birthplace in tennessee—his irish blood—summer-time in the great smokies—the indian signal fires—little davy gets fighting mad—his love of weapons—in the bald mountains—davy’s aspirations—john crockett moves again.
the antecedents of davy crockett are irish, although his mother was rebecca hawkins, a native of maryland, and probably of english descent. after the execution of king charles i, in the seventeenth century, many irishmen were transported to north america as rebels, and there sold into a state of slavery among the english colonists. many of them were sent to virginia and to the somers or bermuda islands, and in sir j. h. lefroy’s “memorials of bermuda” occur the names of james sheehan and david larragan as[14] two of the slaves bought and sold in those islands. as we might expect, the same records often make mention of the unruly and riotous nature of the irish rebels, and of the complaints of those who thought the colony might well be rid of them. it was the blood of the fighting race that told, and one by one the slaves became freemen, to follow every bugle-call or rolling drum that has led into the storms of shot and shell on our country’s battlefields.
david crockett’s grandparents left ireland for america after the birth of william, their oldest son, and it is supposed that john crockett, another son, and the father of david, was born during the voyage. the family, which eventually included four boys, settled in pennsylvania. here john crockett lived as a farmer for some time, removing while still a young man to lincoln county, north carolina, and afterwards to the tennessee mountain country. his parents, displaying the same restlessness that characterized the career of david, came into what is now hawkins county, tennessee, and settled near the site of the present town[15] of rogersville. it is not unlikely that the county took its name from the family to which rebecca hawkins belonged.
the creek indians had now begun to feel the pressure of immigration into their sacred hunting-grounds, and were at all times dangerous, frequent encounters occurring between them and the settlers. both of davy’s grandparents were killed during an indian foray, near the holston river, in hawkins county. in this bloody affair their son joseph had his arm broken by a bullet, though he finally escaped. his brother james, who was deaf and dumb, remained a prisoner for more than seventeen years. it was without doubt due to his being deaf and dumb that he was finally heard of and identified by davy’s father and uncle william, who paid some sort of a ransom and obtained his freedom. he lived for many years in cumberland county, kentucky.
davy crockett was the fifth of six sons, and there were three sisters, besides, or nine children in all, in the family of john crockett. in his own story davy makes little use of the names of[16] his relatives, and although some of them are known, they are not material to this narrative.
davy crockett was born on the 17th of august, 1786. at this time, the “gateses, lees, and rough yankee generals,” as carlyle styled them, had returned to their own shores, and were striving to form a permanent union of the states. the courts of the old world were vying with each other in extravagance and riotous living.
but the great smoky mountains were full of peace, and from the unaka range to the far blue crest of the cumberlands the troubles of the far-off world were but echoes faintly heard. the new and short-lived state of franklin was a year old, and john crockett, veteran of the revolution, was content to work there from dawn till dark, that his children might be fed and housed. the mountains were full of game, corn could be raised when the ground was cleared, and the autumn yielded bountiful stores of nuts, wild grapes, berries, and apples, until from one source or another the cabin was filled with winter supplies; yet somehow there always seemed to be insufficient for the long months[17] before the anemones and azaleas came again beside the leaping brooks or under the tender green of the wakening trees.
the log cabin of the crockett family stood where the limestone creek joined the nolichucky river, ten miles north of the great bend in the bald mountain range. there the rocky summits, angling abruptly about the watersheds of indian creek, are like fortifications of the titans, crowned with battlements of the appalachian range, whose peaks stand more than six thousand feet above the sea—higher than any others east of the mississippi. from the rocky escarpments, between the black forests of pine and hemlock, shone the signal-fires of the creek and chickasaw, and from unseen nooks between their giant flanks the thump-thump-thump of the tom-tom caused the pioneer to look to his stockades and his flintlock guns.
the fierce ebb and flow of war that had given kentucky the name of “the dark and bloody ground” had now and then swept over parts of tennessee—the massacre at fort loudon was a red spot upon the pages of her history; but the rivalries[18] of the english, french, and spanish had promoted indian raids in the disputable regions of the ohio and the mississippi, rather than in the lowlands of the western part of this state and in the alabama plains. what tennessee was spared in earlier days she knew in the civil war in 1861 to 1865, when from knoxville to donelson and shiloh, and from lookout mountain to the cumberland gap, her fields were filled with unknown graves and the wreck and misery of a terrible conflict.
it was not until many years after the birth of crockett that it became safe to travel the rugged roads between virginia and north carolina and the nashville country. in the twenty or more trips that andrew jackson made between jonesboro and nashville in the days when he was foremost in the practice of the law, he had many a close call in indian fights. more than a score of times he came upon the bodies of men, women, and children, robbed and slain and scalped. little davy, listening at nightfall beside the river, hearing above its murmur the hoot of the owl in the dismal trees, the howl of the wolf on the mountain-top, or the[19] panther’s anguished cry, floating out of the vague unknown, would make good use of his sturdy little legs until he was safe at his mother’s side.
as the boy grew older, he lost the instinctive sense of fear that was perhaps a part of his natural heritage; for the cry of the banshee had filled the souls of his irish forebears with terror in their lowly cabins across the seas. something of the daring of sir john and of richard his son, of the hawkins kin—slavers, freebooters, sea-scourges, admirals—had come to him on his mother’s side, and now, too, the fighting blood of his father’s race began to show. davy was scarce six years old when four of his brothers, and a boy named campbell, left him on the shore of the nolichucky while they put out into the river in the rude boat that was used in crossing the stream. had it not been for the bravery of a man named kendall, who saw their danger, the five boys would surely have gone over the falls a little way below, which would have meant certain death. davy seems partly to have realized their danger, but said he was too fighting mad at being left behind to[20] care what happened to them. when they were safe again, his greatest satisfaction was in telling them that the scrape they had been in was what they had earned for not taking him along.
like every boy of the frontier, davy was quick to idealize the great flintlock rifles, powder-horns, and other implements of the hunter. he loved to watch his father mould bullets from the well-nigh priceless supply of lead, or cut and grease “patches” for loading. the boy would sometimes shoulder a stick and imagine himself a hunter, stimulated perhaps by the loan of a powder-horn and a hunting-knife. all this was evidence of what was working in his mind.
an old man who knew the boy and always called him the “corkonian” said that “the only diff’ betwane a crowbar and a gun is thot the gun do have a hole in it, and a stock.” the hunter’s rifle was made from a bar of iron weighing about the same as a crowbar, from eleven to fifteen pounds being the usual weight of the gun. from this it is easy to see that the small boy of 1795 could not take a very active part in the hunting that furnished[21] the greater portion of the supply of food for the pioneer and his family.
in talking with general grant, who had suggested a way in which the reserves might be of use while not needed at the front, abraham lincoln once said: “oh, yes; i see that. as we say out west, if a man can’t skin he can hold a leg for the one that does.” a five-year-old boy might not be able to hunt and kill deer, but he could “hold a leg.” the boy of to-day can go forth with a four-pound “twenty-two” with less fatigue than his grandfather felt in handling a rifle when ten years older. at the age of fifteen a boy might learn to shoot, but he was hardly able to range the mountains for game.
it was on a day in august, when davy was six years old, that his father and his uncle took him with them on a hunting trip into the dark forests of pine on the northern slopes of the bald mountains. they were gone but a single day, but every moment was a revelation to the little fellow. they were looking for wild turkeys, and had bagged several when they came to an opening surrounded[22] by maples, beeches, and other deciduous trees. the grass was fresh, and a dozen sorts of flowers were under their feet as they tied their single horse, on which davy rode with the game.
the men were talking of the west, and as they pointed out across the peaceful land of the chickasaws, the boy heard often the names of the great rivers, the tennessee, the holston, the cumberland, the ohio, and the mississippi. the spirit of unrest that was in their hearts was already in his own, and from that day the nolichucky was no longer satisfying to him; he wanted something bigger.
in the faint echoes of ringing steel and bloody threats that came from the cities of the old world, those august days, there was somewhat that excited the natural restlessness of the pioneer. the events in france were terrible and momentous. on the 20th of the month before, the “black-browed marseillaise,” the reds of the midi, had finished their long march from the shores of the mediterranean, and had entered paris, six hundred strong, armed with forks and scythes and pikes, and singing the song of rouget de lisle that forever afterwards[23] was to be the war hymn of unrest. the few who had left for the new world had not been missed in the ranks of the starving people of europe’s overcrowded streets and lands. the “black chaos of insurrection” had burst upon the last defenses of the french king, and it may have been while the three looked westward to the promised land that the swiss guards—hunted like wild beasts—died to the last man in the place de grêve. the time for blood-letting had come to france, and the whole world was in a ferment that was soon to set the red men of america in battle against the aggressions of the colonists. there could never have been peace in the old world until the opening of the new, and that also meant war to the knife.
from then until he went forth into the strange places of the east, davy grew in thought and stature and in the knowledge of common things, but without any education other than that obtained by the use of sharp ears and keen sight. when he was seven or more, the whole crockett family moved to a place about ten miles north of greenville. from the habit john crockett had, of going from one[24] place to another, it seems that he depended mostly upon game and pelts for a living. he could not have been much of a farmer, in a country where land had to be cleared before crops could be raised.
it was while in greene county that joseph hawkins, brother of davy’s mother, shot a man while hunting, having mistaken him for a deer. the man was gathering wild grapes, and as he reached for the clusters above him, hawkins thought he saw the moving ears of a deer. as all kinds of game were common in such a place, and hunters were scarce, he took a careful aim, and shot the grape-gatherer through the chest. the man finally recovered from the effects of the wound, but davy tells that he saw his father draw a silk handkerchief through the bullet-hole and through the man’s body. such accidents were less frequent in those days, when the human target might be one of a party of indians skulking in the thickets. in such a case the hunter would be tomahawked and scalped before he could reload—or bound fast, and he might be tortured to death later.
a chicago paper obtained a list of one hundred[25] and thirteen men who were killed in the year 1910, through such mistakes and careless handling of guns. in war, the killed are far less in number than the wounded, but in 1910 only eighty-seven were wounded as against one hundred and thirteen killed. this shows that the hunters who do the killing are much more careful in their aim than in finding out what they have for a target. it is a pretty sure thing that the immediate scalping of such blunderers would save one hundred lives every year. davy crockett’s father used to tell him, when he began to use a rifle, “look mighty hard before you shoot: it may be a man you see, but you can always get a man.”
from greene county john crockett moved, after a year or so, to the mouth of cove creek, some twenty-five miles below the mouth of the limestone.
