Crockett of Tennessee

by Judd, Cameron

  From a little Indian boy found roaming amid the horror, the troops learned that beneath the long house was a cellar full of potatoes. Despite the horrific heap of charred corpses, several men probed into the remains of the house and found a hole leading to the cellar, and as the boy had said, there were potatoes in abundance there, roasted by the heat of the fire.

  David joined the feast with the rest of the army, eating the potatoes like they were apples. They tasted fine, like they had been stewed in fat … and suddenly David’s stomach did an unpleasant turn as he realized that these potatoes had been roasted in the dripping bodily juices of more than two-score burning Creeks just above the cellar. He almost brought up what he had already eaten, but managed to squelch the heaves. Well, he certainly would eat no more. He was ready to throw away the last half-eaten potato … but no, he couldn’t. Revolting or not, this was food, and he was still ravenous. He finished the potato, trying not to think about what he was doing.

  It was one of the lowest days in the life of David Crockett. The matter of Persius and the murdered guard, his own self-protective lies, and now this disgusting eating of food cooked in the same heat that cooked human corpses … how much further could a man fall?

  David Crockett wished he had never come to war.

  But more war remained. From Tallusahatchee the troops marched to rejoin the regular army, where for several days they continued to suffer from insufficient provisions. Then word reached General Jackson that hostile Creeks had laid siege on Fort Talladega, which was occupied by Creeks friendly to the whites. A march toward that Coosa River fortification began at once.

  The fight at Talladega didn’t fall out quite as smoothly as the devastation of Tallusahatchee. Failure of communications and some yielding of ground by panicked troops forced Jackson and his army to withdraw to the protection of another fort, with seventeen men lost. Even so, the hostile Creeks, caught by the hundreds in a cross fire during part of the battle, fared much worse. Estimates of those killed ranged between three and four hundred.

  Later in the month, the prospect of a negotiated peace presented itself, only to be destroyed when more failed communications resulted in some troops from David Crockett’s old home region of East Tennessee attacking friendly Hillabee Creeks in their towns. Jackson had nothing to do with this, but the Creeks who had just agreed to negotiations perceived it as treachery and withdrew, stretching out the Creek War much longer than it might have gone otherwise.

  Unhappiness was rampant among Jackson’s troops, and at one point an attempt was made by some disgruntled soldiers to “mutiny” their general—but Jackson called the bluff and prevailed. David took no part in the mutiny attempt, but he felt sympathy for those who did, and shared their resentment of Jackson when he successfully stood his ground against them.

  Just before Christmas, David Crockett’s term of enlistment ended, and he headed home, weary and eager to see his family. He had heard nothing more of Persius Tarr since his murderous escape from the camp. In fact, he had actually managed by the force of hard will to push Persius almost entirely out of his mind. The very thought of the man was enough to make him shudder and fill with a sense of regret and something like scarcely controlled panic. He thought often of the murdered guard, and felt partly responsible for his death. He hadn’t wanted anything like that to happen when Persius escaped. He had just wanted to atone for having gotten Persius into trouble in the first place. How could he have known Persius would do what he did?

  He dreamed sometimes about the murdered guard, and about heaps of charred corpses inside a burned Creek house. Sometimes he would wake up sweating, and imagined he could detect the faint taste of roasted potatoes on the back of his tongue. He could hardly bear it, and a time or two it made him sick outright.

  Polly held him in silence for a long time the day he reached home again. He knew from her manner that she had feared he would never come back at all.

  All was well at home. The boys had grown far more than David had anticipated. His enlistment had been only for ninety days. It seemed more like a year. He was astounded at how much his military service had exhausted him and drained him of the fighting spirit that had prompted his volunteerism in the first place. As far as he was concerned at that point, he would remain a civilian forevermore, if possible.

  For many months he was to live the life he had known before, and gradually become his old self again. News of the Creek War continued to drift in, and he followed it closely. In March, Jackson defeated the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, news that crackled at lightning speed across the nation.

  In early summer Polly became pregnant and voiced a hope for a girl. David would have been happy to have another son—the idea of a houseful of strong young men appealed to him—but if a girl it proved to be, that would suit him just fine. Whatever made Polly happy.

  August brought a treaty negotiation between Jackson and the Creeks, in which the Creeks ceded the lands above Fort Jackson, which stood near the confluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, all the way to Fort Armstrong. But full peace didn’t follow the accord. Some Creeks refused to live by the treaty, and these recalcitrants were given aid and sanctuary by the Spanish in the port area of the Gulf of Mexico. The British had put their hand in the game as well, harboring ships with the Spanish and sending some three hundred troops to join themselves with the Indians.

  It was outrageous affrontery, in the view of most Tennessee frontiersmen—and by now David Crockett had sufficiently forgotten the horrors of war and his earlier weariness and desire to remain free of military life. The fever was on him again, and in September, with Polly very unhappy about it, he enlisted with the Separate Battalion of Tennessee Mounted Gunmen, under Major William Russell.

  They took no part in the battle at Pensacola, arriving too late for that. They found Jackson the victor and the British ships beginning to withdraw, but Fort Barrancas was destroyed, having been blown up by the British to keep Jackson from seizing it. Meanwhile, the Creeks had vanished into the wilderness.

  David was among troops ultimately assigned to roust out and destroy these fugitive Indians in the swamps of West Florida. It was rugged, trying work, and here David saw anew how bloody war could be. But he was older, more hardened, and at one point even accepted the invitation of some Choctaw allies to take coup on the severed heads of some Creeks they had killed. Taking up a war club, he joined in striking the battered heads, and when the Choctaws gathered around him, chanting “Warrior! Warrior! Warrior!” he felt that the life of a combatant had its own fierce rewards after all.

  With Russell, Crockett took part in a fight at an Indian camp where several warriors were killed and women and children were taken prisoner. Soon after, the regiment crossed the Florida panhandle, passed over the Chocta-whatchee and headed east. They suffered the usual lack of provisions, but again Crockett’s rifle brought down game, though not nearly enough. At long last the mission ended and the troops returned to the Coosa River and Fort Strother, established during Crockett’s earlier term of service. On the way to Fort Strother they passed through the Fort Talladega battlefield and observed the skulls and skeletons of Indians killed there, still lying unburied in the open.

  Seeing that made Crockett realize he was weary once more of military life, and longing for his Tennessee home. Near Fort Strother he chanced to meet a body of East Tennessee troops en route to Mobile, and among them were many of his old boyhood neighbors, and his own brother Joseph, a handsome young man who had reached his mid-twenties. The brothers’ reunion was a happy one, and David caught up on news of home and family—making him all the more eager to get back to Tennessee.

  From Fort Strother he began his homeward journey, though he still was subject to call-up for more than a month. He reached home and found Polly again relieved, maybe even surprised, to see him again, having readied herself for life as a widow in case he should not return. He had been home only a short while when orders came in for him to return to service to scout for Indians along th
e Black Warrior and Cahaba rivers.

  Polly was crushed. Would he be gone yet again, after having only recently gotten home?

  “Not this time,” he told her. “There’s nary an Indian left there to be found, and I won’t waste my time with it. I’ll go into town and find me a substitute and pay him my last month’s wages. I intend to be here when our baby is born.”

  Finding a substitute didn’t prove too hard; soon he located a young man eager for such service, and struck the bargain. David returned home. His life as a fighting man was finished, as far as he was concerned, and that suited him perfectly.

  Not long after, Polly gave birth to the girl she had hoped for, and they gave her the formal name of Margaret and the nickname of Polly, the latter in honor of her mother. David delighted in bobbing the newborn up and down in his broad hands, grinning into the crimped little pink face. And he could sit in perfect contentment watching the little one suckle at her mother’s breast.

  But he was worried too. His wife had recovered quickly from childbirth when the boys were born, but this time she seemed unable to regain her strength. For many days after the birthing she remained in bed, too weak to rise for more than a few minutes at a time. She rallied some after that, much to David’s relief, and seemed on the way to a full recovery when one day she collapsed, bleeding from her vagina, her face as white as milk.

  David called for help from neighbor women, who did all they physically could to stanch the flow of blood, while the eldest of them, a withered old woman who stood just over four feet tall, opened the family Bible to the sixteenth chapter of the book of Ezekiel and read a verse that many swore would stop even the worst bleeding: “And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou was in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou was in thy blood, Live.”

  A few minutes later the issue ceased and Polly slept. David cried out of happiness. She would surely get well now.

  But for the next two weeks Polly Crockett didn’t rise from bed. Her strength, already mostly gone, drained even further. Soon she lost her milk and David had to call in a local Indian wet nurse to keep the baby nourished.

  He was nestled close beside Polly in their bed the night she died. There was no murmur, no stiffening, no evident pain. He felt her life pass from her like a faint breeze against his cheek. There was no need to examine her and verify her death; he knew it as soon as it happened, without a moment of doubt. He did not move, but held her body close the rest of the night. David was not given to frequent prayer, but he prayed now, thanking his Creator for the time he had enjoyed with Mary “Polly” Finley Crockett, and for the children they had brought into the world, and for the memory of her, which he would always carry with him, no matter where he went or what he did. Only after his prayer was done did he shed the first tears.

  The next morning, eyes red and heart hollow, he walked into the woods and dug Polly’s grave with a spade, and there laid her in the earth, covering her resting place with a cairn of stones.

  Part 5

  GENTLEMAN FROM THE CANE

  Chapter 38

  Aboard a Cargo Boat on the Mississippi River, Spring 1826

  The mood of resignation that had held an exhausted David Crockett in its gentle hand for the last ten minutes shattered with a most literal jolt. Amid the sound of splintering timbers, he pitched sideways from off his stool, landing so hard on his side that the breath was knocked from him. Ash and smoke from the fire by which he had been warming himself scattered across the wood planking and onto him as well, making him howl in pain and surprise. Flailing at the embers, he rolled onto his back just in time to see the hatchway that led up out of the cabin collapse inward. The boat began to tilt beneath him.

  David scrambled up, trying to keep his footing against the increasing tilt of the boat. He realized what must have happened. The boat had struck a sawyer, or run upon a bar of land or rock, or hit one of the clumps of escaped lumberyard logs that floated in this part of the river.

  A hot panic gripped him. Not only was the boat tilting, but it seemed to be making a steady downward slide as well. It was sinking—and he was below deck! David lost his footing and slipped down the slope as water began gushing in a heavy, powerful jet through the cabin hatchway. He knew he had to get out very quickly, or he surely would drown.

  For a minute or so he struggled to reach the hatch, but the water pounded him back. It was futile to compete with the strength of the inrushing river water. Half submerged, and with water rising by the second, he looked around the darkening cabin for some other way of escape. There was only one other possibility, that being a small opening through the cabin wall on its far side—now the upward side, considering the slant.

  He heard footsteps above and shouts of alarm. David sent up a yell: “Hallooo! I’m down here—help me! Help!” And then he began working his way with tremendous difficulty up the sloping, water-slickened planking, making for the little opening.

  By the time he reached it, the boat had slid even deeper into the river, and the tilt had grown as steep as the pitch of a typical house roof. To his dismay, he found the opening upon which his life depended was too small for him to squeeze his entire body through, but he did manage to get his arms and head out. He yelled and waved with all the volume and vigor he could muster, as the water rose beneath him, reaching his thighs, his waist, his stomach.

  Meanwhile, his mind was frantically talking to itself. So this is how the life of David Crockett comes to its end. Drowned like a bug in the bottom of a boatload of staves, doomed never again to see the light of morning or the faces of my family. And all because I wanted to make money in New Orleans:

  Indeed, this venture had been conceived as a promising means of making money, though now it appeared he wouldn’t be earning, but paying, very likely with his own life. This lumber venture had seemed a fine idea last fall, when he had invested in building two sizable boats and hiring a crew of men to cut some thirty thousand staves to be shipped for sale in New Orleans.

  David knew little about boats and water travel, his best chance at becoming a nautical man having vanished long ago when his ship boy’s berth to London was snatched away by the treacherous Myers. But he had felt lucky and confident when the twin vessels pushed out along the Obion toward the Mississippi. Within two hours all such confidence had faded, and he learned that luck was no substitute for skill.

  The problem lay in guiding the overloaded boats, which tended to drift sideways no matter what the crew did. David finally ordered the boats tied together, but that didn’t help, and the boats caught in the current and went sailing along, as rudderless as driftwood, until darkness fell and the last light of hope flickered out. All attempts to steer, even to ground, the bargelike boats failed. In the predawn hours, David surrendered his fate to the river and descended below deck to warm himself by the fire—and then whatever calamity it was that had shivered the vessel had occurred, and now here he was, trapped in a sinking boat, struggling to save himself against all odds.

  Hands groped down to him and grasped his wrists. “We’ll pull you out, Colonel!” A couple of his crew members had seen his waving hands. Thank God! He had feared no one would detect him, that no one would realize he was gone until it was too late.

  He grimaced as they tugged at his arms. His body moved a little farther into the opening, then wedged like a cork.

  “You won’t fit through, Colonel!”

  “Pull!” David shouted back. The water was lapping his chin now. “Pull even if you tear my arms from their sockets—otherwise I’m a dead man!”

  He closed his eyes as they gave one more tremendous heave. Pain wracked him; he felt the fabric of his shirt tearing away. He gave out a pantherlike cry of pain as his body was pulled through the hole, leaving every scrap of his clothing behind, and a goodly portion of his hide as well.

  He passed out for a few moments. When he came to, he was lying atop a wide, slimy log that was part of a huge tangl
e of sawyers and driftwood lodged against a small island. He was naked and cold. He sat up, groaning and shivering.

  “What the devil happened to us, boys?” he asked.

  “The boats ran against these damn logs, Colonel,” came the answer. “There’s an island here, you see, and it had caught the logs. The current just shoved the boats down underneath it, like a dog diving under bedclothes.”

  “So that’s why the boat tilted on me like she did,” David mumbled. He looked around and now saw the grim results of the accident. Both boats had lost their cargoes, and looked ready to break free of the log tangle at any time and head on down the river unmanned and unloaded. They were stranded in the middle of the river, wide expanses of water separating them from the land on either side.

  “Look at it,” David said. “More planks in this river than Egyptians in the Red Sea. We’ve lost our cargo, boys. Every deuced penny, gone to ruination!”

  “Yes sir. Mighty sorry.”

  “Anybody got a scrap of clothing to spare?” David asked, wrapping his arms around his naked, abraded body. “When that sun comes rising and we get ourselves rescued, Lord willing, I don’t fancy parading my bare hind end before the whole blessed city of Memphis.”

  But when the morning came and a boat appeared to give rescue, David Crockett was still almost as naked as a newborn, because there had been no clothing to spare beyond a ripped shirt that he managed to use as a makeshift loincloth. Every man had left only what clothes he wore; all else had washed away with the staves, or sunk to the bottom of the river in the boats.

  David welcomed the blankets and hot beverages the rescuers offered, and accepted their invitation to carry him and his crew on to Memphis, which was in sight of the wreck, and where they could surely find some sort of refuge and help. The name of one Marcus Winchester, merchant and prominent citizen, was spoken a few times. A generous and helpful soul, they said. David decided on the spot that he would look up this Winchester. At the moment, he needed a generous and helpful soul as badly as ever a man could.