The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (19 page)

By mid-1835, after a whirlwind, two-week book tour of the major cities of the eastern United States—while Congress was in session—Crockett had become one of the most famous individuals in America. But the figure he cut in real life usually fell short of the legend. The half man, half alligator who could whip his weight in wildcats and grin a panther down from a tree was actually a well-dressed, well-mannered gentleman, to the surprise of many, including a woman who saw him in the audience at a ventriloquist’s show:

He is wholly different from what I thought him, tall in stature large in frame but quite thin with black hair combed straight over the forehead parted from the middle and his shirt collar turned negligently back over his coat. He has rather an indolent careless appearance and looks not like a “go-ahead man.”

That observer was close to the truth. “Go-ahead” though Crockett might be in energy and outlook, he was certainly never going to fit the stereotype of the thrusting, can-do politician—nor did he wish to. Indeed, the more time he spent in Washington, the more disenchanted, impatient, and just plain bored he became with the unpleasant and compromising political process. Crockett was a genuinely honest man, despite the slight autobiographical fiddles he engineered and the occasional harmless trick he played on an opponent to make a point and get a laugh from an audience. Even worse for his political career, he was positively resistant to deal making. “I have always supported measurs [sic] and principles, not men,” he wrote, and his political career emphasized the sincerity of that statement.

His disillusionment was all the greater because he had once so admired fellow Tennessean Andrew Jackson. By 1830, during his second term, Crockett was publicly denouncing the president, whom he saw as having been corrupted by Washington and manipulated by the less scrupulous men around him, particularly Vice President Van Buren, a master politician with a reputation as a backroom schemer. That year, Crockett stated, “I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not—he has become a Van Buren man.”

In the spring of 1834, Jackson clashed with the Senate over the extent of executive power and control. Some, including Crockett, interpreted these developments as an impending descent into tyranny; many still alive could remember living under the rule of a king, and did not wish for another monarch. They compared Jackson to Julius Caesar and the times to the last days of the Roman Republic. Near the end of the year, in a letter to a friend, Crockett vowed that if Van Buren, Jackson’s handpicked successor, was elected, “I will leave the united [sic] States. I will not live under his kingdom.”

Nevertheless, Crockett stumped during the late spring and early summer of 1835 with vigor, though he lacked the money for a full-scale campaign. This time his opponents fielded a popular candidate named Adam Huntsman, who gave as good as he got. An attorney with a peg leg, the result of a war injury, he proved adept at savvy disparagement of Crockett, criticizing his lapses in Washington and pointing out his failure to achieve anything of substance during his three terms.

Crockett responded by promising his constituents that he would set out for Texas if he lost the election. But to make matters worse, he had again failed to pass his land bill, despite promising that it would be done, and he had accomplished little else this term save for his tour in support of the book. A mere fifteen months after its publication had established his celebrity, his star was on the decline, and to many, his strident criticism of the president had grown tiresome and his legislation inconsequential. A follow-up narrative of his promotional tour, quickly written (by another ghostwriter, based on Crockett’s notes and press clippings) and published to cash in on his fame, resulted in little of the charm and a fraction of the sales of the first. Another book released a few months later, in the summer of 1835, a polemic against Van Buren disguised as a biography of the vice president, turned out even worse. Finally, his vote against Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 had not been popular with his constituents. On the surface it would appear surprising that Crockett, whose grandparents had been massacred by Creeks and who had fought them himself, could summon the compassion to take their side. But Crockett could empathize with the plight of the “civilized” tribes, for they were in the same boat as many of his constituents regarding land. And Indians had saved his life during one of his early hunting trips when a party of them found him in the woods, near death from malaria. Now peaceful and living on ancestral lands, they were protected by treaties that Jackson was choosing to ignore.

Initially, Crockett was confident he would win. As the campaign wore on, however, he suspected he was beaten, though he put on a brave face. On election day he won in eighteen of his nineteen counties. But in the single county Huntsman took, he won handily, and Crockett lost the early August election by 252 votes out of the nine thousand cast. The verdict hit home, and when he walked into his cabin after receiving the news, he told his wife, “Well, Bet, I am beat, and I’m off for Texas.” His fourteen-year-old daughter, Matilda, would later recall that he seemed unfazed by his defeat, because “he wanted to go to Texas anyhow.” He had given his word, and he would keep it. Another long hunt, another adventure, and a chance to make his fortune in an unsullied land—that was more than enough reason to head west again. Besides, it was surely preferable to the life of a backwoods farmer, which Crockett had never cottoned to and by now was finding intolerable.

At first Crockett suggested that the whole family go together, the sooner the better; but Elizabeth did not like the sound of that idea. “Mother persuaded him to go first and look at the country, and then if he liked it, we would all go,” remembered Matilda. “He seemed very confident… that he would soon have us all to join him in Texas.” It was settled, then: if the country was as good as the stories he had heard made it out to be, he would stake a claim and come back for his family. On the eve of his departure, he wrote to his brother-in-law George Patton: “We will go through Arkinsaw and I want to explore the Texes well before I return.” It would, he hoped, be his last move west.

On an afternoon late in October, a few days before he left, he gave a big barbecue and “bran dance”—that morning they sprinkled the ground liberally with the husks of Indian corn, for a better surface—and invited neighbors and friends from far and near. “They had a glorious time,” Matilda remembered. “The young folks danced all day and night and everybody enjoyed themselves finely.”

On the morning of November 1, less than three months after his defeat, Crockett said good-bye to his family. Three companions would ride with him: Will Patton, his nephew—“a fine fellow,” Crockett thought; Abner Burgin, another brother-in-law; and Lindsey Tinkle, a neighbor and friend. David dressed in his hunting suit and coonskin cap, though he carried finer clothes in his knapsack. The only firearm he carried was his trusted Betsy, the flintlock rifle he had owned for years. He left his nineteen-year-old son, Robert, in charge of the family and farm, said good-bye to Elizabeth, his two teenage daughters, and everyone else, mounted his large bay, and headed southwest to Dyersburg to catch the main road south toward Memphis, about one hundred miles away.

They reached the river town a few days later and soon engaged in a farewell drinking party with some old friends—and some new ones, since Crockett made them as fast as he could meet them, and everyone wanted to meet the famous son of Tennessee. At some point in the evening, he mounted a tavern counter and gave a speech to the crowd who had gathered, concluding with, “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. I am on my way now.” The next day—their group now doubled in size—they crossed the Mississippi and set out overland for Little Rock, to the west. Overhead, Halley’s Comet slowly made its way through the heavens. (Three years earlier, newspapers around the country had carried a story announcing that Crockett had been appointed by the president to “stand on the Allegheny mountains and catch the Comet, on its approach to the earth, and wring off its tail, to keep it from burning up the world!”)

If Crockett had not previously given much thought to the political turmoil in Texas, the subject had by now become a rationale for his journey. In Little Rock he gave a speech largely concerned with Texas independence, explaining that he was on his way there “to join the patriots of that country in freeing it from the shackles of the Mexican government,” as one local scribe noted. In the weeks previous, the local newspapers had been filled with news from the Mexican province, including a letter from Stephen Austin detailing the October 2 skirmish at Gonzales and a thunderous call to arms from Crockett’s acquaintance and fellow Tennessee politician Sam Houston, who had been practicing law in Nacogdoches until the outbreak of hostilities and had recently been elected commander of that town’s militia:

War in defence of our rights, our oaths, and our constitutions is inevitable in Texas!

If
volunteers
from the United States will join their brethren in this section, they will receive liberal bounties of land. We have millions of acres of our best lands unchosen and unappropriated.

Let each man come with a good rifle, and one hundred rounds of ammunition, and come soon.

Our war-cry is “Liberty or death.”

Our principles are to support the constitution, and
down with the Usurper
!!!

From Little Rock, Crockett and his Tennesseans proceeded southwest toward Texas and crossed the Red River sometime during the third week in November. He may have been eager to join the Texians in their fight for freedom, but he found time to go on an extended hunt into northeast Texas. Henry Stout, a legend in the area as a hunter and guide, escorted Crockett and company into the Choctaw Bayou area and beyond, into the dense strip of forest known as the Cross Timbers. For two weeks or more they explored a country rich in bison, bear, deer, and other large and small game.

The disappointment of his political defeat was fading: Crockett was in his element, and in fine form and high spirits. The malaria he had contracted twenty years before had troubled him periodically ever since, but now it was only a memory. As he explored Texas south of the Red River, no fever and aches plagued him; he felt in excellent health. And the country was everything he had heard: “I must say as to what I have seen of Texas it is the garden spot of the world the best land and the best prospect for health I ever saw is here and I do believe it is a fortune to any man to come here,” he wrote to his oldest daughter, Margaret.

Around the end of December, the party turned south toward Nacogdoches, crossed the Sabine River into Texas, and reached the old Spanish village early in January. At a banquet in his honor given by the ladies of the town, he again told the story that ended with “you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” (Crockett was never one to waste a good line.) A few days later he rode thirty miles east to the small village of San Augustine, where a cannon’s roar announced his arrival, and the requisite welcoming dinner provided another opportunity for a speech.

Already being touted as a local delegate to the constitutional convention scheduled for March 1 in San Felipe—which could not only revive his political career but also help him gain appointment as a land agent for part of the area he had traversed to the north—Crockett decided to make his loyalties official. He could have declined military service due to his age (he would turn fifty in August), or due to his likely election to the convention, but on January 12, Judge John Forbes administered his self-composed oath of allegiance to Crockett, Will Patton, and sixty-six other men. (Friends Lindsey Tinkle and Abner Burgin had decided to return to their wives and children.) They signed up for six months in the Volunteer Auxiliary Corps.

When it came time for Crockett to add his name to the list, he read the oath carefully:

I do solemnly swear that I will bear true allegiance to the provisional government of Texas, or any future government that may be hereafter declared, and that I will serve her honestly and faithfully against all her enemies and oppressors whatsoever.

Crockett told Forbes that he was only willing to support a “republican government.” Forbes inserted “republican” between “future” and “government,” and Crockett put his name to the document. With memories of “King Andrew the First” still vivid—and the recollections of life under George III not too far in the past—he had no desire to live under a monarchy, actual or virtual. Now a soldier in the army of Texas, he sent word home. In a letter to Margaret he made clear his enthusiasm for his new cause:

I am rejoiced at my fate. I would rather be in my present situation than to be elected to a seat in Congress for life. I am in hopes of making a fortune for myself and family bad as has been my prospects… do not be uneasy about me. I am with my friends.

The ex-congressman and his companions soon set out west along the Old San Antonio Road—the Anglo name for El Camino Real—for Washington, 125 miles away on the Brazos River. There they hoped to receive orders from Houston, the recently appointed commander in chief of the Texian army, as to their destination. With Crockett now rode fifteen or sixteen others—“almost all,” wrote Judge Forbes of these and other recruits, “gentlemen of the best respectability.” Most were educated professionals from Tennessee and Kentucky, several of them lawyers, men who were familiar with Crockett and were honored and delighted to ride with him. They began to call themselves the Tennessee Mounted Volunteers.