The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation

by James Donovan

  He returned home after his hitch was up, but nine months later, in September 1814, he reenlisted as a sergeant to help drive the British and their allies out of Pensacola, in Spanish Florida, on the Gulf Coast. General Jackson took Pensacola on November 7, and proceeded west toward Mobile. Crockett’s company arrived on November 8, then was directed to engage in a rear-guard action against the Creeks. They spent the next several months in a fruitless and often aimless Indian chase through the swamps and forests of Florida and Alabama. In January 1815, Jackson decisively defeated the British at New Orleans, but Crockett’s unit continued to move north in search of Indians, under the command of a regular army major who kept his troops out even though they were low on rations, suffering from exposure, and exhausted. For weeks they were near starvation; Crockett spent a good amount of the time foraging and hunting, though game was scarce. Sometimes he could only bag squirrels and birds, though his ravenous comrades were happy to get them. Their horses gave out—one day thirteen of them collapsed and were abandoned. By the time Sergeant Crockett returned home—a month early, at the end of February, after hiring a man to serve out the remaining month—he had gained more than enough experience in soldiering.

  Polly gave birth to a daughter early that year, and died at the end of the summer of an undiagnosed frontier illness. She left Crockett with three small children, one an infant. Instead of breaking up his family and placing them with friends or relatives, as was the custom, he decided to find another wife. Not far away lived a widow named Elizabeth Patton. Her husband had lost his life in the Creek War, leaving her with two children close to the age of David’s boys, the considerable sum of $800 in cash, and a farm worth more than his own (which was failing, to boot). After several months of calculated courtship, he married her in the summer of 1816. Elizabeth—“Bet,” as he would sometimes call her—was by all accounts industrious and practical, a capable woman and not a slight one: one frequent visitor to their mill remembered that “Mrs. Crockett was always grinding. She was a woman of great strength and could handle sacks of grain with ease.” Though begun as a union of convenience, their marriage would evolve into one of friendship, respect, and love.

  A year later Crockett sold the two farms and led his enlarged family eighty miles west, settling on a creek near the small village of Lawrenceburg. His service in the recent war and the fact that his wife came from a well-to-do, prominent family combined to improve his social standing, and despite his distrust of officers he had accepted a lieutenancy in the county militia upon his return. For this and other reasons—his genuine honesty, his forthright manner, and his warm personality, no doubt—his fellow townspeople chose him to be magistrate, an office he accepted in November 1817, a few months after his arrival. The citizens’ trust was rewarded when his rulings proved sound and fair: “I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law, learning to guide me,” he wrote later. The rough backwoodsman was becoming respectable. And though he would never achieve financial independence, always spending more than he made, he would occasionally approach solvency after his second marriage. He would even own a few slaves to help on the farm.

  Four months later he was elected lieutenant colonel of his new county’s militia regiment, thus acquiring the honorific of Colonel, which would remain with him until the end of his days. Over the next few years, he assumed other town and county administrative positions. In January 1821, encouraged by friends, he resigned his office of town commissioner and announced his candidacy for the state legislature.

  Regional campaigning in that time and place consisted of making appearances in local communities, giving speeches, debating, and generally entertaining the crowd. Stump-speaking, as it was called—for the tree stump from which the candidates would address their neighbors—constituted one of the chief forms of social amusement of the day. The political talk usually shared equal time with storytelling, drinking, and tobacco chewing. Crockett by this time had developed a fondness for all three, and he now found he was especially good at the first: his quick wit, flair for repartee, and often self-deprecating humor, all delivered in a backcountry drawl, were qualities to which his listeners responded. He never pretended to be anything more than he was, a simple man like them, and they identified with him. At first he avoided opining on issues of which he knew little, but as he learned more he gained confidence and voiced stronger positions. In August, he won election to the state legislature by a margin of two to one.

  Like any poor man—and most of Crockett’s life, until he had the good fortune to marry Elizabeth Patton, had been one of crushing poverty—he had desired advancement and respect and a certain degree of affluence. Toward those ends he eagerly climbed each successive rung of the political ladder. Just before his election, he had ambitiously begun construction of a gristmill, a powder mill, and a distillery on his creekside land—all enterprises typical of a poor man of the time scrambling for a leg up, as they called for the investment of hard work and natural resources more than money. Upon winning his seat he departed for the state capital, Murfreesboro, leaving his wife to handle operations; Elizabeth, a good businesswoman, could do as good a job as he, if not better. But even her skills could not fight nature. No sooner had the mills opened for business than a flash flood washed them away.

  That was the end of Crockett’s flirtation with entrepreneurship. When he returned after the end of that first legislative session in 1822, he and his family packed up their meager possessions and moved west once more, traveling 150 miles to the westernmost part of Tennessee, where he cleared land and built two connected log cabins on the Rutherford Fork of the Obion River. There were far fewer inhabitants in that region, and game was plentiful. Crockett hunted whenever he got the chance, and every fall after the corn was harvested he retreated to the wilderness for as much as a month or more, killing prodigious numbers of bear, deer, elk, and wolves (the government paid a three-dollar bounty for each wolf pelt). His reputation as a woodsman and hunter spread, abetted no doubt by the tall tales Crockett told of his exploits.

  Six years later, after one failed run, he was elected to Congress. He would be reelected in 1829, lose his seat by fewer than six hundred votes out of the 16,482 cast in 1831, and win it back in another close election (by just 173 votes out of the almost eight thousand cast) in 1833. In Washington he tried mightily to push through passage of a bill that would make land available inexpensively to the poor, particularly those in his western Tennessee constituency who had settled on government land and improved it with their own toil. He believed these “squatters” were the country’s true pioneers, risking their lives amid the dangers of the frontier, and should be rewarded for their initiative.

  He would not succeed. The relatively guileless Crockett never learned—or never cared to engage in, if it compromised his principles—the art of deal making, the quid pro quo soon to be taken for granted as the price of doing business in Washington. He also refused to sacrifice his principles or the promises he had made to his constituents in the name of party unity. The result was meager support from his fellow Tennessee legislators and other congressmen, since Crockett would not barter votes for bills he did not believe in. The opposition of the Jackson forces also played a part, as Crockett had broken ranks with his old commander as early as 1828, during his first term, after Jackson’s election to the presidency. The Jacksonians would gerrymander his west Tennessee congressional district before the 1835 elections, eroding his base further. For these reasons and others, he never garnered the support necessary for his land bill’s passage, or for the passage of any other bill he put forward. Unfortunately, he banked his future on getting the bill through to the exclusion of everything else, and that would cost him.

  During congressional recesses, Crockett returned home to his family and spent most of his time hunting, farming, and politicking. He enjoyed and excelled at the first; the second was necessary and unenjoyable; the thir
d was necessary to reassure his reelection and enjoyable enough, since it involved socializing, storytelling, and drinking. He spent less and less time at home and saw little of his family—he missed the marriage of his oldest daughter, Margaret, and gave his consent by mail. Fortunately Elizabeth kept the farm going with the help of their children (a total of eight at one point) and a few slaves.

  His increasing celebrity pleased Crockett. During his time in Washington his outsize reputation spread from western Tennessee throughout the nation, and he thrived on the larger stage. His colorful oratory, combined with the increasingly mythic tales of his backwoods adventures, made him a popular national figure, particularly in a time when few ordinary folk were involved in government at that level. Jackson’s 1828 election had ushered in a new era of the common man in America—he had been the first nonaristocratic elected president, and his populist appeal would never waver—but Crockett even more than the president now personified Jackson’s image. In late 1831 a play entitled The Lion of the West opened to an enthusiastic reception. The frontiersman protagonist, Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, was clearly modeled on Colonel David Crockett. He dressed in buckskin, wore a wildcat-skin cap, and spoke in a boastful patois sprinkled with colorful phrases. The play both celebrated and ridiculed Crockett with equal fervor.

  Crockett’s larger-than-life public image was boosted even further with an unauthorized biography released in 1833. The author had talked to friends and acquaintances of the congressman (and even visited Crockett at his home), and combined truth and tall tales into an entertaining and largely flattering picture of his subject as peerless bear hunter, backwoods original, and principled congressman. The book went into several printings.

  Crockett was not happy with the book. Not only was it full of semitruths and fantastical fictions; even worse, he earned not a penny from its success. He decided to write his story himself, and enlisted a friend and fellow congressman, Thomas Chilton of Kentucky, to help. A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee was released in the spring of 1834 and became an immediate bestseller. Patterned after Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, the book captured Crockett’s true voice. Well written (except for the occasional deliberate misspelling and quaint grammar, intended to authenticate his backwoods reputation) and mostly accurate (Crockett changed details about his military service for political reasons), the book was a classic tale of a poor boy from the backwoods who rises to fame through his determination and innate intelligence. Sprinkled through the many stories of bear hunting, Indian fighting, exploring, and other adventures were occasional political jibes and jokes, almost always at the expense of Jackson and Van Buren, for the book was also designed as a campaign tool. And on the title page was the phrase that Crockett had grown most fond of, and adopted as his slogan: “Be always sure you’re right—then go ahead!”

  By mid-1835, after a whirlwind, two-week book tour of the major cities of the eastern United States—while Congress was in session—Crockett had become one of the most famous individuals in America. But the figure he cut in real life usually fell short of the legend. The half man, half alligator who could whip his weight in wildcats and grin a panther down from a tree was actually a well-dressed, well-mannered gentleman, to the surprise of many, including a woman who saw him in the audience at a ventriloquist’s show:

  He is wholly different from what I thought him, tall in stature large in frame but quite thin with black hair combed straight over the forehead parted from the middle and his shirt collar turned negligently back over his coat. He has rather an indolent careless appearance and looks not like a “go-ahead man.”

  That observer was close to the truth. “Go-ahead” though Crockett might be in energy and outlook, he was certainly never going to fit the stereotype of the thrusting, can-do politician—nor did he wish to. Indeed, the more time he spent in Washington, the more disenchanted, impatient, and just plain bored he became with the unpleasant and compromising political process. Crockett was a genuinely honest man, despite the slight autobiographical fiddles he engineered and the occasional harmless trick he played on an opponent to make a point and get a laugh from an audience. Even worse for his political career, he was positively resistant to deal making. “I have always supported measurs [sic] and principles, not men,” he wrote, and his political career emphasized the sincerity of that statement.

  His disillusionment was all the greater because he had once so admired fellow Tennessean Andrew Jackson. By 1830, during his second term, Crockett was publicly denouncing the president, whom he saw as having been corrupted by Washington and manipulated by the less scrupulous men around him, particularly Vice President Van Buren, a master politician with a reputation as a backroom schemer. That year, Crockett stated, “I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not—he has become a Van Buren man.”

  In the spring of 1834, Jackson clashed with the Senate over the extent of executive power and control. Some, including Crockett, interpreted these developments as an impending descent into tyranny; many still alive could remember living under the rule of a king, and did not wish for another monarch. They compared Jackson to Julius Caesar and the times to the last days of the Roman Republic. Near the end of the year, in a letter to a friend, Crockett vowed that if Van Buren, Jackson’s handpicked successor, was elected, “I will leave the united [sic] States. I will not live under his kingdom.”

  Nevertheless, Crockett stumped during the late spring and early summer of 1835 with vigor, though he lacked the money for a full-scale campaign. This time his opponents fielded a popular candidate named Adam Huntsman, who gave as good as he got. An attorney with a peg leg, the result of a war injury, he proved adept at savvy disparagement of Crockett, criticizing his lapses in Washington and pointing out his failure to achieve anything of substance during his three terms.

  Crockett responded by promising his constituents that he would set out for Texas if he lost the election. But to make matters worse, he had again failed to pass his land bill, despite promising that it would be done, and he had accomplished little else this term save for his tour in support of the book. A mere fifteen months after its publication had established his celebrity, his star was on the decline, and to many, his strident criticism of the president had grown tiresome and his legislation inconsequential. A follow-up narrative of his promotional tour, quickly written (by another ghostwriter, based on Crockett’s notes and press clippings) and published to cash in on his fame, resulted in little of the charm and a fraction of the sales of the first. Another book released a few months later, in the summer of 1835, a polemic against Van Buren disguised as a biography of the vice president, turned out even worse. Finally, his vote against Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 had not been popular with his constituents. On the surface it would appear surprising that Crockett, whose grandparents had been massacred by Creeks and who had fought them himself, could summon the compassion to take their side. But Crockett could empathize with the plight of the “civilized” tribes, for they were in the same boat as many of his constituents regarding land. And Indians had saved his life during one of his early hunting trips when a party of them found him in the woods, near death from malaria. Now peaceful and living on ancestral lands, they were protected by treaties that Jackson was choosing to ignore.

  Initially, Crockett was confident he would win. As the campaign wore on, however, he suspected he was beaten, though he put on a brave face. On election day he won in eighteen of his nineteen counties. But in the single county Huntsman took, he won handily, and Crockett lost the early August election by 252 votes out of the nine thousand cast. The verdict hit home, and when he walked into his cabin after receiving the news, he told his wife, “Well, Bet, I am beat, and I’m off for Texas.” His fourteen-year-old daughter, Matilda, would later recall that he seemed unfazed by his defeat, because “he wanted to go to Texas anyhow.” He had given his word, and he would keep it. Another long hunt, another adventure, and a chance to make his fortune in an u
nsullied land—that was more than enough reason to head west again. Besides, it was surely preferable to the life of a backwoods farmer, which Crockett had never cottoned to and by now was finding intolerable.

  At first Crockett suggested that the whole family go together, the sooner the better; but Elizabeth did not like the sound of that idea. “Mother persuaded him to go first and look at the country, and then if he liked it, we would all go,” remembered Matilda. “He seemed very confident… that he would soon have us all to join him in Texas.” It was settled, then: if the country was as good as the stories he had heard made it out to be, he would stake a claim and come back for his family. On the eve of his departure, he wrote to his brother-in-law George Patton: “We will go through Arkinsaw and I want to explore the Texes well before I return.” It would, he hoped, be his last move west.

  On an afternoon late in October, a few days before he left, he gave a big barbecue and “bran dance”—that morning they sprinkled the ground liberally with the husks of Indian corn, for a better surface—and invited neighbors and friends from far and near. “They had a glorious time,” Matilda remembered. “The young folks danced all day and night and everybody enjoyed themselves finely.”

  On the morning of November 1, less than three months after his defeat, Crockett said good-bye to his family. Three companions would ride with him: Will Patton, his nephew—“a fine fellow,” Crockett thought; Abner Burgin, another brother-in-law; and Lindsey Tinkle, a neighbor and friend. David dressed in his hunting suit and coonskin cap, though he carried finer clothes in his knapsack. The only firearm he carried was his trusted Betsy, the flintlock rifle he had owned for years. He left his nineteen-year-old son, Robert, in charge of the family and farm, said good-bye to Elizabeth, his two teenage daughters, and everyone else, mounted his large bay, and headed southwest to Dyersburg to catch the main road south toward Memphis, about one hundred miles away.