Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  The man David did not even know where his own father had been born, and believed it was either in Ireland or during the ocean passage to the colonies.2 More likely it was his grandfather, for whom he was named, who first set foot on American soil. When he came is lost among the thousands of anonymous arrivals in the generations before the Revolution, but he probably landed in Pennsylvania and migrated west to the Susquehanna before turning southwest through the Cumberland Valley along with the rest of the tide of Scottish immigrants, reaching Virginia's lower Shenandoah Valley by 1755. The first David Crockett farmed there near Berryville, by then a married man with a new son, Robert, born there that August, and another son, John, probably already a few years old and perhaps born in Pennsylvania.

  The tide of migration did not willingly yield any of the flotsam that rode its crest. The immigrants who first reached a new region took up the best land, and those like David Crockett who came after often had to keep moving until it seemingly became a habit. By 1771 he had moved his family, now including two boys in their later teens, to Tryon County, North Carolina, settling on the south side of the Catawba River. It was to be a brief stop, for by 1776 the Crocketts were over the western mountains into the valley of the Holston River. There was confusion about just which colony—North Carolina or Virginia—owned the region, and for a time the inhabitants simply governed themselves under the articles of what they called the Watauga Association. But then on July 5, 1776, aware of the revolt that had commenced the year before in Massachusetts but unaware of the momentous event of the day before in Philadelphia, David Crockett and other Wataugans petitioned the legislature of North Carolina to assume dominion and responsibility over the region. With the continent seemingly in upheaval, they sought some order, especially as the local aboriginal population launched occasional attacks on isolated settlers. North Carolina annexed the area that same year, but, perhaps because of the hostile natives, the Crocketts moved northwest of the Holston to

  Carter's Valley, another area of disputed sovereignty, and there David joined with neighbors in 1776 and again on November 6, 1777, in petitioning Virginia to annex the locality.3

  By now three of his sons, John, William, and Joseph, were grown and had their own homes nearby, and Robert was probably already off serving in the revolutionary forces. Indeed, that is in part what saved them, for David Crockett's days of wandering were done. He had but one last move in store, and it was the Creek or Chickamauga who sent him and his wife on their way. Already incensed at the influx of unwelcome settlers on their ancestral territory, the Indians had agreed to treaties that established definite boundaries protecting their land. But they reckoned without the rapacious appetite of settlers and the speculators, who even now saw the promise of profit on the bow wave of settlement. In an act that would be the hallmark of the push west to the Mississippi and beyond, unscrupulous entrepreneurs ignored the existing occupants and began selling vast quantities of Indian land to incoming settlers. The strain became intolerable, and the affronted victims struck back, often not at the speculators but at any isolated and convenient target. One day in the summer of 1778 they chose the Crockett homestead.

  David and his wife were at home, along with Joseph and their youngest, James. The raid almost certainly took them by surprise. David and his older son were probably in their field tending crops, their rifles out of immediate reach. The attackers fired a ragged volley that brought Joseph down with a broken arm. His father fell either to bullets or swift tomahawk blows. James may have been with them, but he was both deaf and mute and knew little of what was happening until it was all over. His mother probably met death alone in the cabin. As quickly as they had come, the attackers left. In their idiosyncratic way, having killed the parents, they took the boy James with them and kept him for nearly eighteen years before returning him to white society. The wounded Joseph either played or looked dead or simply no longer interested the raiders, who left him behind. With him they left a memory that would become a legacy of hatred between the Crockett family and the Creek nation.4

  At least John Crockett had someone to share his grief. He was living in his own home some three miles away when tragedy struck. Perhaps as little as a year earlier he had married Rebecca Hawkins, a young woman born in Maryland who came south with her father, Nathan, to the settlements north of the Holston.5 But he barely had time to start a family before the war with Britain began to take him away from home for extended periods of time. He went to Lincoln County to join its militia, but by 1780 was back home in what was now Washington County, North Carolina. That October he was one of the “over-mountain men” who took their rifles and walked through the mountain passes to rendezvous with regulars to form an army that defeated the British and helped turn the tide of the war in the southern colonies at the Battle of King's Mountain. While his son David lost all recollection of anything else his father did in the Revolution, he never forgot John Crockett's role at King's Mountain, or that image of the citizen volunteer, his deer rifle on his shoulder, riding off on his own accord to join other men who answered no authority but their own, in common defense of their notion of liberty.6

  After 1781 the war dwindled to occasional skirmishes in the South, and John Crockett could concentrate on making a place for himself. In 1783, the year of the peace, he became a constable in Greene County, which was split from Washington. He also succumbed to the lure of speculation, buying land at sixpence an acre and selling it for twenty times that four years later. But more often than not speculators bought land in exchange for their personal promissory note and sold it for much the same, and where little or no hard coin changed hands there was no real wealth to be gained. Indeed, even as he sought to make a killing in land, Crockett saw debts against him registered in the county court records. Whatever may have been his dreams of prosperity, the reality was that he occupied a page in the annals of the poor and always would.7

  At least his family grew. By 1786 he had four sons and had moved yet again, to the bank of Big Limestone Creek where it flowed into the Nolichucky River on the eastern edge of Greene County. There on August 17, 1786, Rebecca produced another child. Interestingly John waited until this fifth baby boy before honoring his own father with a namesake. The infant David Crockett would have almost no recollection of the Limestone Creek homestead, however, or of the events then exciting his father and others. Already a strong streak of independence and resistance to authority characterized these Scots and Irish settlers. As soon as they moved—which was often—they formed a new allegiance, at first to some distant authority like Virginia or North Carolina that could protect them; and when protection seemed less an issue, their loyalties speedily became more local. At the moment David Crockett was born, the settlers in Greene and Washington Counties and elsewhere were trying to form their own new state. At the end of the Revolution, North Carolina ceded much of its westernmost land back to the new United States, and in the fall of 1784 settlers gathered at Jonesboro, scarcely five miles from Crockett's birthplace, to organize and declare the new state of Franklin. John Crockett supported the Franklin movement, and young David might well have claimed to be a native of this new state. It did not last, however, and in 1789 North Carolina had resumed sovereignty. It would not be the last time David Crockett's fortunes were entwined with those of a new state seeking independence.

  In later years he remembered just two incidents from his first home, neither of them distinctly, but both involving that ever-present companion on the frontier, mortal danger. He was not yet wearing long breeches when he and his older brothers and a friend played by the Nolichucky, and one of the boys got all but David to take a ride in John Crockett's canoe. Once in the stream, they lost control and drifted toward a dangerous falls, when the timely arrival of an adult neighbor saved them from possible drowning. He remembered, too, his uncle Joseph Hawkins accidentally shooting a man looking for grapes, and how his father passed a handkerchief through the hole in the fortunate survivor's body, front to back. Imminent
death was everywhere, feared, and yet as well a subject of morbid curiosity.8

  When David was no more than seven years old, the fifth son's family moved once more, a few miles to Cove Creek. There John Crockett entered partnership with Thomas Galbreath in building a gristmill. At one time or another, almost every settler on the frontier seemed to try a hand at milling. It was the only industry on the edge of civilization other than smithing. A man could build the mill himself, find the proper stones in the streambeds, and shape them with his own hands. It seemed easy after the hard work of the building was finished, and these men were always looking for an easy livelihood. Instead of laboring all the hours of the day in his own fields, the miller could charge his neighbors to grind their grain, and the river did the work for him. Yet most who tried it failed, in part because there were so many others at the milling trade, and also because they were all hostages to nature. Cove Creek reminded John Crockett of that fact when it rose out of its banks before the mill was even completed. It washed away all the construction done thus far and drove the Crocketts out of their cabin.

  Characteristically, when a disaster or loss hit one of these people, they moved away not only from the event but from its locality. John Crockett already held title to a three-hundred-acre parcel on the south side of the Main Holston Road connecting Knoxville with Abingdon, Virginia, about thirty miles from Cove Creek. Now he moved his family there and set himself up in the other mainstay occupation of the frontiersman with business aspirations: tavern keeping. On the south side of the road, on the slope that led down to a spring, he dug out a cellar, lined it with a stone foundation, and on that built a small log structure that served as home and inn.9

  Prosperity always eluded John Crockett—probably due to a combination of hard times for everyone, bad luck, and a certain unwillingness or inability to commit himself to one thing and stay with it in the face of adversity. Then, too, he may have been overardent at his own barrel, an unfortunate and unprofitable weakness for a tavern owner. Certainly he either made an insufficient living by his trade or else mishandled what he took in receipts, for in barely a year he found himself four hundred dollars or more in debt. The sheriff of Jefferson County seized his property and on November 4, 1795, sold it at public auction to William Line for forty dollars.10 David was old enough by now to know what was happening and to remember as well as to be embarrassed by it, for though he told of many hardships in his autobiography, and even spoke with the poor white's typical assertive pride in youthful poverty, he made no mention of his family losing the tavern.

  He did admit, however, that in these years “I began to make up my acquaintance with hard times, and a plenty of them.”11 William Line may have profited by John Crockett's misfortune, but either he allowed him to stay on at the tavern trade, by leasing the property or as an employee, or else Crockett managed to build another tavern not far away and resume his business. In any case for the next three years he continued providing room, board, and drink for the wagoneers passing through what had finally become the new state of Tennessee in 1796. Times were still strained, and young David was now old enough to contribute his mote to the family's survival. Using a wooden maul and wedge, he split fence rails for the father of a playmate, no doubt turning his meager earnings over to his own father.12

  That was not enough. One of the travelers passing through the tavern in late 1798 was Jacob Siler, a German then driving a herd of cattle to Rockbridge, Virginia, some 225 miles northeast. “Being hard run every way,” as David recalled, John Crockett hired out his son to go with Siler to help with the cows, despite the fact that David, who was only twelve, would have to make the return trip by himself. Of course the boy had no say in the matter. He knew better than to dispute his father and risk the birch. “I had been taught so many lessons of obedience,” he recalled, that resistance did not occur to him, despite his child's terror at being taken away from home, spending weeks with a man he did not know, and having to risk the 225 miles back on his own.13

  The trip took two weeks or more before they reached the vicinity of Natural Bridge, Virginia, yet it seemed so long to David that he almost doubled the distance in memory, recalling 225 miles as 400. Siler treated him kindly, and at the end of the road gave him a few dollars above what had been paid to his father. Indeed, he liked David enough to try to persuade him to stay on rather than go home. The boy felt torn. He was more than homesick, and yet, as he admitted later, his father's discipline had so ingrained in him the habit of obedience that he was afraid to resist or openly disobey any adult male. And so he agreed, feigning delight but secretly miserable and lonely.

  He stayed hardly longer than a month, all the time striving to convince the Siler family that he liked the arrangement. Though barely a teenager, young Crockett already had winning manners. Those evenings in the family tavern had exposed him to many a traveler brimming with tales of the road, some of them no doubt told the better for a few drams. Learned young, and practiced and honed in maturing years, easy manners and conviviality lubricated frontier life. It would have been unusual if David had not already acquired some natural bent for storytelling and theatricality. He already had a few experiences of his own to spin into stories—his days on the road, the characters he had seen in the tavern, some of whose speech and expressions he could mimic. Added to the rosy hue of his cheeks and his good honest looks, his genuine personality made him a winning character even at first acquaintance. Despite his unhappiness at Natural Bridge, he would still speak with scarcely concealed pride years later of how thoroughly “I got the family all to believe I was fully satisfied.” It was a kind of acting. He was playing a character.14

  But when the opportunity came to leave, he took it. He had seen his father pull up stakes in the face of adversity enough times that he felt no compunction about leaving the Silers by stealth rather than facing them with his unhappiness. One Sabbath night, as a winter snow started to fall, he went to bed, but not before bundling his few belongings and his precious dollars. Then he lay awake until halfway through the night, when he stole out of the house and started to trudge through the deepening snow to a tavern several miles distant, where he was to meet some teamsters he knew who were moving south to Knoxville. In their company he traveled some thirty miles until his impatience got the better of the slow progress of the wagons, and he set off alone on foot. Fortunately he did not walk far before a man with several horses overtook him. As before and so many times after, David's winning manners impressed the horseman enough that he invited the boy to ride one of his animals and accompany him on the road. The miles now passed quickly, and in a few days, when they parted company, David was but a good morning's walk from his father's tavern.

  It was a happy homecoming, and through the balance of the winter and the two seasons to follow his life was as before—some work, some play, and always learning. Indeed, though Crockett had not yet set foot in a schoolroom, he was already acquiring knowledge. He had traveled the open road and gone distances and seen places that most of his playmates had not. He learned the ways of the road and the wilderness from the teamsters who stopped for a meal and a night at the tavern. He certainly learned from his father. John Crockett may have been a failure at business, but he had at least some rudiments of literacy. Certainly he could sign his name. As a constable he needed to know the rudiments of law, and he would also serve as a magistrate. Even his doomed efforts as a miller and tavern keeper offered lessons he could pass on in the matter of building, of wooden gears and frontier mechanics, of currency and counting and trade. Much of this his sons learned simply by living with him.15

  Yet whatever his other failings as a provider or even as a father, John Crockett must have grasped the value of more formal education, perhaps seeing in it the missing element that left his own efforts so dogged by failure. Schoolteachers of the time were hired by the community, and customarily the parents gave lodging and board as well as a modest income from subscription. As a man of some standing—if minor—in the co
mmunity, Crockett probably had a hand in hiring Benjamin Kitchen to commence a school nearby in the fall of 1799. Having done that, he naturally decided that his sons should attend.16

  David Crockett, now thirteen, knew nothing more of formal learning than perhaps a few letters. After the first four days in Kitchen's school, he found himself just acquiring some familiarity with the alphabet when he ran afoul of the school bully and ambushed him with fists the fourth day after class. For some reason Crockett thought that his extracurricular fight would cause him trouble with master Kitchen, and so the next morning, though he set off for school as usual, he spent the day hiding in the woods and then came home at the proper time. Afraid of his father's wrath, he persuaded his brothers to lie for him and claim he had been in class. The charade continued thereafter until Kitchen sent home a note. Why had David not been in school the past several days? he asked.

  The question caught John Crockett at a very bad moment for David. He had been drinking. He yelled for the truant to come to him. “I knew very well that I was in a devil of a hobble,” David recalled more than thirty years later, “for my father had been taking a few horns, and was in a good condition to make the fur fly.”17 His plea that he feared to face master Kitchen lest he be whipped only prompted John Crockett to growl that there would be whipping aplenty here at home unless he returned to school. When the boy seemed hesitant, his father's anger erupted. He grabbed a two-year-old hickory stick that was more cudgel than cane, and came at the lad, who quickly fled. There followed a chase, in which David had the advantage of being young and sober. He outdistanced his father, hid in a thicket for a time, and then—hurt, angry, and frightened—went to the home of a friend. One thing he knew now was that he could go neither to the school nor to his home. All that remained to him was the road.