American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett

by Buddy Levy

  The Crocketts were forced to sell off property, including the undamaged distillery and equipment, and they were sued by a number of creditors. Those creditors needn’t have worried, since when it came to repaying debt, David Crockett bordered on the obsessive. In 1811, leaving his former home in Jefferson County, Crockett had owed a man named John Jacobs a single dollar, not much of a debt, but enough for Crockett to remember. In 1821, herding a group of horses into North Carolina to sell before his next campaign, Crockett happened to pass through Jefferson, and he stopped in at the Jacobs’s place. Over a decade had gone by, and still Crockett pressed a shining dollar coin into the palm of a surprised Mrs. Jacobs. She shook her head and tried to refuse. But Crockett stood his ground on this one: “I owed it and you have got to take it,” he said.10

  On October 9 Crockett returned to Murfreesboro, weary and troubled again by the uncertainties back home, burdened by the thought of packing up and moving but confident that the steadfast and stable Elizabeth could handle anything thrown her way. He needed to finish up the first session so that he could return home and help plan another move, perhaps this time to ground west of the Congressional Reservation Line, a significant demarcation separating the state into roughly two halves, with the eastern portion reserved to satisfy the preponderance of the outstanding North Carolina warrants. The western portion remained public lands, “unpreempted,”11 effectively open for the squatting. Those lands were of special interest to Crockett, now personally (he needed land and it was free) and professionally. Lobbying for their acquisition would influence the majority of his political decisions.

  He finished out the session by continuing to represent his constituents with their best interests in mind, announcing himself among his peers as a truthful man of strong convictions. He had made a few friends, including William Carroll, whom he’d first met in Vernon and early in the session voted for in the race for governor. He and Crockett had much in common, having both done battle under Jackson in the Creek War, both men self-made, of humble origins. Carroll was close with Jackson,12 and that alignment may have influenced Crockett’s political leanings at the time; early on Crockett appeared to support the tenets that would become known as “Jacksonian Democracy”: a laissez-faire government unfettered by private restrictions, a deep suspicion of special privilege and large business, and a firm belief in the capabilities of ordinary men. Indeed, counting the Mitchell affair, Crockett had made a bit of a stir during his first session.

  The assembly adjourned on November 17, and Crockett packed up what little he had and headed for what little home he had left. It was time to set out scouting again. He mustered his eldest son, John Wesley, and a neighbor named Abram Henry, and “cut out for the Obion.” The Obion River, a tributary of the Forked Deer, is large and braided, with four branches—North, Middle, South, and the southernmost Rutherford’s Fork (near present-day Rutherford, Tennessee).13 Crockett and the boys headed west more than 150 miles to Rutherford’s Fork, and Crockett immediately liked what he saw. The place was wild, unpopulated, and thick with game. “It was complete wilderness,” Crockett said, brimming with excitement, “and full of Indians who were hunting. Game was plenty, of almost every kind, which suited me exactly, as I was always fond of hunting.” Crockett determined that here was a place he could have some elbow room, a sense of freedom, as the nearest two neighbors were seven and fifteen miles away. The land itself had character, with dense canebrakes—tangled thickets of giant tallgrass—rife with game. The rugged terrain also showed scars of the famous New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812, a series of quakes so violent and massive that they were estimated to be the strongest in U.S. history, each far greater in magnitude than the 1906 San Francisco quake. Referred to colloquially as “the shakes,” the New Madrid tremors caused the Mississippi River to flow backward for a time, and vibrations were felt from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Coast and from Mexico to Canada.14 The epicenter of the quakes was at New Madrid, Missouri, in close proximity to Tennessee and Kentucky, and after the first monster quakes, aftershocks would rock the region intermittently for a full seven years in the most dramatic geological upheaval ever witnessed in North America, putting a genuine and continous fear of God into the inhabitants.

  Prior to the quakes, Reelfoot Creek flowed through the low-lying area and into the Obion River, but when the terrifying shakes had finally finished rumbling they’d left the eighteen-mile-long Reelfoot Lake in their wake, a huge slurry of water five miles wide and twenty feet deep in places. Violent and persistent storms ravaged the area in the aftermath of the quakes, razing entire forests, rending enormous caverns in the earth, filling the sky with a thick pall of steam, debris, and gas. Crockett referred, almost reverently, to the devastated area as a “harricane,” and the thickets, choked by abundant regrowth of native and competing Southern grass and giant cane, some well over head high, provided ample cover and abundant food for ground-dwelling creatures.15 The result of this upheaval, this tangle of forest and cane, were the game-filled canebrakes Crockett loved to haunt. Here he would sharpen his already considerable skills as a woodsman and a hunter, here where life made sense to him, where he reveled in the simplicity of the hunt, of moving at the pace of wild things.

  Crockett became enamored with the landscape and he staked a claim on a spot that looked suitable, then figured that while they were there they might as well hunt.16 They first rode out to visit a man named Owens who lived across the Obion. The river was near flood stage, fairly bursting and painfully cold, but in they waded anyway “like so many beavers.” The going was treacherous, the bottom dropping out from under them at times, Crockett carrying a long pole that he used to feel the river bottom in front of him. Tromping through murky sloughs, Crockett used his tomahawk to fell small trees to fashion into bridges for the deepest sections. More than once John Wesley resorted to swimming, becoming soaked and bitterly cold. Finally they trudged ashore on the far banks, John Wesley shivering and shaking “like he had the worst sort of an ague.” They struck for a nearby house, pleased to be greeted by Mr. Owens and some other men, who led the cold and waterlogged travelers inside.

  Crockett and his cohorts warmed by the fire, Owens produced a bottle of whiskey. Crockett concluded at that moment “that if a horn wasn’t good then, there was no use for its invention.” Crockett slugged down half a pint, then passed it on to his boy John Wesley, and they all started to feel better and dry out. Mrs. Owen tended to John Wesley, drying his soaked woolens and plying him with more liquids and some hot food. Crockett accepted an offer to join a run that the men were taking up the Obion, and he and Abram Henry boarded a boat with Mr. Owens and the crew, who had loaded it with “whiskey, flour, sugar, coffee, salt, castings, and other articles suitable for the country.” They had struck a deal to deliver these goods upriver at McLemore’s Bluff, on the South Fork, for five hundred dollars. Crockett remembered the boat party fondly: “We staid all night with them, and had a high night of it, as I took steam enough to drive out all the cold that was in me, and about three times as much more.”

  The next day Crockett decided to tag along for the boat trip, and they proceeded upriver until they came to a logjam of downed timber caused by the shakes; the river was too low to be navigable, and they returned to the Owens’s place to wait for some higher water. Though it rained, as Crockett put it, “rip-roriously” the following day, the river was still too shallow to accommodate the heavy boat, so Crockett used his charm and gregariousness to convince the boat owner and all the crew to head out to his new claim where they “slap’d up a cabin in no time.” Crockett bargained for some provisions, too, putting up in stores “four barrels of meal, one of salt, and about ten gallons of whiskey.” The cabin was simple and crude, just a rough-hewn shelter with stone fireplace and straight front porch, but it would do for the moment.17

  The deal he made for the provisions required that Crockett hire on as boat crew for the trip to McLemore’s Bluff, and so after killing a nice deer and barte
ring for “a large middling of bacon,” he left John Wesley and Abram Henry at his new cabin and headed upriver with the boatmen. He figured he’d be gone six or seven days if things went well on the river. They made camp that night below the fallen timbers, and the next morning at first light Crockett headed out hunting along the shores, thinking the men would be unable to get the boat through the jams and debris that day. He crept quietly along in his knee-high leather hunting moccasins, tracking deer and elk and bringing down two bucks before midday, stopping to hang them in trees to keep predators from absconding with them, and marking the spots to retrieve them later. He stalked all day and into the early evening, noting the time by the long slants of shadow through the thick growth, dropping and hanging six deer that day and then bursting through the bramble to the place he figured the boat would be. After hollering and receiving no reply, Crockett fired his rifle, and the shot the boatmen fired back echoed unsettling news; they had made it through the jammed timber and were well ahead, some two miles upriver.

  By now it was dark, but Crockett’s only choice was to make his way toward the boat, scrabbling over and under nearly impenetrable thicket: “I had to crawl through the fallen timber . . . for the vines and briers had grown all through it, and so thick, that a good fat coon couldn’t much more than get along.” He moved along this way slowly, the thorns tearing away at his clothes and flesh as he hollered for the boat, and at last they came back for him in a skiff. Crockett was so sliced up from the ordeal that he felt as though he “wanted sewing up all over,” and so beaten by fatigue that he could hardly move his jaws to eat his first sustenance in twenty-four hours. In the morning Crockett took a man with him to fetch most of the deer he had hung (leaving a couple to possibly retrieve later), then returned to the boat, and finally, after slow going and some difficult maneuvering, they landed at McLemore’s Bluff on the eleventh day.

  Their work on the boat completed, Crockett was given a skiff from the captain and his men as a present, and he also took with him a young crew man named Flavius Harris, hiring him on to help get the new farm under way.18 Crockett and Harris made a speedy return downriver, then, along with John Wesley, began the difficult duties of getting his new homestead ready for the rest of his family to live in. “We turned in and cleared a field, and planted our corn, but it was so late in the spring, we had no time to make rails, and therefore put no fence around our fields.” It was by now the spring of 1822, and Crockett needed to get back to Elizabeth and the other children. First, he wanted to hunt some more and put up more dried meat, so after planting what they considered a sufficient amount of corn, Crockett took to the woods and mountains and river, awed by the wildness and remoteness of the place. “In all this time, we saw the face of no white person in that country, except Mr. Owens’ family, and a very few passengers, who went out there looking at the country. Indians, though, were still plenty enough.” Hunting hard and expertly, he managed to kill ten bears “and a great abundance of deer.”

  His crop “laid by,” loads of dried bear and venison and other provisions put up to store, Crockett reluctantly headed home the 150 miles to Shoal Creek. He knew that things were in disarray there, and he had made some preparations in advance of his scouting departure, including finding temporary housing for Elizabeth and the children, since they lost their homes after the gristmill disaster. During his absence a number of suits had been brought against him, with a couple of judgments granted, and Crockett’s happy homecoming was peppered with despair. Perhaps the worst was arriving to discover that two men, Rueben Trip and Thomas Pryer, had moved in and now occupied his home.19 Despite knowing that it was likely to happen, the concrete evidence of his own failures must have stung Crockett’s considerable pride. Just as Crockett and John Wesley rejoined Elizabeth and as he and Elizabeth began dealing with their legal and situational issues, Crockett received news on April 22, 1822, from newly elected Governor William Carroll that the second session of the legislature would convene on July 22. This would give the Crocketts just enough time to clear their debts, get all their affairs in order, and prepare to leave for Rutherford’s Fork when he returned from the second session. Elizabeth would once again take on the significant burdens at home, but to Crockett’s great relief, she did so without complaint.

  In his second go-round as a legislator, Crockett took to his work with a sense of duty and fairness. His votes were those of a man concerned with social equality and justice, as when he introduced a bill to provide relief for a black man named “Mathias, a free man of color.”20 He opposed bills that would undermine the prevention of fraud in the execution of last wills and testaments, as well as those that would take rights away from widows and their children.21

  Crockett’s other concerns during this time included the Tennessee Vacant Land bill, a foreshadowing of the contentious issue that would eventually consume him. The bill, in brief, asked representatives to authorize the legislature of Tennessee “to dispose of the vacant and unappropriated lands, lying to the North and East of the Congressional Reservation Line, at such price as may be thought prudent by said legislature, for the purpose of education.”22 David Crockett, primarily self-taught, may have already been somewhat dubious of acts structured to raise money for state-funded education, the learned and privileged being two groups he would come to despise and feel threatened by. His voting record during this term illustrates an interesting blend of equanimity and self-interest: he agreed that vacant lands should be put on sale at the lowest possible prices, prices the poor (which included himself ) just might be able to afford. He also voted on August 20 for a bill designed chiefly to promote the construction of ironworks.23 Given his recent (if failed) dabbling in mills, distilleries, and the gunpowder factory, Crockett appeared to remain intrigued with the potential of such industries and wished to protect them, even garnering governmental support for such entrepreneurship. He managed to get himself placed on a select committee to consider a loan to Montgomery Bell for a “Manufactory and works.”24 Crockett may well have been considering another go at manufacturing once they got relocated.

  The short second session adjourned on August 24, and Crockett went home immediately and wasted no time collecting his family and striking out to his new claim on Rutherford’s Fork. “I took my family and what little plunder I had,” Crockett recalled, “and moved to where I had built my cabin.” It would have been a long, slow, cold, and uncomfortable 150-mile trek, burdened as they were with belongings and young children. They arrived in the Obion country in late October 1822. Crockett’s hired man, Flavius Harris, had kept things in order, and Crockett and the boys helped to bring in the last of the corn crop they’d planted the previous spring. Once settled in the cabin, Crockett grew excited about the hunting opportunities again. The region he had chosen could not have been any richer in game, any more suited to his favorite pursuit. “I found bear very plenty, and indeed, all sorts of game and wild varmints.” He hunted hard and long all autumn and into early winter, filling his larder with venison and fowl, and though still far from financially flush, he would have been somewhat content with the knowledge that he was providing for his family. He had to resort to selling wolf hides for any real income during the difficult early transition to the Obion country.

  Just before Christmas 1822, Crockett ran out of the gunpowder he needed for hunting, but also necessary for the tradition of firing “Christmas guns,” a common regional celebration. Crockett remembered that a brother-in-law, who lived on the opposite bank of Rutherford’s Fork some six miles west, had brought him a keg of powder but Crockett had yet to bring it to his own house. Despite the biting-cold temperatures and recent winter storms, Crockett determined to go after the powder. He later admitted that it was a foolhardy undertaking, with the river over a mile wide in places he’d be forced to ford. The more sensible Elizabeth argued vehemently that he should not attempt such a journey under these circumstances, but Crockett explained that they needed the powder since they were running out of meat. El
izabeth pointed out that they might just as well starve as for David to “freeze to death or get drowned,” either of which was likely if he went. Stubborn as always, Crockett dressed in his thickest and warmest “woolen wrappers,” and moccasins, tying up a dry set of “clothes and shoes and stockings” and against Elizabeth’s entreaties, off he went into the cold, snow swirling around him and collecting in deep drifts. He would later concede that it was a questionable idea, adding that “I didn’t before know how much any body could suffer and not die. This, and some of my other experiments with water, learned me something about it.”

  Crockett plowed through ankle-deep snow until he reached the river, which gave him pause: “It looked like an ocean,” he remembered, and was frozen over, glazed with a thin veneer of ice. Undaunted, he waded right in and crossed a long channel, walking in places over downed logs until he came to a large slough, all the while holding his gun and dry clothes above his head and out of the water. Logs he remembered crossing while out hunting were now submerged, and he was forced to wade armpit-deep, then nearly neck-deep. Then he cut saplings to lay down and crawl across sections too deep to wade. He began to lose feeling in his feet and legs, and after crossing a small island in the river he came to another slough, this one spanned by a floating log he figured he could walk over. The log bobbled in the freezing stream and about halfway across Crockett lost his balance and the log rotated, tossing him and completely submerging him. He hurried as much as he could and fought his way to the higher ground, all his limbs now nearly useless as he pulled off his wet clothes right there on the stream bank and struggled frantically into his dry kit. “I got them on,” he recalled, “but my flesh had no feeling in it.”