Crockett of Tennessee

by Judd, Cameron

  David entered a resolution for the improvement of various Tennessee rivers, arguing that this would be important to national defense should any force ever invade the United States by way of New Orleans. The measure was promptly voted down, adding to his tremblingly long list of lawmaking failures.

  David turned to his old battle standard, the West Tennessee land bill. He struggled to have the measure debated again on the floor, but despite some assistance from other West Tennessee representatives, the rest of the Tennessee delegation would not cooperate. David began to worry about his chances for reelection. His hopes for an eventual presidential nomination depended upon his being returned to the House—and yet he had little by way of success to show his constituents back home.

  January of 1836 brought David a double blow. The first was confirmation of longstanding rumors that his opponent in the next congressional race would be the clever Adam Huntsman, who was said to be telling one and all that he had toured virtually the entire congressional district and found evidence that David’s popularity was greatly declining. “I begin to believe I can beat Davy,” Huntsman had written to James K. Polk. Success with his land bill would give David an advantage, Huntsman said, but otherwise “the conflict will not be a difficult one.”

  This kind of talk inevitably filtered back to David, and began to unsettle him. His great tour of the prior year might have bolstered his confidence of national popularity—yet what good would that do him if his own neighbors decided to evict him from Congress? He realized he might have been better served to spend less time symbolically battling Andrew Jackson and company, and more time seeing to the practical needs of his constituents. Hadn’t Campbell Ibbotson said a thing or two about that before? David hadn’t listened.

  And then the second blow fell. In mid-February, Ibbotson suffered another stroke, far worse than the first. He lived only two days. David lingered at his graveside in the snow long after the other mourners had left. He felt very alone now, and realized how much he had relied upon the practical-minded old doctor for advice and support. Ibbotson had become his family away from home, his chief unofficial advisor, aide, and mentor.

  But there was too much at hand for David to spend an inordinate time in grief. Huntsman posed a tremendous challenge, and he knew it. Even Huntsman’s wooden leg, about which David was sorely tempted to make jokes, was a political advantage. He had lost his real leg during distinguished service in the Creek War, and its wooden replacement was like an eternally visible reminder or badge of his military sacrifice. Furthermore, Huntsman was clever, witty, and well-liked by the abundant West Tennessee supporters of Andrew Jackson.

  The short session of Congress ended, and David turned his full attention to getting reelected. Meanwhile, the Whigs put out two books under his name, one of them the aggrandized account of the prior year’s tour, the other a scandalously insulting “biography” of Martin Van Buren. Crockett had very little involvement in either volume other than gathering newspaper clippings to be rewritten for the tour book and allowing his name to be placed on the Van Buren volume.

  More interesting and amusing to David himself than either of the official Whig publications was an almanac that had burst upon the scene late in 1834 and spread widely throughout 1835. Published in Nashville by a firm that—with tongue firmly in cheek—billed itself as Snag and Sawyer, the wildly illustrated volume was entitled Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Wild Sports of the West and Life in the Backwoods, Calculated for all the States in the Union. At the top, in quotation marks and above pictures of a wolf and dog, were the words “Go Ahead!” abbreviated out of David’s famous motto, “Be always sure you are right, then go ahead!” In the midst of the 1835 date printed in huge type at the bottom center of the cover was a caricature of a black, rod-toting fisherman with a top hat, a pained expression, and a fish hanging by the mouth from his left little finger. That image pretty much set the tone for the contents. In some respects it was a typical almanac, featuring planting tables, astronomical data, moon phase forecasts, weather predictions, sayings, recipes, jokes, and the like. But mixed throughout were wild tall tales and anecdotes of which Crockett was the hero—the screamer Crockett; the half-alligator, half-panther Crockett; the wild-man Crockett cast in the Nimrod Wildfire image. David found it all very funny, but worried some about it as well. He wondered if the wild, tall-tale renderings of himself did all that much to advance the fortunes of the real man.

  He campaigned hard through the summer, staying so busy that he gave only scant attention to another matter of great national interest taking place in the Mexican possession called Texas, home to many transplanted Americans. The dictatorial president, Santa Anna, was gradually tightening his grip on all of Mexico. Relationships between the American Texans and the Mexican ruler had become so strained that in June a young, tall, somewhat moralistic native South Carolinian named William Barrett Travis had raised a company of volunteers who captured and disarmed a Mexican garrison at Anahuac. Many predicted that more such militaristic activities would take place in Texas before the antagonisms were settled.

  In less pressed times, David had thought about Texas. There was reported to be good land there, available in quantities of more than four thousand acres per settling family, at only a few cents per acre. The Mexican government itself, now independent of Spain, had been encouraging Americans to come in. Depending on how governmental matters fell out, it was a land with a future. The kind of place a man could go and build a fortune if he was savvy. From time to time David had thought half seriously that he ought to make a journey to Texas, especially if his political fortunes turned sour. But of course, that wouldn’t happen. His destiny was the White House itself.

  Or so he had thought, until the advent of the current campaign against Huntsman. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  In the summer, David was jolted by yet another personal loss when his mother died. This struck him even harder than the death of his father. How many times had he lay awake at night as a small child, wondering what would happen to him and how he would make it through if his mother died? He had not had to endure that kind of loss as a boy, and was thankful for that. But now, even as a man—a man so reputedly superhuman that it was widely rumored he was going to wring the very tail off of Halley’s Comet as it passed through the 1835 evening skies—the loss of Rebecca Crockett made him a boy again. He cried quite a lot, always in secret.

  Meanwhile, Huntsman and the Jacksonians continued to batter him politically. Jackson himself allowed Huntsman to use his franking privileges to send copies of the pro-Jacksonian Washington Globe to post offices throughout Crockett’s congressional district. David brought this to the attention of the press, but the clever Huntsman replied, truthfully, that David had used his own franking privileges to steadily flood his district with anti-Jackson material, a full twenty thousand pieces of it. Surely what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander as well.

  David resorted to more serious charges. The Union Bank, he declared, was offering twenty-five dollars to any voter who would pledge for Huntsman. Huntsman’s reply, and the bank’s, was that if the esteemed Crockett intended to make such charges, let him present the evidence of its truth. And then Huntsman offered up the reminder that he, unlike his opponent, had never paid for a vote with gifts of liquor. It was a cutting and effective comment in a constituency of voters who knew that Crockett had greased his political skids with gifts of liquor, tobacco, and the like.

  As the summer passed, David felt his confidence slipping. Hammered by deaths of family and friends, surprised by a vigorous Huntsman campaign, and dismayed by mounting evidence that his constituency was not overwhelmingly behind him, he waited for the August vote with a trepidation he dared not show.

  David Crockett lay in bed, listening to the soft snoring of Adam Huntsman, who slept in the same room. He marveled at how odd a situation politics could put a man into. He rolled over on his side and looked across toward Huntsman’s bed. The lawyer’s wooden leg leaned agai
nst the wall near the head of the bed. David peered at it, resenting it for the political advantage he believed it gave his opponent. Who wouldn’t be impressed with a man who had literally given part of himself in battle, yet who retained intelligence, charm, wit, political capability? And to make it all the worse for David, women clearly thought Huntsman was quite a specimen, even if he had only five toes between him and the earth. David had noted the way they gazed adoringly at the man when he spoke. And he had heard the stories about Huntsman’s alleged reputation as a ladies’ man.

  Drat it all, David thought. It’s hard enough to have to share the stump with that joke-cracking jackass, much less have to sleep in the same room with him! It was enough to rob a man of what good humor he had left.

  The situation in which David found himself had come up naturally enough, and was actually common in country politics. He and Huntsman had been traveling together, debating one another and presenting their standard speeches, and this night, in a farmhouse near Memphis, they had been put up by the same farmer, who lodged them in the same room. Huntsman seemed quite comfortable here—and well he should be, David thought resentfully, given that their common host clearly had cast his support to Huntsman. He had been cordial and impartial in his hospitality, but his talk had made his political leanings very clear.

  David was drifting toward sleep, half-closed eyes still gazing at the moonlight-illuminated outline of Huntsman’s wooden leg, when the thought came that it would be a fine, satisfying thing to somehow rob Huntsman of their host’s vote. Then an inspiration struck that wiped away all weariness, and David sat up in bed, grinning.

  His mind went back to what his wife had said after his last political loss, something about David Crockett having lost his famous sense of humor.… Well, this night he would show that nobody could rightly make that charge in this campaign!

  Rising silently, careful not to waken Huntsman, David reached over and gently laid the wooden leg on the floor beside the bed, arranging its straps to make it appear it had been hurriedly tossed down. Then he tiptoed across the room, picked up a straight-backed wooden chair, and held it to himself as he slipped through the door and out. He carefully, silently, closed the door behind him.

  He was on the back porch of the farmhouse now. On the other side of the porch was another door, leading into another bedroom—the bedroom of the young, unmarried, breathtakingly beautiful daughter of their host.

  David crept to the door, took a deep breath, and then loudly rattled the latch, bumping his shoulder against the door as if trying to force his way in. He heard movement on the other side of the door. He bumped it again, and a loud scream of pure feminine terror erupted from inside.

  Turning, David put one foot into a rung of the chair and held it so that only one chair leg touched the wooden porch. Then hurriedly he hobbled back toward his own room, using the chair to make a noise precisely like that of a man wearing a wooden leg.

  Good timing was essential now. David entered his room and quickly closed the door behind him. He gingerly set the chair back into its place and slipped into his own bed, as elsewhere in the house a tumult arose. The old farmer had heard the racket at his daughter’s bedroom door and the noise of what had sounded for all the world like a peg-legged man rushing across the back porch.

  David pulled the covers to his chin and squeezed his eyes tightly shut. He heard muffled voices—the farmer’s, the daughter’s. Then the farmer’s voice again, louder, and swearing fiercely. Stifling the urge to burst into laughter, David began to snore.

  The door all but burst from its hinges. The farmer, wearing a long nightshirt and holding a lighted lamp aloft, filled the doorway. David peeped out from nearly closed eyelids. He hadn’t seen a face showing that much fury since the time his own father had chased him with a hickory pole.

  “Adam Huntsman, you peg-legged dog, you womanizing child of Satan, I’m a-going to kill you dead, here and now!” the farmer bellowed. Huntsman, jolted from a deep sleep, gave a sort of spasm beneath his covers and sat up. “I’m going to beat you to death with your own leg, you tomcat, and enjoy doing it!” He hove into the room and rounded the foot of David’s bed.

  “What’s wrong?” Huntsman asked in a scratchy voice. “I don’t understand … waaaauuugh!”

  The farmer had grabbed the wooden leg from the floor and was raising it aloft like a club over Huntsman. Meanwhile, David had sat up, pretending to have been awakened by the noise.

  “Whoa, whoa, now!” he yelled, throwing off his covers and jumping out of bed. He grabbed the wooden leg as it began its downswing. The farmer cursed and tried to pull free, but David was stronger and wrested the leg from him.

  “I’m a-going to kill him, I am!” the farmer bellowed to David. He was trembling in fury. “He tried to bust in on my little girl!” He aimed his finger at Huntsman. “I don’t stand for that, not even from you, Adam Huntsman! You think that because you have my vote—had my vote, I ought to say, because you surely don’t now—that you can ruin the honor of a pure young woman?”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Don’t go playing the saint with me, you footless scoundrel! I heerd that leg of yours, knocking on the boards of the porch.”

  “I swear, sir, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Easy now, everyone,” David said. “I believe we’d best let some tempers cool. Sir, I’m sorry for what my opponent here has done. I believe perhaps the loveliness of your daughter got the best of his judgment. I promise you I’ll keep an eye on him the rest of the night, and come sunup, we’ll go our way and leave you and your daughter in peace. You can count on David Crockett, sir.”

  “Well, I—the devil! I ought to kill him!”

  “That’d do nothing but bring you trouble; more than Mr. Huntsman is worth. I promise: I’ll keep him penned the rest of the night. You’ve got the pledge of Colonel David Crockett on that, and my pledge is better than a paid bond.”

  The old man calmed himself. “Very well. That’s good enough for me. And you, Colonel Crockett, have my vote—and the vote of every other man I can turn away from that stump-swinging scoundrel a-lying yonder!”

  “I do appreciate that, sir. I’m proud to have your support.”

  When the farmer was gone, Huntsman said, “What in heaven’s name was that all about?”

  “Just forget about it, Adam. It’s late, and we both need our sleep. Good night.”

  David closed his eyes, warm with satisfaction, and enjoyed the best night’s sleep he had experienced in months.

  Late August, 1835

  Elizabeth Crockett walked quietly into the bedroom. David was there already, lying on his back in the bed, hands behind his head and eyes fixed on the ceiling. A lamp burned dimly on the bedside stand. The window was open and a warm breeze blew through the room, making the lamp flame flicker in the bowl.

  She walked to him slowly, her dress rustling softly, and sat down on the foot of the bed. Reaching out, she laid her hand on his knee.

  “You fought it well, husband,” she said. “You can be proud of the fight, even without the victory.”

  He said nothing for a moment. Then, “It was so close, Betsy. Forty-four hundred votes for Crockett … but forty-six hundred fifty-two for old Peg-leg. I’m lying here and wondering what I could have done that would have made the difference. Defeated by two hundred fifty-two votes! God!”

  “You did all you could, and there’s nothing to be sorrowful about. We’re still living. We still have our home, our children. Each other. What did you lose that really matters?”

  He sat up so abruptly she gasped. His brown eyes flashed angrily and he put his hand on her wrist, gripping it painfully tight. “What have I lost? Any reasonable chance to ever be President of the United States of America! God in heaven, woman, you don’t believe that really matters?”

  Eyes wide, lips parted, she stared at him like he was a stranger. As she watched him, his lip trembled and his eyes grew wet with tears. His grip on h
er wrist loosened, then released.

  “Betsy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Forgive me, please. I didn’t mean—”

  He sobbed aloud and turned away to hide his face. He was still as ashamed of tears as he had been while a boy.

  “David … it’s all right. My words were poor-chosen. Of course it matters. Of course it does. I was just trying to tell you that not everything is gone. That’s all.” She touched his quaking shoulder. “Oh, Davy. My Davy.”

  “I’m ashamed for you to see me now,” he said in a choking voice. “Go away from me, please. Leave me alone for a little while.”

  For a moment she remained, about to speak, but then she closed her lips and rose without words, blew out the lamp and left him alone in the dark room.

  Part 6

  HELL AND TEXAS

  Chapter 52

  October 1835

  Elizabeth Crockett’s attempt at a smile was valiantly performed but unconvincing. David looked at her keenly and said, “You don’t favor the idea, I can see.”

  “Why do you say …” She faltered away to momentary silence. “You’ve always seen clean through me, ain’t you, husband?”

  “Don’t you see, Betsy? It’s a fine opportunity for us. They say the land is good there, and easy to obtain. It’s an opening country, the kind where a man like me can set an early foothold and then climb. There’ll be towns growing, governments forming. I could go far there, and get out of this debt and trouble that has plagued us so.”

  “It’s so far away, David. Texas!”

  “Not as far away as Washington City. And it would be only an exploration, like the one I made that time into Alabama. If the prospects look good, then we could put our names down for land and move on in.”

  He paused, waiting for an answer. She gave none.

  He gave a snort of mild but growing exasperation. “Well, tell me this, Betsy: If not Texas, then where? You believe our fortunes will improve if we stay rooted right here? I’m ready for new country and new starts. This old state is a well that’s run dry for the Crocketts. We need to sink a new one.”