Almanac cover, 1854. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)
PART III
CROCKETT HAD SURVIVED yet another brush with death. Finding himself “still in the land of the living and a-kicking,” he wisely recuperated at his cabin on the Rattle Snake Spring Branch of Bean’s Creek. Like other denizens of the frontier, Crockett had little knowledge of what was going on in the rest of the nation at the time. The only news that interested him was anything that had a direct impact on his own family’s daily life. For most of the winter of 1815 and well into the summer of 1816, as his recovery from the bout with malaria progressed, he tended to family and farm. The youngsters were glad to have their father back with them, and Elizabeth kept him healthy and happy while she put up with a hot summertime pregnancy.
On September 16, 1816, Elizabeth gave birth to a healthy son, whom they named Robert Patton Crockett—the first in a new “crop” (Crockett’s word) born to her and David.1
The same week of Robert’s birth, while David and his neighbors quaffed celebratory horns of liquor, others were at work acquiring more Indian land for white settlement. Andrew Jackson and fellow federal treaty commissioners David Meriwether and Jesse Franklin used threats, coercion, and bribery to grab up more enormous land grants from the Cherokee and Chickasaw tribes.2 During negotiations, the Cherokee leaders implored Jackson to reduce the size of the land cession but he refused to budge and overcame all resistance. Jackson told them that the price the Cherokees paid by giving up land had to be great if their tribe wanted a lasting relationship with the United States. The treaty with the Cherokees, who surrendered millions of acres in return for a series of monetary payments, was signed on September 14, 1816, at Turkey Town.3 The treaty also promised peace and friendship between the Cherokee Nation and the United States forever. Jackson’s memory must have soon failed him, for in a letter to newly elected President James Monroe written just a year later, he noted: “I have long viewed treaties with the Indians an absurdity not to be reconciled to the principles of our government.”4 Jackson’s outspoken contempt for Indian treaty rights was not motivated only by an insatiable hunger for more land. It would be too simplistic to conclude that Jackson was simply a greedy “Indian hater.” His attitude toward Indians was patronizing and paternalistic. Jackson believed that, like the scores of slaves laboring on his plantation, Indians were childlike creatures in need of guidance from a father figure. He rationalized that he had their humanitarian interests in mind and that the treaties he negotiated and policies he later enforced were beneficial to Indians and protected them from the white population.
Jackson’s treatment of Indians was not exclusive to any one tribe but to all Indians, as the Chickasaw tribe soon learned. They fared no better than the Cherokees. On September 20, in signing the treaty at the Chickasaw council house in northern Mississippi, Jackson promised the tribe less than $200,000 in exchange for millions of acres of Chickasaw lands, or almost a quarter of the amount taken from the Creeks at Fort Jackson a few years earlier. As a Jackson biographer succinctly noted, “It was a formidable purchase.”5
Jackson was not finished. On October 24, 1816, the Choctaws ceded their land east of the Tombigbee River in return for an annual payment of $16,000 for twenty years and $10,000 in merchandise.6 All of this pleased Jackson, but still he wanted more Indian lands open to white settlement, and he would not stop until that desire was fulfilled. But before he put together another army, including many Tennessee volunteers, to sweep into Florida to punish the Seminole tribe hiding there and wrest the territory away from the Spanish, Jackson looked to some personal interests.
During 1817 and 1818, while pulling together his Florida invasion force to burn Seminole villages, Jackson, his friend John Coffee, and several Tennessee cronies joined land speculators snapping up newly opened parcels of property, including former Creek lands in the future state of Alabama.7 Although he was widely considered by most white citizens as a national hero after his spectacular defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson had no wish to provide any fodder for his political foes. To avoid even the slightest criticism for buying land at government auctions, Jackson emphasized that he was not motivated by personal gain but only wished to encourage settlement to protect the frontier. Few people ever questioned Jackson on this point, but instead held him in even higher esteem for defeating the Indian menace and making valuable land available for settlement.
One of the Tennesseans most pleased with the promise of new land was Crockett. Growing aware that so-called civilization was creeping in around him, Crockett was primed and ready to explore new territory, and the recent treaties gave him ample reason to do so. That autumn of 1816, news of the various Indian treaties was better medicine than an entire case of Bateman’s Drops. No tribal claims remained to delay expansion, leaving the door to the West wide open.
By late autumn, Crockett—despite flare-ups of malaria—was dead-set on moving his family out of Franklin County. “The place on which I lived was sickly, and I was determined to leave it,” Crockett wrote. “I therefore set out the next fall to look at the country which had been purchased of the Chickasaw tribe of Indians. I went on to a place called Shoal Creek, about eighty miles from where I lived, and here again I got sick. I took the ague and fever, which I supposed was brought on me by camping out. I remained here for some time, as I was unable to go farther; and in that time, I became so well pleased with the country about there, that I resolved to settle in it.”8
After he fought off another bout of the recurrent malaria, Crockett rode far to the northeast to spend the winter of 1816–1817 with some of his kinfolk just three miles below the Kentucky border.9 David’s uncles William, Robert, Joseph, and James Crockett had lived for many years in the Wolf River area on the Cumberland Plateau of what eventually became Fentress County, Tennessee. The brothers had moved there not long after the deaf and mute James, affectionately called “Deaf and Dumb Jimmie,” was ransomed from a Cherokee trader after being held captive for seventeen years. Uncle Robert later moved north to Cumberland County, Kentucky, where he died an old man and left his land and several slaves to his children, including a son also named David Crockett.10Robert’s last will and testament was read March 2, 1836, only four days before his famous nephew was killed in battle at the Alamo.
Uncle Jimmy resided only a few miles north of the settlement of Sand Springs—which later became the county seat of Jamestown—in a house owned by the illustrious Conrad “Coonrod” Pile.11 A salty old Longhunter who settled in the area in 1791, Pile had a dozen children, including a daughter, Delila, married to William Crockett, another of David’s uncles, who lived in the small settlement of Boatland on the Obey River.12 A center for boat building, Boatland was where flatboats came up the Obey, also called the Obed by later mapmakers, to take on loads of turpentine and tar bound for Nashville and other markets. David spent the winter in a beach flat near Boatland, getting reacquainted with relatives and picking up boat-making skills that he later would put to use.
He also hunted with Coonrod Pile, a man twenty years Crockett’s senior who long before had found a location to his liking at the Three Forks of Wolf River. Coonrod chose the site because of the cool, clear spring water flowing near his camp, where he cooked game on a hot stone, drank from a turtle shell, and slept inside a cave on a bed of dry leaves and grass. He kept a fire burning at the cave entrance day and night to discourage wild critters from visiting. It was said that he feared neither man nor beast but was deathly afraid of lightning; if a big storm approached, he ran to his cave as quickly as he could. By the time Crockett met the old man, Coonrod had amassed a sizable fortune manufacturing guns, maintaining tollgates on a turnpike road, and overseeing his sizable farmlands. Coonrod lived in a large log house with no windows and only one door that opened by his bedside. Next to the bed, he kept a rifle at the ready and a pitchfork with sharpened prongs.13
Almost a century after Crockett and Coonrod hunted the river bottoms and hollows, another famous Tennessee marksman emerged from the Pall Mall Valley—Alvin C. York.14 York became the most famous American solider in World War I after he won the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German position, killing 28 German soldiers and capturing 132 others. Best known as Sergeant York, this farm boy from the Valley of the Three Forks was Conrad Pile’s great-great-grandson. He grew up hearing tales of both his illustrious ancestor and David Crockett. “I think we had just about the best shots that ever squinted down a barrel,” York wrote in his war diary. “Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett used to shoot at these matches long ago. And Andrew Jackson used to recruit his Tennessee sharpshooters from among our mountain shooters.”15
As would be revealed many years later, Crockett’s brief stay at Boatland had a far-reaching impact on other impressionable young men. Yet in early spring of 1817, Crockett’s focus returned to the new lands that waited to the west. He bid good-bye to family and friends on the Wolf River and at Boatland and made the long ride home to begin preparing his family for another move.
Before leaving Franklin County, Crockett went to the hillside not far from Kentuck for one more visit at Polly’s grave, marked by the cairn of rocks. He pulled some weeds, doffed his hunter’s hat, and mumbled a few words. Then he and his family—on horseback and piled into wagons—went to Shoal Creek.
Many years later, James Burns Gowen, a hunting companion and neighbor when David, Polly, and their babies made their first move west, described Crockett as “an itchy footed sort of fellow who went bear hunting with a knife, bagged a covey of wild turkey with a single shot, went Indian hunting with Andrew Jackson and finally got himself elected to Congress.”16
By 1817 Crockett had hunted Indians with Jackson, but he probably had not yet killed a bear with a knife, and he never did bag a bunch of turkeys with just one shot. Crockett would go to Congress some years away. However, Gowen’s finest description of Crockett was as “itchy footed,” as true as anything that had ever been said about the man.