American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (4 page)

But the sedentary world of the schoolroom never sat well with David, whose personality drew him outside toward the next adventure. Like his father, who occasionally used canings to solve disciplinary transgressions, young David was hot-tempered. His first stint at formal schooling proved brief and volatile:

I went four days, and had just began to learn my letters a little, when I had an unfortunate falling out with one of the scholars—a boy much larger and older than myself. I knew well enough that though a school-house might do for a still hunt, it wouldn’t do for a drive, and so I concluded to wait until I could get him out, and then I was determined to give him salt and vinegar.
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Young Crockett lay in wait for him by the roadside. When the boy wandered along, Crockett bushwhacked him, scratching his face and tearing at him “like a wild cat.” Fearing the repercussions from an angry schoolmaster, Crockett hid out for days, pretending to go off to school each morning, then lying out in the woods all day until school was over. Then he would return home with his brothers, who agreed to keep his hooky-playing a secret from their father. Eventually, the schoolmaster sent a note home to John Crockett inquiring why David was absent. Crockett’s father read the note and, as he had been “taking a few horns” of whiskey, “and was in good condition to make the fur fly,” he broke into a rage, lighting after young Crockett with a hard length of old hickory. Crockett recalled:

We had a tolerable tough race for about a mile; but mind me, not on the school-house road, for I was trying to get as far t’other way as possible. And I yet believe if my father and the schoolmaster could have both levied on me about that time, I should never have been called on to sit in the councils of the nation, for I think they would have used me up.
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Never before had he seen his father so angry, “puffing and blowing as though his steam was high enough to burst his boilers.”

After narrowly escaping his father, Crockett sneaked to a house of an acquaintance, Jesse Cheek. Here he hired on, along with one of his brothers, to help Cheek as he headed out on a cattle drive. Crockett figured both home and school were too hot to return to for some time, so off he went on the excruciatingly long “drove,” passing through Abingdon, and then through Lynchburg and Charlottesville, until they arrived in a town called Fort Royal, nearly 400 miles away, where Cheek sold his cattle. Crockett started homeward again with a new companion, and they alternately rode and tied a single horse, but Crockett soon found that this man did far too much riding and not enough walking, leaving him impatient to cut out on his own. The man gave him four dollars for his expenses on the 400-mile journey, with which Crockett bought some provisions and hoofed along the road, tired and lonely, part of him thinking that enough time had passed to allow his father’s (and the schoolmaster’s) rage to cool, part of him still not certain.

He soon fell in with a wagoner named Adam Myers, heading north toward Geraldstown. It was the wrong direction, but the man assured Crockett that after he finished his business he would return south to Tennessee. Within a couple of days they met up with his brother again, who pleaded with Crockett to head back home immediately. Crockett pondered this, but soon thought better of it:

I thought of the schoolmaster and the race with my father, and the big hickory he carried, and of the fierceness of the storm of wrath that I had left him in, and I was afraid to venture back; for I knew my father’s nature so well, that I was certain his anger would hang on him like a turtle does to a fisherman’s toe, and that, if I went back in a hurry, he would give me the devil in three or four ways. . . . That promised whipping, it came right slap down on every thought of home. I finally determined that make or break, hit or miss, I would just hang on to my journey.
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So began Crockett’s earliest tendencies to light out, to keep moving, to live by his own devices in the woods from day to day. It may well have been at this early juncture that his famed motto began to form in his head. “Be always sure you’re right—then go ahead!”

TWO

Runaway

F
EAR OF PARENTAL AND SCHOOLMASTER WRATH led Crockett on a two-year odyssey and rite of passage into adulthood. By accident, circumstance, and providence, young David Crockett had found relative independence on the open road. The period conjures Mark Twain’s unforgettable characters Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer; Crockett relied on his guile and savvy to survive alone, living from one adventure to the next. He was also beginning to understand how to use his burgeoning charisma and personality to influence people and orchestrate their feelings toward him. To survive the rigors of the road, a young boy needed to be smart, industrious, resilient, and something of an actor, and all these traits—plus others like ambition and pride—began to germinate in the youngster.
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Though he started for home, little did he realize how many adventures, miles, and years lay between his wandering feet and the home in Tennessee that was never far from his mind and heart.

He hired on with a man named John Gray, for whom he labored in the fields, planting grain, plowing and assisting in various chores around the farm for twenty-five cents a day.
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He liked the feeling of freedom and independence that having his own money gave him, and he saved all he could for the next three years as he toiled the road like a grown-up teamster, but he was often duped or cheated by older and more authoritarian men, and the pay never amounted to much. The work began to strengthen him physically and mentally, giving him the taut and sinewy limbs and powerful torso that he would later use to his advantage hunting for food and furs and fighting in the military.

As it happened, Adam Myers began making pretty regular runs between Baltimore and Geraldstown, and more than once Myers asked young David Crockett if he would like to come along. At last, having earned enough money for some decent clothes, Crockett determined that a trip to an exotic place might be interesting, “to see what sort of place it was, and what sort of folks lived there.”
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It was the spring of 1800, and Crockett had never been to a real city in his life, or to the seaside. Before they departed, Crockett squared with Gray, then handed over to Myers his only seven dollars, what amounted to his entire life savings, a risky but not uncommon means of banking for a lad unaccustomed to carrying his own money around.

They obtained a wagonload of flour and proceeded on the road, Crockett anxious and excited to be going somewhere new but also busy at his tasks tending horses and stock. At Ellicott City, a mill town on the outskirts of Baltimore, a noisy roadside work crew spooked Myers’s team. The horses reared, kicking and neighing, breaking the wagon-tongue off and galloping down the road, the flour barrels bouncing and exploding into a cloud of fine powdery dust. Amazingly, when all the dust and flour had settled, Crockett stood unhurt on the roadside comprehending how close he had just come to being dragged behind the wagon and “ground fine as ginger.” He understood at that moment the fickle nature of providence, and he recalled it with playful metaphor: “This proved to me,” he later mused, “that if a fellow is born to be hung he will never be drowned; and, further, if he is born for a seat in Congress, even flour barrels can’t make a mash of him.”
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They managed to locate another wagon and salvage the rest of their load, and Crockett and the disgruntled wagoner limped on to Baltimore. While Myers had the runaway wagon repaired, Crockett walked down to the wharf. For the first time in his life he gazed on great merchant ships, their sails flapping in the briny sea breeze, and heard the eerie creaking of the massive wooden hulls and salty ropes as thick as his waist lashed to the docks. Crockett must have faced the ocean in disbelief, for he had never conceived such things to be found in nature, or to be made by man. His imagination leapt at the possibilities, and he became so curious that he stepped aboard the nearest ship, marveling at the slow sway underfoot. An old and wizened captain met him and inquired whether he wished to accompany the ship to London, for the captain could use a boy like him, with his chipper, easygoing nature and road-hardened toughness. Though he possessed no nautical experience, the adventurous young Crockett delighted at the chance, for by now he was “pretty well weaned from home”
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and open to the idea of new adventure.

He set off to gather his clothes, provisions, and money from Myers, but enthusiasm turned to fear when Myers flatly refused to let him have any of them, threatening to whip him and confine him if Crockett did not obey. The stern and tyrannical wagoner thus changed the course of Crockett’s history, for the boy had been only minutes away from becoming a mariner bound for England. At the same time Crockett learned that trust is illusory on the frontier. Looking over his shoulder at the magnificent ships bound for faraway lands, Crockett could only do as he was told and bide his time until another opportunity presented itself. He put it like this: “I determined to throw myself on Providence, and see how that would use me.”
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Back on the road with the wagoner, Crockett “resolved to leave him at all hazards,” and before dawn one morning he rounded up what few clothes he had and took off on foot, hungry and penniless, toward Tennessee. He wandered for days, sleeping in vacant barns and hay sheds, under the eaves of outbuildings, always slinking out before dawn, afraid of being caught by the owners or overtaken by Adam Myers himself. One day he happened on another wagoner, a man named (by absolute coincidence) Henry Myers. He appeared kind, and inquired about Crockett’s situation, which brought the tough youngster to tears despite his attempts to shore up. The weight of his loneliness and all his troubles bore down on him. “For if the world had been given to me, I could not, at that moment, have helped crying.”
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Through a storm of sobs Crockett told the kind Henry Myers about being deceived and ill treated in Baltimore, and how he had been left “without a copper to buy even a morsel of food.”
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The tale enraged Henry Myers, who swore loud at the scoundrel for mistreating a young boy in this way, and he vowed to backtrack, find Adam Myers, and force him to return Crockett’s money. Though he feared the eventual run-in, Crockett was bolstered by his new ally’s size and passion: “My new friend was very large, stout-looking, and resolute as a tiger . . . and swore he would have my money, or whip it out of the wretch who had it.”
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They did confront Adam Myers, who blamed Crockett for attempting to shirk his duties and run off with a ship’s captain bound for London. Then he admitted, reluctantly, that he had spent all of Crockett’s hard-earned seven dollars. Pressed by the large and angry man, Adam Myers offered to pay Crockett back when they returned to Tennessee, and at this promise Crockett felt reconciled.

Crockett left with his new ally Henry Myers, and they traveled south together for several days. Crockett again became impatient at their progress and determined to strike out alone, on foot. But before he left, while they were all convened at a roadhouse, Myers told a small assemblage of men Crockett’s tale, how he had recently been treated, and how he would be passing penniless through “a land of strangers, where it was not even a wilderness.”
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They passed around a money purse and handed Crockett the collection of three dollars.

That sum held out as far as Montgomery, Virginia, where he worked for a month for a man named James Caldwell at a shilling a day. Crockett then hired on with a hatter, Elijah Griffith, agreeing to work four years for him. After eighteen long months, Griffith fell deep into debt and fled the region, leaving Crockett broke and destitute once more.
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A grim pattern seemed to be developing, and the perceptive youngster knew he had to break the cycle. Life on the road had taught him much, but it was not a life he wished to live permanently. Crockett worked as he could to properly clothe himself and garner a small purse, and then, weary and lonely, he cut out for home.

He arrived finally at the banks of the New River and found the water roiling with whitecaps, the froth so high that no one would risk taking him across by boat. He persuaded some folks to let him borrow a canoe, which he claimed he could navigate. Lashing his bundle of clothes firmly to the seat, he put in to the roaring, churning river, which “was a mighty ticklish business.”
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Crockett turned the canoe into the wind and waves, breakers flooding over the bow, and fought upstream nearly two miles before he could land. By the time he struck shore he was soaked to the core, the canoe half-filled with water, his hands nearly frozen to the paddle. He was so overjoyed at having made the crossing alive that he scarcely felt the cold. He plodded along for three miles until he found a house and a fire to warm him, and took “a leetle of the creater, that warmer of the cold, and cooler of the hot.” It was perhaps the young man’s first taste of spirits, and he did not find unfavorable the taste and effect.
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