and die [sic] on their hands.”18
When, on October 22, 1824, the final session came to a close an exhausted Crockett was ready to go home. He was tired of squabbling over land rights, endless committee meetings, and boardinghouse food. His state political career had come to an end. But his national political career was just beginning. As wearisome as some of the proceedings might have been in Murfreesboro, Crockett surmised that maybe the place he could go and get more accomplished for the poor people he represented was in Washington, D.C. Just three days after the close of the final session, he circulated a letter to his constituents reporting on his activities on their behalf in the state legislature. After giving a summary of his accomplishments, he made a request:
David Crockett: The Lion of the West Page 20