American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (5 page)

Warmed and fed, the pleasant burn of whiskey in his belly, he slogged on until he reached the home of his uncle Joseph in Sullivan County, Tennessee. Ironically he happened across the same brother who had accompanied him on the cattle drive of three years before.
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After they had spent a few weeks together, David Crockett struck out for home, alone once more.

Crockett kept on until he reached his father’s tavern late in the evening.
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He humbly inquired whether he might stay the night, and as it was a roadhouse, he was allowed. Then, much like Huck Finn, he decided to play a trick on his family, keeping his identity hidden to see if anyone would know him. He had been gone for so long and had grown so much that his family did not recognize him at first, partly because Crockett remained in the dimly lit corners and hardly spoke to anyone. When they were all called to supper and seated at the table, Crockett’s eldest sister finally recognized him. She sprang up, seized him around his neck, and exclaimed, “Here is my lost brother!” Crockett’s own response had a Huck Finn-like sheepishness: “The joy of my sisters and my mother, and indeed of all the family, was such that it humbled me, and made me sorry that I hadn’t submitted to a hundred whippings sooner than cause so much affliction as they had suffered on my account.”
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Crockett was now sixteen, and his increase in size and age, coupled with his father’s elation at his unexpected return, safeguarded him against his “long dreaded whipping.” Crockett would later recall in his
Narrative,
“But it will be a source of astonishment to many, who reflect that I am now a member of Congress—the most enlightened body of men in the world—that at so advanced an age . . . I did not know the first letter in the book.” With all his travel and work experiences, by pioneer standards he was already a man, yet he couldn’t even write his own name.
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THREE

The Dutiful Son Becomes a Man

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AVID CROCKETT’S HOMECOMING heralded growth and change, the arrival of a more devoted and responsible, even dutiful, son, a young man with a budding sense of self and an understanding of the importance of how others perceived him. He viewed his father as an honest if unlucky man and endeavored to help him as much as he could. A strict paternal system of order by necessity ruled the frontier, and although by most measures David Crockett was already himself a man, he would remain under his father’s command and tutelage until he moved out and started his own family. Also, throughout his life David Crockett illustrated judiciousness, a fair-minded personality reflected in his decision making. Arriving home after such a long absence, he still felt duty-bound to his father.

During David’s years away his father had continued to buy on credit, ending up indebted to others more frugal or fortunate. As a result, he had creditors all over the county. John Crockett viewed his son’s return as an opportunity to help him repay at least a couple of these debts, after which time he would consider them even and turn his son loose. David remembers the deal they struck: “He informed me that he owed a man, whose name was Abraham Wilson, the sum of thirty-six dollars and that if I would set in and work out the note, so as to lift it for him, he would discharge me from his service, and I might go free.”
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Crockett tore into this new responsibility with tenacity and the vigor he had learned in all his odd jobs away from home. He toiled tirelessly, working every single day straight for the entire half-year period. Impressed by this work ethic, Wilson asked Crockett to stay on, but Crockett declined, finding Wilson’s place and company shady. “It was a place where a heap of bad company met to drink and gamble, and I know’d very well if I staid I should get a bad name, as nobody could be respectable that would live there.”
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Already he was concerned with his reputation, and was developing a sense of what others thought of him and his associates, and how this reflected on one’s character. He had seen and heard things on the road, in the dark and musty taverns and seedy road-houses from Tennessee to Baltimore and back again, that none of his brothers or friends had witnessed—tough characters and rude talk, boozing and carousing and brawling—and he understood already, if only viscerally, that he was destined for much more.

Instead of taking the offered job, he hired on with an honest Quaker farmer named John Kennedy to eradicate another debt of his father’s, this one for forty dollars. Crockett seemed bent on making up for any anguish or trouble caused by his running away, and showed an inclination to better himself. He finished the work, then borrowed one of his employer’s horses and rode the fifteen miles to his father’s place to deliver the paid note to him. At first John Crockett grew shamed and confused, assuming that it was the debt he still owed Mr. Kennedy being presented to him for collection, and he explained that, as usual, he hadn’t the money to pay. David then told his father that the note was not a debt, but rather the amount paid in full, and that he offered it as a present to him. “At this, he shed a heap of tears; and as soon as he got a little over it, he said he was sorry he couldn’t give me any thing, but he was not able, he was too poor.”
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But there was one thing that his father could give him, and had already promised him, and that was his freedom. David Crockett recollects no words that passed between them on the subject, but with his father’s debt paid he turned proudly away from his house and boyhood home and went back to the Kennedy place. A transformation had occurred: David Crockett had grown up, a rite of passage he earned by facing rather than running from hardships and oppression. He was now free to do as he pleased, to go wherever he wanted. His inquisitive mind longed for more than the open road. But he needed to get himself flush, having spent the last year or so working off his father’s debts. “I went back to my old friend the Quaker, and set in to work for him for some clothes . . . my clothes were nearly all worn out, and what few I had left were mighty indifferent.”
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Crockett understood that to improve himself he needed to look respectable, and that the young ladies around the county would not be interested in a threadbare ragamuffin. He had seen enough girls and women in his travels, plenty to have piqued his natural curiosities. During Crockett’s two-month tenure at the Quaker’s farm, Kennedy’s niece, a young woman from North Carolina, came to visit. Crockett was immediately smitten, and his first crush gave way to full-fledged infatuation, such that he recalled it with a heightened sense of melodrama: “And now I am just getting on a part of my history that I know I can never forget. For though I have heard people talk about hard loving, yet I reckon no poor devil in this world was ever cursed with such hard love as mine has always been, when it came on me.” After several stammering attempts he managed to speak to the Quaker’s niece, and she was at least momentarily willing to listen to the stuttering young man. The hyperbole of young love was evident in Crockett’s dire assessment of the situation: “I told her that she was the darling object of my soul and body; and I must have her, or else I should pine down to nothing, and just die away with the consumption.”
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The girl was honest, and informed the poor lovesick suitor that she was already engaged to her cousin, one of the Quaker’s sons. Crockett was devastated, his response typical of a youth’s first love affliction. “This news was worse to me than war, pestilence, or famine.” But the insightful young man determined something else at this moment of defeat. He somehow likened his failure to win her heart the result of his own character flaw, and knew he had to make something of himself in the world, but he felt inadequately prepared. He mused, “All my misfortunes growed out of my want of learning.” By luck, Kennedy had a married son, a schoolteacher, who lived but a mile away, and Crockett struck a deal to go to school four days a week and work two to pay for his learning and boarding. He applied himself for six months, “learning and working back and forwards,” until he could read in his primer, write his own name, “and cypher some in the three first rules in figures.”
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This was all the formal schooling Crockett ever had in his life, though he remained an astute student of human nature and would continue to improve his reading and writing by himself. He grew restless and desirous of the opposite sex, reasoning that a spouse would somehow complete his metamorphosis into manhood. As he put it, “I concluded I couldn’t do any longer without a wife; and so I cut out to hunt me one.”

Soon enough, Crockett met and took a shine to Margaret Elder, one of three eligible and attractive sisters who lived in the neighborhood. Margaret was coy and evasive and Crockett was stricken with longing. “I would have agreed to fight a whole regiment of wild cats if she would only have said she would have me.” He persisted, giving her very little peace until she broke down and consented, and they set a wedding day. Crockett even went so far as to obtain a marriage license on October 21, 1805, in Dandridge, Tennessee.
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One Saturday, just a few days before the appointed nuptials, Crockett went to see his fiancée. He had a brand-new long rifle, which he carried to hunt the woods for deer, and he planned to stop along the way to participate in a shooting competition. At just nineteen, Crockett was already a deadeye marksman, and he won a whole beef in the contest, then sold it for five dollars “in the real grit,” hard currency rather than banknotes. Winning the contest and the cash put Crockett in “a flow of good humour,” which translated to carousing and backwoods frolic that took him and the other contestants through the night and well into Sunday. Drunk and dirty, reeking of booze and tavern smoke, Crockett stumbled to Margaret’s uncle’s house, where he met her sister, who blubbered that Margaret had deceived him; she was already promised to another man, and they were to wed on the following day. Crockett’s tardiness and tendency toward debauchery certainly hadn’t helped his cause.
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Though the sister urged him on, claiming her mother preferred Crockett, he stopped in his tracks, devastated again. “My heart was bruised, and my spirits were broken down . . . so I bid her farewell, and turned my lonesome and miserable steps back again homeward, concluding that I was born only for hardships, misery, and disappointment.”

The rejection put Crockett in “the worst kind of sickness—a sickness of the heart and all the tender parts,” and he moped about, twice heart-broken and utterly dejected. When it came to love, he appeared only destined for heartache. “I now began to think, that in making me, it was entirely forgotten to make my mate; that I was born odd, and should always remain so, and that nobody would have me.”

Evenings, after long and arduous days of work, Crockett would sling his rifle over his shoulder and head out into the dense forests to hunt, and the time afield, kicking along through the soft ferns and grasses, crawling along fresh game traces, took his mind off his suffering. On one such evening Crockett came to a clearing and the house of a Dutch widow and her daughter, a girl with whom he was acquainted but for whom he had no amorous intentions. He referred to her as being “well enough to smartness, but ugly as a stone fence.” She was also loquacious and amusing, free to poke fun. She jibed at Crockett for his recent disappointments with women, reminding him of the old aphorism that “there was as good a fish in the sea as had ever been caught out of it.” His heart still ailing, Crockett doubted this adage very much, and at any rate, whether it were true or not, looking upon her homely visage he concluded that she was not one of the good fish. The girl must have felt sorry for him, because she invited him to their family’s reaping, where she promised to introduce him to one of the prettiest girls in the entire region. Reapings were multiday community frolics, or “stomp downs,” that included some work in the form of harvest, but were primarily social events complete with music, dancing, games and competitions, and skits and plays for the children. Crockett enjoyed a good time as much as the next fellow, and he was already starting to sharpen his bragging and storytelling skills. He had learned that a tale improves with the telling, until he even believed some of his fabrications himself. He agreed to invite as many friends along as he could find, and he would come to the reaping.

Almost as soon as he arrived he blended in well, his gregarious nature at home meeting new people. Among the large assemblage there was a particular “old Irish woman” who immediately accosted Crockett and, as he put it, “had a lot to say.” She turned out to be the mother of the girl he had come to meet, had been informed of his business there, and teased him, praising his “red cheeks” and promising she had a sweetheart for him. Crockett had been jilted enough to remain wary of his prospects, but later that evening he was introduced to the Irishwoman’s daughter, Polly Finley, and he was not disappointed. “I must confess,” he said, “I was . . . well pleased with her from the word go. She had a good countenance, and was very pretty, and I was full bent on making up an acquaintance with her.”

As the sun set, lively music started up and with it people began pairing up and dancing, swinging and knee-slapping to the fiddle tunes. Crockett asked Polly to dance, and they took “a reel” together, then sat down and conversed throughout the remainder of the evening, dancing when the mood struck them or others prompted them. The competitive and persistent young man may even have tried his hand at the fiddle. Polly’s mother, Jean Kennedy Finley, came around periodically, which did not go unnoticed by Crockett, who even became a bit nervous and confused when she jokingly referred to him as her “son-in-law.” Already a shrewd student of human nature, Crockett understood the importance of gaining Polly’s mother as an ally, and he treated her with great politeness, giving her much more attention than he would have otherwise. He looked at it this way: “I went on the old saying of salting the cow to catch the calf.”