American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (16 page)

The short second session adjourned on August 24, and Crockett went home immediately and wasted no time collecting his family and striking out to his new claim on Rutherford’s Fork. “I took my family and what little plunder I had,” Crockett recalled, “and moved to where I had built my cabin.” It would have been a long, slow, cold, and uncomfortable 150-mile trek, burdened as they were with belongings and young children. They arrived in the Obion country in late October 1822. Crockett’s hired man, Flavius Harris, had kept things in order, and Crockett and the boys helped to bring in the last of the corn crop they’d planted the previous spring. Once settled in the cabin, Crockett grew excited about the hunting opportunities again. The region he had chosen could not have been any richer in game, any more suited to his favorite pursuit. “I found bear very plenty, and indeed, all sorts of game and wild varmints.” He hunted hard and long all autumn and into early winter, filling his larder with venison and fowl, and though still far from financially flush, he would have been somewhat content with the knowledge that he was providing for his family. He had to resort to selling wolf hides for any real income during the difficult early transition to the Obion country.

Just before Christmas 1822, Crockett ran out of the gunpowder he needed for hunting, but also necessary for the tradition of firing “Christmas guns,” a common regional celebration. Crockett remembered that a brother-in-law, who lived on the opposite bank of Rutherford’s Fork some six miles west, had brought him a keg of powder but Crockett had yet to bring it to his own house. Despite the biting-cold temperatures and recent winter storms, Crockett determined to go after the powder. He later admitted that it was a foolhardy undertaking, with the river over a mile wide in places he’d be forced to ford. The more sensible Elizabeth argued vehemently that he should not attempt such a journey under these circumstances, but Crockett explained that they needed the powder since they were running out of meat. Elizabeth pointed out that they might just as well starve as for David to “freeze to death or get drowned,” either of which was likely if he went. Stubborn as always, Crockett dressed in his thickest and warmest “woolen wrappers,” and moccasins, tying up a dry set of “clothes and shoes and stockings” and against Elizabeth’s entreaties, off he went into the cold, snow swirling around him and collecting in deep drifts. He would later concede that it was a questionable idea, adding that “I didn’t before know how much any body could suffer and not die. This, and some of my other experiments with water, learned me something about it.”

Crockett plowed through ankle-deep snow until he reached the river, which gave him pause: “It looked like an ocean,” he remembered, and was frozen over, glazed with a thin veneer of ice. Undaunted, he waded right in and crossed a long channel, walking in places over downed logs until he came to a large slough, all the while holding his gun and dry clothes above his head and out of the water. Logs he remembered crossing while out hunting were now submerged, and he was forced to wade armpit-deep, then nearly neck-deep. Then he cut saplings to lay down and crawl across sections too deep to wade. He began to lose feeling in his feet and legs, and after crossing a small island in the river he came to another slough, this one spanned by a floating log he figured he could walk over. The log bobbled in the freezing stream and about halfway across Crockett lost his balance and the log rotated, tossing him and completely submerging him. He hurried as much as he could and fought his way to the higher ground, all his limbs now nearly useless as he pulled off his wet clothes right there on the stream bank and struggled frantically into his dry kit. “I got them on,” he recalled, “but my flesh had no feeling in it.”

He understood the dire nature of his situation, and knew that getting warm was his only way out. He attempted to run to get some blood pumping, but “couldn’t raise a trot for some time.” He staggered on, zombie-like, unable to step more than one foot forward at a time, and in this way he lurched and limped five miles to his brother-in-law’s place, near-dead and dreaming of fire. It was growing dark when he finally knocked feebly on the door, and the family let him in and warmed him slowly back to life in front of the fire and gave him horns of whiskey. The next day dawned bitter cold, snow drifts blowing into cornices along the river, and Crockett agreed to wait out his return. He knew that the river would be freezing over, but doubted its ability to bear his weight. Crockett used the down time to hunt, killing two deer for his in-laws, and the next day chasing after a “big he-bear” until nightfall but failing to bag him. Finally, on the third day, though it remained painfully cold, Crockett decided that he had to get back to his family, who were without food. He “determined to get home to them, or die a-trying.”

The river had frozen over more completely, but as he had feared, not solidly enough to hold him, and before long he had broken through the ice up to his waist. He wielded his tomahawk as an icebreaker before him, hacking as he pushed on. Intermittently the ice would bear his weight, and he crawled those frozen distances until he broke through again, completely submerging himself but holding the powder keg dry above the water. He was now partially frostbitten, clearly hypothermic, and bordering on delirious, and he knew he was in trouble:

By this time I was nearly frozen to death, but I saw all along before me where the ice had been fresh broke, and I thought it must be a bear straggling about in the water. I therefore fresh primed my gun, and, cold as I was, determined to make war on him, if we met. But I followed the trail until it lead me home, and I then found out it had been made by my young man that lived with me, who had been sent by my distressed wife to see, if he could, what had become of me, for they all believed I was dead. When I got home I wasn’t quite dead, but mighty nigh it; but I had my powder, and that was what I went for.
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Though Elizabeth was understandably growing weary of his stubbornness, his near-death experiences, and the constant threat of losing a second husband, she also knew that he had to hunt, both for himself and to keep them in food and furs. Crockett would have measured his own self-worth in part by his hunting prowess, and the very next day he set out for bear, responding to a dream he’d had about a violent battle with one, and viewing it as a sign, adding that “In bear country, I never knowed such a dream to fail.”

He went to likely ground “above the hurricane,” taking with him three dogs, and heading six miles down Rutherford’s Fork and then some four miles over to the main Obion. Sleet drove down in heavy slants across the iron-gray skies, and “the bushes were all bent down, and locked together with ice,” making the going cold and difficult. He was soon warmed by the flush of gobbling turkeys, and he brought down two of the largest, and slung them heavily over his shoulders and continued crashing through the cane. Eventually the birds grew too heavy to carry so he stopped to rest, and just then his oldest hound sniffed about a log, then raised his head to the sky and hollered out baying. Then he bolted, and the other dogs followed, with Crockett running hard behind, the turkeys a mass of feathers and wings and necks dangling and swaying. Soon the dogs were well out of sight, and Crockett could only follow the faint sounds of their barking and baying deep into the thickets.

He finally found them barking up a tree, and he laid down his turkeys and readied to fire on the bear, but when he looked up there was nothing there. The dogs bolted, and when he caught them they were barking up an empty tree again, and he grew so frustrated he vowed to pepper the dogs with shot the next time he got close enough, figuring they were baying at the old scent of turkeys. He ran hard to catch them and finally reached a break in the cover, a big open meadow, and up ahead of his dogs he saw “in and about the biggest bear that ever was seen in America.” The bear was so big and black and frightening that it resembled an enraged bull, and Crockett understood that he was so large that the dogs had been hesitant to attack him, which explained their curious behavior. Crockett quickly hung the gobblers in a nearby tree, and, flushed full of adrenaline, he “broke like a quarter horse after my bear, for the sight of him had put new springs in me.” By the time he managed to get near the dogs and the escaping bear they had entered a deep thicket, and Crockett was slowed to a crawl, as the stuff was too low and tangled to walk through.

Finally, Crockett broke through to see the bear ascending a giant black oak, and he scrambled to within eighty yards of the enraged but frightened creature. Breathing heavily with a mixture of fear and excitement, Crockett primed his rifle, leveled on the great black bear’s breast, and fired. “At this he raised one of his paws and snorted loudly.” Crockett knew full well that a massive black bear, angered and injured, was an extremely dangerous animal, so he reloaded as fast has he could, aimed once more, and fired. “At the crack of my gun he came tumbling down, and the moment he touched the ground, I heard one of my best dogs cry out.” Crockett brandished his tomahawk in one hand, a big butcher-knife in his other, and ran to within a few yards of the bear, which then released his dog and cast his wild eyes on Crockett. Crockett backed off, grabbed his gun again, loaded nervously and quickly, and put a third ball in the bear, this time killing him.

Crockett slumped down and surveyed the bear and could not believe the size of it. He’d need help getting him out of there for sure, so he left the bear and “blazed a trail,” cutting saplings as he went to show him the way back. He arrived home and enlisted his brother-in-law and another man to go with him to bring in the bear. Returning to the kill at dark, they built a fire and butchered the animal. Crockett reckoned it was the second largest bear he ever killed, weighing about 600 pounds, and by now, warmed by the fire and the blood lust of this kill still in his throat and mouth, the trek to retrieve his gunpowder seemed justified. He also noted with some humor, using a phrase he might well have coined, that “a dog might sometimes be doing a good business, even when he seemed to be barking up the wrong tree.”

Crockett devoted the remainder of that winter to the canebrakes, hunting long hours with his dogs and neighbors and occasionally making the forty-mile trek to Jackson to sell wolf, deer, and bear hides for the few dollars they would bring. And while his family needed any extra money his hunting could generate, his prowess afield transcended monetary value: on the frontier, one’s self-worth was measured by one’s ability in the hunt, in what a man could bring down with his gun—whether animal or enemy, and in the field, and as a marksman, David Crockett was peerless. Crockett was becoming not just a formidable hunter but a legendary one, and he would later boast of killing 105 bears in less than a year. Many of the pelts he sold, and much of the meat he used, or shared with family and neighbors. Far and wide throughout the South through the frontier grapevine of storytelling his name became synonymous with successful backwoods life. These bear-hunting tales followed the ancient storytelling motif in which the hero confronts a life-threatening adversary and slays it. His own tales of these adventures illustrate a finely tuned skill, the tall tale, the hyperbolic boasting demanded of the hunter and the hero.
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He may have been only vaguely aware of it, but David Crockett was in the process of manufacturing the myth and legend that would live long after him.

Crockett’s hunts proved so successful that winter that by February, as he put it, he “had on hand a great many skins,” and he set out with John Wesley for Jackson, where he sold the hides and did well enough (wolf “scalps” going for three dollars apiece at the time) to purchase provisions, like sugar, coffee, salt, and more lead and powder for hunting, that might take him through to spring. While in town, Crockett ran into a few of his soldier friends from the war, and he decided that rather than return straight away, he’d take a few horns with the boys.

While whooping it up in a local tavern, Crockett became acquainted with three legislative candidates, among them a Dr. William E. Butler, a nephew by marriage to Andrew Jackson. With Butler were Duncan McIver and Major Joseph Lynn, and the three of them would be running against one another in the coming election. Dr. Butler was, among other things, the town commissioner of Jackson; he was quite influential in the area, especially given his connection to General Andrew Jackson. McIver had been among the earliest settlers in the area, and all three men were known politicos, men of high standing and notoriety in the region.
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During the course of the evening it was suggested, in what Crockett suspected was a joke against him, that he ought to run, too. Crockett pointed out that he lived “forty miles from any white settlement, and had no thought of becoming a candidate at the time,”
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and the next day he and John Wesley headed home.

Just a week or two later a friend arrived at Crockett’s house with a copy of the
Jackson Pioneer,
which contained an article that announced Crockett’s candidacy. Crockett immediately assumed, his insecurity flushing his cheeks even redder than they usually were, that he was being made fun of, and he said as much to Elizabeth: “I said to my wife that this was all a burlesque on me, but I was determined to make it cost the man who had put it there at least the value of the printing, and of the fun he wanted at my expense.” Riled and testy, Crockett hired an able young farmhand to help Elizabeth, and he set out electioneering, discovering quite quickly that his reputation preceded him. People were talking of Crockett the bear hunter, even referring to him reverently as “the man from the cane.”

Butler, McIver, and Lynn were politically savvy, and they understood that they’d have a better chance working together than running against one another, so in March they held a caucus to decide which of the three would be best suited to oppose Crockett, settling on Dr. Butler as the man for the job. That Butler’s wife was Andrew Jackson’s niece likely played some role in the decision, but Butler was also well educated, articulate, and had the money to sustain a serious campaign. Crockett later admitted that it would be a tough race, and that Butler was a smart and worthy opponent: “The doctor was a clever fellow, and I have often said he was the most talented man I ever run against for any office.” Knowing the odds he was facing, Crockett would have to resort to the most creative campaign tactics he could summon, playing off his affability, his growing reputation as a backwoods character, and his uncanny ability to give voters exactly what they wanted to hear. He determined to exploit his authenticity as a man of the people against his opponents’ aristocratic background, hoping the people would be able to relate to him more easily than to Butler.