David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  Fellow Citizens of the Ninth Congressional District—

  I now avail myself of the privilege common to every freeman, of offering myself as a candidate for a seat in the next Congress of the United States. It is not my design at this time to go into a detail of any of the subjects which may be expected to engage the attention of the next Congress, not to discuss any of the public measures of the country—sufficient time will intervene between now and the period of election, to see and converse with many of you—all I will now undertake to say is, that I feel as much interest in your welfare, and if elected, will bestow as much labor in promoting your interest as any other,

  I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

  David Crockett

  Nashville, 25th October, 1824

  It was a bold move, but perhaps not so surprising for someone courageous enough to battle a bear with a knife or wade through icy river water to fetch a keg of gunpowder. Crockett believed he had a good chance of defeating his opponent—the incumbent congressman Adam Alexander. Crockett recalled that Alexander’s congressional vote on the tariff law of 1824 increased the already high rates and “gave a mighty heap of dissatisfaction to his people.”19 Crockett’s friends told him that Alexander was vulnerable and that, despite his wealth and connections, he could be beaten. They were wrong. Crockett may have been well liked by many people, but the congressional district he wished to represent covered eighteen counties, which meant Crockett would have to cover much territory. He simply could not afford the travel required to reach areas where he was not as well known, let alone come up with funds to buy those tobacco twists and drams of whiskey that had won him votes in the past. He stumped as much as he could afford and hoped for the best. In the end, Crockett’s down-home affectation and charm was no match for a well-funded incumbent whose powerful allies waged a newspaper campaign against Crockett that kept him on the defensive during the spring and into the long, hot summer of 1825, a time of sparse rain, soaring temperatures, and wildfires throughout both hemispheres, particularly in America.

  Even Crockett’s presumed ace in the hole—Alexander’s support of a controversial tariff law—turned sour when the price of cotton skyrocketed. Alexander credited this rise on the tariff law and predicted it would raise the price of everything else they made to sell. “I might as well have sung salms [sic] over a dead horse, as to try to make people believe otherwise,” offered Crockett, “for they knowed their cotton had raised, sure enough, and if the colonel hadn’t done it, they didn’t know what had.”20

  The election of August 1825 proved closer than anticipated. The margin was just 267 votes. Alexander polled 2,866 votes to Crockett’s 2,599.21 He took the defeat hard but he was not done for—not in the least. He headed to his place on the Obion. There he could make new plans. He could head out into the canebrakes and lick his wounds.

  TWENTY-SIX

  BIG TIME

  ONLY WEEKS AFTER the disappointing election loss, a resilient Crockett already was regaining his confidence. He was back on his land, which, due to expansion, was no longer in Carroll County but newly formed Gibson County.1 Betsy and the children were a comfort, and so was the news of September 24, 1825: For service rendered in the War of 1812, Crockett would be issued a Military Land Grant for twenty acres in Lawrence County, his former home and place of enlistment.2 Sale of this new property would bring some welcome income. Not surprisingly, what Crockett needed the most was money—as much as it would take to pay off campaign debts and an impressive stack of other past-due bills.

  Financially cornered at thirty-eight years old, Crockett tapped into another natural resource, the forest itself. His plan called for felling timber to be made into pipe staves that would be loaded into vessels and floated down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.3 From his travels as a state legislator, Crockett was aware that the manufacture of barrels was a huge industry. Cooperages stayed busy trying to keep up with the great demand for barrels, casks, and kegs. Practically every commodity and product had to be shipped and stored in wooden containers, including milled flour, turpentine, nails, dried meats, gunpowder, molasses, sugar, coffee, shoes, lobster, paints, pickles, rice, maple syrup, and even money. In Tennessee and neighboring Kentucky, barrels were in constant demand to hold the rivers of sipping whiskey that poured from commercial distilleries and moonshine camps.

  During his hunts, Crockett sometimes encountered the rugged men whose livings were made on the rivers. They had stories about New Orleans, a major southern market and port, where heaps of rough staves shipped down the Mississippi cluttered the waterfront. Many of the staves were exported abroad and assembled into barrels while local coopers snapped up the rest.

  Crockett found a likely place for his new enterprise on Obion Lake, just south of Reelfoot Lake, close to the Mississippi and about twenty-five miles due west of his abode.4 He rounded up a small crew of hired hands to assist him—promising them wages after the staves were delivered—and they went to work setting up a camp. They gathered timber for staves and for the two large flatboats needed to transport the finished staves downriver. Drawing on some of the boat building techniques he observed years before while visiting relatives in Fentress County, Crockett had some notion about the kind of flatboats he wanted, and he assigned a few helpers to that task. He dispatched the rest of the crew to bring in the wood.

  The area around the lake was still cloaked with large stands of timber, including oak, gum, poplar, hickory, and maple. In years to come, as more sawmills sprang up, many of these trees would be gone. White oak was the wood of choice for the coopers who turned out sturdy whiskey barrels, and, consequently, these were some of the first trees cut down. Near the lake, many of the ancient cypress trees—another prized wood—also were taken. All the felled timber was hauled back to camp by horse and oxen teams. After milling, the lumber was cut into narrow strips, or staves, that would be used to form part of the sides of barrels.

  Crockett faithfully supervised the stave-making operation for a time, but eventually the call of the hunt was too tempting. He rationalized that although the workers did not expect to get paid until they reached New Orleans, he had promised to provide all their meals. “I worked on with my hands till the bears got fat, and then I turned out to hunting, to lay in a supply of meat,”5 Crockett wrote. This memorable series of bear hunts stretched through the rest of 1825 and well into the spring of 1826. By his count, Crockett killed 105 bears, including 47 in a one-month period.

  During that winter and spring, Crockett occasionally broke away from his hunting companions to check on the hired hands busily turning out staves and supply them with fresh meat. In the early spring of 1826, the hunting winding down, Crockett was pleased to find that in his absence both boats had been completed and were fully loaded with more than 30,000 barrel staves. Anxious to pocket a hefty profit in New Orleans and pay his workers, Crockett ordered the flatboats pushed off, and soon enough they were moving down the Obion River to the Mississippi.

  Both of the boats were unwieldy craft built of rough lumber and intended only to get as far as New Orleans, where they would be disassembled and the lumber sold for scrap. From there Crockett and the crew, with money in their purses, would take a riverboat back to Tennessee.

  The short trip on the Obion went well enough, but once they entered the broad and powerful Mississippi, it became apparent that none of the crew possessed the navigational skills to make the long journey ahead. Crockett had never before attempted to navigate such a great river. “I found all my hands were bad scar[r]ed, and in fact I believe I was scar[r]ed a little worse of any; for I had never been down the river, and I soon discovered that my pilot was as ignorant of the business as myself,”6 Crockett lamented.

  The boats, top-heavy from all the staves, turned sideways and drifted out of control. Crockett ordered the men to lash the rafts together, but that only made a bad situation worse. They could no longer maneuver the boats nor land them. As night fell, crewmen on passing boats a
nd people with lanterns on the riverbank shouted advice but nothing seemed to work.

  “Our boats were so heavy that we couldn’t take them much any way, except the way they wanted to go, and just the way the current would carry them,” Crockett explained. “At last we quit trying to land, and concluded just to go ahead as well as we could, for we found we couldn’t do any better.”7

  Sometime during the long night, Crockett went below in the cabin to rest and think about “how much better bear-hunting was on hard land, than floating along on the water.” He was still below deck when, just as the town of Memphis appeared on a distant bluff, the boats, still lashed together, crashed into a sawyer, a huge raft of drift timber lodged in the river bottom and pointed upstream. The impact separated the boats, and the lead barge was pulled under, while the second craft nosed beneath it, with Crockett still below the deck. He scrambled around, looking for a way to escape as water rushed into the cabin. The only exit he could find was a window, too small for him to crawl through.

  “I began to think that I was in a worse box than ever,” recalled Crockett. “But I put my arms through and hollered as loud as I could roar, as the boat I was in hadn’t yet quite filled with water up to my head, and the hands who were next to the raft, seeing my arms out, and hearing me holler, seized them, and began to pull.”

  Finally, just as the boat was about to go under, the men jerked Crockett free, ripping off his clothes and a fair amount of his skin in the process. “I was, however, well pleased to get out in any way, even without shirt or hide.” All hands leaped to safety on a pile of driftwood, where they spent the rest of the night, cold, hungry, half naked, but alive. Not a man had been lost. “While I was setting there, in the night, floating about on the drift, I felt happier and better off than I ever had in my life before, for I had just made such a marvelous escape,”8 rejoiced the ever optimistic Crockett.

  At just about sunrise, the bedraggled crew hailed a passing boat headed for Memphis, where spectators lining the bluff greeted them. In the cheering crowd was Marcus Brutus Winchester, a gentleman ten years younger than Crockett, and the eldest son of General James Winchester.9 Marcus had left school at age sixteen to fight alongside his father in the War of 1812, where they both were captured by the British at the Battle of River Basin and sent to prison in Quebec. In 1819, General Winchester was one of the founders of Memphis along with some others, including Andrew Jackson and John C. McLemore, one of Crockett’s chief creditors.10 The elder Winchester, a great lover of history, named the city Memphis after the ancient Egyptian city on the Nile.

  In the spring of 1819, Marcus came to Memphis on a flatboat, but his craft dodged the sawyers and snags. With financial help from his father, he opened the town’s first store, a fashionable place of business on Front Street, just south of Jackson Street, where he erected one of the finest houses in town.11 When he and Crockett met in 1826, Marcus was on the verge of becoming the newly incorporated city’s first mayor and was said to be “the most graceful, courtly, elegant gentleman that ever appeared upon Main Street.”12

  At first glance, it seemed that young Winchester and Crockett had so little in common that any sort of friendship was highly unlikely. Besides the great disparity in lifestyle, upbringing, and personal wealth, the Winchesters were Jacksonians and had no use for anyone who did not fully support Old Hickory. But Marcus Winchester was his own man and, despite his many civic duties and business accomplishments, possessed a definite streak of rebel. In 1823 he had thrown caution to the wind and wed Amarante Loiselle, brilliant and educated in France, and reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in the South. She was one-sixteenth black, which was why the wedding took place in her hometown of New Orleans, where mixed-race marriages were legal. Eventually being wed to “a woman of color” would prove Winchester’s undoing in Memphis. Yet even when the nasty racial slurs began after he served as mayor, Winchester remained steadfast with his beloved wife, even if it meant his certain ruin.13

  On the calamitous morning in 1826, Winchester, seeing Crockett’s distressful situation, ran to his nearby dry goods store and returned with trousers for him. Later he brought Crockett and the rest of the crew to the store and provided them with completely new outfits, hats, and shoes. Then they went to the Winchester residence, where the lovely Amarante welcomed their guests with as fine a meal as they had ever eaten. Crockett regaled his hosts with some of his best stories, and later, at a tavern, he and his crew were toasted for having survived their ordeal on the river.14

  A few days later, Crockett and one of his crew booked passage on a steamboat—the first that Crockett had ever boarded—and went downriver as far as Natchez, the town of antebellum mansions perched on the river bluffs, in the hope that they might discover some of the 30,000 staves. The search proved fruitless.15 Crockett went back to Memphis and spent a bit more time with his new friend Marcus Winchester. The two men discussed Crockett’s future and what might lie ahead. When Crockett left Memphis on a boat headed upriver to his home, Winchester gave him some money. It was not charity, nor did he feel sorry for his new backwoods friend. The money was meant as encouragement for Crockett to take another risk: a second run for U.S. Congress, for which Winchester pledged his support.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “THE VICTORY IS OURS”

  CROCKETT FINALLY REACHED the Obion River and made his way to his home in Gibson County in the late spring of 1826. It had been almost nine months since he had seen his wife or spoken with his children. True to form, as soon as he got back he turned right around and left again—this time for another crack at the bears. They had come out of hibernation, and Crockett wanted to add to his tally. He was out another month and took down 47 more, bringing the total to 105 bears killed over the seven-month-long season.1

  “It is in the bear hunt that he is most himself,”2 wrote Richard Slotkin in Regeneration through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West. “In the bear hunt the forces opposing him, keeping him from his desires, become tangible. They can be met in direct, open combat and vanquished…. The source of Crockett’s satisfaction with politics lies in his association of vote-getting and hunting…. They are quantifiable indicators of the degree of his prowess, symbols of great deeds of skill.”

  It is doubtful if Elizabeth Crockett ever figured out just what kept her wayward husband always on the move and away from home. She and the children played no real role in Crockett’s world. In fact, his wives and offspring were not prominently featured in his autobiography. Instead they almost became “conquests of a hunt, as do bearskins, votes, and a powerful reputation in the community.”3 Elizabeth had to know that neither she nor the land could ever hold her husband. For that reason, she was far from pleased when he announced that he was going to try another run for Congress, for these were not times when all wives accompanied their political husbands to Washington.

  On September 16, 1826, it became official—Crockett once again offered himself as a candidate for a seat in the U.S. Congress. “I have again been induced to submit my pretensions to a generous, high minded and magnanimous people,”4 Crockett wrote to voters on that date. “I am opposed to the Administration of this man from the Yankee states, called John Q. Adams; I am opposed to the conduct of the Kentucky orator, H. Clay [Henry Clay]; I am greatly opposed to our present Representative’s vote on the Tariff.” In closing, Crockett made one more promise. “I will not set [sic] silently, and permit the interest of my District to be neglected, while I have got a tongue to speak and a head to direct it…. I am the rich-man’s safe-guard, and poor man’s friend.”

  Crockett opened his campaign in the spring of 1827. He realized that running against an incumbent opponent was always difficult, but he felt he could best Colonel Adam Rankin Alexander, despite having lost to him in the previous election. This time, Crockett had the much-needed backing of a solid financial benefactor. Crockett put his trust in Major Marcus Winchester; Memphis, on the western edge of the sprawlin
g Ninth Congressional District, was the second largest congressional district in the nation, with more than 22,000 voters.5 Since their first encounter, following the riverboat accident, Crockett and Winchester had become even better acquainted, and Winchester was impressed with Crockett’s grit and style. He lent the campaign $250, endorsed Crockett, and talked him up to friends and associates throughout the region.6

  “We frequently met at different places,” Crockett wrote of Winchester, “and as he thought I needed, he would occasionally hand me a little more cash; so I was able to buy a little of ‘the creature,’ to put my friends in a good humour, as well as the other gentlemen.”7

  Besides Crockett and Alexander, a third candidate entered the race—the politically ambitious William Arnold. He was a veteran of the War of 1812 and a prominent attorney from Jackson who had been elected major general of the Tennessee Militia in 1826.8 Crockett, however, remained undaunted, even though he faced two high-profile opponents with illustrious military records. He figured that he had a military and political record all his own and that in the long run it would be more appealing to the general populace.