American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (2 page)

Four noted (and oft-quoted) scholars quickly responded to a barrage of unsolicited e-mail queries, and I very much appreciate their passion, their scholarship, their forthcoming and candid responses, their depth of knowledge. Thanks to William C. Davis, Michael Lofaro, Andrew Burstein, and H. W. Brands.

I am indebted to a number of archivists and librarians for their good-spirited assistance as I researched this book. Notably, the entire staff at the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville was extremely helpful, immensely knowledgeable, and always professional. Thanks especially to archivists Susan Gordon and Darla Brock, as well as Marylin Bell Hughes. At the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Lizanne Garrett was cheerful, expeditious, and efficient in helping me with images and portraits.

The Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin was an invaluable resource, and their entire staff made my visit and work enjoyable and efficient. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo is a remarkable place, and one senses the history all around those hallowed grounds. The folks there are friendly, detail-oriented, and passionate about Texas history. Warren Stricker, archivist, was particularly helpful and provided me with timely assistance and ideas. At my own institution, Washington State University, I have benefited immensely from interlibrary loans in Holland New Library. The fine, hardworking staff, especially David Smestad, Nancy Beebe, Bob Davis, Shirley Giden, and Kay Vyhnanek, have allowed me to obtain a wide array of materials from a web of libraries and research institutions around the nation, with impressive speed and efficiency.

My early readers included dear friends John Larkin and Kim Barnes, whose sharp eyes and attentive scrutiny I need and greatly appreciate. Longtime friend and muse Sara Aglietti provided spirit, affirmation, and sense of humor. Computer guru Sharon Harris kept me from blowing up my computer. I value her kind patience.

Thanks, finally, to my entire family, immediate and extended, whose support is unequivocal and deeply appreciated. To my lovely children, Logan and Hunter, who endured my absences, and to my wife and partner, Camie, who has always believed in me: you give me more than you will ever know.

Prologue

THERE ARE MEN, and there are legends, and in rare instances the two converge.

On a late December evening in 1833, a weather-worn but well-dressed man of forty-seven heads down the blustery Washington City (present-day Washington, DC) streets toward the Washington Theatre. There is a distinct swagger in his gait, a cockiness and confidence in his purposeful stride and compact, stocky frame. His angular face and aquiline nose are ruddy and wind-scoured, betraying a life outdoors, and his hands, though they have not felt the sure tug of reins or the smooth stock of a hunting rifle in quite some time, are still calloused and craggy.

As he walks, people call out, and some crane their necks as he passes, hoping to get a better look. When they do, their faces brighten with recognition. He smiles and walks on, nodding and waving as he goes.

He has plenty to smile about, and much on his mind as he nears the theater.

He has just begun a new book, a memoir, one he has determined will be “truly the very thing itself, the exact image of its author,”
¹
though he knows there is a bit of tongue-in-cheek to that claim. The book will contain politics, too, and if he plays it right, the book might just make him some money and keep him in Congress for another term or two. Better yet, it could set him up for a run at an even bigger prize—the presidency of the United States of America. Only a few years earlier the very notion would have been preposterous. But now? Nothing seems unattainable.

He is pleased with his recent victory in a hard-fought congressional race, yet it is not so much the political victory as the attendant notoriety that has him practically giddy. More and more his name has started to appear in newspapers across the nation, stories and anecdotes about him (many of them spurious, but that does not stop them from being published), and there is even a well-known writer in Maine, one Seba Smith, who has created a character patterned after him and an ongoing dialogue in the Portland, Maine,
Daily Courier
that has begun to circulate widely across the eastern seaboard and beyond. It is hard to imagine all this hullabaloo over a man from the brambly canebrakes, a squatter from the sticks.

Even more astounding, an unauthorized biography of his life entitled
Life and Adventures
appeared early in the year, and it flew off the shelves so quickly that it was later rereleased in New York and London under the revised title
Sketches and Eccentricities.
Enthusiastic sales firmly ensconced his name and image in the public dialogue and imagination.

And now this play,
The Lion of the West.
It had originally opened in New York two years prior, in 1831, and even then there was widespread agreement that the play’s central character, Nimrod Wildfire, was patterned after him. The connections and parallels were close enough that the author, James Kirke Paulding, wrote to him before the play’s original release requesting assurances that the play would not be injurious to his character. The play’s success simply assured his international fame.

The crowds arrive at the theater and are quickly ushered into the waiting area, men and women dispersing to take their seats. The man, the celebrity, waits restlessly until the entire theater has filled and goes silent, with just the whispery murmur of expectation coursing through the room. Then he and the usher start down the aisle, and as they move all heads turn to him and applause begins, slowly at first, then building until everyone is clapping loudly. The man, unaccustomed to such attention and a little embarrassed, bows slightly and gives a quick wave as he takes his reserved seat at the very front and center of the theater.

Finally the curtain rises slowly and out leaps the star of the show, actor James Hackett in the role of Nimrod Wildfire. Clad in backwoods hunting regalia, in leather leggings and a woodsy buckskin hunting shirt and toting a long rifle in his arms, his head is adorned with a furry wildcat-skin hat. He steps to the front of the stage, pauses, then smiles before bowing appreciatively to the man sitting front and center, the man on whom his character, and the play he is about to perform, are based. The man rises from his seat, grinning broadly, and returns the bow, and in that moment pays homage to his very own growing legend, to the myth he is destined to become. The poignancy of this moment, the odd mirroring image, captivates the audience and they erupt in a frenzy of cheers and applause.

The actor James Henry Hackett as Nimrod Wildfire, “The Lion of the West.” The character was based largely on David Crockett, and contributed significantly to Crockett’s celebrity. (James Henry Hackett. Lithograph by Edward Williams Clay, print 1830-1857? Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.)

The man they cheer is Colonel David Crockett of the state of Tennessee, and the scene is a remarkable and powerful confluence of fiction and fact, of legend and man.

The ovation roars on, and as Crockett finally bows to the audience and takes his seat, he must understand that his present situation is unique—for the man, alive and in the flesh, has just met his own myth.

ONE

Origins

B
EFORE THE MYTH AND LEGEND of Davy Crockett surfaced there lived the real man, David Crockett, born August 17, 1786, “at the mouth of Lime Stone on the Nola-chucky river” in present-day Greene County, east of Knoxville, Tennessee. A lone marble slab now overlooks the stream, marking his likely birth site. He inherited hard times and the brutal realities of pioneer life, when families could never consider themselves safe, not even in their own homes. Theirs was a self-inflicted insecurity, wrought from squatting on Indian land, a consequence of thousands upon thousands of impoverished British “frontiersmen” departing their own green shores beginning in the 1700s and swarming over what they perceived as new and open land. David Crockett’s ancestors were among those hopeful nomads from Ireland and Scotland who came to the idea of America with the promise of a better and more prosperous life and then met with unexpected challenges, including coexisting with native people. The fight for this land defined nearly every aspect of the early American experience, and it was into this embattled climate that young David was born.
¹

The earliest pioneer settlers elbowed one another and the native inhabitants for the best land available. Crockett’s grandfather’s name (also David) appears in the court records of Lincolnton, North Carolina, for 1771, when deed records show that he purchased a 250-acre plot of ground along the Catawba River.
²
Four years later he packed up his family and scrabbled across the flinty Appalachians, descending into the verdant northeastern end of what would eventually be Tennessee.
³
The region turned out to be a contentious grid of land, with squatters and speculators believing it to be reserved for North Carolina. Simultaneously, it was among the last areas allocated by treaty to the Creek and Cherokee nations.
⁴
In 1776, members of the Watauga Settlement or Association, a loosely self-governed community in the heart of disputed land along the Holston River valley, engaged in a series of clashes with the Indians. Ironically, on July 5, 1776, just a day after the historic events taking place in Philadelphia, David Crockett and his son William Crockett signed a petition asking the legislature of North Carolina to annex, and thereby control, the region.
⁵

Speaking of his namesake grandfather during these perilous early days, David Crockett later remarked in his narrative, “He settled there under dangerous circumstances, both to himself and his family, as the country was full of Indians, who were at that time very troublesome.”

The Indians had reason to be “troublesome.” The onslaught of settlers seemed unceasing, and though the local tribes (Chickamauga, Creek, and Cherokee) had signed treaties assuring them of these lands, the voracious settlers and land speculators ignored them. By 1778, North Carolina had set up laws forbidding whites to survey, or even trespass upon, Indian lands, but shrewd entrepreneurs had already set up land-purchase offices in North Carolina, claiming more than a million acres inside the Indian country.
⁶
Fed up and hostile, the Indians began engaging in attacks on settlers wherever and whenever they happened upon them. The Indians’ only hope was to intercept the settlements head-on, attempting to continuously dislodge or dismantle existing outposts and keep the pioneers always moving, in a state of trepidation and displacement.

One day in 1778 a small band of marauding Creeks happened upon the first David Crockett’s homestead in Carter’s Valley. As Crockett wrote in his
Narrative,
“By the Creeks my grandfather and grandmother Crockett were both murdered, in their own house” (near present-day Rogersville, Hawkins County, Tennessee). David and his wife were at home, along with boys Joseph and their youngest, James, and all were unprepared for the stealth and speed of the attack.

A rifle shot shattered Joseph’s arm, and James, who was deaf and mute and less able to flee or defend himself, was abducted. James lived with the Indians for nearly twenty years until he was, according to Crockett, discovered by brothers William and John and subsequently “delivered up” from his bondage and “purchased from an Indian trader.” Having spent nearly two decades with the Indians, for years afterward James attempted, without luck, to relocate gold and silver mines he had visited while blindfolded. Brother John Crockett was away at the time of the attack, working as a backwoods ranger scouting frontier outposts. He later fathered David Crockett.
⁷

For his part, John Crockett’s life was marred by failed attempts and tough luck, land speculation that garnered him nothing, and, more than once, bankruptcy. Some of his tendencies—recurring poverty among them—he would pass to his son, David. But the elder Crockett was a man of solid character and an honest, hardworking nature. In 1780 he married Rebecca Hawkins, a young Maryland woman who came to the Holston Valley with her father, Nathan.
⁸
Almost immediately the Revolution took him away from home; he joined up with the Lincoln County militia to serve as a frontier ranger. By October 1780 he returned in time to join a group called the “over-mountain men.” In his
Narrative
David Crockett remembers it this way: “I have learned that he was a soldier in the revolutionary war, and took part in that bloody struggle . . . in the battle at King’s Mountain against the British and the tories.”