Thanks also to Aaron D. Purcell, associate professor and director of Special Collections and University Libraries, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg; Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo, San Antonio; Berkeley County Historical Society, Martinsburg, West Virginia; Gowen Research Foundation, Lubbock, Texas; Alabama Department of History and Archives, Montgomery; Andrew Burstein, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Dr. Joe Reilly, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the San Jacinto Museum, Houston, Texas; Birmingham Public Library Cartographic Collection, Birmingham, Alabama; Craig Remington, Department of Geography, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; Rick Watson, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Linda Stone, curator, Woolaroc Museum, Bartlesville, Oklahoma; Aryn Glazer, Prints and Photographs Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center of American History, University of Texas at Austin; Oklahoma State Senate Historical Preservations Fund, Inc., Oklahoma City; Dorothy Sloan and Shelby Smith, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books, Austin, Texas; Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library; G. W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Connecticut; Ronald McCoy, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Emily Priddy, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Linda Priddy, Herrin, Illinois; Robert McCubbin, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Larry Yadon, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Danny and Barbara Moon, Hickman, Kentucky; and Phillipe Garmy, Stillwater, Oklahoma.
NOTES
ONE • “KILT HIM A B’AR”
1 Lyrics by Tom Blackburn, music by George Bruns, copyright 1954, Wonderland Music Co.
2 David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1834), 190.
3 Ibid., 190–91. Some sources contend that Crockett’s story about climbing a tree and sliding down to stay warm was pure invention—one of his exaggerated yarns later picked up and reprinted in almanacs and newspapers. Others disagree and believe the story has the ring of truth.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 194.
6 J. H. Grime, Recollections of a Long Life (Lebanon, TN: 1930), 8. Rev. John Harvey Grime, a prominent Baptist preacher and religious leader throughout the South, recalled that as a boy in Tennessee he had a hunting dog named after Davy Crockett and another he named Jolar after Crockett’s favorite dog.
TWO • BORN ON A RIVERBANK IN FRANKLIN
1 No records of David Crockett’s birth exist. In all probability, August 17, 1786, is correct. It has always been the accepted date of birth.
2 Kathryn E. Jones, Crockett Cousins (Graham, TX: K. E. Jones, 1984; 2nd printing, rev. ed., 1986), 21–24.
3 From Joy Bland e-mail to the author, April 8, 2009.
4 Joy Bland, “Genealogical Discovery,” Go Ahead: Newsletter of the Direct Descendants and Kin of David Crockett 25, no. 1, August 2008, 3.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Robert L. Geiser, The Illusion of Caring (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 148.
8 This quote is attributed to Mary Boykin Chestnut, the daughter of a South Carolina governor and the wife of James Chestnut Jr., the son of one of antebellum South Carolina’s largest landowners.
9 Crockett, Narrative, 16.
10 James Atkins Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, edited by John B. Shackford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 7.
11 Curtis Carroll Davis, “A Legend at Full-Length: Mr. Chapman Paints Colonel Crockett—and Tells About It,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, April 1960), 170. Crockett made this statement to artist John Gadsby Chapman in 1834 while sitting for his portrait in Chapman’s studio in Washington, D.C.
12 David Dobson, Directory of Scots in the Carolinas, 1680–1830 (Baltimore: Genealogical Printing Company, 2002), 52. The name Crockett may have come from the ancient Norse word krok-r, meaning crook, hook, or bend and probably the root of the old English word crock.
13 Joseph A. Swann, “The Early Life & Times of David Crockett, 1786–1812,” unpublished manuscript.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid. Lowland Scots were an interesting mixture of Celts, Romans, Scandinavians, Germans, English, Irish, and Scots. The region of southern Scotland and northern England was an age-old border battleground where lawlessness had become a way of life. Residents of this contested landscape raided back and forth across the border from before the time of the Romans in the first century AD. This lawlessness and fighting escalated by the seventeenth century, creating an environment of strife and disorder, which effectively undermined any kind of sustained economic opportunity. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the British government confiscated a great deal of Catholic-owned property and enacted penal laws restricting land ownership exclusively to Protestants.
17 Ibid. Over three or four generations, the Scots succeeded in developing the Ulster-Londonderry area that had been torn apart by war and poverty into a thriving industrial region. By the middle of the seventeenth century the county of Ulster was almost totally populated by Scots-Irish. The marshes and bogs had been drained, and fertile lands were planted with a new crop—the potato—brought by Sir Walter Raleigh from the American Indians and soon a staple in the Irish diet. At the same time, the manufacture of woolen and linen products flourished until the English manufacturers tired of Scots in Ulster shipping goods to the American colonies. This resulted in the implementation of harsh trade restrictions, including a ban of the exportation of Irish wool products to anywhere in the world except England and Wales. The mostly English landlords of Ulster also employed a policy referred to as rack-renting, which doubled or even tripled the property rent. The word “rack” became a term of protest, evoking the medieval torture device, to denote excessive rents.
18 Ibid.
THREE • THE CROCKETTS ARRIVE
1 Crockett, Narrative, 14.
2 Ibid., n. 3.
3 Jim Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 133.
4 Swann, “The Early Life & Times.”
5 Ibid.
6 Webb, Born Fighting, 118. Although the term Scotch-Irish is commonly used in the United States, the author points out that in other countries, especially Scotland, it is considered rude to refer to a person as being Scotch. He explains that Scotch is a whiskey and that Scots are people whose roots go back to Scotland.
7 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
8 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 4. Located on the Potomac River, separating Virginia and Maryland, the ferry was established in 1744 and was named for Evan Watkins, the ferry owner who resided at his nearby home and farm, Maidstone-on-the-Potomac, a site well known to the Crocketts and other early Scots-Irish.
9 Ibid., 4. Frederick County, VA, Court Records, Order Bk. 2, 456.
10 Ibid., 4–5. It also has been suggested that Elizabeth may have been somehow related to a William Patterson who was mentioned in several deeds involving the Crocketts, and may account for the name Patterson bestowed on one of their grandsons.
11 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
12 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 4. Throughout the early 1770s, the names of David the elder and other family members appeared on legal documents and records in Tryon County and later when it became Lincoln County. These records include various Crocketts serving as witnesses for property deeds, codicils to wills, and mortgages. On at least two occasions David and his eldest son, William, served together as jurors, including on a January 1775 criminal trial in which the jury panel ruled in favor of the defendant and found Thomas Espey, a Tryon County justice of the peace, not guilty of a charge of extortion.
13 Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2007), 20.
14 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 39.
15 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
16 Crockett, Narrative, 14.
FOUR • OVER THE MOUNTAIN
1 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 6.
2
John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 39–41.
3 Ibid., 39.
4 Wayne C. Moore, “Paths of Migration,” First Families of Tennessee: A Register of Early Settlers and Their Present-Day Descendants (Knoxville: East Tennessee Historical Society, 2000), 30.
5 J. G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee (Charleston, SC: Walkers & Jones, 1853; reprinted in 1967 for the East Tennessee Historical Society, Knoxville; reprinted in 1999 by Overmountain Press), 94.
6 Ibid., 96.
7 John Trotwood Moore and Austin P. Foster, Tennessee, The Volunteer State (Nashville and Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1923), v.
8 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 2, 6.
9 Wilma Dykeman, Tennessee, A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 43–44.
10 Ibid.
11 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 3, 6. The document signed by two David Crocketts was called the Washington County Petition. It provides additional proof that the David Crockett who is the subject of this book had an uncle named David Crockett Jr.
12 Crockett, Narrative, 15.
13 James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (Nashville: Charles and Randy Elder-Booksellers Publishers, reproduced 1982, originally published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1891 and 1900), 55.
14 Crockett, Narrative, 15–16.
15 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 4–5.
16 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
17 Crockett, Narrative, 16.
18 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 101.
19 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
20 James Collins, Autobiography of a Revolutionary Soldier, edited by John M. Roberts (Clinton, LA: Feliciana Democrat, 1859; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1979), 22.
FIVE • ON THE NOLICHUCKY
1 Fred Brown, Marking Time: East Tennessee Historical Markers and the Stories Behind Them (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 112. Rev. Samuel Doak, a Presbyterian minister and a major influence on the Tennessee frontier, came up with the cry for liberty in 1780 after delivering a sermon to the Overmountain Men preparing for the King’s Mountain battle. Doak urged them to fight with “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” and the Scots-Irish Presbyterians before him responded as one: “The sword of the Lord and of our Gideons.”
2 Wayne C. Moore, “Paths of Migration,” 39.
3 Ibid.
4 Harriette Simpson Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), 195. As the author points out, women listening from behind fort walls often mistook the battle whoops of their own returning menfolk, bearing fresh scalps, for those of Indians.
5 Crockett, Narrative, 14–15. Except for the Roster of Soldiers from North Carolina in the American Revolution listing John Crockett as a member of the Lincoln County militia, no detailed record of his service record has been found. There is, however, a record provided for John’s brother Robert, who filed for a pension in 1833 based on his service during the Revolution. It shows Robert serving in various militia posts for several weeks or months at a time from June 1776 until 1781, when he was discharged. Since Robert and John were from the same family and were close in age, their military service records might be similar.
6 Court Records of Washington County, Virginia—Minutes, vol. 1, 39, August 1778.
7 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 6–7.
8 Court Records of Washington, County, Virginia, 54.
9 Ibid.
10 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 5.
11 Austin P. Foster, Counties of Tennessee, A Reference of Historical and Statistical Facts for Each of Tennessee’s Counties (Nashville: Department of Education, State of Tennessee, 1923. Reprinted by The Overmountain Press, 1998), 14. The county was named in honor of General Nathanael Greene, the Rhode Islander who played a key role in the American victories against the British in the South.
12 Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee, 121. The Crockett cabin was located near the confluence of the Big Limestone and the Nolichucky within a large plot of land known as Brown’s Purchase, after Jacob Brown, an itinerant merchant from South Carolina, who had purchased it from the Cherokees with a load of trade goods.
13 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 5.
14 Ibid., 6.
15 Ibid., 33, 34, 431, n. 17, n. 19.
16 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
17 Arnow, Seedtime, 194. Known as “Little John” by the Indians he fought, Sevier, of French Huguenot descent, also was called “the handsomest man in Tennessee.”
18 Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee, 386–87.
19 Ibid. Greene County became a bastion of support for the State of Franklin—one of the great political experiments on the eighteenth-century frontier—and the capital was established at Greeneville, founded in the early 1780s. John Crockett took an active part in meetings and signed various documents and petitions pertaining to the State of Franklin.
20 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
21 Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee, 517–18.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 659.
24 Crockett, Narrative, 18–20.
25 Stanley J. Folmsbee, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee by David Crockett, A Facsimile Edition with an Introduction and Annotations by James A. Shackford and Stanley J. Folmsbee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 19.
26 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
SIX • A BOY’S LEARNING
1 Swann, “Early Life & Times.” Greene County Deed Book, vol. 3, 320, November 27, 1792, John Crockett from St of NC 197 acres Stogdons Fork, Lick Creek, Grant #1243.
2 Alice Daniel, Log Cabins of the Smokies (Gatlinburg, TN: Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association, 2000), 3.
3 Crockett, Narrative, 20.
4 Fred Brown, “The Stoneciphers,” Knoxville News-Sentinel, September 22, 1996. The Stonecipher family had come to America from Germany by way of Rotterdam in the mid-1700s. They were hired by the governor of Virginia to cut stone for buildings in the expanding Tidewater lands and in 1777 the family moved to the new frontier that would become Tennessee.
5 Ibid.
6 Crockett, Narrative, 21.
7 Brown, “Stoneciphers.”
8 Ibid.
9 Crockett, Narrative, 21.
10 Brown, “Stoneciphers.” Absalom and Sarah Stonecipher raised ten children. When Absalom died at the age of eighty-two in 1851, he had outlived David Crockett by fifteen years.
11 Kay K. Moss, Southern Folk Medicine, 1750–1820 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 2, 27.
12 Ibid., 8. For example, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a renowned Philadelphia physician, knew enough to counsel his aspiring students to seek out practitioners of domestic medicine. “When you go abroad always take a memorandum book and whenever you hear an old woman say such and such herbs are good, or that a compound makes a good medicine or ointment, put it down, for, gentlemen, you may need it.” Before his death in 1813, Rush was professor of the practice of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, America’s preeminent medical school at the time.
13 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
14 Michal Strutin, Gristmills of the Smokies (Gatlinburg, TN: Great Smoky Mountains National History Association, 2000), 3.
15 Ibid., 7.
16 A millstone believed to have been removed from the site of the Crockett gristmill destroyed in the 1794 flood was eventually donated to the Crockett Tavern Museum in Morristown, TN, where it can still be seen.
17 Crockett, Narrative, 21.
18 From the Crockett Tavern and Pioneer Museum files. Swann, “Early Life & Times.
19 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 39: Grant of 300 acres in Jefferson County, TN, to John Crockett, April 14, 1792. Estle P. Muncy, People and Places of Jefferson County (Rogersville, TN: East Tennessee Prin
ting Co., 1994), 3, 5–8. Formed by Territorial Governor William Blount in 1792 and bounded by the French Broad and Holston rivers, the county was named for Thomas Jefferson. The following year Dandridge, established in honor of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, the wife of President Washington, was named the county seat. Mossy Creek, named for the profusion of long, vividly green moss fronds waving in the currents of the stream, was first settled in the 1780s. The community retained its name for almost 120 years, until 1901, when it became Jefferson City
20 William Douglas Henderson and Jimmy W. Claborn, Hamblen County: A Pictorial History (Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Company, 1995), 85.
21 Crockett, Narrative, 22.
22 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 7.
SEVEN • COMING OF AGE
1 Warren Moore, Mountain Voices: A Legacy of the Blue Ridge and Great Smokies (Chester, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 1988), 39.
David Crockett: The Lion of the West Page 33