IF JOHN CROCKETT HAD ANY TRUE sense of right and wrong, he allowed room for rationalization to justify his behavior when it came to his callous treatment of family. He was one of the Scots-Irish with a “Presbyterian conscience,” a term used by Sam Ervin, the native North Carolinian and folksy U.S. senator, who charmed national audiences when he became a national figure during the early 1970s Watergate investigation. Ervin, a self-described “old country lawyer” of Scots-Irish descent, said that such a conscience “won’t keep you from sinning, but it’ll keep you from enjoying your sin, and it will smite you unmercifully if you don’t do what it tells you is right.”1
No call for swift biblical justice, however, can be found in any of David’s writings about his father. Instead he paints a rather sympathetic portrait of a distraught man in need of luck—a beleaguered soul constantly faced with grinding out a sparse living but with only himself to blame for his misery. “His hardships were deepened by misadventures that brought debts and creditors rather than fortune,”2 is how one historian summed up John Crockett.
The rough-and-tumble country tavern that John and Elizabeth Crockett maintained for so many years never completely freed the family from debt but eventually brought in enough income to keep at least a few creditors at bay. A steady stream of herders and teamsters traveling the “Big Road” stopped at the tavern to refresh themselves with dippers of icy water from the cedar-lined well. Travelers tromped inside for hot meals and drank newly made woods whiskey served in hollowed-out cow horns, then found a night’s rest beneath quilts and bearskins on bedding and mattresses stuffed with dried corn shucks and goose feathers.
All of the Crocketts, no matter their age, had duties to perform, and for David and his brothers that included hunting game for the tavern table. David learned the basics of handling firearms from his father and uncles. The need to make every shot count to conserve expensive ammunition was instilled in him. In the present-day community of Morristown, the reconstructed Crockett Tavern lies a few miles southeast of a long hill known as Crockett’s Ridge. Local tradition holds that this was where David most enjoyed hunting, eventually honing his marksmanship skills.3
In spite of his sharp hunter’s eye and contributions to the tavern’s larder, David was briefly bound out after his twelfth birthday. As he succinctly put it, “I began to make my acquaintance with hard times, and a plenty of them.”4 John Crockett, in need of quick revenue, traded seven weeks of labor from two of his eldest sons in exchange for credit for goods and supplies, including whiskey, at a local store.5 Just two years later, in 1798, John decided the time had come for twelve-year-old David to be used as a financial asset to whittle down the family’s mounting debts.
“An old Dutchman, by the name of Jacob Siler, who was moving from Knox county to Rockbridge, in the state of Virginia, in passing, made a stop at my father’s house,” David wrote. “He had a large stock of cattle, that he was carrying on with him; and I suppose made some proposition to my father to hire some one to assist him.” The boy was shocked when he learned that his father had bound him out to Siler but had made no arrangements for David’s eventual return home. “Young as I was, and as little as I knew about travelling, or being away from home, he hired me to the old Dutchman, to go four hundred miles on foot, with a perfect stranger that I had never seen until the evening before.”6
David offered no explanation of how his mother must have felt to see her young son walk out of her life and not know when, or if, she would ever see him again. There is a conspicuous absence of much mention at all of Elizabeth Crockett throughout her son’s Narrative. She apparently did not figure in any of the major decisions affecting the family and seems to have made little impression on David. As strong and tenacious as most frontier wives and mothers had to be, the reality was that they still resided in a world ruled by dominant males.
As David set out with Siler and the herd of cattle, Elizabeth and the rest of the family had no inkling that it would be several months before he would return to them. “The old Dutchman” was thirty-five, born Jacob Sëyler Jr. in Virginia in 1763, the youngest son of immigrants from northern Alsace-Lorraine, then a part of Germany.7
As David helped water and feed the cattle and keep them moving on the Abingdon Road, he found Siler a pleasant and thoughtful man who saw to the boy’s needs and treated him well. When they finally reached their destination, just three miles from the Natural Bridge, a landmark geological formation created when Cedar Creek carved out a gorge in the mountainous limestone, David was even provided lodging at the home of Siler’s in-laws, Peter and Elizabeth Hartley, and made to feel welcome.8
“My Dutch master was very kind to me, and gave me five or six dollars, being, pleased, as he said, with my services,” David wrote of Siler. “This, however, I think was bait for me, as he persuaded me to stay with him, and not return any more to my father. I had been taught so many lessons of obedience by my father, that I at first supposed I was bound to obey this man, or at least I was afraid to openly disobey him; and I therefore staid with him, and tried to put on a look of contentment until I got the [Siler-Hartley] family all to believe I was fully satisfied.”9
After four or five weeks of living at the Hartley place and continuing to work for Siler, David found his chance to leave and return home to Tennessee. One day, as he played alongside the road with two local boys, three wagons passed, one driven by a man named Dunn and the others by his two sons. David recognized the Dunns from their frequent rest stops at the Crockett Tavern.10 When they told the boy they were taking their loads of goods to Knoxville, David explained that he, too, wanted to go home. The Dunns invited him to join, with the promise to protect David if they were pursued. With that, he returned to his quarters, gathered his clothing and the little bit of money he had, and waited for morning, when he planned to sneak away and join the Dunns at the tavern, where they spent the night. “I went to bed early that night, but sleep seemed to be a stranger to me,” David recalled. “For though I was a wild boy, yet I dearly loved my father and mother, and their images appeared to be so deeply fixed in my mind, that I could not sleep for thinking of them.”11
Several hours before daybreak, fearful of being discovered but driven by his “childish love of home,” he rose to face a blinding snowstorm and at least eight inches of fresh snow already on the ground. By the time the boy plodded the seven miles to the inn, the snow, according to Crockett, was “about as deep as my knees.” A warm breakfast by the fire revived the chilled boy for the journey ahead. “The thoughts of home now began to take the entire possession of my mind, and I almost numbered the sluggish turns of the wheels, and much more certainly the miles of travel, which appeared to me to count mighty slow.”12
By the time the Dunn wagons pulled up for the night at the home of John Dunn on the Roanoke River, David had grown so impatient with the slow pace that he announced he was going to continue his homeward trek alone on foot. Dunn tried to reason with him, but he would have none of it. “Mr. Dunn seemed very sorry to part with me, and used many arguments to prevent me from leaving him,” related Crockett. “But home, poor as it was, again rushed on my memory, and it seemed ten times as dear to me as it ever had before. The reason was, that my parents were there, and all that I had been accustomed to in the hours of my childhood and infancy was there; and my anxious little hart panted also to be.”13
A determined David set out by himself the next morning, but, near the first ford of the Roanoke River, a man returning from market with a drove of horses overtook him. The man led a saddled horse, which he kindly allowed David to mount and ride, thus sparing the youngster the river’s frigid waters. David rode with the man until they reached a fork in the road and parted. The man and his horses took off for Kentucky, and David trudged the remaining miles to his family, who were overjoyed to see him walk through the tavern door that evening.
Life went reasonably well for David as he returned to his daily chores and frequent hunts for fresh meat. But during the autumn of 1799, John Crockett “took it into his head” to send thirteen-year-old David and his four older brothers to a subscription school at nearby Barton Springs, where Benjamin Kitchen attempted to teach book learning to the few area youngsters desirous of a rudimentary education.14
David’s tenure at Kitchen’s country school, however, was short-lived. Students of all ages, some nearly as old as their teacher, crowded into an airless room and tried to master the three Rs. David had only attended four days of classes and was just beginning to learn his letters when he had a falling-out with “one of the scholars” who was much older and larger than himself. Not wanting to draw his big brothers into his personal business, David determined to waylay the bully after school. He lay in wait along the roadside, and when the other boy wandered by, David sprang from the bushes and “set on him like a wild cat.” He scratched the boy’s face “to a flitter jig, and soon made him cry out for quarter in good earnest.”15
The next morning, fearful of the repercussions sure to follow when word of his ambush reached the schoolmaster, David only pretended he was going to school. Instead, he went out into the woods, only emerging at evening to walk home with his brothers, all of who were sworn to secrecy. This ruse went on for several more days until a curious Kitchen sent a note to John Crockett inquiring about his hooky-playing son. John demanded an explanation. “I knew very well that I was in a devil of a hobble,” Crockett related, “for my father had been taking a few horns, and was in a good condition to make the fur fly.”16 Vowing to whip David harder than Kitchen ever could, John cut a stout hickory switch and the chase was on. “I put out with all my might, and soon we were both up to the top of speed,” wrote David. He was thoroughly convinced that if his father or the schoolmaster got his hands on him he “would have used me up.” After being pursued by his father for more than a mile, David managed to escape by topping a hill and hiding in a clump of brush until his “huffing and puffing” father passed and gave up the hunt.
To avoid the wrath and hickory rods of either his father or his teacher ever again, David “cut out,” and went to the home of Jesse Cheek, only a few miles from the Crockett Tavern.17 In 1795, Cheek built a general merchandise store and stock pens at what was known as Cheeks Crossroads. The store sold a wide range of dry goods, supplies, foodstuffs, and as many as sixty different books, including Bibles, hymnals, almanacs, and primers. Locals and travelers purchased gun flints, axes, tobacco, chocolate, bulk tea and coffee, scythes, rat traps, saddlery, pewter candlesticks, fiddles and Jew’s harps, and a variety of spirits and liquors.18
At the store, David found one of his older brothers already there with Cheek, who was about to depart on a cattle drive. David was cheered by the presence of his brother, and, for his part, Cheek was only too happy to hire on both Crockett boys as drovers. They set out immediately, bound for Virginia to deliver Cheek’s herd of a cattle. For David it was the beginning of a two-and-a-half-year adventure that would introduce the teenager to new and distant places and expose him to people and experiences that would shape the rest of his life. In many ways, this interlude provided David with a more useful education than any he would have received in Benjamin Kitchen’s school. It was a journey to test the young man’s mettle and temper his courage.