David Crockett (39 page)

10
Shackford,
David Crockett: The Man and the Legend
, 5.

11
Austin P. Foster,
Counties of Tennessee, A Reference of Historical and Statistical Facts for Each of Tennessee’s Counties
(Nashville: Department of Education, State of Tennessee, 1923. Reprinted by The Overmountain Press, 1998), 14. The county was named in honor of General Nathanael Greene, the Rhode Islander who played a key role in the American victories against the British in the South.

12
Ramsey,
Annals of Tennessee
, 121. The Crockett cabin was located near the confluence of the Big Limestone and the Nolichucky within a large plot of land known as Brown’s Purchase, after Jacob Brown, an itinerant merchant from South Carolina, who had purchased it from the Cherokees with a load of trade goods.

13
Shackford,
David Crockett: The Man and the Legend
, 5.

14
Ibid., 6.

15
Ibid., 33, 34, 431, n. 17, n. 19.

16
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

17
Arnow,
Seedtime
, 194. Known as “Little John” by the Indians he fought, Sevier, of French Huguenot descent, also was called “the handsomest man in Tennessee.”

18
Ramsey,
Annals of Tennessee
, 386–87.

19
Ibid. Greene County became a bastion of support for the State of Franklin—one of the great political experiments on the eighteenth-century frontier—and the capital was established at Greeneville, founded in the early 1780s. John Crockett took an active part in meetings and signed various documents and petitions pertaining to the State of Franklin.

20
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

21
Ramsey,
Annals of Tennessee
, 517–18.

22
Ibid.

23
Ibid., 659.

24
Crockett,
Narrative
, 18–20.

25
Stanley J. Folmsbee,
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee
by David Crockett, A Facsimile Edition with an Introduction and Annotations by James A. Shackford and Stanley J. Folmsbee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 19.

26
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

SIX • A BOY’S LEARNING

1
Swann, “Early Life & Times.” Greene County Deed Book, vol. 3, 320, November 27, 1792, John Crockett from St of NC 197 acres Stogdons Fork, Lick Creek, Grant #1243.

2
Alice Daniel,
Log Cabins of the Smokies
(Gatlinburg, TN: Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association, 2000), 3.

3
Crockett,
Narrative
, 20.

4
Fred Brown, “The Stoneciphers,”
Knoxville News-Sentinel
, September 22, 1996. The Stonecipher family had come to America from Germany by way of Rotterdam in the mid-1700s. They were hired by the governor of Virginia to cut stone for buildings in the expanding Tidewater lands and in 1777 the family moved to the new frontier that would become Tennessee.

5
Ibid.

6
Crockett,
Narrative
, 21.

7
Brown, “Stoneciphers.”

8
Ibid.

9
Crockett,
Narrative
, 21.

10
Brown, “Stoneciphers.” Absalom and Sarah Stonecipher raised ten children. When Absalom died at the age of eighty-two in 1851, he had outlived David Crockett by fifteen years.

11
Kay K. Moss,
Southern Folk Medicine, 1750–1820
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 2, 27.

12
Ibid., 8. For example, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a renowned Philadelphia physician, knew enough to counsel his aspiring students to seek out practitioners of domestic medicine. “When you go abroad always take a memorandum book and whenever you hear an old woman say such and such herbs are good, or that a compound makes a good medicine or ointment, put it down, for, gentlemen, you may need it.” Before his death in 1813, Rush was professor of the practice of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, America’s preeminent medical school at the time.

13
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

14
Michal Strutin,
Gristmills of the Smokies
(Gatlinburg, TN: Great Smoky Mountains National History Association, 2000), 3.

15
Ibid., 7.

16
A millstone believed to have been removed from the site of the Crockett gristmill destroyed in the 1794 flood was eventually donated to the Crockett Tavern Museum in Morristown, TN, where it can still be seen.

17
Crockett,
Narrative
, 21.

18
From the Crockett Tavern and Pioneer Museum files. Swann, “Early Life & Times.

19
Jones,
Crockett Cousins
, 39: Grant of 300 acres in Jefferson County, TN, to John Crockett, April 14, 1792. Estle P. Muncy,
People and Places of Jefferson County
(Rogersville, TN: East Tennessee Printing Co., 1994), 3, 5–8. Formed by Territorial Governor William Blount in 1792 and bounded by the French Broad and Holston rivers, the county was named for Thomas Jefferson. The following year Dandridge, established in honor of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, the wife of President Washington, was named the county seat. Mossy Creek, named for the profusion of long, vividly green moss fronds waving in the currents of the stream, was first settled in the 1780s. The community retained its name for almost 120 years, until 1901, when it became Jefferson City

20
William Douglas Henderson and Jimmy W. Claborn,
Hamblen County: A Pictorial History
(Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Company, 1995), 85.

21
Crockett,
Narrative
, 22.

22
Shackford,
David Crockett: The Man and the Legend
, 7.

SEVEN • COMING OF AGE

1
Warren Moore,
Mountain Voices: A Legacy of the Blue Ridge and Great Smokies
(Chester, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 1988), 39.

2
Shackford,
David Crockett: The Man and the Legend
, 7.

3
Henderson and Claborn,
Hamblen County
, 85. A development of private residences was built on the 1,952-foot-high Crockett Ridge starting in the early 2000s.

4
Crockett,
Narrative
, 22.

5
June 14, 1797, Bent Creek Day Book, May 1796–June 5, 1800.

6
Crockett,
Narrative
, 22–23.

7
Wallace L. McKeehan, Sons of DeWeitt Colony Texas, 1997–2006, The Sylar Family, www.tamu.edu/ccbn/mckstorysylarframe.htm. His family surname means “ropemaker” in German. It was spelled a variety of ways in America, including Sylar, Seiler, Silor, and Siler, the spelling used by David’s new employer. In 1793, Siler married fourteen-year-old Jane Hartley, and they established themselves near the home of her father, Peter Hartley, in Rockbridge County, VA.

8
Ibid. The famed Natural Bridge formed an arch that was sacred to Indian tribes and one of the wonders of the new world for European visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

9
Crockett,
Narrative
, 23.

10
Ibid., 23–24.

11
Ibid., 24.

12
Ibid., 24–25.

13
Ibid., 25–26.

14
Ibid., 29.

15
Ibid., 29–30.

16
Ibid., 30.

17
Ibid., 32.

18
Ann K. Blomquist, ed.,
Cheek’s Cross Roads, Tennessee Store Journal, 1802–1807
(Baltimore: Gateway Press, 2001), ix.

EIGHT • THE ODYSSEY

1
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

2
Extracted from files of the Berkeley County Historical Society, Martinsburg, West Virginia.

3
Crockett,
Narrative
, 32.

4
Ibid., 33.

5
Ibid.

6
Ibid., 34.

7
Ibid., 35.

8
Ibid. Perhaps the horses pulling the wagon did see a ghost, as Crockett humorously suggested. Elliott City, MD, formerly named Elliott’s Mill, has been called the most haunted small town in the state and one of the most haunted spots on the eastern seaboard.

9
Ibid., 36–37.

10
Ibid., 37.

11
Ibid., 38.

12
Ibid., 39.

13
Ibid., 39–40.

14
James Strefhan Johnson III, “The Evolution of an American Small Town,” master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2004, 18. A warrant was issued for Boone’s arrest, but by then he had moved on. To this day the document is intact at the courthouse.

15
Shackford,
David Crockett: The Man and the Legend
, 10.

16
Ibid.

17
Crockett,
Narrative
, 40.

18
Ibid., 40–41.

19
Ibid., 41.

20
Ibid., 42.

21
Ibid.

22
Ibid., 42–43.

NINE • RISE ABOVE

1
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

2
Lareine Warden Clayton,
Stories of Early Inns and Taverns of the East Tennessee Country
(Nashville: National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Tennessee, 1995), 85. The costliest spirit at the time was wine, at ten cents for a half pint, the same price as a full dinner.

3
Crockett,
Narrative
, 45.

4
Ibid.

5
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

6
Ibid.

7
Ibid.

8
John and Margaret Thornbrough Canaday Family, www.freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mygerman. In later years, Lost Creek Meeting became a station on the Underground Railroad, helping runaway slaves find freedom.

9
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

10
Ibid.

11
Crockett,
Narrative
, 46.

12
Ibid., 46–47.

13
Ibid., 47.

14
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

15
Ibid.

16
Bent Creek Baptists Church Minutes, Saturday, February 4, 1803. The baptism took place on Samuel Riggs’s property.

TEN • LOVESICK

1
Crockett,
Narrative
, 47.

2
Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

3
Crockett,
Narrative
, 47–48.

4
Ibid., 48.

5
Ibid., 48–49.

6
Ibid., 49.