David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  Upon arriving, David remained mounted and asked Polly if she was ready to ride away with him to their marriage. She said she was, and jumped up on the spare horse Crockett led. Then Billy Finley intervened. He stopped the riders at the gate and implored David to stay and have the wedding at his home. David had always respected Polly’s father and replied that he would remain if Jean herself would ask him and also apologize for her rude behavior. Finley summoned his wife, and after an intense private visit, she finally acquiesced. “She came to me and looked at me mighty good, and asked my pardon for what she had said, and invited me to stay,” wrote Crockett about his soon to be mother-in-law. “She said it was the first child she ever had to marry; and she couldn’t bear to see her off in that way; that if I would light, she would do the best she could for us.”

  David accepted the offer and immediately sent off for Henry Bradford, the justice of the peace, to perform the ceremony.23 The anxious bridegroom “was afraid to wait long, for fear of another defeat.” That evening at the Finleys’ cabin, with a slew of witnesses looking on, David and Polly were wed. At long last, Crockett’s dream of having a wife had been realized. He was just one day shy of his twentieth birthday, a typical age then for a young man to marry.

  TWELVE

  FINLEY’S GAP

  FOLLOWING THEIR WELL-ATTENDED wedding ceremony and the ensuing frolic, David and Polly Crockett spent their first night together as husband and wife beneath the roof of the Finleys’ snug cabin, hardly a honeymoon love nest with several family members sleeping in close proximity. Early the next morning the newlyweds departed for the Crockett Tavern at Morristown, where another large company of family and friends waited to celebrate the nuptials and mark David’s twentieth birthday.

  “We passed the time quite merrily,” Crockett recalled, “until the company broke up; and having gotten my wife, I thought I was completely made up, and needed nothing more in the whole world. But I soon found this was all a mistake—for now having a wife, I wanted every thing else; and, worse than all, I had nothing to give for it.”1

  That was not quite true, for upon the couple’s return to the Finley place, Crockett was pleasantly surprised to find his mother-in-law in the “finest humor in the world.” The Finleys gave David and Polly the gift of “two likely cows and calves,” which Crockett thought a modest dowry. Still, it was better than what he had expected to receive from them. The livestock was certainly more than what his father, John Crockett, apparently provided, beyond some food and horns of whiskey at the tavern party.

  John Canaday, Crockett’s longtime employer and friend, who had not attended any of the festivities because of his strong Quaker beliefs, proved the most generous of anyone. He gave David and Polly an order for fifteen dollars’ worth of goods at a local store, a great deal of money at that time and a true indication of the depth of affection Canaday had for David.2 “With this [the Canaday gift], we fixed up pretty grand, as we thought, and allowed to get on very well,” wrote Crockett.

  Like so many young frontier couples, David and Polly started out with only the barest necessities. They possessed no property and had no money. As the best land in the area had already been claimed and the game was quickly being thinned out, Crockett now faced a lifetime of growing a few crops on rented land and working for other people, just as he had done all of his life.

  They set up housekeeping in a small rented cabin within sight of his in-laws’ place. The Finleys had established their home years before near where the headwaters of Long Creek and Dumplin Creek rise on either side of Bays Mountain, at a point that soon became known as Finley’s Gap. Nearby ran the Great Indian War Trail, the path used in 1776 by 1,800 frontier militiamen led by Colonel William Christian in the campaign against the Cherokees who had allied with the British.3 After seeing the rolling terrain and loamy soil during their march, many of those veterans came back with their families, resulting in heavy settlement activity.

  By the early 1780s, communities were being established around Bays Mountain and along the Holston and French Broad rivers in what was soon to become Jefferson County. Some of those first white settlers included Thomas Jarnagin, owner of large tracts of rich bottomland on the north side of the Nolichucky River, who specialized in making corn whiskey and in 1784 had built the first mill in the county on Long Creek.4 By the following year, with the coming of more settlers, large tracts of land were cleared that had been covered with dense forest and canebrakes.

  The Finleys may have been there before any of the others. Around 1786, when Thomas Rankin, of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, arrived at the upper end of Dumplin Creek, he found Billy Finley was already there, living in a comfortable log house in Finley’s Gap at Bays Mountain.5

  The first domicile that David Crockett and his eighteen-year-old bride called home was not nearly as comfortable as Billy Finley’s two-story log house on a rock foundation. Situated in the hollow near the Finley house, the simple dwelling that the young Crocketts rented from a neighbor was described as “not much more than a shanty.”6 It was constructed of pine logs that were not hewn or even stripped of bark. The cracks between the logs were daubed with mud and the chimney made from mud and sticks, a common technique in 1806. The cabin was topped with a clapboard roof, probably of heart pine or white oak. There were two small rooms, two outside doors, and a door through the middle partition wall. There were no windows.7 A nearby spring gurgled up plenty of water cold enough to make teeth hurt, and the woods provided fresh meat. The Crocketts would live here for six years, and this is where their first two children would be born.

  Some aspects of the couple’s early married years seemed pleasant enough. There is no evidence of further disagreements between David and his mother-in-law, even though it would not have taken too long for Jean Finley to realize that her early assessment of Crockett’s lack of financial stability was proving painfully correct. It is unclear just how Polly faired during those first few years, other than David’s descriptions of her domestic life, which left little time for anything but work. “My wife had a good wheel, and knowed exactly how to use it,” observed Crockett. “She was also a good weaver, as most of the Irish are, whether men or women; and being very industrious with her wheel, she had, in little or no time, a fine web of cloth, ready to make up; and she was good at that too, and almost any thing else that a woman could do.”8

  Meanwhile, Crockett proved that he was good at proverbially everything a man could do too, or, at least a free white man living in the foothills of Tennessee in the early nineteenth century. Crockett frequently showed up at competitive shooting matches and other events and activities, and hunted for game in the surrounding forests and hills. He frequently paid calls on friends such as James Blackburn, a Virginia native who lived two miles from Finley’s Gap on the waters of Long Creek and the headwaters of Carson’s Branch. Crockett enjoyed Blackburn’s company and stayed in touch with him for the rest of his life. Crockett also spent time on Long Creek with James McCuistion, a longtime neighbor of the Finleys, who had purchased Crockett’s prized first .48-caliber flintlock rifle from the Canaday son shortly after the Quaker schoolteacher took it in barter from David in exchange for a horse. The weapon was still in McCuistion’s possession when he died in 1836 and has remained in his family ever since.9 Today, it is owned by Joseph Swann, the Crockett historian and a McCuistion descendant, and is on public display at the Museum of East Tennessee History in Knoxville.

  Crockett would have been pleased that his first Kentucky rifle—a symbol of his most passionate pursuit—remains for all to see. When he lived at Finley’s Gap, long before he had achieved any acclaim, Crockett looked for ways to leave some sort of sign so he would be remembered after he was gone. Stories circulate about a certain tree at Colliers Crossroads, not far from the Crockett home. In the early 1900s it was said people still came there to see the beech tree that Crockett topped and the unknown words he cut with his hunting blade in the tree’s thick hide. Another local story is told of o
ne of Crockett’s neighbors coming upon David chopping two distinct marks high up on the trunk of a cucumber tree. The man asked what he was doing. Crockett went right on hacking away and answered, “I am doing this for the memory of Davy when Davy is dead and gone.”10

  The Crocketts’ first two children were John Wesley Crockett, born on July 10, 1807, and William F. Crockett, born on November 25, 1808. It is likely that David and Polly named the boys for their own fathers. “In this time we had two sons, and I found I was better at increasing my family than my fortune,”11 Crockett mused.

  David scratched out a bit of a living by tenant farming his small crop patch, and picked up a little more income hiring out to others in the area. “Crockett was a poor man when I first saw him,” recalled John L. Jacobs, a neighbor of the Finleys. “He was then a married man, lived three-fourths of a mile from my Father in Findley’s [sic] Gap. He was then making rails for my father. I went to him where he had cut a very large yellow pine tree. He frequently called on me to hand him the wedge or glut, whichever he needed.”12

  By far, Crockett’s best method of getting food was ancestral. His ability with a rifle constantly improved, and whenever possible he took to the woods and hills to track and kill both small and large game. Toting home a deer or turkey meant David, Polly, and their two little boys would eat well for a while, but bagging a black bear provided them with an abundance of edible flesh as well as valuable fat and fur. Both bear meat and oil from the layers of fat were in great demand across the American frontier and well beyond. Bear pelts were fabricated into a variety of goods, including rugs, bed robes, coats, and tall dressy fur caps—fashioned from the prized thick, glossy fur of a mother bear with cubs and proudly worn by various army regiments.13 As early as the mid-1700s, colonial America exported thousands of bear pelts. By the time Crockett took to the woods with his hounds and long gun, great quantities of bear fat and oil—stowed in barrels or sewn up in deerskins—were being shipped by barges down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, eastern seaboard cities, and European markets.14 In the field following a kill, hunters wrapped the butchered meat in the bear’s own skin and carried the oil home in the bear’s bladder. The oil was clarified by boiling it with shaved slippery elm bark, then stored for later use. The bladder could be used as an oilcloth for wrapping packages, and the fat served as cooking oil, lamp fuel, various home remedies, and insect repellent.15 Smart hunters such as Crockett sometimes followed the example of many Indian tribes and slathered on bear fat to protect their bodies from the cold.

  Along with jerked venison, wild turkey, rabbit, squirrel, cured hams, and slabs of bacon, generous cuts of bear meat hung from the rafters of Crockett’s smokehouse and were staples in his family’s diet. Supposedly, the choicest cuts from bear came from the paws and thighs, although cured side meat and the spareribs of young bears also were favored.16 Generally, no matter which part of the bear was consumed, those who partook agreed that the taste was dependent on the diet and age of the animal. Before he left Finley’s Gap, Crockett was said to own “seven of the most vicious bear dogs in the South.”17 The only problem for hunters such as David was that the bear population was beginning to dwindle due to all the settlers moving into the region. He needed new hunting grounds and fewer folks around him.

  “We worked on for some years, renting ground, and paying high rent, until I found [hunting] wasn’t the thing it was cracked up to be; and that I couldn’t make a fortune at it just at all,” wrote Crockett. “So I concluded to quit it, and cut out for some new country…as I knowed I would have to move at some time, I thought it better to do it before my family got too large, that I might have less to carry.”18

  Before Crockett could make a move, a crisis erupted on Polly’s side of the family that required urgent attention. One of Polly’s five brothers, John Finley, who had wed Nancy Barnes, a local girl, on June 18, 1811, found himself at the center of an embarrassing legal action that threatened his reputation, livelihood, and perhaps even his life. His dilemma stemmed from gossip circulating the settlements and crossroads of Jefferson County that, in October of 1810, Finley had sexual intercourse with a mare, owned by William Bradshaw.19

  Such a “crime against nature” was considered to be as detestable as any offense, and in many places if judged guilty the resulting punishment could mean execution. Respect for law and order demanded harsh consequences. As early as 1792, the first criminal indictment was recorded in Jefferson County, when a man named Reuben Roach was found guilty of stealing three yards of linen and three yards of royal ribbon. He received ten lashes on his bare back at the public whipping post.20 A few years later, Jesse Jeffrey was convicted of horse theft, a crime that often ended on a gallows. Instead, the sentence handed down ruled that the man “should stand in the pillory one hour, receive thirty-nine lashes upon his bareback well laid on, have his ears nailed to the pillory and cut off, and that he should be branded upon one cheek with the letter H and on the other with the letter T, in a plain and visible manner.”21 Some citizens thought that hanging would have been a more humane punishment. If stealing a horse could get a person strung up, or whipped and mutilated, the Finley family shuddered to think what the punishment would be for “buggery of a horse.”

  Adam Peck was hired to defend John Finley against the charges of bestiality. A respected lawyer and veteran of the Revolutionary War, Peck also was an early pioneer of the Mossy Creek settlement and one of the county’s first state representatives. Peck and his client went on the offensive and in 1811 filed a case of slander against Finley’s three accusers—David Givens, Richard Grace, and William Bradshaw, owner of the horse allegedly made “victim” by Finley. Legal proceedings continued for quite sometime as both sides made their case before Judge James Trimble.22

  Several persons were called to give testimony. Crockett was among those summoned by the sheriff to appear in court to speak on behalf of Finley, his brother-in-law and the plaintiff in the slander suit filed against the three men. Several other neighbors and friends of the Finley family were called to give their support, including James McCuistion. According to court records, Crockett had to be served his court summons in distant Franklin County, well to the west in south-central Tennessee.23 Crockett, it seems, was in Franklin County scouting for a new home for his family and did not make it back in time to testify.

  The sordid Finley proceedings finally concluded with Judge Trimble finding for the plaintiff. John Finley never received what he considered his just due after the trial. He died in 1814, and it was not until the following year that two hundred bushels of corn were paid as retribution to his heirs, William and James Finley.24 By then David Crockett was long gone from the mountains of east Tennessee. For in the autumn of 1811, after making further inquiries and scouting a few more sites, Crockett determined the time had come to pack up his household and take his leave.

  The frontier was moving on and David, at age twenty-five, wanted to move right along with it. As was always his way, he had a desire to know what waited for him on the other side of every river and mountain he encountered. His curiosity and restlessness never wavered. And so the Crocketts loaded up their few possessions on packhorses and, accompanied by his father-in-law, Billy Finley, they set out to start afresh. They left behind the rickety cabin on rented land and their friends and loved ones. They crossed over the mountains and headed west.

  Almanac cover, 1837. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

  PART II

  THIRTEEN

  KENTUCK

  ALTHOUGH BY EARLY OCTOBER of 1811 Crockett had left his original home and stomping grounds far behind, he never forgot the people and land of eastern Tennessee, and it was this early indoctrination that contributed mightily to his lore. His life was more than half over when he left, but for the rest of his years he corresponded with many old friends and associates who stayed along the streams and hills where he grew up.

  One of the best examples of Crockett’s strong attachment to
his roots also reveals how obsessive he became about staying out of debt. This was undoubtedly a result of witnessing his father’s constant struggle with creditors. When David departed Jefferson County in 1811, he also left behind an outstanding debt of one dollar borrowed from John Jacobs, the farmer he had once worked for, splitting rails.1 Knowing that the debt had not been forgiven nagged at Crockett for a decade. In his mind, a debt, no matter how small, had to be paid off. It was a matter of personal honor and reputation.

  John L. Jacobs, the son of the man to whom Crockett owed that single dollar, clearly recalled the day that debt was paid off. It was in 1821, and Crockett was back in east Tennessee, leading a herd of horses he intended to sell in North Carolina.

  “One morning I was standing in the door next to the main road,” said Jacobs in 1884, reminiscing about early times in the hills of Jefferson County. “I looked down the road toward Mossy Creek and saw a fine looking man riding in front of a large drove of horses. He rode opposite me and stopped and asked me if my mother was in the house. I answered she was. ‘Tell her to come to the door.’ I did so, and when she appeared he said, ‘How do you do, Mrs. Jacobs?’ My mother said, ‘Sir, you have the advantage of me.’ ‘I am Davy Crockett,’ responded he. ‘Is that you Davy?’ said my mother. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘this is Davy Crockett.’”2

  Once he was recognized, there followed a general shaking of hands and an exchange of small talk about family members’ health and other news from the past ten years. At that moment, explained Jacobs, “his horses came rushing by and nearly got ahead of him.” David quickly thrust his hand into his pocket, pulled out a silver dollar, and handed it to the startled woman. “Here, Madam, is a dollar I owed your husband, John Jacobs, when I left this country,” Crockett told her.