David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  “My Dutch master was very kind to me, and gave me five or six dollars, being, pleased, as he said, with my services,” David wrote of Siler. “This, however, I think was bait for me, as he persuaded me to stay with him, and not return any more to my father. I had been taught so many lessons of obedience by my father, that I at first supposed I was bound to obey this man, or at least I was afraid to openly disobey him; and I therefore staid with him, and tried to put on a look of contentment until I got the [Siler-Hartley] family all to believe I was fully satisfied.”9

  After four or five weeks of living at the Hartley place and continuing to work for Siler, David found his chance to leave and return home to Tennessee. One day, as he played alongside the road with two local boys, three wagons passed, one driven by a man named Dunn and the others by his two sons. David recognized the Dunns from their frequent rest stops at the Crockett Tavern.10 When they told the boy they were taking their loads of goods to Knoxville, David explained that he, too, wanted to go home. The Dunns invited him to join, with the promise to protect David if they were pursued. With that, he returned to his quarters, gathered his clothing and the little bit of money he had, and waited for morning, when he planned to sneak away and join the Dunns at the tavern, where they spent the night. “I went to bed early that night, but sleep seemed to be a stranger to me,” David recalled. “For though I was a wild boy, yet I dearly loved my father and mother, and their images appeared to be so deeply fixed in my mind, that I could not sleep for thinking of them.”11

  Several hours before daybreak, fearful of being discovered but driven by his “childish love of home,” he rose to face a blinding snowstorm and at least eight inches of fresh snow already on the ground. By the time the boy plodded the seven miles to the inn, the snow, according to Crockett, was “about as deep as my knees.” A warm breakfast by the fire revived the chilled boy for the journey ahead. “The thoughts of home now began to take the entire possession of my mind, and I almost numbered the sluggish turns of the wheels, and much more certainly the miles of travel, which appeared to me to count mighty slow.”12

  By the time the Dunn wagons pulled up for the night at the home of John Dunn on the Roanoke River, David had grown so impatient with the slow pace that he announced he was going to continue his homeward trek alone on foot. Dunn tried to reason with him, but he would have none of it. “Mr. Dunn seemed very sorry to part with me, and used many arguments to prevent me from leaving him,” related Crockett. “But home, poor as it was, again rushed on my memory, and it seemed ten times as dear to me as it ever had before. The reason was, that my parents were there, and all that I had been accustomed to in the hours of my childhood and infancy was there; and my anxious little hart panted also to be.”13

  A determined David set out by himself the next morning, but, near the first ford of the Roanoke River, a man returning from market with a drove of horses overtook him. The man led a saddled horse, which he kindly allowed David to mount and ride, thus sparing the youngster the river’s frigid waters. David rode with the man until they reached a fork in the road and parted. The man and his horses took off for Kentucky, and David trudged the remaining miles to his family, who were overjoyed to see him walk through the tavern door that evening.

  Life went reasonably well for David as he returned to his daily chores and frequent hunts for fresh meat. But during the autumn of 1799, John Crockett “took it into his head” to send thirteen-year-old David and his four older brothers to a subscription school at nearby Barton Springs, where Benjamin Kitchen attempted to teach book learning to the few area youngsters desirous of a rudimentary education.14

  David’s tenure at Kitchen’s country school, however, was short-lived. Students of all ages, some nearly as old as their teacher, crowded into an airless room and tried to master the three Rs. David had only attended four days of classes and was just beginning to learn his letters when he had a falling-out with “one of the scholars” who was much older and larger than himself. Not wanting to draw his big brothers into his personal business, David determined to waylay the bully after school. He lay in wait along the roadside, and when the other boy wandered by, David sprang from the bushes and “set on him like a wild cat.” He scratched the boy’s face “to a flitter jig, and soon made him cry out for quarter in good earnest.”15

  The next morning, fearful of the repercussions sure to follow when word of his ambush reached the schoolmaster, David only pretended he was going to school. Instead, he went out into the woods, only emerging at evening to walk home with his brothers, all of who were sworn to secrecy. This ruse went on for several more days until a curious Kitchen sent a note to John Crockett inquiring about his hooky-playing son. John demanded an explanation. “I knew very well that I was in a devil of a hobble,” Crockett related, “for my father had been taking a few horns, and was in a good condition to make the fur fly.”16 Vowing to whip David harder than Kitchen ever could, John cut a stout hickory switch and the chase was on. “I put out with all my might, and soon we were both up to the top of speed,” wrote David. He was thoroughly convinced that if his father or the schoolmaster got his hands on him he “would have used me up.” After being pursued by his father for more than a mile, David managed to escape by topping a hill and hiding in a clump of brush until his “huffing and puffing” father passed and gave up the hunt.

  To avoid the wrath and hickory rods of either his father or his teacher ever again, David “cut out,” and went to the home of Jesse Cheek, only a few miles from the Crockett Tavern.17 In 1795, Cheek built a general merchandise store and stock pens at what was known as Cheeks Crossroads. The store sold a wide range of dry goods, supplies, foodstuffs, and as many as sixty different books, including Bibles, hymnals, almanacs, and primers. Locals and travelers purchased gun flints, axes, tobacco, chocolate, bulk tea and coffee, scythes, rat traps, saddlery, pewter candlesticks, fiddles and Jew’s harps, and a variety of spirits and liquors.18

  At the store, David found one of his older brothers already there with Cheek, who was about to depart on a cattle drive. David was cheered by the presence of his brother, and, for his part, Cheek was only too happy to hire on both Crockett boys as drovers. They set out immediately, bound for Virginia to deliver Cheek’s herd of a cattle. For David it was the beginning of a two-and-a-half-year adventure that would introduce the teenager to new and distant places and expose him to people and experiences that would shape the rest of his life. In many ways, this interlude provided David with a more useful education than any he would have received in Benjamin Kitchen’s school. It was a journey to test the young man’s mettle and temper his courage.

  EIGHT

  THE ODYSSEY

  EVEN FOR THE LATE EIGHTEENTH century, David Crockett did not have a typical adolescence. His journey into manhood commenced in the autumn of 1799, when he set out with Cheek, again bound for the state of Virginia. This trip was intended as a cooling-off period to give the angry John Crockett time to calm down and forgive David’s trespasses, in particular his dropping out of school after less than a week of attending classes. David originally had no intention of being gone so long. Before he finally did come home, in the spring of 1802, John Crockett, unsure if his prodigal son was even still alive, had forgiven David.

  The party left on a crisp fall morning. Jesse Cheek’s small band of drovers included one of David’s brothers as well as one of Cheek’s brothers. They took the well-used route east out of Tennessee into northern Virginia, with stops along the way at Abingdon, Lynchburg, and Charlottesville.1 After flanking the Blue Ridge Mountains, they passed through Chester Gap, obscured by hanging clouds of morning fog as thick as wood smoke. They then moved on to the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. Their final stop was Front Royal, chartered in 1788 and often called “Hell Town” due to the glut of strong drink and comely women readily available for rough mountaineers and travelers off the Shenandoah River.2 It is not known if David or any of his fellow drovers partook of either the liquor or the women, as r
andy cowhands were known to do seventy-five years later in the cattle towns of Kansas.

  David had no plans to tarry long in the same country where his grandfather David Crockett and other family had once lived before crossing over the mountains to what became Tennessee. After Cheek sold the herd to a local buyer, David and the other Cheek brother started back home in advance of the others, including David’s brother. With but one horse available for their return trip, David and his traveling companion agreed that they would share the steed equally so one of them would not have to walk more than the other. It was a failed plan. After three days on the road, David found that the Cheek brother hardly ever gave up his perch on the saddle.3 Unwilling to continue with someone so contrary, the footsore Crockett felt he would be better off looking for alternative transportation and, with four dollars of pay in his pocket, struck out on his own.

  Crockett purchased a few provisions and had resumed his journey back to Tennessee when he encountered Adam Myers, a teamster hauling a wagonload of goods. Myers, from Greene County, Tennessee, where David was born, seemed “a jolly good fellow.”4 He proposed that Crockett reverse directions and go with him to his delivery destination in Gerrardstown, Virginia, now West Virginia, and then immediately return to Tennessee.

  “On a little reflection, I determined to go back with him, which I did; and we journeyed on slowly as wagons commonly do, but merrily enough.” As the wagon slowly bumped down the road, Crockett concluded that he had made the right decision. “I often thought of home, and, indeed, wished bad enough to be there; but when I thought of the school-house and Kitchen, my master, and the race with my father, and the big hickory he carried, and of the fierceness of the storm of wrath that I had left him in, I was afraid to venture back; for I knew my father’s nature so well, that I was certain his anger would hang on him like a turkle [sic, turtle] does to a fisherman’s toe, and, if I went back in a hurry, he would give me the devil in three or four ways.”5

  Just two days out on the eastbound trip, Crockett and Myers encountered the rest of the original Jesse Cheek drovers on their way home. The other Crockett son tried his best to talk David into going back to their family. Crockett’s brother “pressed him hard” and came up with several persuasive arguments, such as “the pleasure of meeting my mother, and my sisters, who all loved me dearly.”6 David came close to yielding and even shed tears, an uncharacteristic behavior for such an adventurous young man, but when the thought of that “promised whipping” came to mind, he finally “determined that make or break, hit or miss, I would just hang on to my journey, and go ahead with the waggoner.”

  Crockett and Myers accordingly pressed on to Gerrardstown. After unloading the shipment, Myers tried to find some cargo to take back to Tennessee and learned that the closest goods available were to the southeast in Alexandria, near the new city of Washington. Crockett opted to stay in Gerrardstown and find temporary work until Myers returned with the back load.

  Crockett hired on as a laborer with John Gray, a local farmer who in 1787 had helped lay out Gerrardstown with David Gerrard, whose father, John Gerrard, not only gave the village its name but also served as pastor of the first Baptist church west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. John Gray was Scottish to his fingertips, but he was willing to shell out twenty-five cents a day in wages to the young Scots-Irish hireling who plowed the grain fields as well as any man. “I continued working for him until the waggoner got back, and for a good time afterwards, as he continued to run his team back and forward, hauling to and from Baltimore.”7

  In the spring of 1800, Crockett had put aside enough money to purchase some decent clothing and decided to take time off and sport his new wardrobe. Myers was bringing a wagonload of flour to Baltimore, so Crockett joined him and gave the teamster his remaining savings of about seven dollars to tuck away for safekeeping. The leisurely wagon ride from Virginia into Maryland was uneventful until they reached Ellicott’s Mills, just outside Baltimore. Founded by Quakers, this bustling town built on seven hills on the banks of the Patapsco River had one of the largest merchant mills in the nation—the place where Myers was to deliver the barrels of flour that filled his wagon.

  “Here I got into the wagon for the purpose of changing my clothing, not thinking that I was in any danger; but while I was in there we were met by some wheel-barrow men, who were working on the road, and the horses took a scare and away they went, like they had seen a ghost,”8 Crockett later wrote. When the spooked horses bolted, the wagon tongue and both axletrees snapped, tossing Crockett and several heavy wooden barrels out in the road. David was shaken up but somehow avoided being “ground up fine as ginger.” He spoke of the incident years later in his autobiography as a member of Congress when he wrote, “[But] this proved to me, that if a fellow is born to be hung, he will never drown; and, further, that if he is born for a seat in Congress, even flour barrels can’t make a mash of him.”

  His determination and body intact, Crockett helped Myers with the flour unloading, and the broken runaway wagon was hauled to a Baltimore shop for repairs. Over the couple of days they had to wait, Crockett sported his new clothes and explored the city, and that included going to the busy wharf to see the big sailing ships. The curious youngster stepped aboard one of the vessels, and the ship’s captain told him that he was in need of another crewman and inquired of Crockett if he would be interested in a voyage to London. Crockett jumped at the chance, and when he was asked about his parents, he explained that they lived hundreds of miles away in Tennessee and that he was on his own. Crockett admitted that by then “I had become pretty well weaned away from home, and I cared but little where I was, or where I went, or what become of me.”9

  After reaching an agreement with the captain, Crockett hurried back to tell Myers and get both his clothes and the stash of money. Myers refused to give Crockett either and vowed that he would confine the young man and take him back to Tennessee. Unable to board the ship without his most precious belongings, David continued on with Myers. Over the next several days, as they traveled once again down the road, Myers kept a constant watch on the boy and several times threatened him with his wagon whip.10 At last, Crockett saw an opening and being “resolved to leave him at all hazards,” he managed to get his clothing and sneak away but “without a farthing of money to bear my expenses.”

  As usual, Crockett’s luck held, and after going just a few miles, he came upon yet another teamster, “as resolute as a tiger.” They struck up a conversation, and when Crockett began crying and spoke of his plight and the treatment he had received, the new acquaintance became angry and pronounced Myers “a scoundrel, and many other hard names.”11 Coincidentally, this man was named Henry Myers, but he was from Pennsylvania, not related in any way to the Tennessee Myers. David and the man backtracked and found Adam Myers. “You damn’d rascal, you have treated this boy badly,” Henry Myers bellowed.12 The trembling Adam Meyers confessed that he had already spent David’s seven dollars and promised to pay it back to him when he got to Tennessee. That satisfied Crockett. He persuaded his champion to leave the other Meyers alone and they departed.

  The new duo traveled together for several days. When they reached a point where they had to part ways, the older man took up a collection from some other “waggoners” at a roadhouse and handed Crockett three dollars to help tide him over until he found more work.13 That grubstake got Crockett as far Christiansburg, Virginia. The seat of government for Montgomery County, this town had been established in 1776 and named for William Christian, a famed Indian fighter and brother-in-law of Patrick Henry. When Crockett first came to town, the legend was already being told of Daniel Boone coming to the area for an extended visit and getting in trouble with the law for failing to pay a loan he took out to purchase supplies for his axemen blazing the Wilderness Trail.14

  Shortly after arriving in Christiansburg, Crockett hired on for a month of hard farmwork with James Caldwell for one shilling a day. After that, he bounded himself to Elijah Griffith, a C
hristiansburg hatter.15 In exchange for his room and board and a chance to learn the hatter’s trade, Crockett agreed to work for Griffith for a four-year term of service. He joined the other journeymen and apprentices at the shop, hopeful that he may have found a trade that would earn him the decent living he yearned for. Hatmaking had become a viable business on the frontier, with wagonloads of hats leaving Virginia for Tennessee and returning with furs and pelts, maple syrup, feathers, and peach brandy.

  Unfortunately for David, not every hatter succeeded. After only eighteen months of learning the trade, Crockett rose one morning to learn that he was once more out of work. His employer had become so far behind with his debts that he packed up in the middle of the night and left the country.16 Broke and without gainful employment, Crockett for a time hired on at John Snider’s Hattery Shop, which enabled him to pull together the money needed to return to Tennessee. Life on the open road had been a useful teacher, but home and hearth beckoned. In the late winter of 1802, Crockett “cut out for home.”17

  He had barely started the journey when he faced the frigid crossing of the white-capped New River at the point where it connects with the Little River, ten miles south of Christiansburg.18 Try as he might, Crockett was not able to convince any of the ferryboat operators to take him across. They all told him that it was far too dangerous for anyone to attempt a crossing until the stormy weather abated and the winds died down. He eventually found someone who reluctantly agreed to lend him a canoe. Using rope to secure his bundle of clothes and belongings in the canoe, he pushed off into the choppy water.