David Crockett (35 page)

During this period of the 1830s and for several years to come, it was not uncommon to see the letters
G.T.T.
painted or carved on the doorways of cabins in Tennessee and other parts of the country, especially the South. It was a sure sign that the occupants had picked up and were, as they said, “
Gone to Texas
.” The slogan was first seen in print in 1825, and had become a popular expression for those people who had committed crimes or owed money or just did not want to be found.
³⁸
When bill collectors went looking for defaulters and found an empty house, they realized those they sought had absconded and had gone to Texas. It became common that when a grand jury returned indictments but the sheriff had no luck bringing in the accused, he would report back that they had gone to Texas. When a banker rifled the vaults of his institution and made a successful getaway, he, too, was gone to Texas.

And when a man had a broken marriage, lost his job, but hoped to start fresh as a land agent on the Mexican frontier, he, too, was gone to Texas.

B
Y LATE AUTUMN OF
1835,
near the end of Jackson’s second term as president, Crockett had “gone to Texas.” In this land of turmoil and revolt he soon joined other historical refugees destined to become larger-than-life legends, thanks to the hyperbole of the press and biased historians. These mythmakers surgically removed any flaws and foibles, rationalized motivations, and justified deeds. In so doing, they created not only a plethora of heroic figures but also one of the most iconic symbols of gallantry and independence in America—the Alamo.

Crockett had never heard of the Alamo and certainly had no thought of taking part in any revolt against Mexico when, on October 31, 1835, he composed a letter to George Patton, his brother-in-law in Swannanoa, North Carolina. “I am on the eve of Starting to the Texes…we will go through Arkinsaw and I want to explore the Texes well before I return.”
¹

At the time of Crockett’s departure for Texas, he and Elizabeth still lived apart, but he had hoped that, if the trip panned out and he found some suitable land, she would be willing to try a fresh start. At a going-away frolic attended by family and friends, there was pit-roasted barbecue, dancing, logrolling and shooting contests, and plenty of storytelling. It was said that Crockett was in fine spirits, took several horns of whiskey, and played the fiddle.
²

Crockett set out on this scouting trip with a trio of traveling companions—nephew William Patton, brother-in-law Abner Burgin, and Lindsey Tinkle, the neighbor who had bought one of the slave girls Crockett had sold from the Patton estate. The four men packed their horses much as they would have done in preparation for a long bear hunt. They took salted meat, bedrolls, and a full compliment of weapons and ammunition. No doubt Crockett slipped some gunpowder into his saddlebag and shooting pouch. Contrary to popular belief, he did not take Pretty Betsey, the fancy weapon presented to him by the Whigs in Philadelphia, but opted for just plain Betsey, his well-used long gun.
³

On the morning of November 1, the four men mounted up, Crockett astride a large chestnut horse with a white star on its forehead. People later recalled that his spirits were high. He was in his hunting clothes, riding with men he liked, and ahead waited the promise of adventure and opportunity.

Like many others making the same journey at the time, Crockett understood what he faced once he crossed the Red River and left the United States. He had to have been aware that, in the weeks before he departed, the animosity had increased between the government of Mexico and the American settlers, called Texians, in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. The white colonists were becoming increasingly tired of living under Mexican rule, and they headed for war with hopes of forming their own separate republic. Many of these Anglos were illegal immigrants and did not abide by Mexican law. All citizens were required to join the Catholic Church, accept the language and laws of the governing country, and, by the late 1820s, observe the ban on the enslavement of human beings.

To the Anglos’ way of thinking, slaves were too important to give up, particularly for the wealthier southerners who were accustomed to the plantation system style of farming. “The discussion of slavery in the West begins in Texas, the heart of the region’s slave regime,” writes Quintard Taylor Jr., African American history scholar. “Slaveholders unapologetically proclaimed both the agricultural need for black labor and their right to own their fellow human beings.”
⁴

Slavery had been a volatile issue in Texas ever since the early 1820s, when Stephen Fuller Austin convinced the Mexican government, which had just won its independence from Spain, that Anglo settlers would provide a buffer on the northern frontier between the settlements to the south and the raiding Comanches. The original three hundred families that Austin led to what was promised as the land of milk and honey soon multiplied. Prospects of free land lured thousands of whites across the Sabine and Red rivers. By 1823 at least 3,000 U.S. citizens had entered Texas illegally, along with 700 legitimate settlers.
⁵
About the same time, the Austin Colony had established an unofficial capital at San Felipe de Austin, on the west bank of the Brazos River. Two years earlier, Austin was already expressing concern over what he perceived would become a major problem with the Mexican government and the colonists.

“The principal difficulty is slavery, this they will not admit—as the law is all slaves are to be free in ten years, but I am trying to have it amended so as to make them slaves for life and their children free at 21 years—but do not think I shall succeed in this point, and that the law will pass as it is now, that the slaves introduced by the settlers shall be free after 10 years,”
⁶
Austin wrote in a dispatch from Mexico City in 1822.

Only five years later, the Austin Colony’s political and social hub of San Felipe was “still in swaddling clothes” when Noah Smithwick arrived. The feisty nineteen-year-old had a “strong aversion to tearing up God’s earth,” so took up blacksmithing instead of farming.
⁷
Smithwick left behind one of the most accurate memoirs of the first Anglo settlement in Texas. He described pioneer doctors who devoted most of their practice to “dressing wounds and holding inquests,” running hounds after feral hogs in the river bottoms, trying to stay clear of a certain lawyer “who had a penchant for dueling,” and a poet whose verse so disturbed some San Felipeans that they gave him a “new suit of tar and feathers” and ran him out of town.
⁸
The offending verse from the unnamed bard that resulted in his “poetical flight” read:

More importantly, Smithwick also wrote of the colonists’ true motives for moving into the province and their decision to take the land away from Mexico. According to Smithwick, many of his fellow settlers were social outcasts and deadbeat exiles from the Mississippi Valley and across the southern states eager to acquire cheap land or get a new lease on life. “Faulty statutes in the United states sent many a man to Texas,” he wrote.
⁹

Smithwick also described wealthy landowners who established cotton plantations and imported large numbers of slaves. “Over on the Brazos…a planter from South Carolina…had over 100 slaves, with which force he set to work clearing ground and planting cotton and corn. He hired two men to kill game to feed them on, and the mustangs [wild horses] being the largest and easiest to kill…the negroes lived on horse meat till corn came in.”
¹⁰

Slavery was indeed an important issue in the Texas war of rebellion, just as it would be a decade later in the Mexican-American War. Yet because slavery is antithetical to hero worship, often the subject has been noticeably absent in discussions of early Texas settlement by Anglo immigrants. The fact remains that by the late 1820s Mexico had a politically active and strong abolitionist movement. In 1829 a new Mexican constitution prohibited slavery, which so outraged the big landowners and speculators in Texas that a provision was drafted that permitted slavery under certain conditions. That was soon rescinded and a new policy put into place. It allowed all slaves currently residing in Texas to remain but banned the importation of additional slaves. It also decreed that children born to slaves in the territory would be free. At the same time, the Mexican government passed a law blocking any further American immigration into Texas. By 1830 there were more than 20,000 settlers and 2,000 slaves living in Texas, making Anglos more numerous than Mexicans.

The flood of immigrants was overwhelming, and brought even more problems. Many of the new arrivals disregarded the laws, refused to pay customs fees, and took part in illegal smuggling activities. This provoked a great outcry from Mexican newspapers and political leaders fearful that the white colonists would attempt a revolution. During a speech to a secret session of the Mexican congress in 1830, one political leader warned: “Mexicans! Watch closely, for you know all too well the Anglo-Saxon greed for territory. We have generously granted land to these Nordics; they have made their homes with us, but their hearts are with their native land. We are continually in civil wars and revolutions; we are weak, and know it—and they know it also. They may conspire with the United States to take Texas from us. From this time, be on your guard!”
¹¹

The situation only worsened for the Mexican government. By 1835, the population had ballooned to 35,000, including 3,000 black slaves. All of this changed the very nature of the province. Most of the newcomers spoke only English, pretended to practice Catholicism, and “true to their manly Southern roots, kept slaves at a time when the peculiar institution had been abandoned by the rest of Mexico.”
¹²

That August, as Crockett was reeling from his election loss in Tennessee, Austin continued to press for not only a continuation of slavery but also for independence from Mexico. In a letter to his cousin, Mary Austin Holley, he wrote:

The mostly southern-born white settlers of Texas were on a collision course with the Mexican government. The two sides could no longer avoid the slavery issue. Mexico now fully supported equality for its entire population, while many of the white immigrants wanted Texas to become an empire for slavery.

Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, president of Mexico and commander of the Mexican army, puzzled as to why a province in his republic still allowed slaves, asked: “Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose kind laws protect the liberty of man without distinction of cast or color?”
¹⁴
Santa Anna posed the rhetorical question in early 1836, just as Crockett was making his way to Texas.

Crockett himself was not opposed to slavery, having bought and sold slaves over the years, though never on a large scale. But he was not so passionate about slavery that he went to Texas to take part in a revolt. He was more interested in shooting the bison on the Texas prairie than killing “yaller niggers,” as Mexicans were sometimes called.
¹⁵
Crockett’s only concern with the war that raged between transplanted Americans and the forces of Gen. Santa Anna was whether its outcome would help him get some land sooner rather than later. Shortly after he lost his last congressional race in August of 1835, he explained in a letter that one of his main reasons for leaving the United States was to get away from Jackson and Van Buren until they were no longer in power. “I do believe Santa Ana’s [
sic
] kingdom [Mexico] will be a paradise, compared with this, in a few years,”
¹⁶
he wrote.

His decision to go to Texas, then, was not impulsive. Texas promised Crockett a fresh start and new opportunities for homesteading as well as politicking.
¹⁷

A desire for land and not heroism was on Crockett’s mind as he and his companions made their way south. The quartet of riders made stops at several towns, including Jackson and Bolivar, and along the way picked up others who wanted to go to Texas. As many as thirty riders had joined Crockett’s entourage by the time they finally rode into Memphis on November 10. Most of them would stay in Memphis or drop out along the journey through Arkansas and across the Mexican border into Texas.

While spending a few days in Memphis, Crockett looked up old friends such as Mayor Marcus Winchester, the well-known business and political figure who had invested money and energy in his earlier political campaigns. The river town, with its many pleasurable distractions, had always proved inviting to Crockett. Much time also was spent enjoying horns of drink with citizens and comrades at the Union Hotel, Hart’s Saloon, and Neil McCool’s establishment. It was at this time that Crockett made his famous declaration to the Tennessee voters: “Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”
¹⁸
Most likely he repeated the statement many times as he traveled southward to the U.S.-Mexico border.