DAVID CROCKETT
Almanac cover, 1848. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)
PART I
DAVID CROCKETT BELIEVED in the wind and in the stars. This son of Tennessee could read the sun, the shadows, and the wild clouds full of thunder. He was comfortable amid the thickets and canebrakes, the quagmires, and the mountain balds. He hunted the oak, hickory, maple, and sweet gum forests that had never felt an axe blade. He was familiar with all the smells—the odor of decaying animal flesh, the aroma of the air after a rain, and the pungent smell of the forest. He knew the rivers lined with sycamore, poplar, and willow that breached the mountains through steep-sided gorges with strange-sounding names, many with Indian influences like the Nolichucky, the French Broad, the Pigeon, the Tellico, the Hiwassee, the South Holston, the Watauga, the Coosa, the Obey’s, the Wolf, the Elk, and the Obion. He stalked the dimensions of lakes and streams studded with ancient cypress. He learned that dog days arrive not with the heat of August but in early July, when the Dog Star rises and sets with the sun. He carried his compass and maps in his head. He traversed the land when it was lush in the warm times and when it was covered with the frost that Cherokees described as “clouds frozen on the trees.”
The wilderness was, indeed, Crockett’s cathedral, and as the stress of his political and home life began to wear him down, it was the forest where he took refuge. Even with the debates that continue to rage today about who the real David Crockett was, no one disputes that this was a man who approached nature as a science and hunting as an art and who found excitement in combining the two. Crockett had a calling and was a hunter by trade, relying on black bears just as much to clothe and feed his family as for the rich fodder they provided for stories told around the campfires and when campaigning for political office.
Yet, contrary to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the popular tune from the mid-1950s, Crockett did not “kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.”1 For that matter, Crockett was not even “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee.” Indeed, he most likely never signed his name Davy but always David, and only took to wearing the ubiquitous coonskin cap so much identified with him when he thought it would help boost his public image. To uncover the truth about Crockett, one must travel to the land he knew and loved most—the Tennessee that was America’s frontier. That was his training ground and the school in which he was to become a legendary student. For the authentic Crockett—the man with only a smattering of formal education—possessed uncanny woods wisdom. From his boyhood in eastern Tennessee to his adult years in the middle of the state and, finally, in western Tennessee, Crockett honed his outdoor skills and applied them to his everyday life.
Over the years, he came to understand his quarry and its ways in almost an existential way. He knew adult male bears, or boars, weighed as much as six hundred pounds and females, or sows, usually weighed no more than four hundred pounds. He learned that black bears could live twenty-five years or more and were solitary except during mating time, and that a cub weighed only about as much as an apple when born but quickly grew on its mother’s fat-rich milk. He understood, as his fellow pioneers did, that an angry sow with cubs, just like a “he-bear” when cornered, was a formidable adversary. He never forgot that the only thing predictable about black bears is that they are unpredictable.
Crockett’s remarkable woodsmanship saved his life many times. On a moonless January night in the rough country near Reelfoot Lake, in far western Tennessee, Crockett, thirty-nine, soaked to the bone and freezing, found himself locked in combat with a fully grown black bear. “I made a lounge [sic] with my long knife, and fortunately stuck him right through the heart,” he later explained in his autobiography.2 Exhausted from the struggle, he calmed his pack of panting hounds and managed to pull the bear from the crevice in the frozen ground where they had fought. After butchering the animal, he tried to kindle a fire but could find nothing dry enough to burn. His moccasins, buckskin breeches, and hunting shirt were frozen to his numb body and he knew that unless he kept moving he would die.
“So I got up, and hollered a while, and then I would jump up and down with all my might and throw myself into all sorts of motions,” Crockett wrote. “But all this wouldn’t do; for my blood was now getting cold, and the chills coming all over me. I was so tired, too, that I could hardly walk; but I thought I would do the best I could to save my life, and then, if I died, nobody would be to blame.”3
He found a stout tree about two feet in diameter without any limbs on it for thirty feet. Crockett locked his arms and legs around the trunk and shinned up the tree until he reached the limbs, and then he slid back down to the ground. “This would make the insides of my legs and arms mighty warm and good,” he wrote. “I continued this till daylight in the morning, and how often I clomb [sic] up my tree and slid down I don’t know, but I reckon at least a hundred times.”4
As the sun rose, Crockett set out to find his camp, where one of his sons and another hunting companion waited. After breakfast they salted all the dressed bear meat and secured it atop a high scaffold. Then they followed the dogs into the thick canebrake on the trail of more bear. By his own count, during that seven-month hunting season spanning 1825–1826, Crockett had killed 105 bears, including 47 in just one month.5
Crockett, like the other good hunters of the day, stalked bears by finding tracks fresh enough for dogs to follow and by reading signs. He looked for claw marks or hair on tree bark and checked the freshness of scat to see how long ago the bear had passed through the area. If the scat was dried out and colonized with insects it meant the bear was long gone. Scat also revealed what the bears had eaten. That diet included almost anything: carrion, animal matter, insects, wild honey, snakes, and plenty of vegetation, like squawroot in the spring, berries in the summer, and nuts and acorns in autumn. If the droppings were dark and runny it indicated the bear had eaten meat and might still be around for several days to feed off the carcass.
Savvy hunters were aware of the bears’ nonretractable curved claws that allowed them to bring down a deer or a hound with one powerful blow. Bears also used the claws to scramble up trees, especially when they spied wild grapevines or if snarling dogs were in close pursuit. For Crockett, bear hunting with dogs was like no other hunting. He loved the adrenaline rush as he fought for breath and tried to keep up behind a pack of baying hounds on the trail of a bear crashing through the brush. For a seasoned and passionate hunter like Crockett, the chorus of dog howls was sweet music.
Much like the human company he kept, Crockett preferred the company of mongrel hounds to purebred dogs with fancy pedigrees. A few of the names that Crockett supposedly bestowed on his dogs include Soundwell, Old Rattler, Tiger, and Sport. One account suggests that Crockett named his favorite hound Jolar, said to be an ancient Gaelic-Scots word for eagle-eyed.6 No matter their names, Crockett was known to use stocky crossbred dogs that lived solely to run bears. But while running his hounds and stalking bears remained a constant passion, Crockett also found that his reputation as a fearless hunter brought other dividends. Over the course of his life, Crockett’s bear hunting ability became a key ingredient in the manufacture of the populist hypermasculine persona he often used to bolster his public image and political career.
The real Crockett successfully combined his expertise with a rifle and passion for hunting with his trademark homespun humor and masterful storytelling technique. In so doing he was able to rise from the canebrakes to the halls of Congress. The stories he gathered from his adventures as a woodsman became entertainment from the backwoods that made his campaigns original and successful. In thus putting them to use, he became one of the first notable political figures to emerge from the ranks of common men and not the landed gentry.