David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  “My father had died in the meantime,” his son later wrote. “My mother said, ‘Davy, I don’t want it.’” Crockett could not accept her response. “I owed it,” he said, “and you have to take it.” The woman complied and took the coin, and with no further ado Crockett rode off to sell his horses.3

  Much had transpired in Crockett’s life during the years after leaving east Tennessee, in what became an endless search for the right place to settle. He found himself caught up in the great westward migration just like thousands of others—mostly poor and, often, desperate people searching for a fresh start. In October of 1811, the desire to settle in newly opened land brought Crockett to Lincoln County, Tennessee. Named for Revolutionary War General Benjamin Lincoln, the county had been formed in 1809 and was said to have much fertile soil. “The Duck and Elk river country was just beginning to settle, and I was determined to try that,”4 wrote Crockett.

  He was issued a warrant for five acres of land south of the headwaters of Mulberry Creek, a branch of the Elk River that divided Lincoln County into two nearly equal parts. With the assistance of Billy Finley, he cleared sassafras and brush on a rise that he dubbed “Hungry Hill” and hastily built a makeshift cabin to shelter Polly and the two boys. They dug a well and built a fence corral for Crockett’s old horse and pair of two-year-old colts. As he had done before at Finley’s Gap, Crockett carved his initials, “D.C.,” in a soaring beech tree on the property line.5

  “I found this a very rich country, and so new, that game, of different sorts, was very plenty,” Crockett wrote of the family’s latest home. “It was here that I began to distinguish myself as a hunter, and, to lay the foundation for all my future greatness; but mighty little did I know of what sort it was going to be.”6

  Shortly after helping his daughter and son-in-law get settled, Billy Finley bid them farewell and retraced his journey back to his home at Finley’s Gap. It may have been the last time Polly saw her father.

  One of Crockett’s first acquaintances in the new territory was the feisty James Burns Gowen, who was born in Virginia in 1785. An insane man, wielding an axe, had murdered his father, and Gowen’s mother was said to be a cousin of the Scottish poet Robert Burns.7 Two years Crocket’s senior, Gowen also was bound out, along with a brother, after their father’s slaying. Gowen and Crockett often were seen with their packs of dogs headed into the trees and loaded for bear. After an evening hunt, they pulled bones together from roasted bear ribs, and slept beneath a covering of tree branches with their rifles and hounds as their only companions.

  “It was here, wrestling with the sassafras that adorned the summit of Hungry Hill[,] that the brawn and bravery was developed that afterward made [Davy] famous as a soldier as well as a hunter and backwoods statesman,” Gowen related to relatives before his death in 1880. “So here in the jungles of the forest living with his first wife, the faithful one who crossed the mountains of East Tennessee with him…this old pioneer no doubt spent his happiest days. He says himself that his reputation as a hunter was made on Mulberry.”8

  This reputation eventually proved quite useful to Crockett, as it helped propel him into the limelight. His hunting expeditions, either alone or in the company of colorful backwoods characters, supplied the material for many of Crockett’s best stories, which he honed and polished for strategic use at public and private occasions.

  “The forest and the mountain stream had great charms for him,” wrote John S. C. Abbott in his 1875 biography of Crockett. “He loved to wander in busy idleness all the day, with fishing-rod and rifle; and he would often return at night with a very ample supply of game. He would then lounge about his hut, tanning deerskins for moccasins and breeches, performing other little jobs, and entirely neglecting all endeavors to improve his farm, or to add to the appearance or comfort of the miserable shanty which he called his home.”9 In spite of his rather harsh critique of Crockett’s domestic habits, Abbot—the author of many popular nineteenth-century historical works and biographies—also pointed out some of what he considered to be Crockett’s strengths. “He had an active mind, and a very singular command of the language of low, illiterate life, and especially of backwoodsman’s slang,” wrote Abbot. “Though not exactly a vain man, his self-confidence was imperturbable, and there was perhaps not an individual in the world…whom he looked up to as in any sense his superior. In hunting, his skill became very remarkable, and few, even of the best marksmen, could throw the bullet with more unerring aim.”10 There was an abundance of deer, and much smaller game, in the area close to his homestead, but Crockett noticed that black bears had been hunted heavily and “were not so plenty as I could have wished.”11

  Even when Crockett stalked game in those forests, the face of the land was changing due to the growing tide of settlers moving westward with the frontier. The earliest of these settlers claimed the lush valley land, so those who came later were forced to stake out less desirable sites on sides of mountains. As they cleared the land, the steep slopes eroded and became too poor to farm. The solution was to move on to yet another location. Crockett did not see the old-growth forests that flourished long before his family ever came to the shores of America. That was back in the time when it was said that a squirrel could travel the canopy of the woodlands from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without once touching the ground. Frontier settlers sliced down great mixes of hardwoods that spilled over the rolling old mountains in a multilayered carpet. The first people to enter the yet unbroken wilderness followed bison trails, the only breaks in the thick undergrowth. These trails were cut deep and wide by the hooves of the big lumbering animals seeking clear spring water, salt licks, and grassy meadows, much like the Indians and white men who hunted them. Old trails became well-used paths for restless pioneers such as Crockett and his kin. They were soon followed by land speculators and developers anxious to wrest the land from the Indians who dwelled there long before any whites even knew of the existence of the mountains blanketed with chestnuts, hemlocks, and fir. To the newcomers the wilderness was an adversary that had to be conquered and tamed. The land had to be dismembered and parceled out to families and town builders.

  On November 25, 1812, Polly Crockett gave birth to her third child. This time it was a daughter. She was named Margaret, after David’s oldest sister. Crockett cherished the baby girl, who went by the nickname Polly, but he also had to wonder how he was going to feed yet another mouth. Although it was important for frontier families to be large so there were plenty of helping hands, there also was a price to pay before a child was old enough to earn its keep.

  After less than two years in Lincoln County, Crockett was beginning to feel the itch to move once more. Besides the decline in the bear population, Crockett, not agriculturally inclined, was having problems making a go of it as a farmer. He spent much of his time out hunting, and not nearly enough behind the plow. Taking a chance by adding to his holdings to provide more crop fields, he put in a claim for an additional fifteen acres. The plan did not work. He soon fell behind on his taxes and in the end lost all of his land, including his original five-acre plot.12

  By the time the delinquent tax payment resulted in foreclosure, Crockett had already moved the family away from Hungry Hill. In late 1812 or perhaps early 1813, the Crocketts established residency in adjacent Franklin County, formed in 1807 and named in honor of Benjamin Franklin. Lying in a portion of the valley of the Elk River, the county contained an abundance of streams, springs, and caves. David cleared land and built a cabin home on the Rattlesnake Spring Branch of Bean’s Creek, about ten miles southwest of the county seat of Winchester and a few miles north of the Alabama border.13 It is not clear if Crockett purchased part of a two-hundred-acre tract of land in late 1812 or leased it, as would have been the case for those without any money. Another common alternative would have been to settle on the land as squatters.

  Whatever arrangement Crockett worked out in order to get his property, it is known that he named the new home Kentuck. The
choice of this name, sometimes spelled Kaintuck, may have signaled a future move to the land of Daniel Boone, whom Crockett knew of only by reputation. By 1812, however, Boone was seventy-eight years old and long gone from Kentucky: he had been happily residing in Missouri for thirteen years.14

  Crockett built a log cabin with just enough room for a family of five, while Polly stayed busy with her chores and tended two growing sons and an infant daughter. David cleared and cultivated some of the land, and put in corn and row crops, but he took to the woods as much as he could. Crockett, as we have seen, was a hunter first and farmer a distant second. He continued to go hunting with James Burns Gowen, and also stalked game with a new neighbor, Archard Hatchett. A Virginian by birth who settled in Tennessee in 1806, Hatchett farmed and raised livestock, as well as fourteen children fathered with two wives. The pair roamed far on long hunts, and along the way Crockett continued his practice of tattooing his initials with his hunting knife on the trunks of trees. Before dying on his family farm in 1852, Hatchett told stories of herding cattle with Crockett and of their hunting trips, and the old man made sure his son James knew the locations of some of the trees that Crockett had marked. More than thirty years later in the 1880s, a logging crew inspecting timber came across a beech tree on the highest point of Round Mountain with Crockett’s initials carved deep in the bark. James Hatchett was there that day to tell the story, but also to make sure that the tree was spared from their saws and axes.15 Such accounts of Crockett are still told throughout Tennessee.

  Crockett’s own considerable storytelling skill was sharpened in Franklin County as he became acquainted with the old-timers and wisdom keepers who dwelled there. Some of the more memorable storytellers—including William Russell and Jesse Bean, two figures of note from prominent Tennessee families, who were touted as the first white men to settle the land that became Franklin County—had been long acquainted with the Crocketts. The Russell and Bean families had intermarried and spread their kin all across the frontier. Russell’s sister, Lydia, was the wife of Bean’s father, the intrepid William Bean, a rugged adventurer who had hunted with Daniel Boone. In 1769, the elder Bean, after leaving Virginia, became the first permanent white settler in what eventually became Tennessee.16

  The Russells also provided plenty of story fodder. William Russell, a native North Carolinian and another early arrival in Tennessee, had fought in several engagements during the Revolutionary War, including the Battle of King’s Mountain. Russell’s house on Boiling Fork became the place for holding court, musters, and other legal proceedings in Franklin County until the town of Winchester was laid out in 1810, and a proper courthouse was built.17 One of Crockett’s good friends was old Major Russell’s son, George, the namesake of his uncle Captain George Russell, who followed his brother-in-law, William Bean, to Tennessee in 1770 and was promptly killed by Indians while on a hunting trip near his home at German Creek.

  Jesse Bean, one of old William’s sons, was born in Virginia and came to Tennessee with the rest of his family. That is where his younger brother, Russell, was born in 1769, making him the first white child born to a permanent settler in Tennessee. Jesse had become a highly sought-after gunsmith well before he established a home and business in Franklin County. Russell was also an expert gun maker and often the subject of some of the wildest stories told on the Tennessee frontier. Crockett feasted on tales about the colorful Bean family, especially an infamous one based on an incident in 1802, when Russell returned to his Jonesboro, Tennessee, home after a long absence.

  The story, as Crockett heard it, was that Bean had delivered a cargo of his handcrafted guns to buyers in New Orleans, where he then remained for two years, engaging in cock fighting, horse racing, foot races, and other pleasures.18 When he got back to Jonesboro and walked into his cabin, Bean was shocked to find his wife, Rosamond, nursing an infant. Outraged at this blatant act of infidelity, the swaggering Bean swigged down some fresh whiskey and decided to mark the baby so he could then distinguish it from the eight children that he had fathered. Bean yanked out his hunting knife and sliced off the baby’s ears. For such a horrific deed, Bean was fined, imprisoned, and branded on the palm of his hand, as was the custom. To show his distain for such treatment, Bean bit out the brand from his hand and spit the flesh on the floor.19

  Though divorce was an infrequent occurrence in those days, the stricken Rosamond soon divorced Bean, who managed to escape prison and, because the authorities feared him, remained at large. While free, Bean let it be known that he would get revenge on the seducer responsible for getting his wife pregnant. He assaulted the man’s brother and beat him unmercifully, but was still free when the matter came to the attention of a young judge who demanded that the sheriff serve the arrest warrant and bring the culprit to him. The sheriff tried and failed, even attempting to assemble a posse to help apprehend Bean, but he could not enlist any volunteers.

  A drunken and menacing Bean bellowed that he would shoot “the first skunk that came within ten feet of him.”20 The judge had heard and seen enough. “By the Eternal, I’ll bring him,” vowed the judge. He adjourned his court and went straight to Bean, who was cursing and waving a pistol. The judge never flinched. With a pistol in each hand, he walked right up to the big fellow, stared into his red eyes, and roared, “Now, surrender you infernal villain, this very instant, or I’ll blow you through!”21 Bean looked into the judge’s eyes, laid down his weapon, and gave up with no further fuss. The judge marched him to the courtroom, where he was tried and heavily fined.

  Tall and lanky, with reddish hair and blazing blue eyes, the young judge was in fact future U.S. president Andrew Jackson. Later, when Bean was asked why he gave up so easily, he explained that when he looked into Andy Jackson’s eyes he could see the fire, and he knew that he had best give up or die.22 One day—under far different circumstances—those same fiery eyes would glare at David Crockett.

  Jackson, in his early career as a circuit court judge, not only presided over matters such as the Bean trial but also had occasion to travel through Franklin County. In 1808, Jackson received a patent from the State of Tennessee for 1,000 acres located on the Boiling Fork, just below Winchester. The following year he acquired an additional 640 acres on the Elk River.23 Jackson also enjoyed a long relationship with the Bean and Russell families. Only ten years after the encounter with Russell Bean, many members of both families faithfully served under then General Jackson when duty called. Among the volunteers was Russell Bean, who, it was said, eventually got back with his wife when Jackson brokered reconciliation.24 Crockett, too, would be in that number fighting under Jackson’s command, as would Jesse Bean, the master craftsman who supplied so many fine hunting rifles.

  Jesse lived by the creek that was named for him, and in a nearby cave he set up the gun shop that brought him fame and a bit of fortune well beyond the county and state. Known for their precision, Bean rifles became the standard for all other weapons on the frontier. Rifles crafted by various Beans had been put to good use at the Battle of King’s Mountain during the last days of the Revolutionary War, and were coveted by militia and outback white settlers as their weapons of choice for killing Indians or large game.

  As the autumn of 1813 approached, the gunsmith shop and powder mills tucked into the stone grottoes on Bean’s Creek would be pressed into service once again. So would most of the able-bodied men from Franklin County, including the crack shot David Crockett.

  FOURTEEN

  “REMEMBER FORT MIMS”

  THE UNITED STATES STUNNED the diplomatic world on June 19, 1812, when President James Madison declared war on the imperial power of Great Britain.1 Growing resentment over the seizure of U.S. ships primarily caused the conflict, which lasted until 1815, although Eric Jay Dolin notes in Fur, Fortune, and Empire that competing claims over fur territory in the Northwest were compelling factors. Britain, already at war in Europe, was desperate to find fresh sailors, and so began the press-ganging of American crews into the Britis
h navy and confiscating of all cargo bound for Napoleonic France. These appropriations caused the United States to cut off all trade with the continent.2 At the same time, some members of Congress began beating the drums of war when they saw an opportunity to claim the rest of the North American continent still in the hands of the King of England.

  Nowhere was the cry for war louder than in certain political circles in landlocked Tennessee and surrounding states. These warmongers were not as worried about halting the impressments of American seamen as they were about finding a solution to what was called “the Indian problem.” Mostly southern congressmen—such as Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina—the “War Hawks,” as they were known—firmly believed that taking more Indian property would appease the gnawing hunger for territorial expansion.3 Many Indian tribes, encouraged by the British, resisted giving up any more of their land. Forcibly evicting Indians who refused to comply promised to spark economic opportunities and open new lands for white settlement.

  While most of the major engagements between America and Britain occurred in the Northeast, along the Canadian border, or at sea, in Tennessee war was being waged against the bands of Creek Indians who allied with Britain. It was a war that thrust the state into the national spotlight, for when Madison called on Tennessee to help defend their land, thousands of Tennesseans anxious to get into the melee came forward as volunteers, helping to establish the moniker the “Volunteer State.”4 The nickname caught on but was not commonly used until after the Mexican War in the 1840s when, once again, tens of thousands of Tennessee men and boys rode off to battle.