David Crockett (14 page)

The sordid Finley proceedings finally concluded with Judge Trimble finding for the plaintiff. John Finley never received what he considered his just due after the trial. He died in 1814, and it was not until the following year that two hundred bushels of corn were paid as retribution to his heirs, William and James Finley.
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By then David Crockett was long gone from the mountains of east Tennessee. For in the autumn of 1811, after making further inquiries and scouting a few more sites, Crockett determined the time had come to pack up his household and take his leave.

The frontier was moving on and David, at age twenty-five, wanted to move right along with it. As was always his way, he had a desire to know what waited for him on the other side of every river and mountain he encountered. His curiosity and restlessness never wavered. And so the Crocketts loaded up their few possessions on packhorses and, accompanied by his father-in-law, Billy Finley, they set out to start afresh. They left behind the rickety cabin on rented land and their friends and loved ones. They crossed over the mountains and headed west.

Almanac
cover, 1837. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

A
LTHOUGH BY EARLY
O
CTOBER
of 1811 Crockett had left his original home and stomping grounds far behind, he never forgot the people and land of eastern Tennessee, and it was this early indoctrination that contributed mightily to his lore. His life was more than half over when he left, but for the rest of his years he corresponded with many old friends and associates who stayed along the streams and hills where he grew up.

One of the best examples of Crockett’s strong attachment to his roots also reveals how obsessive he became about staying out of debt. This was undoubtedly a result of witnessing his father’s constant struggle with creditors. When David departed Jefferson County in 1811, he also left behind an outstanding debt of one dollar borrowed from John Jacobs, the farmer he had once worked for, splitting rails.
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Knowing that the debt had not been forgiven nagged at Crockett for a decade. In his mind, a debt, no matter how small, had to be paid off. It was a matter of personal honor and reputation.

John L. Jacobs, the son of the man to whom Crockett owed that single dollar, clearly recalled the day that debt was paid off. It was in 1821, and Crockett was back in east Tennessee, leading a herd of horses he intended to sell in North Carolina.

“One morning I was standing in the door next to the main road,” said Jacobs in 1884, reminiscing about early times in the hills of Jefferson County. “I looked down the road toward Mossy Creek and saw a fine looking man riding in front of a large drove of horses. He rode opposite me and stopped and asked me if my mother was in the house. I answered she was. ‘Tell her to come to the door.’ I did so, and when she appeared he said, ‘How do you do, Mrs. Jacobs?’ My mother said, ‘Sir, you have the advantage of me.’ ‘I am Davy Crockett,’ responded he. ‘Is that you Davy?’ said my mother. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘this is Davy Crockett.’”
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Once he was recognized, there followed a general shaking of hands and an exchange of small talk about family members’ health and other news from the past ten years. At that moment, explained Jacobs, “his horses came rushing by and nearly got ahead of him.” David quickly thrust his hand into his pocket, pulled out a silver dollar, and handed it to the startled woman. “Here, Madam, is a dollar I owed your husband, John Jacobs, when I left this country,” Crockett told her.

“My father had died in the meantime,” his son later wrote. “My mother said, ‘Davy, I don’t want it.’” Crockett could not accept her response. “I owed it,” he said, “and you have to take it.” The woman complied and took the coin, and with no further ado Crockett rode off to sell his horses.
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Much had transpired in Crockett’s life during the years after leaving east Tennessee, in what became an endless search for the right place to settle. He found himself caught up in the great westward migration just like thousands of others—mostly poor and, often, desperate people searching for a fresh start. In October of 1811, the desire to settle in newly opened land brought Crockett to Lincoln County, Tennessee. Named for Revolutionary War General Benjamin Lincoln, the county had been formed in 1809 and was said to have much fertile soil. “The Duck and Elk river country was just beginning to settle, and I was determined to try that,”
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wrote Crockett.

He was issued a warrant for five acres of land south of the headwaters of Mulberry Creek, a branch of the Elk River that divided Lincoln County into two nearly equal parts. With the assistance of Billy Finley, he cleared sassafras and brush on a rise that he dubbed “Hungry Hill” and hastily built a makeshift cabin to shelter Polly and the two boys. They dug a well and built a fence corral for Crockett’s old horse and pair of two-year-old colts. As he had done before at Finley’s Gap, Crockett carved his initials, “D.C.,” in a soaring beech tree on the property line.
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“I found this a very rich country, and so new, that game, of different sorts, was very plenty,” Crockett wrote of the family’s latest home. “It was here that I began to distinguish myself as a hunter, and, to lay the foundation for all my future greatness; but mighty little did I know of what sort it was going to be.”
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Shortly after helping his daughter and son-in-law get settled, Billy Finley bid them farewell and retraced his journey back to his home at Finley’s Gap. It may have been the last time Polly saw her father.

One of Crockett’s first acquaintances in the new territory was the feisty James Burns Gowen, who was born in Virginia in 1785. An insane man, wielding an axe, had murdered his father, and Gowen’s mother was said to be a cousin of the Scottish poet Robert Burns.
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Two years Crocket’s senior, Gowen also was bound out, along with a brother, after their father’s slaying. Gowen and Crockett often were seen with their packs of dogs headed into the trees and loaded for bear. After an evening hunt, they pulled bones together from roasted bear ribs, and slept beneath a covering of tree branches with their rifles and hounds as their only companions.

“It was here, wrestling with the sassafras that adorned the summit of Hungry Hill[,] that the brawn and bravery was developed that afterward made [Davy] famous as a soldier as well as a hunter and backwoods statesman,” Gowen related to relatives before his death in 1880. “So here in the jungles of the forest living with his first wife, the faithful one who crossed the mountains of East Tennessee with him…this old pioneer no doubt spent his happiest days. He says himself that his reputation as a hunter was made on Mulberry.”
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This reputation eventually proved quite useful to Crockett, as it helped propel him into the limelight. His hunting expeditions, either alone or in the company of colorful backwoods characters, supplied the material for many of Crockett’s best stories, which he honed and polished for strategic use at public and private occasions.

“The forest and the mountain stream had great charms for him,” wrote John S. C. Abbott in his 1875 biography of Crockett. “He loved to wander in busy idleness all the day, with fishing-rod and rifle; and he would often return at night with a very ample supply of game. He would then lounge about his hut, tanning deerskins for moccasins and breeches, performing other little jobs, and entirely neglecting all endeavors to improve his farm, or to add to the appearance or comfort of the miserable shanty which he called his home.”
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In spite of his rather harsh critique of Crockett’s domestic habits, Abbot—the author of many popular nineteenth-century historical works and biographies—also pointed out some of what he considered to be Crockett’s strengths. “He had an active mind, and a very singular command of the language of low, illiterate life, and especially of backwoodsman’s slang,” wrote Abbot. “Though not exactly a vain man, his self-confidence was imperturbable, and there was perhaps not an individual in the world…whom he looked up to as in any sense his superior. In hunting, his skill became very remarkable, and few, even of the best marksmen, could throw the bullet with more unerring aim.”
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There was an abundance of deer, and much smaller game, in the area close to his homestead, but Crockett noticed that black bears had been hunted heavily and “were not so plenty as I could have wished.”
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Even when Crockett stalked game in those forests, the face of the land was changing due to the growing tide of settlers moving westward with the frontier. The earliest of these settlers claimed the lush valley land, so those who came later were forced to stake out less desirable sites on sides of mountains. As they cleared the land, the steep slopes eroded and became too poor to farm. The solution was to move on to yet another location. Crockett did not see the old-growth forests that flourished long before his family ever came to the shores of America. That was back in the time when it was said that a squirrel could travel the canopy of the woodlands from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without once touching the ground. Frontier settlers sliced down great mixes of hardwoods that spilled over the rolling old mountains in a multilayered carpet. The first people to enter the yet unbroken wilderness followed bison trails, the only breaks in the thick undergrowth. These trails were cut deep and wide by the hooves of the big lumbering animals seeking clear spring water, salt licks, and grassy meadows, much like the Indians and white men who hunted them. Old trails became well-used paths for restless pioneers such as Crockett and his kin. They were soon followed by land speculators and developers anxious to wrest the land from the Indians who dwelled there long before any whites even knew of the existence of the mountains blanketed with chestnuts, hemlocks, and fir. To the newcomers the wilderness was an adversary that had to be conquered and tamed. The land had to be dismembered and parceled out to families and town builders.

On November 25, 1812, Polly Crockett gave birth to her third child. This time it was a daughter. She was named Margaret, after David’s oldest sister. Crockett cherished the baby girl, who went by the nickname Polly, but he also had to wonder how he was going to feed yet another mouth. Although it was important for frontier families to be large so there were plenty of helping hands, there also was a price to pay before a child was old enough to earn its keep.

After less than two years in Lincoln County, Crockett was beginning to feel the itch to move once more. Besides the decline in the bear population, Crockett, not agriculturally inclined, was having problems making a go of it as a farmer. He spent much of his time out hunting, and not nearly enough behind the plow. Taking a chance by adding to his holdings to provide more crop fields, he put in a claim for an additional fifteen acres. The plan did not work. He soon fell behind on his taxes and in the end lost all of his land, including his original five-acre plot.
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By the time the delinquent tax payment resulted in foreclosure, Crockett had already moved the family away from Hungry Hill. In late 1812 or perhaps early 1813, the Crocketts established residency in adjacent Franklin County, formed in 1807 and named in honor of Benjamin Franklin. Lying in a portion of the valley of the Elk River, the county contained an abundance of streams, springs, and caves. David cleared land and built a cabin home on the Rattlesnake Spring Branch of Bean’s Creek, about ten miles southwest of the county seat of Winchester and a few miles north of the Alabama border.
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It is not clear if Crockett purchased part of a two-hundred-acre tract of land in late 1812 or leased it, as would have been the case for those without any money. Another common alternative would have been to settle on the land as squatters.

Whatever arrangement Crockett worked out in order to get his property, it is known that he named the new home Kentuck. The choice of this name, sometimes spelled Kaintuck, may have signaled a future move to the land of Daniel Boone, whom Crockett knew of only by reputation. By 1812, however, Boone was seventy-eight years old and long gone from Kentucky: he had been happily residing in Missouri for thirteen years.
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Crockett built a log cabin with just enough room for a family of five, while Polly stayed busy with her chores and tended two growing sons and an infant daughter. David cleared and cultivated some of the land, and put in corn and row crops, but he took to the woods as much as he could. Crockett, as we have seen, was a hunter first and farmer a distant second. He continued to go hunting with James Burns Gowen, and also stalked game with a new neighbor, Archard Hatchett. A Virginian by birth who settled in Tennessee in 1806, Hatchett farmed and raised livestock, as well as fourteen children fathered with two wives. The pair roamed far on long hunts, and along the way Crockett continued his practice of tattooing his initials with his hunting knife on the trunks of trees. Before dying on his family farm in 1852, Hatchett told stories of herding cattle with Crockett and of their hunting trips, and the old man made sure his son James knew the locations of some of the trees that Crockett had marked. More than thirty years later in the 1880s, a logging crew inspecting timber came across a beech tree on the highest point of Round Mountain with Crockett’s initials carved deep in the bark. James Hatchett was there that day to tell the story, but also to make sure that the tree was spared from their saws and axes.
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Such accounts of Crockett are still told throughout Tennessee.

Crockett’s own considerable storytelling skill was sharpened in Franklin County as he became acquainted with the old-timers and wisdom keepers who dwelled there. Some of the more memorable storytellers—including William Russell and Jesse Bean, two figures of note from prominent Tennessee families, who were touted as the first white men to settle the land that became Franklin County—had been long acquainted with the Crocketts. The Russell and Bean families had intermarried and spread their kin all across the frontier. Russell’s sister, Lydia, was the wife of Bean’s father, the intrepid William Bean, a rugged adventurer who had hunted with Daniel Boone. In 1769, the elder Bean, after leaving Virginia, became the first permanent white settler in what eventually became Tennessee.
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The Russells also provided plenty of story fodder. William Russell, a native North Carolinian and another early arrival in Tennessee, had fought in several engagements during the Revolutionary War, including the Battle of King’s Mountain. Russell’s house on Boiling Fork became the place for holding court, musters, and other legal proceedings in Franklin County until the town of Winchester was laid out in 1810, and a proper courthouse was built.
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One of Crockett’s good friends was old Major Russell’s son, George, the namesake of his uncle Captain George Russell, who followed his brother-in-law, William Bean, to Tennessee in 1770 and was promptly killed by Indians while on a hunting trip near his home at German Creek.