LIKE A PRODIGAL SON finally forgiven, Crockett entertained his family with many tales of the high and low adventure he had experienced during his long sojourn. He spoke of the people he encountered and places he saw. He told about being broke and being flush, nights spent sleeping in barn lofts, runaway horses, great sailing ships that beckoned, and of times bitter and times sweet. He talked of the kindness of strangers and the cruelty of those he thought were friends. As the stories unfolded, everyone clearly saw that at almost sixteen years of age, the young man had grown in stature and muscle, and strengthened his resolve and character. Crockett had proven his manhood, an unwritten but understood obligation for frontier males.
David was barely thirteen years old when he left his home in east Tennessee. Two and a half years on his own had exposed the young man to different people and places. Important life lessons had inevitably been learned. “He left his home a novice in the ways of the world but returned a person who understood considerably more about himself—what he wanted and what he valued,” writes Joseph Swann. “He was beginning to rise above his circumstances against great odds.”1
The same could not be said for David’s father. Each time John Crockett attempted to rise above his lot in life, the odds overwhelmed him. Debt remained the Crockett family’s cornerstone and hounded its patriarch like a cur dog pack pursuing a bear. The Crockett Tavern offered only meager accommodations, suitable for wagoners and wanderers but a cut below the more comfortable inns and roadhouses of the day. No doubt Elizabeth and her girls prepared tasty meals, kept the place neat and clean, and made sure the bed ticking stuffed with dried leaves was free of lice and other vermin. Still, the charges for food, drink, and lodging were low in east Tennessee due to a legal ruling in 1800 that froze most fees that taverns were allowed to charge. With the price of meals set at no more than ten cents, a night’s lodging six cents, fodder and good pasture for wagon teams six cents, and half-pints of brandy, whiskey, and rum also just six cents, it was difficult to turn a profit.2 Glad as he was to be back in the fold, David had to have known what was apparent to others—that while he may have changed, his family’s fortunes had not.
In the spring of 1802, not long after David returned home, his father came to him seeking help. Prone to drink, John told his teenaged son that once more he found himself in a financial bind that even an ocean of hard cider could not wash away. During David’s absence, his father continued to buy on credit and had run up more debts, including one that was long past due for thirty-six dollars to Abraham Wilson, a resident of the Panther Springs community.3 With the industrious David back on the scene, John saw an opportunity. He proposed that David hire out to Wilson and work off the outstanding debt. In return, David would be released from ever having to turn any of his future earnings over to his father, as was the custom of the day for all minors. The proposition appealed to David and he quickly agreed.
Wasting no time, David immediately went to Panther Springs to meet with Wilson. The arrangement between them called for six months of labor; in exchange, John Crockett’s note would be fully forgiven. David would be working at a range of tasks for approximately six dollars a month, which broke down to twenty cents a day in wages, or the cost for a full pint of tavern wine. The thought of being free of his father’s strict parental control was a powerful incentive.
“I set in, and worked with all my might, not losing a single day in six months,” Crockett reported in his autobiography. “When my time was out, I got my father’s note, and then declined working with the man [Abraham Wilson] any longer, though he wanted to hire me badly. The reason was, it was a place where a heap of bad company met to drink and gamble, and I wanted to get away from them, for I know’d very well if I staid there, I should get a bad name, as nobody could be respectable that would live there.”4
When his son delivered the paid-off note, John Crockett was genuinely pleased. As David later reflected, “Though he was poor, he was an honest man, and always tried mighty hard to pay off his debts.” What he failed to mention, however, was that often John had his own children do the heavy lifting for him.
As soon as his work for Abraham Wilson ended, David found employment with John Canaday, a man who would come to have a major impact on Crockett but who for 150 years went unnamed in all published works, or was inaccurately identified as John Kennedy.5 The problem with the Canaday surname mostly stemmed from Crockett’s own Narrative, in which he phonetically spelled the name Kennedy, based on the pronunciation: accented on the first syllable, with the second a silent. It was likely that David’s Ulster ear caused him to hear the name as Kennedy, a common variation of Canaday. Of interest, but puzzling, are Tennessee land records that posted the name as John Kennedy, while tax lists used the correct spelling. The Canaday clan—having spelled their name in a variety of ways, including Canady, Cannaday, and Kennedy—answered to any of them.6
The Canadays were a Quaker family, all members in good standing of the Society of Friends. John Canaday, born in Prince George County, Maryland, in 1741, and his wife, Margaret Thornbrough Canaday, born in 1744 and a native of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, met and married in 1764 in Rowan County, North Carolina, where both their families had settled.7 In 1796, the Canadays migrated to the new state of Tennessee accompanied by three of their grown sons, joined later by their daughter and three other sons. All of them settled in Jefferson County and affiliated with the recently formed Lost Creek Monthly Meeting, only the second Friends meetinghouse in Tennessee.8 Lost Creek became a thriving center of Quaker life and worship and had a profound influence in East Tennessee history and culture during the antebellum years. Quakers recognized the evils of slave ownership and by the late 1780s had freed their slaves. If a Quaker farmer needed work done he relied on his family or else employed laborers.
After hearing that the many Quakers residing in the area “were remarkable for their kindness,” the notion of working on the tidy Canaday farm appealed to Crockett.9 At their first meeting Canaday hired the strapping lad for two shillings a day, provided that after a week’s trial the young man’s work proved satisfactory. At week’s end, Canaday, or the “honest old Quaker,” as Crockett referred to him, announced that he was pleased with Crockett’s work ethic. Then the shrewd farmer informed David that he held a note on John Crockett in the sum of forty dollars. Canaday further explained that the note would be surrendered if David paid it off by working for him for six months. It has been surmised that Canaday owned the property where the Crockett Tavern operated and that the outstanding debt resulted from back rent that John owed.10
“I was certain enough that I should never get any part of the note,” Crockett wrote. “But then I remembered it was my father that owed it, and I concluded it was my duty as a child to help him along, and ease his lot as much as I could. I told the Quaker I would take him up on his offer, and immediately went to work.”11
For six months, he labored as hard as any field hand in Tennessee for Canaday, who, in turn, provided David with quarters and meals at the Canaday home. The Canadays treated David like one of their own. “I never visited my father’s house during the whole time of this engagement, though he lived only fifteen miles off. But when it was finished, and I had got the note, I borrowed one of my employer’s horses, and, on a Sunday evening, went to pay my parents a visit.”
Presently, David took the newly redeemed note from inside his shirt and handed it to his father, who, upon seeing it, straightaway thought Canaday had sent it for collection. John “looked mighty sorry” and told his son that he did not have the money to pay off the note and was not sure what he should do. “I then told him I had paid it for him, and it was then his own; that it was not presented for collection, but as a present from me. At this, he shed a heap of tears; and as soon as he got over it, he said he was sorry he couldn’t give me any thing. But he was not able, he was too poor.”12
Seeing his father sob, receiving finally some heartfelt gratitude for what he had done without being asked, proved payback in itself for David. For two backbreaking terms of servitude over the course of a year, David had voluntarily worked without any personal income to clear his father’s due notes. Now the ledger between them was finally wiped clean, and David had some options to weigh. Just after the emotional scene with his grateful father, David made up his mind about how to proceed. “The next day, I went back to my old friend, the Quaker, and set in to work for him.”13
For the next four years, until David was twenty years old and about to wed Polly Finley, he lived and worked for the Quakers on land they bought at the headwaters of Panther Creek, near the community of Panther Springs.14 David’s time with the Canadays was time very well spent. During those years he became literate and received the only formal schooling he ever had, excluding the few hectic days spent in Kitchen’s subscription school years earlier. David also found a true role model and enduring friend in John Canaday, who proved a counterbalance to his father. “The influence of John Canaday on David was profound,” according to Crockett historian Joseph Swann. “Although David continued to do many things of which Canaday did not approve, they both evidently thought enough of each other to be sensitive and tolerant. John Canaday was a father figure for David—one quite different from his natural father. John Canaday’s influence on David’s character development, in those formative years, should not be underestimated.”15
On the surface it appeared that the aging Quaker farmer and the upstart young man had little in common. Unlike the Canadays, the Crocketts seemed to avoid taking part in organized religion, even though it is likely that David’s mother was the “Rebecca Crocit” who, with eight others, was baptized at the Bent Creek Baptist Church on a cold February morning in 1803.16 It also could be assumed that, given their strong Scots-Irish bloodlines, both sides of the Crockett family had, at one time, ties with the Presbyterians. There was a marked difference between the culture and lifestyle of the Quakers and the Ulster Scots. Beyond the wide cultural gap between David and his mentor, there was also a generational gap of forty-five years that had to be overcome.
Canaday had to have seen qualities in Crockett that made the effort to befriend and help the young man worthwhile. One can only assume that John Crockett’s dire straits acted as a countervailing influence on his son, who had no wish to emulate his father. David’s irrepressible passion for life and yearning to better his state continually drove him in the right direction. Instead of taking the path of least resistance, however, he almost always chose the difficult route. He firmly believed that in the long run it was the wisest course to follow.