Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
The primary aim of his newfound interest in education was to improve his odds among the fairer sex, for he had determined to find himself a wife. At the age of nineteen he became engaged to a young woman and even took out a marriage license. David had begun to spend much of his time hunting, and had become quite good at it. Just a few days before the wedding, after a successful shooting match—he won a whole beef in a competition—he found that his fiancée, perhaps exasperated with having a hunting gun as a rival, had left him for another. His despondency only lasted a short time, and after a quick recovery, he found another young beauty and began courting her. On August 16, 1806, one day before his twentieth birthday, David Crockett married Mary Finley, nicknamed Polly.
They rented a small farm and cabin. In the next few years, two boys, John and William, were born. Crockett soon learned the grimness of his situation:
We worked for some years [he wrote later], renting ground, and paying high rent, until I found it wasn’t the thing it was cracked up to be; and that I couldn’t make a fortune of it just at all…. I found I was better at increasing my family than my fortune. It was therefore the more necessary that I should hunt some better place to get along; and as I knowed I would have to move at some time, I thought it was better to do it before my family got too large, that I might have less to carry.
So he took his wife and children to the west, following the frontier, in the Crockett way. He left in the fall of 1811, bound for central Tennessee. A year and a half later, he pulled up stakes and moved again, farther west and south to Bean’s Creek, almost to the Alabama line, a sparsely settled area where game was still plentiful and a good hunter and marksman like Crockett could supply his family with sufficient meat to get by. Now in his late twenties, he had filled out to about six feet, tall for the time, with lank black hair parted in the middle over an open face of dark blue eyes and light complexion. Despite the time spent outdoors on long hunts and sporadic farming, he would never lose his fair face and rosy cheeks.
Recent clashes between Creeks and whites had led to Indian massacres and retaliatory attacks before Crockett’s arrival in the region. The Creek War erupted soon after, when a thousand warriors attacked Fort Mims, in southern Alabama, on August 30, 1813, and killed all but fifty of the 553 men, women, and children gathered there. A few weeks later men began mustering into the militia, and Crockett rode to nearby Winchester to join the Tennessee Volunteer Mounted Riflemen for ninety days. The plan was to march south and meet the Indians before the fight spread north to their homes. The Tennessee men would eventually serve under the command of Major General Andrew Jackson. Crockett participated in some hard fighting, particularly the annihilation of a Creek village full of warriors (including a few women and children), the memory of which would haunt him for a long time. And for a variety of reasons, he also developed a healthy dislike for officers, particularly when one ignored his scouting report until another officer verified it.
He returned home after his hitch was up, but nine months later, in September 1814, he reenlisted as a sergeant to help drive the British and their allies out of Pensacola, in Spanish Florida, on the Gulf Coast. General Jackson took Pensacola on November 7, and proceeded west toward Mobile. Crockett’s company arrived on November 8, then was directed to engage in a rear-guard action against the Creeks. They spent the next several months in a fruitless and often aimless Indian chase through the swamps and forests of Florida and Alabama. In January 1815, Jackson decisively defeated the British at New Orleans, but Crockett’s unit continued to move north in search of Indians, under the command of a regular army major who kept his troops out even though they were low on rations, suffering from exposure, and exhausted. For weeks they were near starvation; Crockett spent a good amount of the time foraging and hunting, though game was scarce. Sometimes he could only bag squirrels and birds, though his ravenous comrades were happy to get them. Their horses gave out—one day thirteen of them collapsed and were abandoned. By the time Sergeant Crockett returned home—a month early, at the end of February, after hiring a man to serve out the remaining month—he had gained more than enough experience in soldiering.
Polly gave birth to a daughter early that year, and died at the end of the summer of an undiagnosed frontier illness. She left Crockett with three small children, one an infant. Instead of breaking up his family and placing them with friends or relatives, as was the custom, he decided to find another wife. Not far away lived a widow named Elizabeth Patton. Her husband had lost his life in the Creek War, leaving her with two children close to the age of David’s boys, the considerable sum of $800 in cash, and a farm worth more than his own (which was failing, to boot). After several months of calculated courtship, he married her in the summer of 1816. Elizabeth—“Bet,” as he would sometimes call her—was by all accounts industrious and practical, a capable woman and not a slight one: one frequent visitor to their mill remembered that “Mrs. Crockett was always grinding. She was a woman of great strength and could handle sacks of grain with ease.” Though begun as a union of convenience, their marriage would evolve into one of friendship, respect, and love.
A year later Crockett sold the two farms and led his enlarged family eighty miles west, settling on a creek near the small village of Lawrenceburg. His service in the recent war and the fact that his wife came from a well-to-do, prominent family combined to improve his social standing, and despite his distrust of officers he had accepted a lieutenancy in the county militia upon his return. For this and other reasons—his genuine honesty, his forthright manner, and his warm personality, no doubt—his fellow townspeople chose him to be magistrate, an office he accepted in November 1817, a few months after his arrival. The citizens’ trust was rewarded when his rulings proved sound and fair: “I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law, learning to guide me,” he wrote later. The rough backwoodsman was becoming respectable. And though he would never achieve financial independence, always spending more than he made, he would occasionally approach solvency after his second marriage. He would even own a few slaves to help on the farm.
Four months later he was elected lieutenant colonel of his new county’s militia regiment, thus acquiring the honorific of Colonel, which would remain with him until the end of his days. Over the next few years, he assumed other town and county administrative positions. In January 1821, encouraged by friends, he resigned his office of town commissioner and announced his candidacy for the state legislature.
Regional campaigning in that time and place consisted of making appearances in local communities, giving speeches, debating, and generally entertaining the crowd. Stump-speaking, as it was called—for the tree stump from which the candidates would address their neighbors—constituted one of the chief forms of social amusement of the day. The political talk usually shared equal time with storytelling, drinking, and tobacco chewing. Crockett by this time had developed a fondness for all three, and he now found he was especially good at the first: his quick wit, flair for repartee, and often self-deprecating humor, all delivered in a backcountry drawl, were qualities to which his listeners responded. He never pretended to be anything more than he was, a simple man like them, and they identified with him. At first he avoided opining on issues of which he knew little, but as he learned more he gained confidence and voiced stronger positions. In August, he won election to the state legislature by a margin of two to one.
Like any poor man—and most of Crockett’s life, until he had the good fortune to marry Elizabeth Patton, had been one of crushing poverty—he had desired advancement and respect and a certain degree of affluence. Toward those ends he eagerly climbed each successive rung of the political ladder. Just before his election, he had ambitiously begun construction of a gristmill, a powder mill, and a distillery on his creekside land—all enterprises typical of a poor man of the time scrambling for a leg up, as they called for the investment of hard work and natural resources more than money. Upon winning his seat he departed for the state capital, Murfreesboro, leaving his wife to handle operations; Elizabeth, a good businesswoman, could do as good a job as he, if not better. But even her skills could not fight nature. No sooner had the mills opened for business than a flash flood washed them away.
That was the end of Crockett’s flirtation with entrepreneurship. When he returned after the end of that first legislative session in 1822, he and his family packed up their meager possessions and moved west once more, traveling 150 miles to the westernmost part of Tennessee, where he cleared land and built two connected log cabins on the Rutherford Fork of the Obion River. There were far fewer inhabitants in that region, and game was plentiful. Crockett hunted whenever he got the chance, and every fall after the corn was harvested he retreated to the wilderness for as much as a month or more, killing prodigious numbers of bear, deer, elk, and wolves (the government paid a three-dollar bounty for each wolf pelt). His reputation as a woodsman and hunter spread, abetted no doubt by the tall tales Crockett told of his exploits.
Six years later, after one failed run, he was elected to Congress. He would be reelected in 1829, lose his seat by fewer than six hundred votes out of the 16,482 cast in 1831, and win it back in another close election (by just 173 votes out of the almost eight thousand cast) in 1833. In Washington he tried mightily to push through passage of a bill that would make land available inexpensively to the poor, particularly those in his western Tennessee constituency who had settled on government land and improved it with their own toil. He believed these “squatters” were the country’s true pioneers, risking their lives amid the dangers of the frontier, and should be rewarded for their initiative.
He would not succeed. The relatively guileless Crockett never learned—or never cared to engage in, if it compromised his principles—the art of deal making, the quid pro quo soon to be taken for granted as the price of doing business in Washington. He also refused to sacrifice his principles or the promises he had made to his constituents in the name of party unity. The result was meager support from his fellow Tennessee legislators and other congressmen, since Crockett would not barter votes for bills he did not believe in. The opposition of the Jackson forces also played a part, as Crockett had broken ranks with his old commander as early as 1828, during his first term, after Jackson’s election to the presidency. The Jacksonians would gerrymander his west Tennessee congressional district before the 1835 elections, eroding his base further. For these reasons and others, he never garnered the support necessary for his land bill’s passage, or for the passage of any other bill he put forward. Unfortunately, he banked his future on getting the bill through to the exclusion of everything else, and that would cost him.
During congressional recesses, Crockett returned home to his family and spent most of his time hunting, farming, and politicking. He enjoyed and excelled at the first; the second was necessary and unenjoyable; the third was necessary to reassure his reelection and enjoyable enough, since it involved socializing, storytelling, and drinking. He spent less and less time at home and saw little of his family—he missed the marriage of his oldest daughter, Margaret, and gave his consent by mail. Fortunately Elizabeth kept the farm going with the help of their children (a total of eight at one point) and a few slaves.
His increasing celebrity pleased Crockett. During his time in Washington his outsize reputation spread from western Tennessee throughout the nation, and he thrived on the larger stage. His colorful oratory, combined with the increasingly mythic tales of his backwoods adventures, made him a popular national figure, particularly in a time when few ordinary folk were involved in government at that level. Jackson’s 1828 election had ushered in a new era of the common man in America—he had been the first nonaristocratic elected president, and his populist appeal would never waver—but Crockett even more than the president now personified Jackson’s image. In late 1831 a play entitled
The Lion of the West
opened to an enthusiastic reception. The frontiersman protagonist, Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, was clearly modeled on Colonel David Crockett. He dressed in buckskin, wore a wildcat-skin cap, and spoke in a boastful patois sprinkled with colorful phrases. The play both celebrated and ridiculed Crockett with equal fervor.
Crockett’s larger-than-life public image was boosted even further with an unauthorized biography released in 1833. The author had talked to friends and acquaintances of the congressman (and even visited Crockett at his home), and combined truth and tall tales into an entertaining and largely flattering picture of his subject as peerless bear hunter, backwoods original, and principled congressman. The book went into several printings.
Crockett was not happy with the book. Not only was it full of semitruths and fantastical fictions; even worse, he earned not a penny from its success. He decided to write his story himself, and enlisted a friend and fellow congressman, Thomas Chilton of Kentucky, to help.
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee
was released in the spring of 1834 and became an immediate bestseller. Patterned after Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, the book captured Crockett’s true voice. Well written (except for the occasional deliberate misspelling and quaint grammar, intended to authenticate his backwoods reputation) and mostly accurate (Crockett changed details about his military service for political reasons), the book was a classic tale of a poor boy from the backwoods who rises to fame through his determination and innate intelligence. Sprinkled through the many stories of bear hunting, Indian fighting, exploring, and other adventures were occasional political jibes and jokes, almost always at the expense of Jackson and Van Buren, for the book was also designed as a campaign tool. And on the title page was the phrase that Crockett had grown most fond of, and adopted as his slogan: “Be always sure you’re right—then go ahead!”