Chapter 5
“The Lion of The West”
David Crockett was one of the most celebrated men of his time: A buckskin-clad backwoodsman who wore a coonskin cap with the tail still on it and carried his faithful flintlock rifle, Betsey; a “b’ar” hunter and a hero of the 1813 Creek Indian wars; a frontier magistrate who dispensed justice though he “had never read a page in a law book”; Colonel of a Tennessee military regiment; one of the greatest riflemen of his day; a former U.S. Congressman from Tennessee; a famous humorist who toured the great cities of America; and a fiddle player of renown.
If you hadn’t met Crockett, you could watch his life enacted in two plays, or you could read countless news stories about his exploits, or even read his autobiography. Or, if like Rose, you could not read – others would be happy to regale you with stories about the great frontiersman.
David Crockett, almost 10 years older than Bowie, was born in East Tennessee in 1786. He was named for his grandfather who was killed by Creek Indians. The same Indians also slew his grandmother, wounded his Uncle Joseph and abducted his Uncle James, who remained in their tribe for 18 years until he was found and his freedom purchased.
David (not “Davy” till late in life) was born poor (“I began to make up my acquaintance with hard times, and a plenty of them”), remained poor, even while a member of Congress (“I am the poorest man on this floor”) and he died poor – but true to his creed: “. . . better to keep a good conscience with an empty purse than to get a bad opinion of myself.”
His one true love was Polly Finley. Following the custom of the day, he courted his loved one by sending an empty jug to the father of the prospective bride-to-be. If the jug was returned filled with drink, the match was on and marriage followed, often the same day. In 1806, Crockett’s jug was brimming over and with family and friends present, all drank till tipsy and the couple were married. Polly brought a dowry of two cows and their calves. With their own hands, the couple built a cabin in South Tennessee, and then brought three babies into the world. Never a success at farming, Crockett, one of the best riflemen in Tennessee, fed his family by hunting in the wilderness.
In 1813 whites attacked the Creek Indians, who retaliated leaving 500 dead. This precipitated military action and Crockett travelled to Alabama, as part of the Tennessee Voluntary Mounted Riflemen, to participate in a retributive massacre of the Creeks. This was his first military service and his first duty under Major General Andrew Jackson. It was also his first conflict with Jackson who he would later vehemently oppose in the political arena. Crockett backed the volunteers who demanded that Jackson honor their prior agreement to a limited 90 day military commitment: the men had land to till, food to hunt and families to protect from Indians. Defying their leaders, Crockett and the others departed from their military duties; Jackson labelled them deserters and “luke-warm patriots.”
But duty called again the next year when Crockett joined another band of volunteers as a third sergeant to again fight under Gen. Andrew Jackson: this time to march south and drive the British out of Pensacola, due east of New Orleans. But Jackson had seized the town the day before Crockett arrived and was already on his way to New Orleans to win that battle just before the Bowie brothers arrived. Instead, Crockett spent his time hunting down British-trained Indians in the Florida swamps.
Polly had regretted that war kept her husband away so much and was overjoyed when he finally returned. But their happy reunion was cut short when Polly died of the dreaded cholera. In 1815, Crockett, 29, was a distraught widower, mourning the loss of his “tender and loving wife” – “the hardest trial which ever fell to the lot of man.” With three young children, he (pragmatically) married a widow with two children, whose husband had died in the Creek Wars. In 1817, when the Chickasaw tribe was forced to surrender West Tennessee land to the U.S., Crockett and his new family, along with other settlers, relocated there.
The new acreage was worse than any land he had ever worked, but Crockett was seeking a new means to support his family: public service. Despite his later image as an illiterate backwoodsman, Crockett was well educated, having worked for a schoolmaster in exchange for private schooling. This training enabled him to earn some money as a Justice of the Peace, following in the path of his father who had been a constable and magistrate.
In 1818, Crockett was elected Lt. Colonel of the local militia formed for protection against Indians. Later, he became town commissioner, court referee and a road commissioner. These small salaries supplemented his meager farm income.
Crockett was by now a prominent, if poor, resident and his name was put up for local office. In 1821, he was sworn in as a state legislator. After doing well, he was proposed for the U.S. Congress as a Representative from Tennessee.
In 1825 he ran and barely lost a race for Congress. However, two years later he was elected, campaigning in the favored style of exaggeration and bravado – and no one did it better than David Crockett. He asked his neighbors to elect a man “fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half alligator, a little touched with the snapping-turtle; who can wade the Mississippi with a steamboat on his back, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning and whip his weight in wildcats” – just the traits, he said, that were needed for the U.S. Congress.
Crockett’s poverty followed him into the poorly-paid U.S. Congress. He was disparaged as “the gentleman from the cane” – referring to his bare subsistence from land almost impossible to farm because “the cane grew so thick and strong . . . that men or beast could scarcely penetrate it.” And he looked the part: wearing a homespun shirt and trousers while his colleagues dressed like successful lawyers.
Crockett was embarrassed to be so poverty-stricken but he later threw the insults into his tormentors’ faces when he became the champion of the poor: introducing a bill calling for the U.S. to relinquish all its remaining, unoccupied public land in Tennessee so that his fellows could buy at a low price and own their property; he also fought to finance education for common folk, personally understanding its importance and how hard it was for needy folks to afford schooling.
Crockett became a national treasure: the plain spoken, self-educated, outdoorsman and Indian fighter, the “gentleman from the cane,” was now in vogue. In 1829, a play was produced about a bold frontiersman, a dynamic stump speaker and a U.S. representative. Referred to as one of the “Lions of the West,” Crockett had become the image of the new American ideal: a character larger then life, “the genius of the New World.”
“I never had six months education in my life,” said the frontiersman. “I was raised in obscurity without wealth or education. I have made myself to every station in life that I ever filled through my own exertions.” Later, a second play, based on Crockett’s life, was put before the public, called “The Lion of the West.”
He even wrote a memoir: “A Narrative of the Life Of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee,” which became America’s first western autobiography and a best seller.
The subject of the memoir was tall in stature approaching 6 feet and “large in frame but quite thin with black hair combed straight over the forehead, parted from the middle.”
On March 4, 1829, his former commander, Andrew Jackson, was elected the Seventh President of the United States, campaigning for democracy for all. Crockett hoped that with “Old Hickory” in the White House, the common man would be protected.
But the frontiersman soon was in conflict again with the President who had once called him a traitor. In 1830, Crockett voted against Jackson’s Indian Removal bill – that “wicked, unjust measure” – because it would do to Indians what North Carolina laws had done to Tennessee resident squatters: taken their homes. Not simply angering his colleagues, he angered his constituents who viewed the Cherokee and allied tribes as a menace and their tribal lands as fair game for settlement. Crockett had to admit he knew of no one within 300 miles of his home who agreed with his vote.
In retaliation, Crockett’s land bill never again came up for a vote and he lost re-election to Congress in 1831. “I have one consolation,” he proclaimed. “I would rather be beaten and be a man than to be elected and be a little puppy dog.”
In 1833, following his own adage (Be always sure you’re right, then Go-Ahead!), he ran again for Congress and regained his seat. As his popularity soared anew – he bragged how he could “grin” wild creatures into giving up without a fight – he was touted as a possible anti-Jackson candidate for President.
But two years later he lost re-election to Congress, most believed because of his highly personalized and continued animosity to the popular President Jackson. He was also estranged from his wife. The marriage of convenience had ceased being a convenience for either of them. He bid farewell to his wife and their children, rationalizing that “I have set them free.”
As to his 1835 Congressional defeat, Crockett explained: “I told the people of my District, that, if they saw fit to re-elect me, I would serve them faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell and I would go to Texas.”
He mounted a large chestnut horse with a white star on its forehead and headed west – to a land that had changed hands seven times in 150 years: from the Indians to the Spanish, then back and forth from the French to the Spanish . . . and now to the Mexicans.
Crockett entered Texas by riding across the Sabine River. He then headed for Nacogdoches – where Moses Rose had settled a decade earlier.