David Crockett (15 page)

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

The story, as Crockett heard it, was that Bean had delivered a cargo of his handcrafted guns to buyers in New Orleans, where he then remained for two years, engaging in cock fighting, horse racing, foot races, and other pleasures.
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When he got back to Jonesboro and walked into his cabin, Bean was shocked to find his wife, Rosamond, nursing an infant. Outraged at this blatant act of infidelity, the swaggering Bean swigged down some fresh whiskey and decided to mark the baby so he could then distinguish it from the eight children that he had fathered. Bean yanked out his hunting knife and sliced off the baby’s ears. For such a horrific deed, Bean was fined, imprisoned, and branded on the palm of his hand, as was the custom. To show his distain for such treatment, Bean bit out the brand from his hand and spit the flesh on the floor.
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Though divorce was an infrequent occurrence in those days, the stricken Rosamond soon divorced Bean, who managed to escape prison and, because the authorities feared him, remained at large. While free, Bean let it be known that he would get revenge on the seducer responsible for getting his wife pregnant. He assaulted the man’s brother and beat him unmercifully, but was still free when the matter came to the attention of a young judge who demanded that the sheriff serve the arrest warrant and bring the culprit to him. The sheriff tried and failed, even attempting to assemble a posse to help apprehend Bean, but he could not enlist any volunteers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no lack of volunteers from jingoistic Franklin County when the Creek Indian War broke out in 1813 and became intertwined with the War of 1812. One of the first local men to step forward was David Crockett. “I was living ten miles below Winchester when the Creek War commenced,”
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Crockett remembered. The call to arms that the twenty-seven-year-old Crockett answered in those last days of the summer of 1813 resulted from news that flashed across the frontier of the killing and scalping of more than four hundred settlers at Fort Mims, a stockade in what was then southern Mississippi Territory, about thirty miles north of the coastal town of Mobile.

The tragic Creek War that resulted was in reality a Creek civil war between opposing factions of the tribe. On one side were the Creeks from the lower towns of eastern Alabama and Georgia, who, as a means of survival, had turned away from most of their traditional beliefs and assimilated into the white culture. Many of them were of mixed blood and over time had adopted the white settlers’ religion, language, manner of dress, and lifestyle. They farmed and raised livestock like the whites, and some Creeks acquired their own black slaves to work the land, much as other southeastern tribes, particularly the Cherokees, also were doing.

The Creeks from the upper towns in south-central Alabama, however, were not about to give up the ways of their ancestors. They underwent a religious revitalization that inspired them to retain their culture and identity. These staunchly traditional Creeks despised their tribes-men in the lower towns. About the time that Crockett and his family moved westward out of east Tennessee, the hatred between the Creek factions intensified when the famous Shawnee leader, Tecumseh, a symbol of courage respected and revered by his followers and many of his enemies, traveled from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Tecumseh was seeking support for his vision of a vast Indian coalition that would fight to recover the many lands stolen from the tribes through the dubious treaties white men had crafted and broken ever since their arrival in North America.

The imposing Tecumseh had no success convincing the Choctaws and Chickasaws to join his confederacy against further white expansion, so he turned to the Creeks.
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In October 1811, he attended a Creek council meeting along with members of other southeastern tribes. The charismatic Tecumseh implored the gathering to unite and resist any further American aggression. His eloquence touched many there, especially younger warriors with a deep sense of pride for their people and land.

“Let the white race perish!” he bluntly told them, espousing the kind of bellicose language that spawned similar invective from the frontiersmen. “They seize your land; they corrupt your women; they trample on the bones of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven! Back—aye, back to the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings—destroy their stock—slay their wives and children, that the very breed may perish. War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!”
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When one of the powerful chiefs in attendance resisted and challenged the call to action, an angry Tecumseh made an ominous promise: “Your blood is white…. You do not believe the Great Spirit sent me. You shall believe it. I will leave directly and go straight to Detroit. When I get there I will stamp my foot upon the ground and shake down every house in Tookabatcha.”
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Just as Tecumseh had vowed, two months later there was a tremendous rumble from deep within the earth that toppled every dwelling in the village of Tookabatcha. This put all the people into a complete state of shock, and they cried, “Tecumseh has got to Detroit! We can feel the shake of his foot!”
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The powerful Tecumseh may have been stamping the ground at Detroit, but he had some help from a coincidental and catastrophic natural occurrence. Between December 16, 1811, and late April 1812, a series of devastating earthquakes shook the Mississippi Valley and beyond when more than two thousand tremors, some of Old Testament proportions, rocked the land.
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Eventually the quakes were called the New Madrid Earthquakes because tiny New Madrid, in the boot-heel region of what was to be named Missouri, was the village closest to the epicenter. It was estimated that the tremors affected more than a million and a half square miles, making whole towns disappear, swallowing up untold numbers of people, and even causing the Mississippi to reverse course and flow backward for several hours.
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Between the shocks, people heard the moans of the dying, the bleating of animals, and the screeching of birds. The air was clogged with a thick vapor that smelled like sulfur. Dazed survivors of the initial tremors believed the end of the earth had come and the gates of hell were opening.

The earthquakes were so powerful that they were felt by people in all directions—in New York, New Orleans, Canada, and on the western fringes of the Missouri River. President James Madison claimed that he was tossed from his bed in Washington by the initial shock. It was said that the catastrophic quakes stopped clocks in Boston and set bells ringing in Virginia.
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If people from so many locales experienced the shocks, Crockett certainly had to have felt them at his home near the border of Tennessee and Mississippi Territory (Alabama). But he never made mention of it, even though this natural disaster would come to have quite an impact on Crockett. Besides helping to spur on traditional Creeks to war (because they perceived that Tecumseh’s prediction had come true), the earthquakes created a remarkable lake, twenty-five miles long and from one-half to eight miles in width on the Tennessee side of the Mississippi River.
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Later named Reelfoot Lake, this body of water sat untouched for many years after Chickasaw Indians and the few white settlers living there vanished due to the many quakes. During that time the area became a paradise for hunters and fishermen; it would later become known as “the land of the shakes.”
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Throughout 1812 raids and reprisals for massacres took place between militant Creeks and the “Friendly” Creeks siding with the Americans, thus widening the divide within the tribe. The Upper Creeks, called Red Sticks because of the bright red war clubs they carried, were determined to halt further white encroachment. While these Red Sticks were proud of these wooden clubs, which had come to symbolize the traditional Creek warriors, they also knew that more powerful arms were needed in order for them to triumph over their enemies.
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In July 1813, Peter McQueen, a mixed-blood Creek leader, and a party of his Red Sticks journeyed to Pensacola, in Spanish-controlled Florida, to purchase guns and gunpowder from the Spanish governor.
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On July 27, during their return trip to the upper villages in Alabama, at the time Mississippi Territory, they paused at some springs near a small settlement called Burnt Corn, on the Old Wolf Trail. After a meal, the Red Sticks were resting on the creekbank when 180 militiamen hiding in the surrounding forest ambushed them. The force of white and mixed bloods swept down on the camp, scattering the horses and sending the startled Red Sticks fleeing into the canebrakes. The attackers became so carried away with looting the camp that they dropped their guard, allowing the Red Sticks to regroup and launch a counterattack, which scattered the Americans and sent them running in full retreat.
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Known as the Battle of Burnt Corn, it was a victory for the outnumbered Creeks. The outraged Red Sticks considered this encounter to be a declaration of war by the American settlers.

Seeking revenge, the Red Sticks turned their attention to Fort Mims, located at the junction of the Tombigbee and Alabama rivers, just north of Mobile. This was the stockade where the militia who had been humiliated at Burnt Corn took refuge, along with many other white and mixed blood families fearful of Red Stick retaliatory strikes sure to follow. Their fear was well founded. The Red Stick attack on the flimsy fortification built around the home of wealthy mixed-blood merchant Samuel Mims came August 30, 1813.
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The assault was led by the son of a Scot trader and Creek mother, who had been born William Weatherford but took the name Red Eagle. He had been greatly influenced by the inspiring message of Tecumseh when the Shawnee chieftain said:

Tecumseh proved unsuccessful in his effort to form a united Indian coalition. He died in Canada on October 5, 1813, fighting on the British side against his old adversary William Henry Harrison in the Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh did, however, die knowing of the events that transpired at Fort Mims.

On that sweltering August day, Red Eagle carried the words of Tecumseh in his heart as a war party of a thousand Red Sticks descended on Fort Mims. After easily gaining entry into the ramshackle stockade, the Red Sticks systematically slaughtered as many as five hundred men, women, and children. “Every Indian was provided with a gun, war club, and a bow and arrow pointed with iron spikes,” recalled Dr. Thomas Holmes, who was able to escape by chopping a hole through the stockade wall from inside a cabin during a lull in the slaughter. “With few exceptions they were naked; around the waist was drawn a girdle from which was tied a cow’s tail running down the back and almost dragging the ground. It is impossible to imagine people so horribly painted. Some were painted half red and half black. Some were adorned with feathers. Their faces were painted so as to show their terrible contortions.”
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So horrific was the carnage that even Red Eagle tried to rein in the massacre, but to no avail. The avenging Red Sticks were overwhelmed by too many memories of mistreatment at the hands of the white Americans. This meant that no quarter could be given to anyone except for some of the black slaves taken as part of the spoils of war.

An American army officer who led the detachment dispatched to bury the dead was sickened by what they found. “Indians, negroes, white men, women and children lay in one promiscuous ruin. All were scalped, and the females of every age were butchered in a manner which neither decency nor language will permit me to describe. The main building was burned to ashes, which were filled with bones. The plains and woods were covered with dead bodies.”
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The premeditated Fort Mims massacre spread fear and panic across the frontier and left the entire nation in shock. Yet for the hawkish Tennesseans and their white neighbors in Mississippi Territory, particularly the land speculators, this horrific event was seen as just the impetus needed to escalate an all-out war of attrition against the Creeks. The vivid accounts from Fort Mims survivors, some of which described pregnant women who had “their unborn infants cut from the womb” and laid by their sides, so inflamed the passions of the white population that soon a war cry thundered across the frontier—“Remember Fort Mims!”
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