by Buddy Levy
Just as the young Crockett family was settling in on Bean’s Creek, relations between settlers and the native population stretched perilously, then finally snapped. The whites continued their ceaseless pouring in and scattering out to the west and south, pushing populations of the Creek Nation to frustration and anguish as whites squatted on and acquired disputed lands. By circumstance, Crockett and his family were part of this exodus, and they dwelt on the cusp of what would come to be known as the War of 1812, and its bloody offshoot, the Creek War.
Due south, around the gulf port of Pensacola, tensions were high and the political situation was complicated. In addition to the growing English and Indian alliance, the Spanish, having yet to agree that West Florida had been annexed by the Louisiana Purchase, created a thorny problem by supplying Gulf Coast Indians with arms and hard goods, even food.4 In July 1813, an armed band of Indians were moving north to their Upper Creek villages along the Pensacola Road when they were surprise-attacked by a party of 180 soldiers. The Creek band, numbering between sixty and ninety,5 were resting in the south Alabama shade after a noon meal when the first volleys sprayed down upon them. The Indians scattered into the woods, dispersing but remaining quiet and on guard. Relishing the easy victory, the soldiers moved quickly in and began to loot the stores, supplies, and gunpowder abandoned by the Creeks. The greed proved a tactical mistake. Outnumbered by more than two to one but emboldened with anger, the band of Red Sticks (so named for their practice of painting their war clubs bright red to symbolize the blood of their fallen enemies), led by mystics Peter McQueen and High Head Jim, erupted screaming from the woods and violently drove away the numerically superior force.6
They had also managed to shame and enrage the whites, who took shelter and nursed their wounds at Fort Mims, a temporary installment erected around the home of Georgia trader Samuel Mims. The structure, about forty miles north of Mobile near the Alabama River, served as a safe haven and way station for troops moving through the region. As it turned out, their security at this outpost was more perceived than real.
The Creeks were ripe for retaliation. For some time they had been rallying behind the emotional and spiritual guidance of the great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, whose name, legend, and uncompromising beliefs still echoed across the Appalachians. Tecumseh’s resonating oratory had inflamed and inspired the Creek Nation. He had witnessed and endured enough displacement, enough broken treaties, enough illegal ransacking of Indian land. He raged and railed, inciting his people to action:
Let the white race perish. Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven. Back! Back into the water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwelling—destroy their stock—slay their wives and children, that the very breed may perish. War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!7
Tecumseh’s agenda had been bold, unwavering, and visionary—he would lead a confederacy of Indian tribes, stretching from the St. Lawrence River near the Canadian border and sweeping through the mountains and seaboard all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico, in a sustained attack against the violating white settlements. Only such a determined and organized cooperation among native people would realize his dream, “to sweep the white devils back into the ocean whence they had come and restore the continent to its rightful owners.”8
Such was the sustained wrath that the Red Sticks brought to Fort Mims on August 30, 1813. With the memory of the brutal surprise attack at Burnt Corn still fresh and the wrath inspired by Tecumseh coursing through the Red Sticks’ warring veins, Chief Red Eagle (William Weatherford) led a stealthy attack on the encampment. The Red Sticks were soon amazed to find the gates normally barring entry to Fort Mims wide open—and unguarded! At high noon the Indians streamed into the defenseless fort, striking down a Major Beasley, who at last and too late had arrived to defend the gates. War whoops wailed across the grounds and soon Creeks overwhelmed the garrison in what would later be described as among the more shocking and barbarous massacres in the annals of frontier history. Dreadful carnage continued for the next few horrific hours. “The bullets, the knives, the war clubs, the tomahawks, the flames did their work, and more than half a thousand human beings in a few hours perished.”9
Though the attack was in fact retaliation, the grotesque nature of the slayings would be most remembered among settlers. Women and children were corralled, then butchered and scalped. Young children were held by their legs and flung, their heads battered against the stockade walls. Women were tackled and bludgeoned, and the pregnant women were eviscerated, their unborn infants ripped from their wombs. Blood lust consumed the marauding Creeks, and though Chief Red Eagle later claimed he wanted no part of the massacre and had only intended to fire warning shots, once it started he was helpless to stop the revenge. In the end, 275 settlers, friendly Indians and mixed-bloods lay dead; only a small and terrified number escaped the smoldering fort to tell their harrowing tale.10
News of the massacre traveled like wildfire across the frontier settlements, arriving even to quiet and pastoral Bean’s Creek, where Crockett would have been out hunting along the banks, watching snapping turtles sunning on rocks, listening to the rising of trout in the slow-moving water. When he got word of the attacks, Crockett’s normally congenial nature shifted and he determined that it was time to fight, perhaps as he remembered what had happened to his own family:
For when I heard of the mischief which was done at the fort, I instantly felt like going, and I had none of the dread of dying that I expected to feel . . . I knew that the next thing would be, that the Indians would be scalping the women and children all about there, if we didn’t put a stop to it.11
But packing up and running off to fight would come at a significant familial cost, and Polly begged Crockett not to go, arguing that she was in a strange land, and remaining alone raising two young boys was a frightening prospect for her, as fit and able as she was. In his absence, who would work what little ground they were attempting to farm? Who would provide them with meat? Her arguments impressed him, and he thought carefully about the consequences, and about her desires. Finally, the general call to arms, prompted by Tennessee Governor Willie Blount, and an innate patriotism, made up Crockett’s mind. “I reasoned the case with her as well as I could, and told her, that if every man would wait till his wife got willing for him to go to war, there would be no fighting done, until we would all be killed in our own houses . . . and I believed it was a duty I owed to my country.”12
Though Polly fought his decision with pleading and tears, she ultimately turned back to her weaving and the duties of the farm as he rode off to fight the Indians. “I was bent on it,” Crockett later admitted. “The truth is, my dander was up, and nothing but war would bring it right again.”
What Crockett would come to understand soon enough was that political machinations of national import were already at work, and that the muster to which he was responding was part of a broader movement generated from Washington itself. The Madison administration understood that these skirmishes and uprisings, incited by Tecumseh, needed to be thwarted before they gained momentum and spread to many tribes. The plan was to muster and send four armies—from Georgia, the Mississippi Territory, and Tennessee—into the heart of the Creek Nation, and convene their forces at the confluence of the Tallapoosa and Coosa rivers. The commander of the army from West Tennessee was General Andrew Jackson, a fierce, ambitious, and disputatious man with a penchant for dueling. Jackson had earned a reputation as a man not to be trifled with, an intimidating and unreasonable grudge-holder. He had killed Charles Dickenson in a duel in 1806, and was later embroiled in a scandal that threatened to tarnish his growing political reputation when he became involved in another duel between one of his young officers, William Carroll, and Jesse Benton. At the City Hotel in Nashville, tempers flared and four guns were fired, and though there remains disagreement about who fired first, Jackson took a bullet in the shoulder and was badly injured.13 The incident ceme
nted his image as a man with a hair-trigger temper. Jackson’s shrewd political mind also understood that military fame and glory were absolute necessities for professional political advancement, and he had long champed at the bit to go fight Indians. By his early teens he had already developed deep and unwavering prejudices against the native people. Like many migratory whites, Jackson “accepted as indisputable fact that Indians had to be shunted to one side or removed to make the land safe for white people to settle and cultivate. The removal, if not the elimination of the Indian from civilized society, became ingrained in the culture.”14
What Crockett did not know was that the army he was about to join and the battles he was soon to fight would help deliver Andrew Jackson, the man who would eventually become his nemesis, straight to the steps of the White House.
Polly had packed him down with as much dried and salted meat as he could possibly carry. He then mounted and waved good-bye to her and the boys as he rode off to Beaty’s Spring, south of Huntsville, Alabama, where troops were gathering. “At last we mustered about thirteen hundred strong, all mounted volunteers, and all determined to fight, judging for myself, for I felt wolfish all over. I verily believe the whole army was of the real grit.”15 Most men, like Crockett, had left their women and children at home alone, or with relatives and neighbors, to fight a nebulous enemy, and the fear and uncertainty moved through the camp. Commanders reminded the men of the dangers they were to encounter, offering any who wished to leave the chance, before they were officially signed on for service. Crockett noted with pride that none took up the offer. Crockett himself signed on for a ninety-day enlistment.16
Word went round the spring that General Andrew Jackson was on his way south from Nashville with a horde of foot soldiers and mounted men, and fear grew into excitement. While they waited, Major John Gibson arrived, seeking volunteers to go with him into Creek country on a scouting mission. He wanted two of the most experienced woodsmen and marksmen available. David Crockett was immediately selected, proudly asserting that he would “go as far as the major would himself, or any other man,” providing that he could select his own partner. Crockett selected a young man named George Russell, a son of old Major Russell, also of Tennessee. When Major Gibson saw Crockett’s choice, he balked, claiming the stripling hadn’t beard enough—he sought men, not mere boys. Crockett later confessed he was “nettled” at the major’s doubt in his choice, for he valued Russell’s pluck, and did not believe that age determined bravery: “I didn’t think that courage ought to be measured by the beard, for fear a goat would have the preference over a man.”17 After some argument on the matter, Crockett held firm to his convictions, explaining that he had more knowledge of Russell’s abilities, and eventually Gibson acquiesced.
“Old Hickory.” Andrew Jackson as he might have appeared when Crockett first met him during the Creek War. (Andrew Jackson. Hand-colored stipple engraving by James Barton Longacre, copy after Thomas Sully, 1820. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.)
David Crockett had entered the fray.18 Major Gibson, Crockett, George Russell, and ten others headed out, crossing the Tennessee River at Ditto’s Landing, then moving slowly and quietly due south about seven miles, making camp at nightfall. The next morning, Gibson and Crockett agreed that they would cover more ground, and more stealthily, if they split up, so Gibson took seven men and Crockett was placed in charge of five, and they agreed on a rendezvous point that evening some fifteen miles away. The loose plan was for Gibson to pass by the home of a “friendly” Cherokee named Dick Brown (who would later become a colonel and serve under Jackson), and Crockett to go by Brown’s father’s place, each to obtain all the intelligence they could to share when they met up. Crockett made it to the elder Brown’s place, then enlisted a half-blood Cherokee named Jack Thompson to serve as a sentry. They agreed to communicate using owl hoots to avoid detection by hostiles. Crockett got to the rendezvous point that evening, and waited until nearly dark, but still Major Gibson failed to arrive. Knowing the road to be unsafe, Crockett took his men away from the well-used “Indian trace” and found a secluded hollow where they struck camp.
Deep in the night Crockett heard the screechy hoot of an owl, and he called back, and Jack Thompson emerged from the woods to report no sign of Gibson in the vicinity. They rested there until morning, but still Major Gibson failed to arrive. Here Crockett made his first significant military decision. Some of the men wished to return, spooked by the prospect that Gibson and his men had been butchered, but Crockett reminded them of their duty, that they had “set out to hunt a fight,” and that they were bound to “go ahead, and see where the red men were at.”
Moving quietly and carefully, they proceeded to a Cherokee town some twenty miles distant. At midafternoon of the second day they came to the home of a man named Radcliffe, who had married a Creek woman, had two sons, and was living in relative harmony on the edge of the Creek Nation. Radcliffe was well stocked, and he fed Crockett’s company and their horses, providing the hungry men with “a great deal of potatoes and corn, and indeed, almost everything else to go on.” But Radcliffe himself was “bad scared all the time,” noting that just an hour earlier there had been “ten painted warriors at his house,” and if Crockett and his boys were discovered there, the whole lot of them would be killed for harboring the soldiers. Again Crockett’s men voiced their concerns and suggested they leave, but Crockett scoffed that his business had been to hunt “just such fellows,” so they saddled up and readied to ride on. Crockett also understood that under such circumstances, it would be cowardly to return to camp.
They rode into the night, their shadows passing through the trees under brilliant moonglow, all of them afraid to talk for fear of the “painted warriors.” They moved this way, sometimes riding and sometimes leading their horses through slanting moonlight and dark shadow, across creeks and ponds, until they came upon “two negroes, well mounted on Indian ponies and each with a good rifle.” Ironically, the men were slaves who had been stolen from their owners by the Indians, and had fled them, and were now attempting to get back to their white masters. The two were brothers, big friendly fellows, and each could speak in Creek dialect as well as in English. Crockett convinced one to continue on to Ditto’s Landing, the other he adopted as a guide and translator. Eventually they heard voices and discerned the flickering of firelight through the trees, and arrived at the encampment of a group of friendly Creeks.
Some of the boys had bows and were firing arrows into the trees by the fire and moonlight, and Crockett, playful and inquisitive even under the dangerous conditions, proceeded to join in, amusing himself and “shooting with their boys by pine light.” Finally the newly enlisted slave guide returned from speaking with some of the Indian elders, his face grim. He told Crockett that the friendly Indians were concerned, and if the Red Sticks found them there they would all be killed. Crockett relayed the following message back through his translator: “If one would come that night, I would carry the skin of his head home to make me a mockasin.” The friendly natives laughed aloud at the correspondence, admiring Crockett’s nerve and humor, but unease spread across the camp, and the men left their horses saddled for a speedy departure, and they lay down, attempting to get what little rest they might with their rifles clutched across their chests.
Crockett lay dozing fitfully when he was startled awake by “the sharpest scream that ever escaped the throat of a human creature.” An Indian runner arrived in camp and reported that the Red Sticks were coming, and that a large war party had been “crossing the Coosa River all day at Ten Islands, and were going to meet Jackson.” Crockett believed he finally had some useful intelligence, and he felt compelled to convey the news quickly. News of Red Sticks on the warpath sent the friendly Indians into a frenzy, and they packed up and scattered in a matter of minutes. Crockett gathered his men and they quickly mounted up, knowing they had a long and dangerous ride ahead. By now, they were some sixty-five miles from the landing. They st
opped only to water and feed their horses, riding through soreness and hunger and fear, until they came once more to the friendly Indian community where they had met Radcliffe, now vacated and ablaze. Crockett later boasted that they could easily have taken on a force of five to one, then mused wryly: “But we expected the whole nation would be on us, and against such fearful odds we were not so rampant for a fight.”
The torched town at their backs, they rode by moonlight through the night, and stopped at daybreak at the Brown residence, to feed their horses and eat a hurried meal themselves. At about ten o’clock the next morning they straggled into the main camp, their horses limping and foaming, the men hunched, saddle-sore. Crockett dismounted and reported immediately to Colonel John Coffee the news from the front. Coffee took in the information but seemed to pay little attention to it, practically ignoring Crockett, who fumed quietly, not wishing to offend a superior: “I was so mad that I was burning inside like a tarkiln, and I wonder that the smoke hadn’t been pouring out of me at all points.” His rightful anger at being disregarded would shortly turn to real bitterness. Major Gibson, who had been presumed dead, emerged the next day, and when with great histrionics and embellishments he relayed nearly the identical information that Crockett had previously brought to Colonel Coffee’s attention, the Colonel acted immediately. Many years later Crockett would still remember that feeling of disparity, of being ignored simply because he was a common foot soldier and not an officer. It convinced him that the world could be hierarchical and unfair. “When I made my report, it wasn’t believed, because I was no officer; I was no great man, just a poor soldier. But when the same thing was reported by Major Gibson!! Why, then, it was all as true as preaching, and the colonel believed it every word.”
