David Crockett (6 page)
Authors: Michael Wallis
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Adventurers & Explorers, #Political, #Historical
T
HIS IS NOT ANOTHER
straightforward chronological biography of Davy Crockett, nor is it a regurgitation of the many myths and lies perpetuated about Crockett over the years. Instead this book is for those people interested in learning the truth—or at least as much as can be uncovered—about the historical and fictional Crockett, and how the two often became one. I hope that readers will gain some new historical insight into the man and how he captured the imagination of his generation and later ones as well.
In the course of researching and writing this book, I came to know David Crockett. I scoured all the places he lived and journeyed—from throughout the breadth of his native Tennessee to Washington, D.C., and cities of the northeast and, finally, to Texas, where he spent but a few months before his much mythologized death at the Alamo. I learned about the man’s accomplishments and shortcomings, discovering that the Davy Crockett created by Walt Disney in 1954 was definitely not the David Crockett who actually lived, and that much of the distortion of truth about Crockett began in his own lifetime and only increased after his death.
The authentic David Crockett was first and foremost a three-dimensional human being—a person with somewhat exaggerated hopes and well-checked fears, a man who had, as we all do, both good points and bad points. He was somewhat idiosyncratic, possessed of often unusual views, prejudices, and opinions that governed how he chose to live his life. Crockett could be calculating and self-aggrandizing, but also as valiant and, indeed, as resourceful as anyone who roamed the American frontier. As a man, he was both authentic and contrived. He was wise in the ways of the wilderness and most comfortable when deep in the woods on a hunt, yet he also could hold his own in the halls of Congress, a fact that distinguished him from so many other frontiersmen. Remarkably, he enjoyed fraternizing with men of power and prestige in the fancy parlors of Philadelphia and New York. Crockett was, like none other, a nineteenth-century enigma. He fought under Andrew Jackson in the ruinous Indian Wars, only later to become Jackson’s bitter foe on the issue of removal of Indian tribes from their homelands. Crockett’s contradictions extended beyond politics. He had only a few months of formal education, yet he read Ovid and the Bard. He was neither a buffoon nor a great intellect but a man who was always evolving on the stage of a nation in its adolescence, a pioneer whose inchoate dreams aptly reflected a restless nation with a gaze firmly pointed toward the West.
Perhaps more than anyone of his time, David Crockett was arguably our first celebrity hero, inspiring people of his own time as well as a twentieth-century generation. The man David Crockett may have perished on March 6, 1836, in the final assault on the Alamo, but the mythical Davy Crockett, now an integral part of the American psyche, perhaps more so than any other frontiersman, lives powerfully on. In this way his story then becomes far more than a one-note Walt Disney legend, while his life continues to shed light on the meaning of America’s national character.
Almanac
cover, 1848. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)
ILT
H
IM A
B’
AR
”
D
AVID CROCKETT BELIEVED
in the wind and in the stars. This son of Tennessee could read the sun, the shadows, and the wild clouds full of thunder. He was comfortable amid the thickets and canebrakes, the quagmires, and the mountain balds. He hunted the oak, hickory, maple, and sweet gum forests that had never felt an axe blade. He was familiar with all the smells—the odor of decaying animal flesh, the aroma of the air after a rain, and the pungent smell of the forest. He knew the rivers lined with sycamore, poplar, and willow that breached the mountains through steep-sided gorges with strange-sounding names, many with Indian influences like the Nolichucky, the French Broad, the Pigeon, the Tellico, the Hiwassee, the South Holston, the Watauga, the Coosa, the Obey’s, the Wolf, the Elk, and the Obion. He stalked the dimensions of lakes and streams studded with ancient cypress. He learned that dog days arrive not with the heat of August but in early July, when the Dog Star rises and sets with the sun. He carried his compass and maps in his head. He traversed the land when it was lush in the warm times and when it was covered with the frost that Cherokees described as “clouds frozen on the trees.”
The wilderness was, indeed, Crockett’s cathedral, and as the stress of his political and home life began to wear him down, it was the forest where he took refuge. Even with the debates that continue to rage today about who the real David Crockett was, no one disputes that this was a man who approached nature as a science and hunting as an art and who found excitement in combining the two. Crockett had a calling and was a hunter by trade, relying on black bears just as much to clothe and feed his family as for the rich fodder they provided for stories told around the campfires and when campaigning for political office.
Yet, contrary to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the popular tune from the mid-1950s, Crockett did not “kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.”
1
For that matter, Crockett was not even “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee.” Indeed, he most likely never signed his name Davy but always David, and only took to wearing the ubiquitous coonskin cap so much identified with him when he thought it would help boost his public image. To uncover the truth about Crockett, one must travel to the land he knew and loved most—the Tennessee that was America’s frontier. That was his training ground and the school in which he was to become a legendary student. For the authentic Crockett—the man with only a smattering of formal education—possessed uncanny woods wisdom. From his boyhood in eastern Tennessee to his adult years in the middle of the state and, finally, in western Tennessee, Crockett honed his outdoor skills and applied them to his everyday life.
Over the years, he came to understand his quarry and its ways in almost an existential way. He knew adult male bears, or boars, weighed as much as six hundred pounds and females, or sows, usually weighed no more than four hundred pounds. He learned that black bears could live twenty-five years or more and were solitary except during mating time, and that a cub weighed only about as much as an apple when born but quickly grew on its mother’s fat-rich milk. He understood, as his fellow pioneers did, that an angry sow with cubs, just like a “he-bear” when cornered, was a formidable adversary. He never forgot that the only thing predictable about black bears is that they are unpredictable.
Crockett’s remarkable woodsmanship saved his life many times. On a moonless January night in the rough country near Reelfoot Lake, in far western Tennessee, Crockett, thirty-nine, soaked to the bone and freezing, found himself locked in combat with a fully grown black bear. “I made a lounge [
sic
] with my long knife, and fortunately stuck him right through the heart,” he later explained in his autobiography.
2
Exhausted from the struggle, he calmed his pack of panting hounds and managed to pull the bear from the crevice in the frozen ground where they had fought. After butchering the animal, he tried to kindle a fire but could find nothing dry enough to burn. His moccasins, buckskin breeches, and hunting shirt were frozen to his numb body and he knew that unless he kept moving he would die.
“So I got up, and hollered a while, and then I would jump up and down with all my might and throw myself into all sorts of motions,” Crockett wrote. “But all this wouldn’t do; for my blood was now getting cold, and the chills coming all over me. I was so tired, too, that I could hardly walk; but I thought I would do the best I could to save my life, and then, if I died, nobody would be to blame.”
3
He found a stout tree about two feet in diameter without any limbs on it for thirty feet. Crockett locked his arms and legs around the trunk and shinned up the tree until he reached the limbs, and then he slid back down to the ground. “This would make the insides of my legs and arms mighty warm and good,” he wrote. “I continued this till daylight in the morning, and how often I clomb [
sic
] up my tree and slid down I don’t know, but I reckon at least a hundred times.”
4
As the sun rose, Crockett set out to find his camp, where one of his sons and another hunting companion waited. After breakfast they salted all the dressed bear meat and secured it atop a high scaffold. Then they followed the dogs into the thick canebrake on the trail of more bear. By his own count, during that seven-month hunting season spanning 1825–1826, Crockett had killed 105 bears, including 47 in just one month.
5
Crockett, like the other good hunters of the day, stalked bears by finding tracks fresh enough for dogs to follow and by reading signs. He looked for claw marks or hair on tree bark and checked the freshness of scat to see how long ago the bear had passed through the area. If the scat was dried out and colonized with insects it meant the bear was long gone. Scat also revealed what the bears had eaten. That diet included almost anything: carrion, animal matter, insects, wild honey, snakes, and plenty of vegetation, like squawroot in the spring, berries in the summer, and nuts and acorns in autumn. If the droppings were dark and runny it indicated the bear had eaten meat and might still be around for several days to feed off the carcass.
Savvy hunters were aware of the bears’ nonretractable curved claws that allowed them to bring down a deer or a hound with one powerful blow. Bears also used the claws to scramble up trees, especially when they spied wild grapevines or if snarling dogs were in close pursuit. For Crockett, bear hunting with dogs was like no other hunting. He loved the adrenaline rush as he fought for breath and tried to keep up behind a pack of baying hounds on the trail of a bear crashing through the brush. For a seasoned and passionate hunter like Crockett, the chorus of dog howls was sweet music.
Much like the human company he kept, Crockett preferred the company of mongrel hounds to purebred dogs with fancy pedigrees. A few of the names that Crockett supposedly bestowed on his dogs include Soundwell, Old Rattler, Tiger, and Sport. One account suggests that Crockett named his favorite hound Jolar, said to be an ancient Gaelic-Scots word for eagle-eyed.
6
No matter their names, Crockett was known to use stocky crossbred dogs that lived solely to run bears. But while running his hounds and stalking bears remained a constant passion, Crockett also found that his reputation as a fearless hunter brought other dividends. Over the course of his life, Crockett’s bear hunting ability became a key ingredient in the manufacture of the populist hypermasculine persona he often used to bolster his public image and political career.
The real Crockett successfully combined his expertise with a rifle and passion for hunting with his trademark homespun humor and masterful storytelling technique. In so doing he was able to rise from the canebrakes to the halls of Congress. The stories he gathered from his adventures as a woodsman became entertainment from the backwoods that made his campaigns original and successful. In thus putting them to use, he became one of the first notable political figures to emerge from the ranks of common men and not the landed gentry.
ORN ON A
R
IVERBANK IN
F
RANKLIN
C
ONTRARY TO WHAT
has often been implied, mostly by Texans themselves, David Crockett was not a Texan. Crockett remained a Tennessean until his dying day. While he did meet his end during an exploratory trip in the then-Mexican state of Texas, he spent most of his life in Tennessee and more than half of those forty-nine years in the east Tennessee of his birth. Writers frequently have skimmed over Crockett’s early life in a rush to get to the period when he achieved celebrity and became well known as a colorful frontier hunter, political figure, and prominent participant in the legendary battle at the Alamo. All too often, Crockett’s two months spent in Texas at the end of his life garner more attention than the decades he spent living in Tennessee.
By all appearances, Crockett was well aware of the importance geography played in his life. He never forgot that his east Tennessee frontier roots ran deep and shaped much of his character. An examination of Crockett and his many incarnations, starting with his birth and boyhood, reveals a man who never fully completed his own biographical metamorphoses. He died as a work still very much in progress.
Yet from his first breath, Crockett was a characteristically American product. He squalled into the world on August 17, 1786.
1
It was a Thursday, and, true to the old rhyme, he was indeed a Thursday’s child who had far to go, much like the newly conceived nation in which he grew up. The Revolutionary War had been over for only three years, and a growing number of citizens on life’s periphery, especially on the frontier, felt the new American government was mistreating them. Soon after Crockett’s birth, insurgent farmers in western Massachusetts, led by Daniel Shays, revolted against local authorities because of high debt and tax burdens.
What we do know reliably is that Crockett was born in a snug frontier log house on the banks of the Nolichucky River, near its confluence with Limestone Creek. The Crocketts resided in the backwoods of what was then known as the State of Franklin, a part of North Carolina that later became Tennessee. John and Rebecca named their newest son David, after the infant’s paternal grandfather, massacred nine years earlier, along with his wife and others, by a band of marauding Indian warriors.
One of nine Crockett children, David was the fifth of six sons. His elder brothers were Nathan, William, Aaron, and James Patterson. Brother John was a year younger than David, followed by two sisters, Elizabeth (mostly known as Betsy) and Rebecca.
2
The identity of the eldest Crockett sibling, always believed to have been a daughter, remained unknown for many years. This mystery was resolved only in July 2008, at a three-day gathering of the Direct Descendants and Kin of David Crockett (DDDC) at Crockett’s birthplace on the Nolichucky River. For the first time, indisputable evidence was presented that David’s elder sister was Margaret Catharine Crockett. She was born to John and Rebecca Crockett at Womack’s Fort, built by Jacob Womack as a refuge from Indian war parties in the northeast corner of what eventually became Tennessee.
Identification of Crockett’s long “unknown” sister surprised the organization’s members, including Joy Bland, DDDC historian and a fourth great-granddaughter of David Crockett. “I don’t have a doubt,” Bland replied, when asked if enough evidence existed to authenticate the discovery. “Great descendants are coming from her [Margaret Catharine] and contributing to our history. There is a bible record that proves this.”
3
This record was found in the family Bible of Louisa Taylor Lemmons, granddaughter of Margaret Catharine, and was brought to light by Timothy E. Massey, a great-grandson of Margaret Catharine.
4
In the Bible, a letter written by Louisa Taylor Lemmons spells out the family lineage: “This is what your momma always tole of your mammaw. Your mammaw was Margaret Catharine Crockett then oldest younon of old John Crockett of Limestone Creek. She was borned at a place called Womack’s Fort. Her brother was Col. David that all the stories are about.”
5
According to the handwritten letter, the girl was only twelve years old when she was “served out” by her father, John Crockett, to a prominent family residing at Jonesborough—a town established in 1779, only seventeen years before Tennessee was granted statehood. Soon after going to work as a household servant, the girl “got in the motherly way,” presumably through the amorous advances of her master. Margaret Catharine was dismissed by her employer’s wife, only to be turned away at her own family home by John Crockett, the pregnant girl’s uncaring father, who, more than likely, was angry that a convenient source of income had dried up.
It is difficult to imagine the feelings a pregnant girl, still a child herself, must have experienced. Pregnancy and childbirth were life-threatening events, and the infant death rate was high. Without proper care and attention, women and older girls frequently died from traumatic deliveries or a variety of complications. But, beyond the physical and psychological pain, a bound-out servant who turned up pregnant usually was branded as a cunning and seductive Jezebel and was blamed for the dalliance that led to her condition.
A compassionate preacher and his family, living on Limestone Creek, took in the abandoned girl. A short time later, a daughter was born whom Margaret Catharine named Catharine. However, the rigors of childbirth weakened the young mother, and later that same day she died. Her “earthly body was laid to rest…at the big oak tree at the stone fort buring [
sic
] ground.” The man who had impregnated Margaret Catharine sent her surviving daughter dolls and candy at Christmas but never publicly acknowledged that she was his child.
6
It is no surprise that the Crockett family buried her story.
The practice of parents binding out their children for wages was nothing new on the Tennessee frontier of the late 1700s. Neither was the indenturing of neglected or orphaned children, even in larger cities such as New York, where a four-year-old and a toddler eighteen months old were bound out to grow up as servants.
7
Legally speaking, children were the property of parents and had no more standing than livestock. Fathers not only were considered the titular head of every household but also ruled both their wives and their offspring. This power was absolute, and punishment, which followed the stern disciplinary measures spelled out in the Bible, was severe. As even a well-to-do wife of an antebellum plantation owner put it, “All married women, all children and girls who live in their fathers’ house are slaves.”
8
Although there is no evidence that David ever knew Margaret Catharine, the boy, too, eventually fell prey to his father’s callousness. Before he reached his adolescence, David was bound out to a stock herder in order to pay off one of John Crockett’s many debts.
In his autobiography, Crockett addresses his humble beginning in the self-effacing manner he often used when he wrote: “I stood no chance to become great in any other way than by accident. As my father was very poor, and living as he did
far back in the back woods
, he had neither the means nor the opportunity to give me, or any of the rest of his children, any learning.”
9
Crockett failed to mention that, despite his family’s monetary deficits, and unlike many people living on the frontier of America in the late eighteenth century, his parents were not illiterate. While they had only a rudimentary education, both John and Rebecca signed documents with their full names and not their marks.
10
David’s parents always signed their surname as Crockett, but other people spelled it in a variety of ways, as happened with many family names in early America. Common variations were
Crocket
,
Croket, Crocit
, and
Crokit.
David never spelled his name any other way than Crockett, although at least on one occasion he did admit that the middle
c
and the extra
t
were unnecessary.
11
Variations of Crockett were not uncommon in Scotland, and by far the greatest number of Crockett families hailed from Coupar Angus, north of the mouth of the Tay River, on the eastern coast of central Scotland, one of the oldest settled areas of the British Isles.
12
For hundreds of years, Moot Hill, not far from Scone Palace, was the site of the coronations of many Scottish kings, including Robert the Bruce. Coupar Angus also was the home of the Picts, an ancient tribe of fierce warriors whose name in Latin translates as “Painted Ones,” in reference to the elaborate tattoos that the Picts proudly displayed on their naked bodies. Pict men and women fought side by side in battle, and the Picts were known as the only tribe the Romans could not subdue.
13
The characteristics of these mysterious people are interesting in light of what is known about David Crockett. For the Picts had a great love of horses and hounds and were known to ride effortlessly in groups of three with only a saddle blanket and snaffle bit. It was said that Picts would whisper commands to their horses, riding as one with the steed as they vanished without a trace into the rugged Highlands. The men were powerfully built, with short legs and barrel chests, and were renowned as extraordinary fighters possessing great physical strength and stamina. It was suggested that the Arthurian knight Lancelot was a Pictish king from Angus, the land of the Crockett clan. According to local tradition, Guinevere, quasi-legendary queen to King Arthur, was a Pictish princess from Sterling Castle who was buried north of Coupar Angus at the town of Meigle.
14
“Arthurian history is not unlike Crockett history in many respects,” explains Crockett historian Joseph Swann. “The size of the legend engulfs its historical subject. It is often a tedious process to extract history from legends that grow up around historical icons like Arthur and Davy. Still these two legends may both have roots in the same small area of land in east-central Scotland.”
15
The Crockett roots eventually spread to Ireland during the early 1600s. That was when members of the clan joined the ranks of the Ulster Scots, or Scots-Irish. This group of Scots and North Britons were encouraged by the ruling English government to migrate on a large scale to Ulster, in Northern Ireland, to help hold lands confiscated from malcontent Irish lords. Although predominantly Celtic Scots, including a lesser number of the Pictish or Gaelic Highland Scots, they differed from the Highland Scots and the native Irish in almost every respect, from religion to language, politics, and customs.
16
Transplanted to these confiscated lands in the area of Northern Ireland known as Ulster, the predominantly Presbyterian Scots, including members of the Crockett family, brought with them a bitter dislike for the pope and the Roman Catholic Church, a dislike that turned to hatred after a few generations had occupied lands in Ulster. Irish attempts to isolate and eradicate the Scots caused them out of necessity to become more rigid and self-reliant. This created an intense animosity between the transplanted Protestant Scots and the disposed Irish Catholics, which led to the resentment and strife that continued for many years to come.
17
Finally, the Scots-Irish had their fill of social, religious, political, and especially economic oppression. They boarded ships and moved to America in a mass migration of more than a quarter of a million people during the years 1718 to 1775. They settled in the backcountry of Pennsylvania, since the best land there had long been taken. Among the ranks of the stalwart Scots-Irish who left the North Tyrone–East Donegal area in the early eighteenth century and migrated to America were David Crockett’s grandparents.
18
The Crockett family’s adventure had only just begun.