David Crockett (22 page)

As luck would have it, that evening Crockett came upon a cambric ruffle lying on the dirt road just like the one worn at the neck by Mitchell. The following morning, Crockett pinned the fancy ruffle to his own coarse shirt and strode into the chamber. Waiting until the eloquent Mitchell finished speaking once again, Crockett arose to offer his comments on the matter under discussion. As a pontificating Crockett walked back and forth, the frilly ruffle caught the eye of other members of the body and soon titters and giggles turned into uproarious and prolonged laughter at the stark contrast between the foppish neck scarf and Crockett’s country garb. A humiliated Mitchell, who later served with Crockett in the U.S. Congress, quickly fled the chamber, as if he had been effeminized by the swashbuckling frontiersman. Crockett took his bows as the others cheered. Crockett won his spurs that day and he did so without shedding blood in a duel. From that moment on, the title “gentleman from the cane” was no longer considered derogatory. It was a badge of honor for Crockett and for the people he represented.

A
LTHOUGH
C
ROCKETT WAS ENSCONCED
as a lawmaker in Murfreesboro, it became quickly evident that he was not able to detach himself from the hardships of the frontier. Only twelve days into his first session as a state lawmaker, “the gentleman from the cane” was dealt a devastating blow. On September 29, 1821, an urgent message from Elizabeth reached Crockett in Murfreesboro with the news that a torrential summer storm had caused the Tennessee River and all its tributaries, including Shoal Creek, to flood. The Crockett family’s gristmill and gunpowder factory on the swollen creek were completely demolished and washed away by the flash flood. All that remained of the complex was a portion of the dam, the millrace, and the distillery. Floodwater filled the log house where the Crocketts lived, but, thankfully, none of the family was lost or injured.

News of the catastrophe stunned Crockett. An accidental explosion of the gunpowder mill was of utmost concern to him; the usually calm waters of Shoal Creek seemed far less menacing. Obviously thankful that his loved ones were not injured, Crockett nonetheless realized that, in one swift blow, a promising business venture had vanished. Crockett later wrote, “the misfortune just made a complete mash of me.”
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He immediately requested and was granted a leave of absence to go home and survey the damage. Before he departed, the dutiful rookie legislator took time to cast his vote for General William Carroll for governor of Tennessee. In those years, governors and U.S. senators were elected by the state legislature, and Crockett wanted to perform this important duty and support Carroll, a Pennsylvania native and well-known and admired liberal who had fought as one of Andrew Jackson’s colonels in the Creek War.
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After voting for Carroll—who was victorious in the election and would serve as governor for all but two years between 1821 and 1835—Crockett rode back to Lawrence County as fast as his horse would go. When he arrived, he discovered the disaster was every bit as bad as Elizabeth had described in her message. As someone later observed, Crockett came home expecting the worst, and that was exactly what he found.
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Only splinters remained of the buildings. Without a gristmill to grind corn, the badly damaged distillery was useless. David, Elizabeth, and their children had to seek shelter in the homes of other Crockett and Patton family members living in the area.

For David, the sight of his own mill in ruins surely triggered a flashback to his childhood in east Tennessee when his father, John Crockett, was driven to ruin by a horrendous flood that swept away his gristmill. Determined to avoid the debt that overwhelmed his father, David wisely listened to Elizabeth’s counsel. She knew more about the operation of the mill and the family finances than Crockett, who was usually away either hunting or politicking. In the 1880s, William Simonton, from a respected family of Lawrenceburgians that stretched back to early settlement times, recalled that as a boy he often saw Elizabeth running the mill in her husband’s absence. Simonton spoke of Elizabeth’s great strength and said that she always was grinding or lugging sacks of grain with ease.
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Of course, she did all of that work while nursing an infant, overseeing a couple of toddlers, and trying to keep her older children out of trouble.

Elizabeth advised her husband not to pack up and run away from the dilemma but to face the adversity head-on, just as they always had done in times of trouble. She told David to practice what he preached—to be always sure he was right and then go ahead. “She didn’t advise me, as is too fashionable, to smuggle up this, and that, and t’other, to go on at home; but she told me, says she, ‘Just pay up, as long as you have a bit’s worth in the world; and then every body will be satisfied, and we will scuffle for more.”
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Much of the milling operation had been financed by Elizabeth’s funds, but there also were several loans that had to be satisfied. “I determined not to break full handed, but thought it better to keep a good conscience with an empty purse, than to get a bad opinion of myself, with a full one. I therefore gave up all I had, and took a bran-fire new start.”
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The best course of action for the Crocketts was to clear up as many of their debts as possible and then start over.

“I had some likely negroes, and a good stock of almost every thing about me, best of all I had an honest wife,”
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a reflective Crockett wrote almost twelve years later. This was his first mention of slaves in his autobiography. Slavery was a part of everyday life in Tennessee, particularly in the middle and western sections of the state, where tobacco and cotton were the favored crops. Back in Crockett’s homeland of eastern Tennessee, small farmers who had no need for a large slave workforce largely dominated the hilly land. Also, even early in the state’s history, eastern Tennessee harbored a great deal of antislavery sentiment. Since Crockett never farmed on the scale of the larger farms and plantations, he would have had no need for many slaves or hired hands to help with the work. Although it is not known if those “negroes,” as Crockett calls them, were his slaves or on loan from a family member or friend, the 1820 Lawrence County census records listed one slave, gender not given, living in the Crockett household.

Three months later, on October 9, 1821, Crockett returned to Murfreesboro and his work as a state legislator. Despite the troubles he faced, he also seemed steadfast and genuinely concerned about the welfare of his two-county legislative district and other matters of state importance. He not only introduced bills to help Hickman and Lawrence counties, where small farms produced such staple crops as cotton, corn, wheat, and oats but also supported the call for a revised state constitution that would adjust property taxes and place more of the burden on the wealthy class, providing some long overdue relief to citizens of modest means. Bearing in mind his fondness for all sorts of wagering, it was odd that Crockett voted to prohibit gambling. He may have taken such a stance on behalf of his constituents, the small landholders and squatters who had to work hard just to subsist. Yet given his own experiences as a bound-out boy, it was no surprise when he voted against a measure that would have allowed the state to hire out debtors as laborers. For many of the more seasoned politicians of the time, Crockett was a novelty of sorts, but still someone who had to be taken seriously.

“He was one of the earliest specimens to emerge of that nineteenth-century type, the Backwoodsman, a type that was often more given to noise and a kind of shrewdness than to solidity,”
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wrote a scholar in 1956, near the peak of the revival of interest in Crockett. Others agreed but narrowed their assessment of the man as a political force and pinpointed his primary objective—helping people just like himself, who had been unable to acquire property of their own. In Crockett, backwoods citizens witnessed a new sort of politician emerge, one quite different from the patrician Jackson, who, despite his attempts to come off as a man of the people, in fact was a large landowner and shrewd businessman who did quite well in the marketing of cotton, tobacco, and slaves.

The differences between the two men became clear when one examined Crockett’s record not only as a state lawmaker but as a congressman. Virtually every vote that Crockett spoke up for and cast, in some way or another, was of a populist nature, generally directed against the established landholding gentry and meant to help the large number of settlers moving into the recently opened western lands.

The potential those lands promised also greatly appealed to Crockett. As soon as the first session of the Fourteenth General Assembly concluded its business and adjourned on November 17, he packed his trunk and bags and headed home to prepare for an expedition to the western frontier of Tennessee. Although he enjoyed seeing his wife and children, he saw no good purpose spending the winter in a crowded cabin as the guests of kindly relatives. Crockett knew there was land to be scouted in Carroll County, named for Governor Carroll, and newly established on November 7, only ten days before the legislative session ended.
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The vast expanse stretched all the way from the Tennessee River to the Mississippi.

Crockett had never been to the area before, but he was well aware of its existence; on July 10, 1788, his father-in-law, Robert Patton, had received from the state of North Carolina a 1,000-acre land grant for his service in the Revolutionary War.
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In October 1821, when Patton learned of the tremendous property loss suffered by the Crocketts due to the flood, he deeded 800 of the acres to Elizabeth and David. The deed was executed in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where Patton resided after Crockett agreed to pay $1,600 for the acreage.
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Elizabeth’s brothers-in-law, Abner Burgin and James Edmonson, witnessed the transfer of the deed, and at least one of them brought the document to Tennessee for Crockett’s signature.

Crockett was eager to have a look at the newly purchased tract and pick a new site to which his family could move after his debts were cleared up in Lawrence County. He recruited his eldest son, John Wesley, an already physically impressive fourteen-year-old, and another young man, Abram Henry, and they cut out for the Obion River, 150 miles to the northwest.
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For the first time in his life, Crockett rode into what had become known as “the land of the shakes,” ever since the thundering series of earthquakes of 1811–1812 that were felt hundreds of miles away. It had been more than a decade since the earthquakes shook the region, but from time to time tremors could still be felt. The ground was scarred by deep fissures and cracks, some extending for miles through the canebrakes and woods already thick again with stands of hickory, oak, and gum. A focal point of the region was Reelfoot Lake, a large body of water created by the earthquakes and studded with cypress trees, some hundreds of years old.

In 1891—some seventy years after Crockett arrived there—a
New York Times
correspondent, who toured the land of the shakes and visited Reelfoot Lake, described the place as a “peculiarly weird and uncanny” place.
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The
Times
article, entitled “A Sportsmen’s Paradise,” published with no byline, went on to report: “No where perhaps in the United States, at least east of the Rocky Mountains, is to be found another such perfect sporting ground for gunners and fishermen. Bears, deer, wolves, panthers, wildcats, wild turkeys, and all sorts of lesser game abound in the forest on the borders of the lake…. Far out in the lake, beyond the sight of shore, one gets the impression of being in a vast ruined temple. On every side rise endless spires of decaying cypresses, branchless, leafless, shorn of their beauty, gleaming in the still air like gaunt, mysterious monuments of destruction and death.”
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Tangles of dead tree trunks and logs lay submerged just below the lake’s surface. The knees of ancient cypresses flanking the edges of the water stood as timeless sentinels. In the upper branches eagles preened in their great nests. Animals of all sorts roamed the canebrakes and thickets, and the shimmering waters of the lake seemed alive with fish and fowl. On quick inspection, this place seemed tailor-made for Crockett. He knew that as soon as he and his two young companions arrived on winded horses, trailing their packhorse loaded with enough provisions for a month. As far as Crockett was concerned, the land lacked for nothing. “It was a complete wilderness, and full of Indians who were hunting. Game was plenty of almost every kind, which suited me exactly, as I was always fond of hunting.”

The men accordingly staked off some land and selected a site for the family home close to Rutherford’s Fork, the southernmost branch of the Obion River. Crockett liked the lay of the land and the proximity to water and wood—two frontier basics. There were not many settlers living in the vicinity, but as soon as the Crockett party had hobbled their horses in a grazing meadow, they took off on foot to visit a family named Owens at their cabin more than seven miles away. It was early winter, and the Obion was running full and icy cold. All three of them waded into the river “like so many beavers” and sloshed through water that sometimes came up to their necks, forcing John Wesley to swim.
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Crockett led the way, using a long pole to feel his way along and cutting back fallen brush and overhanging branches with his tomahawk. Finally they reached land and found the cabin, where a team of boatmen had gathered. Owens and his wife were congenial and dished out hot food and comforted the shivering John Wesley. “The old gentleman set out his bottle to us, and I concluded that if a horn wasn’t good then, there was no use for its invention,” Crockett observed. “So I swig’d off about a half pint, and the young man [Abram Henry] was by no means bashful in such a case; he took a strong pull at it too, I then gave my boy some, and in a little time we felt pretty well.”
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After warming by the fire, Crockett left the other two at the cabin and tagged along with the men to see about a boat loaded with whiskey, flour, sugar, coffee, and salt. The men had been hired for $500 to take the goods to a place called McLemore’s Bluff, named for the same person who had lent Crockett money back in Lawrence County. The river level was too low for the boat to travel, so while they all waited for rains, Crockett used his charm to persuade the boat owner and crew to go with him to his new claim of land, where they “slap’d up a cabin in no time.”
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Crockett also managed to get four barrels of meal, a barrel of salt, and ten gallons of whiskey. In return he agreed to pay them back by supplying fresh meat for the 100-mile journey up the Obion to unload their cargo. Once the river rose, Crockett went with the crew, leaving John Wesley and Abram Henry behind at the new cabin.