American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (8 page)

Deep in the night Crockett heard the screechy hoot of an owl, and he called back, and Jack Thompson emerged from the woods to report no sign of Gibson in the vicinity. They rested there until morning, but still Major Gibson failed to arrive. Here Crockett made his first significant military decision. Some of the men wished to return, spooked by the prospect that Gibson and his men had been butchered, but Crockett reminded them of their duty, that they had “set out to hunt a fight,” and that they were bound to “go ahead, and see where the red men were at.”

Moving quietly and carefully, they proceeded to a Cherokee town some twenty miles distant. At midafternoon of the second day they came to the home of a man named Radcliffe, who had married a Creek woman, had two sons, and was living in relative harmony on the edge of the Creek Nation. Radcliffe was well stocked, and he fed Crockett’s company and their horses, providing the hungry men with “a great deal of potatoes and corn, and indeed, almost everything else to go on.” But Radcliffe himself was “bad scared all the time,” noting that just an hour earlier there had been “ten painted warriors at his house,” and if Crockett and his boys were discovered there, the whole lot of them would be killed for harboring the soldiers. Again Crockett’s men voiced their concerns and suggested they leave, but Crockett scoffed that his business had been to hunt “just such fellows,” so they saddled up and readied to ride on. Crockett also understood that under such circumstances, it would be cowardly to return to camp.

They rode into the night, their shadows passing through the trees under brilliant moonglow, all of them afraid to talk for fear of the “painted warriors.” They moved this way, sometimes riding and sometimes leading their horses through slanting moonlight and dark shadow, across creeks and ponds, until they came upon “two negroes, well mounted on Indian ponies and each with a good rifle.” Ironically, the men were slaves who had been stolen from their owners by the Indians, and had fled them, and were now attempting to get back to their white masters. The two were brothers, big friendly fellows, and each could speak in Creek dialect as well as in English. Crockett convinced one to continue on to Ditto’s Landing, the other he adopted as a guide and translator. Eventually they heard voices and discerned the flickering of firelight through the trees, and arrived at the encampment of a group of friendly Creeks.

Some of the boys had bows and were firing arrows into the trees by the fire and moonlight, and Crockett, playful and inquisitive even under the dangerous conditions, proceeded to join in, amusing himself and “shooting with their boys by pine light.” Finally the newly enlisted slave guide returned from speaking with some of the Indian elders, his face grim. He told Crockett that the friendly Indians were concerned, and if the Red Sticks found them there they would all be killed. Crockett relayed the following message back through his translator: “If one would come that night, I would carry the skin of his head home to make me a mockasin.” The friendly natives laughed aloud at the correspondence, admiring Crockett’s nerve and humor, but unease spread across the camp, and the men left their horses saddled for a speedy departure, and they lay down, attempting to get what little rest they might with their rifles clutched across their chests.

Crockett lay dozing fitfully when he was startled awake by “the sharpest scream that ever escaped the throat of a human creature.” An Indian runner arrived in camp and reported that the Red Sticks were coming, and that a large war party had been “crossing the Coosa River all day at Ten Islands, and were going to meet Jackson.” Crockett believed he finally had some useful intelligence, and he felt compelled to convey the news quickly. News of Red Sticks on the warpath sent the friendly Indians into a frenzy, and they packed up and scattered in a matter of minutes. Crockett gathered his men and they quickly mounted up, knowing they had a long and dangerous ride ahead. By now, they were some sixty-five miles from the landing. They stopped only to water and feed their horses, riding through soreness and hunger and fear, until they came once more to the friendly Indian community where they had met Radcliffe, now vacated and ablaze. Crockett later boasted that they could easily have taken on a force of five to one, then mused wryly: “But we expected the whole nation would be on us, and against such fearful odds we were not so rampant for a fight.”

The torched town at their backs, they rode by moonlight through the night, and stopped at daybreak at the Brown residence, to feed their horses and eat a hurried meal themselves. At about ten o’clock the next morning they straggled into the main camp, their horses limping and foaming, the men hunched, saddle-sore. Crockett dismounted and reported immediately to Colonel John Coffee the news from the front. Coffee took in the information but seemed to pay little attention to it, practically ignoring Crockett, who fumed quietly, not wishing to offend a superior: “I was so mad that I was burning inside like a tarkiln, and I wonder that the smoke hadn’t been pouring out of me at all points.” His rightful anger at being disregarded would shortly turn to real bitterness. Major Gibson, who had been presumed dead, emerged the next day, and when with great histrionics and embellishments he relayed nearly the identical information that Crockett had previously brought to Colonel Coffee’s attention, the Colonel acted immediately. Many years later Crockett would still remember that feeling of disparity, of being ignored simply because he was a common foot soldier and not an officer. It convinced him that the world could be hierarchical and unfair. “When I made my report, it wasn’t believed, because I was no officer; I was no great man, just a poor soldier. But when the same thing was reported by Major Gibson!! Why, then, it was all as true as preaching, and the colonel believed it every word.”

This perceived betrayal would be the seed of a growing distrust in Crockett, a deep suspicion of rank and privilege that would eventually fester into near-hatred.
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At the time, Crockett simply took the insult quietly and went about his business, as immediate action was called for. Under orders, the troops erected breastworks nearly a quarter-mile long around the camp, and Colonel Coffee dispatched news of the developments via Indian runner to General Jackson, now stationed at Fayetteville.

Jackson was in no mood for the information. He had only arrived the previous day, and his arm was bound and useless, injured by gunshots in the aftermath of the duel between Carroll and Benton. The wounds had been very serious, a bullet having pierced, and remaining lodged in, his upper left arm, another slug having shattered his shoulder. Using “poultices of elm and other wood cuttings as prescribed by Indians,”
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a doctor staunched the blood flow that might have killed him; it took Jackson almost a month before he was fit to rise from bed. But Jackson, as his men were coming to understand, was no ordinary man, and it would take more than a shattered arm to sideline him. As it turned out, he would carry that bullet with him through the Creek War, the Battle of New Orleans, and right into the White House, where it would finally be removed in 1832, in an operation without anesthesia, by a prominent Philadelphia surgeon.
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So it was that Jackson mounted up and drove a furious forced march from Fayetteville, arriving at Crockett’s camp in some discomfort, his men’s feet raw and blistered from the speed of their journey. Already, for the last six months or so, Jackson’s men had privately been calling him by a nickname. Noting his toughness, willpower, and refusal to yield to anything, they dubbed him “Old Hickory,” and the name stuck.
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On October 10, 1813, acting on news conveyed to him by Colonel John Coffee but first iterated by David Crockett, an able volunteer of the Tennessee Mounted Militia, Old Hickory, his left arm slung tight to his body and his face stern and narrow but betraying no sign of pain, rode into camp and dismounted. The fight with the Indians he had longed for was about to begin in earnest.

The breastworks that the troops had erected were never put to use in defense, for Jackson’s ire was up, and he quickly determined that the best tactic was to go on the offensive, to intercept the mobilizing Creeks to the south. Fatigued and hungry but now driven by the possessed Old Hickory—“Sharp Knife” to the Indians who faced his blade—the Tennessee Volunteers marched and rode for Creek country, essentially retracing Crockett’s reconnaissance by crossing the Tennessee River, moving through Huntsville, then fording the river again where it passed Muscle Shoals. Jackson had split his forces, sending about 800, Crockett among them, under Colonel Coffee. The river at Muscle Shoals was dangerous, nearly two miles wide, with a bottom so rough and rocky that a number of horses’ hooves became lodged between submerged stones. The riders leapt from them into the water and sloshed along on foot, leaving the panicked animals to founder, topple, and eventually drown in the muddy roil. The men drove on to the headwaters of the Black Warrior River, very near the present-day location of Tuscaloosa, and moved as quietly as a troop of 800 could into what was known as Black Warrior Town. It had recently been vacated, and the hungry soldiers proceeded to loot what stores remained, securing “a fine quantity” of beans and corn. Content with new food supplies, they then torched the town down to ash.

Crockett noted that the fields surrounding the town were pocked with very fresh Indian tracks, and he surmised that the Indians had anticipated their arrival and fled not long before. They pressed on, a number of the men now gaunt and haggard, heading to meet Jackson’s main army at the fork where Crockett was originally to have made rendezvous with Major Gibson. The forces convened and reassessed the situation, realizing by the next day that they were completely out of meat. Jackson’s army had originally assembled and moved so fast that they had arrived insufficiently supplied, and Crockett’s division had used up all the provisions they had brought. Crockett took the opportunity to approach Major Gibson and ask him whether he might venture afield to hunt as they marched along, and Gibson consented, perhaps wishing to confirm the rumors of Crockett’s hunting skills and marksmanship. They certainly needed the food.

Crockett left the main and had gone only a short distance when he came across a fresh-killed deer carcass, so recently dropped that the flesh was “still warm and smoking.” Crockett surmised that the Indian who had killed the deer would be very close at hand, perhaps still in shooting range, and though, as he put it, “I was never much in favor of one hunter stealing from another, yet meat was so scarce in the camp, that I thought I must go in for it.” Without hesitation he slung the bloody carcass in front of him across his horse and rode with his spoils until nightfall.

Returning to camp, he distributed the deer among the men, keeping a small portion for his immediate group, and they gorged themselves on the venison and gnawed on small rations of parched corn. The next day Crockett hunted again, this time flushing a pack of hogs from a canebrake and shooting one, and in moments gunfire erupted all around, sounding like battle fire. When Crockett arrived back with his hog he happily discovered that the hogs had broken from the cane toward the camp, and the soldiers had harvested a good number of them, and a hefty beef cow as well. They were temporarily sated, but things would soon get worse again. “The next day we met the main army, having had, as we thought, hard times and a plenty of them, though we had yet seen hardly the beginning of trouble.”

Crockett’s foreshadowing would prove accurate, as the men would soon face hardships so severe as to test their tenacity and patriotism and result in a famous mutiny. The convened armies plodded on, arriving back at Radcliffe’s place, only to find that Radcliffe had stashed and hidden all his provisions. Even more remarkable was the revelation that the runner who’d screamed in the night and claimed that the “Red Sticks” were on the move had actually been an elaborate and successful ruse by Radcliffe himself. They had been tricked, and Crockett noted that there was nothing much to do about it but march on to Camp Wells, between Tuscaloosa and Gadsden. They vowed retribution against the scheming Radcliffe, and for atonement they absconded with “the scoundrell’s two big sons . . . and made them serve in the war.” At length they came to Ten Islands, on the Coosa River, where Coffee’s troops erected a stockade named Fort Strother and began to send out small spy parties to get detailed and confirmed intelligence on the Creek activity and locations. These forays paid off, as it was soon determined that a fairly large contingent of Indians remained encamped at the town of Tallusahatchee only eight miles away. This was it; Jackson’s chance to avenge the atrocity of Fort Mims was now at hand.

General John Coffee (he had just recently been given the raise in rank) divided his troops and cleverly marched one line on either side of the town, and in this way used a force of some 900 men to completely encircle a town, and within it, about 180 Creek warriors. They tightened their line. Clearly outnumbered, a good many Creek women began fleeing from houses and shelter and clinging to the soldiers, begging mercy, surrendering. But with Fort Mims still a vivid memory and rallying cry, Coffee’s men closed their ranks tight and Captain Eli Hammond, commanding a band of rangers, advanced straight on the town. Crockett remembered that “Indians saw him, and they raised a yell, and came running at him like so many red devils.” The outnumbered Indians fired guns and arrows when they could, then quickly retreated into houses and behind outbuildings, waiting. What followed was a scene as gruesome as Fort Mims. Crockett and his contingent chased a group of forty-six Creek warriors into a house, and arriving there, watched as a brave and unyielding Creek squaw drew a bow back with her feet and let fly an arrow that pierced and slew one of their men. It was the first man Crockett ever saw killed by bow and arrow, and the act enraged him and his men. “She was fired on, and had at least twenty balls blown through her. . . . We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six warriors in it.” Similar routs took place all around the town, and in a very few minutes the attack was complete, with 186 Creek warriors dead and eighty taken prisoner. Just five of the white troops perished in the raid. Jackson would comment, “We have retaliated for the destruction of Fort Mims.”
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