Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  “I, for one, had often thought about war,” said Crockett in after years, “and I did verily believe in my own mind, that I couldn't fight in that way at all.” Unlike many of his peers, David Crockett had no real instinct for fighting. His was a nature too cheerful, too even-tempered. Though certainly he felt the prejudices of his time, he bore no man ill. He preferred fun to feuding, bragging to brawling. But self-defense was something else, and when word of Fort Mims reached Bean's Creek, he told Polly that he would have to join the local militia. “My dander was up, and nothing but war could bring it right again,” he told her. Despite all his protestations that he had to go, that it was better to fight and stop the Creek in Alabama than have them appear at his doorstep in Tennessee, she could not accept his leaving her alone in a country still strange and new to her, where she had neither family nor friends. In the end she stopped arguing and wept, then went to her spinning wheel. David Crockett never knew if she accepted his decision or simply resigned herself to it, but for the rest of his life he carried with him the mental portrait of her sad, tear-streaked face as she turned to her housework while he went off to war.26

  Early on September 24 he shouldered his rifle and rode the ten miles to Winchester, where the volunteers gathered. There Capt. Francis Jones organized the Tennessee Volunteer Mounted Riflemen. For the rest of his life Crockett would be proud that “I was one of the first men that ever crossed the Tennessee river into the Creek war.”27 Along with the rest he enlisted for ninety days' service, and two days later, after getting in a supply of firewood and stores for Polly and the children, Crockett and the company set off south for the war.

  Rapidly they rode first to Huntsville and then on to a nearby springs that was to be the rendezvous for several companies of militia that would soon be reorganized into the Second Regiment of Volunteer Mounted Riflemen. In the end almost thirteen hundred of them mustered, to join the cavalry division of Col. John Coffee. Meanwhile in Nashville Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson was organizing the infantry division of militia before bringing it south. He already had some experience, having made a frustrating and fruitless expedition to Natchez, Mississippi, the previous winter, but his standing in Tennessee was undimmed, and he would command the campaign to avenge Fort Mims.

  Until Jackson and the infantry arrived, however, the cavalry had to cover Tennessee from hostile incursion and also to find out what the Creek were doing. When a request went out for good woodsmen skilled with the rifle to ride deep into Alabama to seek the foe, Crockett's captain suggested him, and the next day he and a dozen others set out on their scout. They crossed the Tennessee below Huntsville, then separated into two groups, a major leading one and Crockett detailed to command the other. Within two days they began crossing the paths of small bands of Creek warriors, sometimes missing them by no more than an hour as they made their way southeast toward Ten Islands on the Coosa River. Finally on October 6 he learned of a large band crossing the river, on their way north to meet the advancing Jackson. Crockett and his party rode all night by moonlight the fifty miles or more back to the rendezvous to carry the warning. It was with no little chagrin, then, that Crockett found Colonel Coffee unimpressed by his intelligence, made the worse the next day when a major came in from a scout with much the same news, which Coffee then took seriously. Whether intended or not, the message that Crockett got from Coffee's attitude was that officers had little or no regard for anything that did not come from a fellow officer. To a poor white like Crockett it was exactly the sort of slight that he expected from the smug, the better educated, the affluent—the classes that did their best to suppress the poor. It was, he said, “one of the hateful ways of the world,” and he did not forget it.28

  The next day Jackson himself arrived, having pushed his command doggedly after getting Coffee's anxious report of what Crockett and the officer had learned. By then the cavalry had moved down to the Tennessee to watch its crossings, and south, scouting to the headwaters of the Black Warrior River. They saw plenty of sign of recent Creek activity, and once or twice came across their camps only recently vacated. Thanks to the haste with which the militia had mustered and the inefficiency of Jackson's commissary, none of the volunteers came well supplied. They lived largely on parched corn, and after a few days their meat ran out. Crockett himself volunteered to go into the woods alone to hunt, and one day actually came across a freshly killed and dressed deer carcass, eloquent testimony that the foe were almost within earshot of the main column.

  The hardship of the long scout seemed wasted when the volunteers finally discovered that the report of Creek crossing the Coosa several days before had all been mistaken. There was nothing for them to do but go back to Ten Islands. There Coffee's division camped and built a stockade, Fort Strother, and started sending out scouting parties. Within a few days they learned positively that a band of Creek sat camped at Tallusahatchee, no more than eight or ten miles distant. Coffee immediately mounted the division, nine hundred strong, and sent them out well before dawn on the morning of November 3. They divided into two parties, approaching the camp from opposite sides, and then joined their flanks to surround the still unsuspecting Creek completely.

  The fight opened shortly after sunrise, when a company of rangers advanced on the sleeping village and a shout of alarm awoke the foe. At first the Creek saw only the rangers, and rushed out at them as the whites purposely withdrew to their main line. Suddenly the volunteers opened fire, forcing them back into their camps, and then began inexorably to close in on them, tightening a circle from which there was no escape. This was to be the white man's repayment for Fort Mims, as everyone knew, and Crockett felt no more compunction than the rest at firing into the teeming mass of trapped natives before him. Seeing themselves hopelessly surrounded, about eighty women and children in the camp ran out to surrender themselves, and some were taken alive. But for the rest, once the killing fire started, only their blood could quench the flame. When one woman loosed an arrow that struck a militiaman, Crockett himself felt no hesitation at joining twenty others in answering with a fatal volley. “We now shot them like dogs,” he recalled without remorse. Two score warriors took shelter in one wooden house, and the volunteers set it alight and burned them alive. He never forgot the image of one boy no more than twelve, a leg and arm broken by rifle fire, trying fruitlessly to crawl away from the blazing hut. Crockett said apparently with no touch of compassion that “he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him.” Any dead Creek, even a child, redeemed the debt for Fort Mims, and was one more that would never threaten his own home and family. It was a part of the brutal but inevitable law of the frontier.

  In the end the massacre—it could hardly be called a battle—left 186 natives dead. Not one adult male escaped. Only five of the volunteers died of their wounds, but without waiting the Tennesseans mounted and rode back to Fort Strother, mindful that there could be more and larger parties of Creek in the vicinity and not wanting to be caught out in the open. Hunger still welcomed them, however, for Jackson's commissary remained inept at best, and discontent among the volunteers rose in chorus with their grumbling bellies. So hungry were they that the next day they rode back to Tallusahatchee, remembering beef and potatoes in some of the burning houses. Crockett surveyed a battle-ground strewn with bloating and half-burned corpses, but then he and others found a large store of potatoes beneath the ruins of the great house that they had burned with forty warriors inside. “Hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had a little rather not,” he said, “for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.”29

  It gave only a brief respite from starvation, however, and a few days later they boiled and ate beef hides. On November 7 word came that Creek were besieging Fort Talladega, just over thirty miles south of them, and Jackson put his small army on the march in the night. Once again he hoped to surround and annihilate the foe, and divided Coffee's cavalry in
to the two wings of his advance, expecting them to swing around the foe and link on the other side. It all worked as before, and with the encirclement complete, Jackson sent two companies of rangers to initiate the fight and lure the Creek into rushing against his lines. But the rangers themselves almost fell into a trap and had to abandon their horses and flee into the fort, whereupon the Creek then turned and charged Jackson's lines. When one line of riflemen loosed a volley, the Creek fell back in disorder and then rushed another side of the surrounding wall of militia, only to be repelled yet again. Before it was done, well over three hundred of them lay dead, and more would have fallen had they not finally escaped through a gap left by some militia who broke ranks.

  Crockett and the rest returned to Fort Strother, and to starvation and discontent. Tallusahatchee and Fort Talladega may have vented their anger at the Creek, but increasingly now they turned it on their own authorities who showed no signs of relieving their distress. Winter's cold approached, their clothing wore thin, and their mounts approached collapse. Some of the officers importuned Jackson to allow the men to take their horses back to Tennessee to replenish both men and beasts, promising—apparently without consulting their men—that when they returned they would serve out the campaign even beyond their enlistment. Jackson agreed to a two-week furlough, starting November 22, ordering that they rendezvous at Huntsville on December 8 to return to the army. It suited his purpose to have his cavalry fit and equipped for a winter campaign, and at the same time the furlough might quell or at least dampen some of the now mutinous spirit among the volunteers.

  Though barely a hundred miles from home, it probably took the weak and weary men and horses several days before Crockett saw the familiar rude cabin at Bean's Creek. Still he must have had a good two weeks to replenish Polly's firewood, kill and salt or smoke some more game for her table, and trade or work for enough to purchase some vegetables to fill out her diet after he left again, and grain to refit his horse. He must have eaten ravenously himself. Of course he expected he would not have to be away long when his furlough ended, for his ninety-day enlistment itself would expire by the end of December, and he apparently knew nothing of his officers' promise. What he could not expect was that his active service was already over for the time being.

  Back at Fort Strother the unrest and incipient mutiny finally erupted when infantry volunteers confronted Jackson himself and announced that they were leaving, regardless of their unexpired enlistment. The general single-handedly quelled the insubordination, though it was a temporary victory. Early in December some of their enlistments actually did expire, and he could not hold them longer. Just as Crockett and other mounted men returned to Huntsville on December 8 for their rendezvous, large groups of these released volunteers passed through, and the infection for home spread to Coffee's men. Crockett and others reasoned that with their own enlistment expiring December 24, just over two weeks hence, it was pointless to proceed. Some of the men refused to go any farther toward the Tennessee, while several hundred did cross the river but halted immovably on the other side, Crockett probably among them. Many turned ugly, plundering the army grain supplies and frightening the local population. Given his mild nature, Crockett was not likely to have been among of the riotous element, but he shared their enthusiasm for going home enlistment or none. The promise to serve out the campaign after their furloughs meant nothing to them for they had not given it, and now they demanded to return to Tennessee. Coffee drew them up in formation and harangued them about their duty, reading letters from Jackson reminding them of their pledge. The general called them deserters and “luke-warm patriots indeed, who, in the moment of danger and necessity, can halt in the discharge of their duty, to argue and quibble,” strong words hardly calculated to endear him to them. Many a man who would come to hate Jackson dated his animosity from those days. A minister even appealed to their duty to their God and their honor, but it availed him nothing. A few officers and half a dozen enlisted men agreed to go on to Fort Strother, but all the rest, Crockett certainly included, stuck to their demand to be dismissed, and so they were.30 A few weeks later, on December 24, Private Crockett was discharged and paid $65.59. Through a calculating error, he was actually underpaid six cents, but since this was already more money than David Crockett had ever seen in his life, he probably neither noticed nor cared.31

  However reasonable it may have seemed at the time, Crockett later took no pride in his action, and in future years—with very definite purpose—he distorted the story of what happened that December. A sense of guilt may well have begun to plague him not long after he returned to Polly, as he heard stories of the battles at Emuckfau Creek and Enotachopco Creek, and the decisive battle of the campaign at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa in March 1814. The Creek War was won, and he had not been there to take part. When he gathered with his neighbors in the local tavern to trade war stories, he could hardly compete by matching his participation in two one-sided massacres with their tales of winning the war. Yet there was his family to tend, a spring crop to plant, and always hunting to be done. By the fall, however, his shame, or his adventurous spirit, the enthusiasm of the moment, or the need for more hard cash propelled him once more into the war.

  The authorities called for volunteers to form an army to march south and drive the British out of Pensacola, and despite Polly's entreaties David stepped forward to enlist on September 28 as a “mounted gunman.” Perhaps because of his previous experience as a scout—and in spite of his behavior in December—he was soon raised to third sergeant in Capt. John Cowan's company of scouts and set off once more to serve under Jackson. Their mission now was not only the British, but a portion of the Creek nation that refused to accept the treaty that followed Horseshoe Bend, and at a leisurely pace they rode far south of the scene of their earlier operations, down to the confluence of the Tombigbee with the Alabama, not far from Fort Mims, and only a few miles north of Mobile.

  Lacking forage for their horses, the volunteers set off on foot for Pensacola, about sixty miles southeast, but they arrived on November 8 to find that the town had fallen to Jackson the day before. Crockett came just in time to see British ships in the harbor evacuating their soldiers, and to go into town that night for a “few horns” with his messmates. Jackson and the main army left almost at once, marching east for Mobile and New Orleans. A few days later Crockett's volunteers retraced their steps toward Fort Mims, and near there they camped for several weeks to fill their knapsacks for another winter campaign. Their mission now would be to keep the Creek at bay while Jackson dealt with the British regulars.

  It would be a season of long scouts and little action. In time they moved back toward Pensacola, then turned east and crossed the Escambia. Crockett heard occasional skirmishes on the fringes of the advance, and made a few scouts on his own, especially to find food for the once more undersupplied volunteers. By the New Year they camped near the Chattahoochee River, thirty-four days out from their base and having taken only twenty days' rations of flour and even less of beef. Crockett himself mainly subsisted on coffee he had bought back near Pensacola. In desperation they even attacked a Creek town that promised a stiff resistance, all with the hope of capturing food. But the town had been burned and abandoned, and not a morsel remained.

  Part of the command just left, marching for Baton Rouge on the Mississippi, while Crockett's regiment returned to central Alabama and Fort Decatur on the Tallapoosa. Along the way, as they pushed through virgin wilderness, Crockett left the column every day to hunt game, but the farther they went the more scarce became the deer and squirrels. Finally Crockett went absent without leave, feeling that nothing worse could happen to him on his own than if he stayed with the regiment. It was, he said, “root hog or die.” After three days he got three squirrels and a couple of turkeys, and finally had a full meal, followed by fresh honey from a nearby bees' nest. A few deer followed, and when the main column caught up with Crockett, it quickly forgot his absence in the small bonanza of me
at he presented.

  Arrival at Fort Decatur revealed not the provisions they had expected but only a single ration of meat and no bread. Crockett traded some of his powder and shot for two hatfuls of corn from a friendly native, and then set out for another fifty miles to Fort Williams. Nothing but a ration of pork met them there to get them the remaining forty miles to Fort Strother. It was February by then, and the farther north they marched, the more they felt the winter. None of them even knew that the month before Jackson had defeated the British decisively at New Orleans, or that the conflict with Britain was already over anyhow. Crockett's war now was with cold and starvation, his campaign simply one of getting home alive. Happily Fort Strother proved abundantly supplied, and he stayed several days to recoup himself. Then, despite having still a month of his six months' enlistment outstanding, he simply repeated what he had done a year before. He left the army and went home. Polly was overjoyed to see him, for certainly there had been no news of him since he left the previous September. And when, a few days after his return, he got orders to leave again on a scout, he decided that he had done enough. He found a young man in the neighborhood and hired him to serve as a substitute for the last month of his enlistment. On March 27, 1815, Coffee gave Crockett his discharge, with praise for his good conduct and an apparent demotion to fourth sergeant either as a clerical error or else a mild rebuke for David's penchant for doing as he pleased.32