Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis

1

CROCKETT

1786-1815

I never had six months education in my life I was raised in obs[c]urity without either wealth or education I have made myself to every station in life that I ever filled through my own exertions. . .

DAVID CROCKETT, AUGUST 18, 1831

When he wrote his autobiography in the winter of 1833–34, David Crockett insisted that it should run at least 200 pages. That, to him, was a real book. As he wrote he studied other books, counted the words on their pages, and compared the tally with his own growing manuscript. As a result, when published his narrative spanned 211 pages, and he was content. By that time in his life he had been a state legislator, three times elected to Congress, the subject of a book, the thinly disguised hero of an acclaimed play, a popular phenomenon in the eastern press, and touted for the presidency. Yet he devoted more than one-fourth of his own work to his youth: a time when his own exertions availed him nothing. He remembered youthful pranks, a few adventures, and vicissitudes that should have made him wise but only left him gullible. Repeatedly he returned to three things he remembered from his first eighteen years: that the father whom he loved was a stern disciplinarian and could be violent; that he wept easily as a child and as a young man; and that he was poor. Certainly it took no stretch of memory to recall the last in particular. For David Crockett poverty was never yesterday.

His was the story of a whole population of the poor who started moving from the British Isles in the 1700s and simply never stopped. Despite the misnomer Scots-Irish, they were almost all Scots, as surely were Crockett’s ancestors.¹ Like so many who grew up ignorant and illiterate on the fringes of young America, he knew little of his forebears, and some of what he believed was erroneous. Indeed, that father whom he loved yet feared knew little himself, or else chose not to speak of it. Perhaps the child David did not listen or kept his distance, especially when John Crockett had been at the drink and felt ill-tempered and prone to reach for the birch.

The man David did not even know where his own father had been born, and believed it was either in Ireland or during the ocean passage to the colonies.² More likely it was his grandfather, for whom he was named, who first set foot on American soil. When he came is lost among the thousands of anonymous arrivals in the generations before the Revolution, but he probably landed in Pennsylvania and migrated west to the Susquehanna before turning southwest through the Cumberland Valley along with the rest of the tide of Scottish immigrants, reaching Virginia’s lower Shenandoah Valley by 1755. The first David Crockett farmed there near Berryville, by then a married man with a new son, Robert, born there that August, and another son, John, probably already a few years old and perhaps born in Pennsylvania.

The tide of migration did not willingly yield any of the flotsam that rode its crest. The immigrants who first reached a new region took up the best land, and those like David Crockett who came after often had to keep moving until it seemingly became a habit. By 1771 he had moved his family, now including two boys in their later teens, to Tryon County, North Carolina, settling on the south side of the Catawba River. It was to be a brief stop, for by 1776 the Crocketts were over the western mountains into the valley of the Holston River. There was confusion about just which colony—North Carolina or Virginia—owned the region, and for a time the inhabitants simply governed themselves under the articles of what they called the Watauga Association. But then on July 5, 1776, aware of the revolt that had commenced the year before in Massachusetts but unaware of the momentous event of the day before in Philadelphia, David Crockett and other Wataugans petitioned the legislature of North Carolina to assume dominion and responsibility over the region. With the continent seemingly in upheaval, they sought some order, especially as the local aboriginal population launched occasional attacks on isolated settlers. North Carolina annexed the area that same year, but, perhaps because of the hostile natives, the Crocketts moved northwest of the Holston to

Carter’s Valley, another area of disputed sovereignty, and there David joined with neighbors in 1776 and again on November 6, 1777, in petitioning Virginia to annex the locality.³

By now three of his sons, John, William, and Joseph, were grown and had their own homes nearby, and Robert was probably already off serving in the revolutionary forces. Indeed, that is in part what saved them, for David Crockett’s days of wandering were done. He had but one last move in store, and it was the Creek or Chickamauga who sent him and his wife on their way. Already incensed at the influx of unwelcome settlers on their ancestral territory, the Indians had agreed to treaties that established definite boundaries protecting their land. But they reckoned without the rapacious appetite of settlers and the speculators, who even now saw the promise of profit on the bow wave of settlement. In an act that would be the hallmark of the push west to the Mississippi and beyond, unscrupulous entrepreneurs ignored the existing occupants and began selling vast quantities of Indian land to incoming settlers. The strain became intolerable, and the affronted victims struck back, often not at the speculators but at any isolated and convenient target. One day in the summer of 1778 they chose the Crockett homestead.

David and his wife were at home, along with Joseph and their youngest, James. The raid almost certainly took them by surprise. David and his older son were probably in their field tending crops, their rifles out of immediate reach. The attackers fired a ragged volley that brought Joseph down with a broken arm. His father fell either to bullets or swift tomahawk blows. James may have been with them, but he was both deaf and mute and knew little of what was happening until it was all over. His mother probably met death alone in the cabin. As quickly as they had come, the attackers left. In their idiosyncratic way, having killed the parents, they took the boy James with them and kept him for nearly eighteen years before returning him to white society. The wounded Joseph either played or looked dead or simply no longer interested the raiders, who left him behind. With him they left a memory that would become a legacy of hatred between the Crockett family and the Creek nation.⁴

At least John Crockett had someone to share his grief. He was living in his own home some three miles away when tragedy struck. Perhaps as little as a year earlier he had married Rebecca Hawkins, a young woman born in Maryland who came south with her father, Nathan, to the settlements north of the Holston.⁵ But he barely had time to start a family before the war with Britain began to take him away from home for extended periods of time. He went to Lincoln County to join its militia, but by 1780 was back home in what was now Washington County, North Carolina. That October he was one of the over-mountain men who took their rifles and walked through the mountain passes to rendezvous with regulars to form an army that defeated the British and helped turn the tide of the war in the southern colonies at the Battle of King’s Mountain. While his son David lost all recollection of anything else his father did in the Revolution, he never forgot John Crockett’s role at King’s Mountain, or that image of the citizen volunteer, his deer rifle on his shoulder, riding off on his own accord to join other men who answered no authority but their own, in common defense of their notion of liberty.⁶

After 1781 the war dwindled to occasional skirmishes in the South, and John Crockett could concentrate on making a place for himself. In 1783, the year of the peace, he became a constable in Greene County, which was split from Washington. He also succumbed to the lure of speculation, buying land at sixpence an acre and selling it for twenty times that four years later. But more often than not speculators bought land in exchange for their personal promissory note and sold it for much the same, and where little or no hard coin changed hands there was no real wealth to be gained. Indeed, even as he sought to make a killing in land, Crockett saw debts against him registered in the county court records. Whatever may have been his dreams of prosperity, the reality was that he occupied a page in the annals of the poor and always would.⁷

At least his family grew. By 1786 he had four sons and had moved yet again, to the bank of Big Limestone Creek where it flowed into the Nolichucky River on the eastern edge of Greene County. There on August 17, 1786, Rebecca produced another child. Interestingly John waited until this fifth baby boy before honoring his own father with a namesake. The infant David Crockett would have almost no recollection of the Limestone Creek homestead, however, or of the events then exciting his father and others. Already a strong streak of independence and resistance to authority characterized these Scots and Irish settlers. As soon as they moved—which was often—they formed a new allegiance, at first to some distant authority like Virginia or North Carolina that could protect them; and when protection seemed less an issue, their loyalties speedily became more local. At the moment David Crockett was born, the settlers in Greene and Washington Counties and elsewhere were trying to form their own new state. At the end of the Revolution, North Carolina ceded much of its westernmost land back to the new United States, and in the fall of 1784 settlers gathered at Jonesboro, scarcely five miles from Crockett’s birthplace, to organize and declare the new state of Franklin. John Crockett supported the Franklin movement, and young David might well have claimed to be a native of this new state. It did not last, however, and in 1789 North Carolina had resumed sovereignty. It would not be the last time David Crockett’s fortunes were entwined with those of a new state seeking independence.

In later years he remembered just two incidents from his first home, neither of them distinctly, but both involving that ever-present companion on the frontier, mortal danger. He was not yet wearing long breeches when he and his older brothers and a friend played by the Nolichucky, and one of the boys got all but David to take a ride in John Crockett’s canoe. Once in the stream, they lost control and drifted toward a dangerous falls, when the timely arrival of an adult neighbor saved them from possible drowning. He remembered, too, his uncle Joseph Hawkins accidentally shooting a man looking for grapes, and how his father passed a handkerchief through the hole in the fortunate survivor’s body, front to back. Imminent death was everywhere, feared, and yet as well a subject of morbid curiosity.⁸

When David was no more than seven years old, the fifth son’s family moved once more, a few miles to Cove Creek. There John Crockett entered partnership with Thomas Galbreath in building a gristmill. At one time or another, almost every settler on the frontier seemed to try a hand at milling. It was the only industry on the edge of civilization other than smithing. A man could build the mill himself, find the proper stones in the streambeds, and shape them with his own hands. It seemed easy after the hard work of the building was finished, and these men were always looking for an easy livelihood. Instead of laboring all the hours of the day in his own fields, the miller could charge his neighbors to grind their grain, and the river did the work for him. Yet most who tried it failed, in part because there were so many others at the milling trade, and also because they were all hostages to nature. Cove Creek reminded John Crockett of that fact when it rose out of its banks before the mill was even completed. It washed away all the construction done thus far and drove the Crocketts out of their cabin.

Characteristically, when a disaster or loss hit one of these people, they moved away not only from the event but from its locality. John Crockett already held title to a three-hundred-acre parcel on the south side of the Main Holston Road connecting Knoxville with Abingdon, Virginia, about thirty miles from Cove Creek. Now he moved his family there and set himself up in the other mainstay occupation of the frontiersman with business aspirations: tavern keeping. On the south side of the road, on the slope that led down to a spring, he dug out a cellar, lined it with a stone foundation, and on that built a small log structure that served as home and inn.⁹

Prosperity always eluded John Crockett—probably due to a combination of hard times for everyone, bad luck, and a certain unwillingness or inability to commit himself to one thing and stay with it in the face of adversity. Then, too, he may have been overardent at his own barrel, an unfortunate and unprofitable weakness for a tavern owner. Certainly he either made an insufficient living by his trade or else mishandled what he took in receipts, for in barely a year he found himself four hundred dollars or more in debt. The sheriff of Jefferson County seized his property and on November 4, 1795, sold it at public auction to William Line for forty dollars.¹⁰ David was old enough by now to know what was happening and to remember as well as to be embarrassed by it, for though he told of many hardships in his autobiography, and even spoke with the poor white’s typical assertive pride in youthful poverty, he made no mention of his family losing the tavern.

He did admit, however, that in these years I began to make up my acquaintance with hard times, and a plenty of them.¹¹ William Line may have profited by John Crockett’s misfortune, but either he allowed him to stay on at the tavern trade, by leasing the property or as an employee, or else Crockett managed to build another tavern not far away and resume his business. In any case for the next three years he continued providing room, board, and drink for the wagoneers passing through what had finally become the new state of Tennessee in 1796. Times were still strained, and young David was now old enough to contribute his mote to the family’s survival. Using a wooden maul and wedge, he split fence rails for the father of a playmate, no doubt turning his meager earnings over to his own father.¹²

That was not enough. One of the travelers passing through the tavern in late 1798 was Jacob Siler, a German then driving a herd of cattle to Rockbridge, Virginia, some 225 miles northeast. Being hard run every way, as David recalled, John Crockett hired out his son to go with Siler to help with the cows, despite the fact that David, who was only twelve, would have to make the return trip by himself. Of course the boy had no say in the matter. He knew better than to dispute his father and risk the birch. I had been taught so many lessons of obedience, he recalled, that resistance did not occur to him, despite his child’s terror at being taken away from home, spending weeks with a man he did not know, and having to risk the 225 miles back on his own.¹³

The trip took two weeks or more before they reached the vicinity of Natural Bridge, Virginia, yet it seemed so long to David that he almost doubled the distance in memory, recalling 225 miles as 400. Siler treated him kindly, and at the end of the road gave him a few dollars above what had been paid to his father. Indeed, he liked David enough to try to persuade him to stay on rather than go home. The boy felt torn. He was more than homesick, and yet, as he admitted later, his father’s discipline had so ingrained in him the habit of obedience that he was afraid to resist or openly disobey any adult male. And so he agreed, feigning delight but secretly miserable and lonely.

He stayed hardly longer than a month, all the time striving to convince the Siler family that he liked the arrangement. Though barely a teenager, young Crockett already had winning manners. Those evenings in the family tavern had exposed him to many a traveler brimming with tales of the road, some of them no doubt told the better for a few drams. Learned young, and practiced and honed in maturing years, easy manners and conviviality lubricated frontier life. It would have been unusual if David had not already acquired some natural bent for storytelling and theatricality. He already had a few experiences of his own to spin into stories—his days on the road, the characters he had seen in the tavern, some of whose speech and expressions he could mimic. Added to the rosy hue of his cheeks and his good honest looks, his genuine personality made him a winning character even at first acquaintance. Despite his unhappiness at Natural Bridge, he would still speak with scarcely concealed pride years later of how thoroughly I got the family all to believe I was fully satisfied. It was a kind of acting. He was playing a character.¹⁴

But when the opportunity came to leave, he took it. He had seen his father pull up stakes in the face of adversity enough times that he felt no compunction about leaving the Silers by stealth rather than facing them with his unhappiness. One Sabbath night, as a winter snow started to fall, he went to bed, but not before bundling his few belongings and his precious dollars. Then he lay awake until halfway through the night, when he stole out of the house and started to trudge through the deepening snow to a tavern several miles distant, where he was to meet some teamsters he knew who were moving south to Knoxville. In their company he traveled some thirty miles until his impatience got the better of the slow progress of the wagons, and he set off alone on foot. Fortunately he did not walk far before a man with several horses overtook him. As before and so many times after, David’s winning manners impressed the horseman enough that he invited the boy to ride one of his animals and accompany him on the road. The miles now passed quickly, and in a few days, when they parted company, David was but a good morning’s walk from his father’s tavern.

It was a happy homecoming, and through the balance of the winter and the two seasons to follow his life was as before—some work, some play, and always learning. Indeed, though Crockett had not yet set foot in a schoolroom, he was already acquiring knowledge. He had traveled the open road and gone distances and seen places that most of his playmates had not. He learned the ways of the road and the wilderness from the teamsters who stopped for a meal and a night at the tavern. He certainly learned from his father. John Crockett may have been a failure at business, but he had at least some rudiments of literacy. Certainly he could sign his name. As a constable he needed to know the rudiments of law, and he would also serve as a magistrate. Even his doomed efforts as a miller and tavern keeper offered lessons he could pass on in the matter of building, of wooden gears and frontier mechanics, of currency and counting and trade. Much of this his sons learned simply by living with him.¹⁵

Yet whatever his other failings as a provider or even as a father, John Crockett must have grasped the value of more formal education, perhaps seeing in it the missing element that left his own efforts so dogged by failure. Schoolteachers of the time were hired by the community, and customarily the parents gave lodging and board as well as a modest income from subscription. As a man of some standing—if minor—in the community, Crockett probably had a hand in hiring Benjamin Kitchen to commence a school nearby in the fall of 1799. Having done that, he naturally decided that his sons should attend.¹⁶

David Crockett, now thirteen, knew nothing more of formal learning than perhaps a few letters. After the first four days in Kitchen’s school, he found himself just acquiring some familiarity with the alphabet when he ran afoul of the school bully and ambushed him with fists the fourth day after class. For some reason Crockett thought that his extracurricular fight would cause him trouble with master Kitchen, and so the next morning, though he set off for school as usual, he spent the day hiding in the woods and then came home at the proper time. Afraid of his father’s wrath, he persuaded his brothers to lie for him and claim he had been in class. The charade continued thereafter until Kitchen sent home a note. Why had David not been in school the past several days? he asked.

The question caught John Crockett at a very bad moment for David. He had been drinking. He yelled for the truant to come to him. I knew very well that I was in a devil of a hobble, David recalled more than thirty years later, "for my father had been taking a few horns, and was in a good condition to make the fur fly."¹⁷ His plea that he feared to face master Kitchen lest he be whipped only prompted John Crockett to growl that there would be whipping aplenty here at home unless he returned to school. When the boy seemed hesitant, his father’s anger erupted. He grabbed a two-year-old hickory stick that was more cudgel than cane, and came at the lad, who quickly fled. There followed a chase, in which David had the advantage of being young and sober. He outdistanced his father, hid in a thicket for a time, and then—hurt, angry, and frightened—went to the home of a friend. One thing he knew now was that he could go neither to the school nor to his home. All that remained to him was the road.

He never suspected how much time would pass before again he crossed his father’s threshold. Wandering seemed to come somewhat naturally to young David, as did hardship. First he hired himself to his friend, Jesse Cheek, for a cattle drive to Virginia. He went back over the road he knew now to Abingdon, on to the Roanoke River crossing, then east to Lynchburg, and on through Charlottesville.

These days before the turn of the century were interesting ones for anyone passing through Charlottesville, for there was the rural seat of the Virginian, Vice-President Thomas Jefferson. He would still have been at his hillside Monticello when David passed through, preparing to return to the capital in Philadelphia for his last session as president of the Senate. Crockett may not have seen him, but Jefferson’s presence was strong in Charlottesville. The term of President John Adams was coming to an end; George Washington had but a few weeks to live; and the influence of their Federalist Party was waning with them. Jefferson would probably be chosen president in a few months, and with him would come a renewed adherence to the Enlightenment and a new commitment to democracy. Yet it would be deceptive, for Jefferson’s was a middle-class democracy, founded on the landed, the educated, and most of all the successful. David Crockett and his kind were not part of the coming Jeffersonianism. All he could do was aspire to it.

The drive ended at Front Royal, 375 miles from where it began, a long trip indeed for a thirteen-year-old on foot. With the herd sold, Crockett started on the road back, this time in company with one of the other drovers. With only a horse between them, which the other never seemed to share, they parted company, and with four dollars in his pocket Crockett continued by himself. The road made for easy acquaintance and alliances, and when Crockett met Adam Myers, he agreed to accompany him even though he was heading north. That errand done, however, Myers promised that he was then returning to Tennessee and would take David with him. The weeks on the road had softened his hurt and his anger but not his fear. I often thought of home, and, indeed, wished bad enough to be there, he later recalled, but he also remembered my father, and the big hickory he carried. He had not forgotten the storm of wrath that ruled John Crockett when last he saw him. I knew my father’s nature so well, that I was certain his anger would hang on him. Better to stay away awhile longer, he thought.¹⁸

One road led to another, though, and none of them seemed to take him home. David’s was a trusting and gullible nature. When not acting he spoke plainly and truthfully, saying what he felt or believed without thought or artifice; and he took others at their word and as a result was often deceived. Moreover his habitual acquiescence in the expectations of adult males—expected of all youths—made it difficult for him to refuse even if he did suspect deceit, and more inclined to run than to stand up for himself. And so, even though often moved to tears by his homesickness, he spent three largely unhappy years as a teamster and vagabond. Myers never seemed to get around to going back to Tennessee, instead making runs to Baltimore while David worked as a day laborer at twenty-five cents a day. In the spring of 1800 he went to Baltimore with Myers, giving the man his little hoard of seven dollars for safekeeping on the journey. Never before had he seen a real city, much less something like the Chesapeake Bay. Crockett went down to the wharf to marvel at the great sailing ships, and when he ventured to walk aboard one he encountered the master of the vessel. The winning way that won him instant friends on the road worked for David on the deck of a schooner as well, and shortly the captain offered him a job and a berth for a voyage to England. At age fourteen or nearly so he would have been a bit old for a cabin boy, but hard labor had made him firm and fit, and his stature, probably no more than a few inches over five feet by then, would suit him well for the cramped lower decks. He could make a good deckhand, and his cheerful manner would always be welcome during the long weeks at sea.

But Myers refused to let him go, and kept him all but confined until they were several days into their return journey, more than once threatening to use his wagon whip on the boy. Finally Crockett simply escaped in the night, taking his clothes but unable to get at his seven dollars. Dejectedly he took to the road, only to encounter yet another in the succession of men who would befriend him. This time Crockett broke down in tears at his misfortune, and the samaritan promised to confront Myers and get his money back. It was to no avail, though, for Myers had already spent it. David moved on with his new friend for a few days, and then set off for Tennessee once more, no longer fearful of his father’s wrath after experiencing the deceit and violence of the larger world. As if to soften his disillusionment with humankind, several wagoneers who heard his story took up a collection among themselves and gave him three dollars for the journey. By then it cannot have escaped David Crockett’s notice that something in him could win the affection and the trust of others.

The money (and his legs) got him just over halfway home, across the Roanoke, before it gave out. He took a month’s job to earn five dollars, and then bound himself by an indenture to work four years for a hatmaker who would provide room and board, some small income, and undoubtedly teach him the hatter’s trade as well. It would be a useful skill to have, make him independent of his father, and perhaps promise a good living as the Tennessee frontier matured and men craved some headgear more sophisticated than animal skins. But the hatter went broke after a year and a half and left David with nothing for his time. All he could do was take a few odd jobs to earn a little money, and then try once more for Tennessee.

The spring rains in 1802 had swelled many of the streams, and when Crockett reached the New River just a few miles after starting, the water ran so rough that no ferryman would cross. Determined not to be stopped, he got the use of a canoe and set off by himself, brave if unwise. The raging current and cold wind carried him two miles downstream and soaked him thoroughly before he reached the other side. His clothing almost froze on him as he walked nearly an hour before he came to a house where he stopped and begged a seat by the fire. Better yet, his host offered a leetle of the creater to warm the inner man. Liquor was nothing new to a tavern keeper’s son and a young man who had been on the high road with the wagoneers. This probably was not David Crockett’s first drink, nor was it to be his last, but it is the only one of his life that he thought significant enough to rhapsodize over in his autobiography thirty years later.

Another ninety miles, and he crossed the line into Tennessee at last, but there he stopped in Sullivan County to visit with an uncle and one of his brothers for several weeks. Finally, as the weather warmed and the days grew longer, he took the road for the final fifty miles to home. He could do it in two days, and well after dark the second evening he saw the familiar Crockett tavern on its slope on the south side of the road. Now the imp in him took over. He had been away for three years, almost. He had surely grown by several inches and filled out. A youthful sprout of whiskers may well have dulled the ruddy cheeks. Would his family know him? He entered and took a place on the fringes of the dim and crowded room of travelers, spoke little, and just watched. When his mother called the guests to the communal table for supper, he sat down, and was just eating when his oldest sister, Betsy, looked hard at him, burst into a smile, and jumped from her stool to grasp his neck, yelling: Here is my lost brother.

Even John Crockett was delighted, and the much-feared birch rod stayed in the corner. The son had traveled widely now, more widely than the father, and had experienced more of the world than any of his brothers. At sixteen he was a man so far as the frontier was concerned. John could not hold him or dictate to him much longer, but although he forgave him, he still expected obedience and one last service. A son’s labor belonged to his father by right until that son went off on his own. The old specter of debt never left John Crockett, as it never would, and now he made a bargain with his son. If David would work off a thirty-six-dollar note due another man, his father would thereafter release him from all responsibility, and as well relieve himself from having to provide for him. Young Crockett agreed and spent the next six months redeeming the note, even though the workplace put him in the objectionable company of coarse men who gambled and drank far too much. Though never in later years a prude, still David Crockett seemed from his early years to carry with him a rude frontier gentility of good manners and relatively chaste speech. He loved a good story, and by now surely told them toe to toe with the older men, but he stopped short of the obscenity common to the road. Certainly he could and did drink, but as with gambling, there was simply never enough money to indulge to regular excess. He had seen enough of the rougher tavern crowd by now to know that this was not the company he craved. Consequently, when his employer asked him to stay on even after the debt was paid, he declined.

Crockett took a job with a Quaker instead, a job that started to earn him some cash of his own. But a few days into the effort the man informed him that he, too, held a note against John Crockett, this one for forty dollars. He suggested that if David would work for him for six months, he would sign the note over to him, in effect making David his father’s creditor. David knew his father too well for that. I was certain enough that I should never get any part of the note, he said later. Nevertheless, perhaps out of guilt for the three years of uncertainty he had put the family through during his disappearance, he agreed, and toiled away until the Quaker presented him with the debt. Then young Crockett went to the Crockett tavern and handed his father the note, not in presentation for payment but as a present, and this time it was John Crockett who broke into tears. The act was more than a gift, however. It was David Crockett’s declaration of independence. There would never be another caning, no more appropriation of his labor, no more fear. His debt to his father, in every sense, was paid. He was nearly seventeen. Now he was a man.

No sooner did Crockett take another job than he decided that it was time for him to take a wife as well. His first infatuation was with the Quaker’s niece, and it hit him powerfully. I have heard people talk about hard loving, he confessed, yet I reckon no poor devil in this world was ever cursed with such hard love as mine has always been, when it came on me.¹⁹ Overcome by his feeling, and no doubt as well inhibited by his humble circumstances, he could barely speak to her. After several false starts he told her how he felt, only to find out that she was already engaged to another.

Though he thought himself heartbroken, still Crockett took it well enough to realize that his prospects for finding a wife—not to mention his prospects in the world—would improve if he had some education. It took more than riding a wagon or walking behind a herd of cattle to make one a man of the world. He needed schooling, and a better effort than he had made of it during those four days several years before. Education cost money, of which he had none, and so Crockett turned to the only currency he had, his labor. He struck a bargain with a schoolmaster to work for him one or two days a week, in exchange for receiving lessons on the other days.

It proved to be a felicitous arrangement. Thanks to his age, Crockett would have been placed with the other older boys, there being no other divisions or grades among the pupils. The master taught them chiefly by repetition of their lessons, aloud, over and over until they knew them by rote, with the result that some called it a blab school. Yet once he mastered the alphabet and the beginnings of a vocabulary, Crockett could find the lessons of some interest. Textbooks were few, but regardless of the age of the intended pupils, they were written for adults, with no differentiation by age or grade. The reading books, such as they were, came from New England, mostly, and were often just compilations of biblical sayings, anecdotal stories about animals, some encyclopedia entries, newspaper articles, and of special interest to Crockett, excerpts from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. The selections taught moral and civic examples, as well as the reading itself, and there was also some elementary mathematics, history, geography, grammar, of course, and even bits of art and music. There was probably also a spelling primer, though spelling in England and America—not yet standardized—was idiosyncratic, its chief goal comprehension rather than uniformity. There being no dictionaries, Crockett, like most other nonuniversity students of his time, learned to spell phonetically, writing as he spoke, and thus unconsciously incorporating his East Tennessee drawl into his written words.²⁰

Crockett later played down his education, but in fact in six months he learned enough of sums and multiplication that he could calculate his own almost constant debt, and he learned to read well enough that in the years ahead he expanded his education on his own. By the measure of his time and place, he was now a literate man, and some considerable distance ahead of his friends and associates in learning. He would have continued his program further but for the now burning desire to have a wife, and quite consciously he shopped about the neighborhood for a suitable mate. He soon found one in Margaret Elder, and paid court to her with much the same application that he invested in his schooling—and nearly as long. By October 1805, with Crockett now nineteen, she accepted his suit and he proudly appeared before the clerk of the court at Dandridge, Jefferson County, to obtain his marriage license.²¹

Nothing seemed to pass easily for young Crockett. With the wedding arrangements set, he took his proudest new possession, a rifle, to a shooting match just five days before the intended nuptials. He shot well at the meet, having a good eye and an apparent natural skill with the weapon, and won the prize of a whole beef, which he sold immediately for five dollars. That only buoyed his step as he walked to Margaret’s home, where he intended to observe the previously neglected formality of asking her parents for their permission to wed. On the way he met her sister, who tearfully told him that he was deceived, and that his betrothed planned to marry another on the morrow. It was the cap-stone of all the afflictions I had ever met with, he confessed. As he sadly turned his face homeward, dejection almost overcame him, and he concluded that I was only born for hardships, misery, and disappointment. For several weeks, in an almost universal experience that at the moment seemed uniquely his own, he neither ate nor slept, unable to free his mind of the torment of his lost love and her deception. It was the worst kind of sickness, he said, a sickness of the heart.²²

But it passed. Indeed, as young hearts heal rapidly, so did his, and within a few months he courted again. At a frolic one evening he met Polly Finley, and I must confess, I was plaguy well pleased with her from the word go. David wooed both mother and daughter, seeing in the former an ally in his campaign. He soon discovered that he had a rival, but Polly preferred young Crockett, and in time, with the mother’s objections being their chief obstacle, they came to an understanding. Once more Crockett went to the court clerk in Dandridge, where on August 12, 1806, now aged twenty, he took out another marriage license. Two days later he and his brothers and a few friends approached the Finley home. In an old frontier custom, he sent the others to the house with an empty jug. If William Finley filled it with drink, it was a sign that David and his wedding party were welcome and the match approved. His friends came back with a brimming container, David sent for the preacher, and the match was made.²³

The couple spent their first few days living with her parents and his, and then, with the wedding gift of two cows with calves, Crockett rented a small farm near Finley Spring on Bay’s Mountain in Jefferson County and commenced making his own way. He quickly came to a sobering realization: Having a wife, I wanted every thing else; and, worse than all, I had nothing to give for it. What he got was the almost immediate start of a family. On July 10, 1807, Polly gave birth to John Wesley, and two years later to William. Polly made them a comfortable home within their meager means, and David could at least feed them from his hunting in the wilderness, but he simply could not provide enough to pay even their rent, much less anything for the necessities they could not make themselves. Years later a friend of the time could only recall Crockett as a poor man. Faced with the problem, he did as his family before him, and as his people had done for generations. He moved on.²⁴

In the next four years the Crocketts moved twice. First, sometime in the fall of 1811, he took them a grueling 150 miles west past Knoxville, across the Tennessee River, over the Cumberland Plateau, and then south to Lincoln County, almost to the Alabama Territory line. There, on the Mulberry fork of the Elk River, he marked his initials on a beech tree for a reference point, and laid out a five-acre claim on state land, built a cabin, and several months later received a warrant for title to the property. The hunting was good in the area, better than in the home he had left, and perhaps Crockett indulged too much his passion for taking the deer and other game, for once more he failed to prosper on the land. He entered a claim for fifteen more acres next to his first holding, but lost both tracts in the end for delinquency on his taxes. By then he had already removed his family anyhow, to Bean’s Creek, a few miles south, and just above the Alabama border. Arriving sometime in 1813, for some reason he chose to call his new home Kentuck, which, given his itinerant nature, might just as well have signaled his next intended destination if this claim did not show profit.²⁵

If ever David Crockett had any awareness of politics or of national affairs on a sphere greater than his immediate neighborhood in these years, he gave no indication, but now outside events compelled his attention. The United States was at war with Great Britain again, as he well knew, but that was a faraway war. However, from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast, the British were enlisting native allies to distract the Americans, capitalizing on relations already strained by the pressure of white westward expansion. Anticipating the need for a preemptive strike, some whites that summer attacked a party of Creek at Burnt Corn Creek in southern Alabama Territory, inaugurating what would be called the First Creek War. The Creek were not long in retaliating. White settlers and a couple of companies of Mississippi volunteers occupied a stockade at Fort Mims, about thirty miles up the Alabama River from Mobile, and on August 30, 1813, the Creek struck by surprise. The whites never even got the gates to the fort closed. After several hours of brutal and largely one-sided fighting, nearly five hundred lay dead in the stockade. No more than fifty escaped to spread the news of the massacre through the shocked frontier. The British might be hundreds of miles away, but now there was war right here on their hearths.

I, for one, had often thought about war, said Crockett in after years, and I did verily believe in my own mind, that I couldn’t fight in that way at all. Unlike many of his peers, David Crockett had no real instinct for fighting. His was a nature too cheerful, too even-tempered. Though certainly he felt the prejudices of his time, he bore no man ill. He preferred fun to feuding, bragging to brawling. But self-defense was something else, and when word of Fort Mims reached Bean’s Creek, he told Polly that he would have to join the local militia. My dander was up, and nothing but war could bring it right again, he told her. Despite all his protestations that he had to go, that it was better to fight and stop the Creek in Alabama than have them appear at his doorstep in Tennessee, she could not accept his leaving her alone in a country still strange and new to her, where she had neither family nor friends. In the end she stopped arguing and wept, then went to her spinning wheel. David Crockett never knew if she accepted his decision or simply resigned herself to it, but for the rest of his life he carried with him the mental portrait of her sad, tear-streaked face as she turned to her housework while he went off to war.²⁶

Early on September 24 he shouldered his rifle and rode the ten miles to Winchester, where the volunteers gathered. There Capt. Francis Jones organized the Tennessee Volunteer Mounted Riflemen. For the rest of his life Crockett would be proud that I was one of the first men that ever crossed the Tennessee river into the Creek war.²⁷ Along with the rest he enlisted for ninety days’ service, and two days later, after getting in a supply of firewood and stores for Polly and the children, Crockett and the company set off south for the war.

Rapidly they rode first to Huntsville and then on to a nearby springs that was to be the rendezvous for several companies of militia that would soon be reorganized into the Second Regiment of Volunteer Mounted Riflemen. In the end almost thirteen hundred of them mustered, to join the cavalry division of Col. John Coffee. Meanwhile in Nashville Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson was organizing the infantry division of militia before bringing it south. He already had some experience, having made a frustrating and fruitless expedition to Natchez, Mississippi, the previous winter, but his standing in Tennessee was undimmed, and he would command the campaign to avenge Fort Mims.

Until Jackson and the infantry arrived, however, the cavalry had to cover Tennessee from hostile incursion and also to find out what the Creek were doing. When a request went out for good woodsmen skilled with the rifle to ride deep into Alabama to seek the foe, Crockett’s captain suggested him, and the next day he and a dozen others set out on their scout. They crossed the Tennessee below Huntsville, then separated into two groups, a major leading one and Crockett detailed to command the other. Within two days they began crossing the paths of small bands of Creek warriors, sometimes missing them by no more than an hour as they made their way southeast toward Ten Islands on the Coosa River. Finally on October 6 he learned of a large band crossing the river, on their way north to meet the advancing Jackson. Crockett and his party rode all night by moonlight the fifty miles or more back to the rendezvous to carry the warning. It was with no little chagrin, then, that Crockett found Colonel Coffee unimpressed by his intelligence, made the worse the next day when a major came in from a scout with much the same news, which Coffee then took seriously. Whether intended or not, the message that Crockett got from Coffee’s attitude was that officers had little or no regard for anything that did not come from a fellow officer. To a poor white like Crockett it was exactly the sort of slight that he expected from the smug, the better educated, the affluent—the classes that did their best to suppress the poor. It was, he said, one of the hateful ways of the world, and he did not forget it.²⁸

The next day Jackson himself arrived, having pushed his command doggedly after getting Coffee’s anxious report of what Crockett and the officer had learned. By then the cavalry had moved down to the Tennessee to watch its crossings, and south, scouting to the headwaters of the Black Warrior River. They saw plenty of sign of recent Creek activity, and once or twice came across their camps only recently vacated. Thanks to the haste with which the militia had mustered and the inefficiency of Jackson’s commissary, none of the volunteers came well supplied. They lived largely on parched corn, and after a few days their meat ran out. Crockett himself volunteered to go into the woods alone to hunt, and one day actually came across a freshly killed and dressed deer carcass, eloquent testimony that the foe were almost within earshot of the main column.

The hardship of the long scout seemed wasted when the volunteers finally discovered that the report of Creek crossing the Coosa several days before had all been mistaken. There was nothing for them to do but go back to Ten Islands. There Coffee’s division camped and built a stockade, Fort Strother, and started sending out scouting parties. Within a few days they learned positively that a band of Creek sat camped at Tallusahatchee, no more than eight or ten miles distant. Coffee immediately mounted the division, nine hundred strong, and sent them out well before dawn on the morning of November 3. They divided into two parties, approaching the camp from opposite sides, and then joined their flanks to surround the still unsuspecting Creek completely.

The fight opened shortly after sunrise, when a company of rangers advanced on the sleeping village and a shout of alarm awoke the foe. At first the Creek saw only the rangers, and rushed out at them as the whites purposely withdrew to their main line. Suddenly the volunteers opened fire, forcing them back into their camps, and then began inexorably to close in on them, tightening a circle from which there was no escape. This was to be the white man’s repayment for Fort Mims, as everyone knew, and Crockett felt no more compunction than the rest at firing into the teeming mass of trapped natives before him. Seeing themselves hopelessly surrounded, about eighty women and children in the camp ran out to surrender themselves, and some were taken alive. But for the rest, once the killing fire started, only their blood could quench the flame. When one woman loosed an arrow that struck a militiaman, Crockett himself felt no hesitation at joining twenty others in answering with a fatal volley. We now shot them like dogs, he recalled without remorse. Two score warriors took shelter in one wooden house, and the volunteers set it alight and burned them alive. He never forgot the image of one boy no more than twelve, a leg and arm broken by rifle fire, trying fruitlessly to crawl away from the blazing hut. Crockett said apparently with no touch of compassion that he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him. Any dead Creek, even a child, redeemed the debt for Fort Mims, and was one more that would never threaten his own home and family. It was a part of the brutal but inevitable law of the frontier.

In the end the massacre—it could hardly be called a battle—left 186 natives dead. Not one adult male escaped. Only five of the volunteers died of their wounds, but without waiting the Tennesseans mounted and rode back to Fort Strother, mindful that there could be more and larger parties of Creek in the vicinity and not wanting to be caught out in the open. Hunger still welcomed them, however, for Jackson’s commissary remained inept at best, and discontent among the volunteers rose in chorus with their grumbling bellies. So hungry were they that the next day they rode back to Tallusahatchee, remembering beef and potatoes in some of the burning houses. Crockett surveyed a battle-ground strewn with bloating and half-burned corpses, but then he and others found a large store of potatoes beneath the ruins of the great house that they had burned with forty warriors inside. Hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had a little rather not, he said, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.²⁹

It gave only a brief respite from starvation, however, and a few days later they boiled and ate beef hides. On November 7 word came that Creek were besieging Fort Talladega, just over thirty miles south of them, and Jackson put his small army on the march in the night. Once again he hoped to surround and annihilate the foe, and divided Coffee’s cavalry into the two wings of his advance, expecting them to swing around the foe and link on the other side. It all worked as before, and with the encirclement complete, Jackson sent two companies of rangers to initiate the fight and lure the Creek into rushing against his lines. But the rangers themselves almost fell into a trap and had to abandon their horses and flee into the fort, whereupon the Creek then turned and charged Jackson’s lines. When one line of riflemen loosed a volley, the Creek fell back in disorder and then rushed another side of the surrounding wall of militia, only to be repelled yet again. Before it was done, well over three hundred of them lay dead, and more would have fallen had they not finally escaped through a gap left by some militia who broke ranks.

Crockett and the rest returned to Fort Strother, and to starvation and discontent. Tallusahatchee and Fort Talladega may have vented their anger at the Creek, but increasingly now they turned it on their own authorities who showed no signs of relieving their distress. Winter’s cold approached, their clothing wore thin, and their mounts approached collapse. Some of the officers importuned Jackson to allow the men to take their horses back to Tennessee to replenish both men and beasts, promising—apparently without consulting their men—that when they returned they would serve out the campaign even beyond their enlistment. Jackson agreed to a two-week furlough, starting November 22, ordering that they rendezvous at Huntsville on December 8 to return to the army. It suited his purpose to have his cavalry fit and equipped for a winter campaign, and at the same time the furlough might quell or at least dampen some of the now mutinous spirit among the volunteers.

Though barely a hundred miles from home, it probably took the weak and weary men and horses several days before Crockett saw the familiar rude cabin at Bean’s Creek. Still he must have had a good two weeks to replenish Polly’s firewood, kill and salt or smoke some more game for her table, and trade or work for enough to purchase some vegetables to fill out her diet after he left again, and grain to refit his horse. He must have eaten ravenously himself. Of course he expected he would not have to be away long when his furlough ended, for his ninety-day enlistment itself would expire by the end of December, and he apparently knew nothing of his officers’ promise. What he could not expect was that his active service was already over for the time being.

Back at Fort Strother the unrest and incipient mutiny finally erupted when infantry volunteers confronted Jackson himself and announced that they were leaving, regardless of their unexpired enlistment. The general single-handedly quelled the insubordination, though it was a temporary victory. Early in December some of their enlistments actually did expire, and he could not hold them longer. Just as Crockett and other mounted men returned to Huntsville on December 8 for their rendezvous, large groups of these released volunteers passed through, and the infection for home spread to Coffee’s men. Crockett and others reasoned that with their own enlistment expiring December 24, just over two weeks hence, it was pointless to proceed. Some of the men refused to go any farther toward the Tennessee, while several hundred did cross the river but halted immovably on the other side, Crockett probably among them. Many turned ugly, plundering the army grain supplies and frightening the local population. Given his mild nature, Crockett was not likely to have been among the riotous element, but he shared their enthusiasm for going home enlistment or none. The promise to serve out the campaign after their furloughs meant nothing to them for they had not given it, and now they demanded to return to Tennessee. Coffee drew them up in formation and harangued them about their duty, reading letters from Jackson reminding them of their pledge. The general called them deserters and luke-warm patriots indeed, who, in the moment of danger and necessity, can halt in the discharge of their duty, to argue and quibble, strong words hardly calculated to endear him to them. Many a man who would come to hate Jackson dated his animosity from those days. A minister even appealed to their duty to their God and their honor, but it availed him nothing. A few officers and half a dozen enlisted men agreed to go on to Fort Strother, but all the rest, Crockett certainly included, stuck to their demand to be dismissed, and so they were.³⁰ A few weeks later, on December 24, Private Crockett was discharged and paid $65.59. Through a calculating error, he was actually underpaid six cents, but since this was already more money than David Crockett had ever seen in his life, he probably neither noticed nor cared.³¹

However reasonable it may have seemed at the time, Crockett later took no pride in his action, and in future years—with very definite purpose—he distorted the story of what happened that December. A sense of guilt may well have begun to plague him not long after he returned to Polly, as he heard stories of the battles at Emuckfau Creek and Enotachopco Creek, and the decisive battle of the campaign at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa in March 1814. The Creek War was won, and he had not been there to take part. When he gathered with his neighbors in the local tavern to trade war stories, he could hardly compete by matching his participation in two one-sided massacres with their tales of winning the war. Yet there was his family to tend, a spring crop to plant, and always hunting to be done. By the fall, however, his shame, or his adventurous spirit, the enthusiasm of the moment, or the need for more hard cash propelled him once more into the war.

The authorities called for volunteers to form an army to march south and drive the British out of Pensacola, and despite Polly’s entreaties David stepped forward to enlist on September 28 as a mounted gunman. Perhaps because of his previous experience as a scout—and in spite of his behavior in December—he was soon raised to