Be always sure you’re right—then go ahead!
DAVY CROCKETT
If anyone in America could be called an amiable cuss, it was the Honorable David Crockett. On that point virtually everyone, friend and foe alike, agreed. There were only a few for whom the cussedness outweighed the amiability—and one of them was President Andrew Jackson. Once, he had been Crockett’s political hero, as well as his commander during the Creek War. But Crockett’s allegiance would always be to his poor constituents of west Tennessee, and he had come to realize that Jackson had become an opportunist whose allegiances shifted with the wind, or at least that is what Crockett believed. Over the past five years or so, the congressman from Tennessee’s near-constant jabs at Jackson—in the press, in session, in company of every kind—had come to infuriate the president. Jackson’s handpicked successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren, was another on Crockett’s blacklist. Crockett loathed him, and let everyone know it. For Jackson and Van Buren, Crockett’s defeat in his bid for a fourth congressional term, and the loss of his bully pulpit, was something to be devoutly thankful for.
Jackson’s followers had helped bring about that defeat, but it was Crockett himself who would ultimately relieve them of the gadfly who had plagued them for so long. He had told his constituents (or so he claimed later) that if they elected his rival, “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” To the surprise of many, he did just that.
EVERY GENERATION HAS ITS LAND OF MILK and honey. In 1835, it was Texas, and had been for more than a decade. And Texas lay to the west. Like his father and grandfather before him, and like their forefathers before them, reaching back many hundreds of years—Celtic warriors and their willful women, who had fought in and conquered the lands from middle Europe westward to the sea, and traveled up the English island to Scotland and over the waters again to Ireland, and then made the great journey across the northern Atlantic to the New World—David Crockett had always been bound westward. It was in his blood, his marrow. Like thousands of others, he was hopeful of finding his fortune by following the sunset. He would encounter something very different.
In common with so many early American frontiersmen, Crockett was of primarily Scots-Irish stock (though he preferred to think the Irish dominated). About 1775, his grandfather David Crockett led his family from the Piedmont region of North Carolina west across the Appalachians into Indian territory. Shortly after settling in what would become eastern Tennessee, the elder Crockett and his wife were massacred by Creek Indians, who were justifiably angry at white encroachment into their land. Some of his children were wounded or captured—one, deaf and mute, resided with the Creeks for eighteen years before his brothers found him and bought him from his captors. But the remaining family refused to leave the area, and on August 17, 1786, a new David Crockett, the fifth of nine children, was born to John Crockett and his wife, the former Rebecca Hawkins, in a log cabin in the hill country, on the Nolichucky River near Limestone.
John Crockett had fought as a citizen soldier in the Revolution, where he and 1,100 other Tennessee volunteers defeated the British in the bloody battle at Kings Mountain. Later he served as county constable for several terms, and attempted various types of employment—land speculation, working in a gristmill, innkeeping—but he and his family never rose much above poverty, and, if anything, fell deeper in debt. Those financial circumstances would never change, even after he moved farther west in 1796, and on the side of a well-traveled road opened a six-room log tavern that also served as their home. It was a crude existence, the inn catering primarily to a rough trade of drovers and wagoners, and all the children did their share. David would remember later that he and his family made their “acquaintance with hard times, and a plenty of them.”
Two years later John Crockett, “being hard run every way,” hired out his twelve-year-old son David (a common practice of the time) to a cattle drover named Jacob Siler to help take a herd 225 miles to Rockbridge County, Virginia. Wary of his father’s hickory-stick discipline, David went along, even though he would have to make the return trip on his own in winter. Upon arriving at their destination two weeks later, Siler tried to force the boy into indentured servitude. David stayed a month, all the time convincing the man and his family of his cooperation, then snuck out of the house late on a cold Sunday night. After walking seven miles through knee-deep snow, he reached a tavern, where he found a group of travelers who, fortunately and coincidentally, knew his father and arranged his passage south. He arrived home a few weeks later.
David had received no schooling up to that point; there was little opportunity for formal education on the frontier. But the people of the community hired a schoolteacher in the fall of 1799—usually the teacher served in exchange for room and board and a small salary—and the Crockett children dutifully began to attend. Only a few days later a disagreement with his drunken father over his education, and a desire to avoid a severe whipping, led David, now thirteen, to leave once more, again not entirely of his own volition. This time, he hired himself out—to another cattle drover on the way to Virginia.
Over the next two and a half years young David took on odd jobs here and there, learning as he went along how to win friends and attain their approval. When he finally returned home in the spring of 1802 to a touching reunion—even his father was glad to see him—he was sixteen, more man than boy, with a seasoning only the road could supply. He worked off some of his father’s debts over the next year, and finally got around to learning his letters by working for a neighboring Quaker in exchange for schooling and board. Six months of four days’ lessons a week would be all he would ever know of classwork, but he gained enough knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic to stand him in good stead.
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!”
By mid-1835, after a whirlwind, two-week book tour of the major cities of the eastern United States—while Congress was in session—Crockett had become one of the most famous individuals in America. But the figure he cut in real life usually fell short of the legend. The half man, half alligator who could whip his weight in wildcats and grin a panther down from a tree was actually a well-dressed, well-mannered gentleman, to the surprise of many, including a woman who saw him in the audience at a ventriloquist’s show:
He is wholly different from what I thought him, tall in stature large in frame but quite thin with black hair combed straight over the forehead parted from the middle and his shirt collar turned negligently back over his coat. He has rather an indolent careless appearance and looks not like a “go-ahead man.”
That observer was close to the truth. “Go-ahead” though Crockett might be in energy and outlook, he was certainly never going to fit the stereotype of the thrusting, can-do politician—nor did he wish to. Indeed, the more time he spent in Washington, the more disenchanted, impatient, and just plain bored he became with the unpleasant and compromising political process. Crockett was a genuinely honest man, despite the slight autobiographical fiddles he engineered and the occasional harmless trick he played on an opponent to make a point and get a laugh from an audience. Even worse for his political career, he was positively resistant to deal making. “I have always supported measurs [sic] and principles, not men,” he wrote, and his political career emphasized the sincerity of that statement.
His disillusionment was all the greater because he had once so admired fellow Tennessean Andrew Jackson. By 1830, during his second term, Crockett was publicly denouncing the president, whom he saw as having been corrupted by Washington and manipulated by the less scrupulous men around him, particularly Vice President Van Buren, a master politician with a reputation as a backroom schemer. That year, Crockett stated, “I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not—he has become a Van Buren man.”
In the spring of 1834, Jackson clashed with the Senate over the extent of executive power and control. Some, including Crockett, interpreted these developments as an impending descent into tyranny; many still alive could remember living under the rule of a king, and did not wish for another monarch. They compared Jackson to Julius Caesar and the times to the last days of the Roman Republic. Near the end of the year, in a letter to a friend, Crockett vowed that if Van Buren, Jackson’s handpicked successor, was elected, “I will leave the united [sic] States. I will not live under his kingdom.”
Nevertheless, Crockett stumped during the late spring and early summer of 1835 with vigor, though he lacked the money for a full-scale campaign. This time his opponents fielded a popular candidate named Adam Huntsman, who gave as good as he got. An attorney with a peg leg, the result of a war injury, he proved adept at savvy disparagement of Crockett, criticizing his lapses in Washington and pointing out his failure to achieve anything of substance during his three terms.
Crockett responded by promising his constituents that he would set out for Texas if he lost the election. But to make matters worse, he had again failed to pass his land bill, despite promising that it would be done, and he had accomplished little else this term save for his tour in support of the book. A mere fifteen months after its publication had established his celebrity, his star was on the decline, and to many, his strident criticism of the president had grown tiresome and his legislation inconsequential. A follow-up narrative of his promotional tour, quickly written (by another ghostwriter, based on Crockett’s notes and press clippings) and published to cash in on his fame, resulted in little of the charm and a fraction of the sales of the first. Another book released a few months later, in the summer of 1835, a polemic against Van Buren disguised as a biography of the vice president, turned out even worse. Finally, his vote against Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 had not been popular with his constituents. On the surface it would appear surprising that Crockett, whose grandparents had been massacred by Creeks and who had fought them himself, could summon the compassion to take their side. But Crockett could empathize with the plight of the “civilized” tribes, for they were in the same boat as many of his constituents regarding land. And Indians had saved his life during one of his early hunting trips when a party of them found him in the woods, near death from malaria. Now peaceful and living on ancestral lands, they were protected by treaties that Jackson was choosing to ignore.
Initially, Crockett was confident he would win. As the campaign wore on, however, he suspected he was beaten, though he put on a brave face. On election day he won in eighteen of his nineteen counties. But in the single county Huntsman took, he won handily, and Crockett lost the early August election by 252 votes out of the nine thousand cast. The verdict hit home, and when he walked into his cabin after receiving the news, he told his wife, “Well, Bet, I am beat, and I’m off for Texas.” His fourteen-year-old daughter, Matilda, would later recall that he seemed unfazed by his defeat, because “he wanted to go to Texas anyhow.” He had given his word, and he would keep it. Another long hunt, another adventure, and a chance to make his fortune in an unsullied land—that was more than enough reason to head west again. Besides, it was surely preferable to the life of a backwoods farmer, which Crockett had never cottoned to and by now was finding intolerable.
At first Crockett suggested that the whole family go together, the sooner the better; but Elizabeth did not like the sound of that idea. “Mother persuaded him to go first and look at the country, and then if he liked it, we would all go,” remembered Matilda. “He seemed very confident… that he would soon have us all to join him in Texas.” It was settled, then: if the country was as good as the stories he had heard made it out to be, he would stake a claim and come back for his family. On the eve of his departure, he wrote to his brother-in-law George Patton: “We will go through Arkinsaw and I want to explore the Texes well before I return.” It would, he hoped, be his last move west.
On an afternoon late in October, a few days before he left, he gave a big barbecue and “bran dance”—that morning they sprinkled the ground liberally with the husks of Indian corn, for a better surface—and invited neighbors and friends from far and near. “They had a glorious time,” Matilda remembered. “The young folks danced all day and night and everybody enjoyed themselves finely.”
On the morning of November 1, less than three months after his defeat, Crockett said good-bye to his family. Three companions would ride with him: Will Patton, his nephew—“a fine fellow,” Crockett thought; Abner Burgin, another brother-in-law; and Lindsey Tinkle, a neighbor and friend. David dressed in his hunting suit and coonskin cap, though he carried finer clothes in his knapsack. The only firearm he carried was his trusted Betsy, the flintlock rifle he had owned for years. He left his nineteen-year-old son, Robert, in charge of the family and farm, said good-bye to Elizabeth, his two teenage daughters, and everyone else, mounted his large bay, and headed southwest to Dyersburg to catch the main road south toward Memphis, about one hundred miles away.
They reached the river town a few days later and soon engaged in a farewell drinking party with some old friends—and some new ones, since Crockett made them as fast as he could meet them, and everyone wanted to meet the famous son of Tennessee. At some point in the evening, he mounted a tavern counter and gave a speech to the crowd who had gathered, concluding with, “Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas. I am on my way now.” The next day—their group now doubled in size—they crossed the Mississippi and set out overland for Little Rock, to the west. Overhead, Halley’s Comet slowly made its way through the heavens. (Three years earlier, newspapers around the country had carried a story announcing that Crockett had been appointed by the president to “stand on the Allegheny mountains and catch the Comet, on its approach to the earth, and wring off its tail, to keep it from burning up the world!”)
If Crockett had not previously given much thought to the political turmoil in Texas, the subject had by now become a rationale for his journey. In Little Rock he gave a speech largely concerned with Texas independence, explaining that he was on his way there “to join the patriots of that country in freeing it from the shackles of the Mexican government,” as one local scribe noted. In the weeks previous, the local newspapers had been filled with news from the Mexican province, including a letter from Stephen Austin detailing the October 2 skirmish at Gonzales and a thunderous call to arms from Crockett’s acquaintance and fellow Tennessee politician Sam Houston, who had been practicing law in Nacogdoches until the outbreak of hostilities and had recently been elected commander of that town’s militia:
War in defence of our rights, our oaths, and our constitutions is inevitable in Texas!
If volunteers from the United States will join their brethren in this section, they will receive liberal bounties of land. We have millions of acres of our best lands unchosen and unappropriated.
Let each man come with a good rifle, and one hundred rounds of ammunition, and come soon.
Our war-cry is “Liberty or death.”
Our principles are to support the constitution, and down with the Usurper!!!
From Little Rock, Crockett and his Tennesseans proceeded southwest toward Texas and crossed the Red River sometime during the third week in November. He may have been eager to join the Texians in their fight for freedom, but he found time to go on an extended hunt into northeast Texas. Henry Stout, a legend in the area as a hunter and guide, escorted Crockett and company into the Choctaw Bayou area and beyond, into the dense strip of forest known as the Cross Timbers. For two weeks or more they explored a country rich in bison, bear, deer, and other large and small game.
The disappointment of his political defeat was fading: Crockett was in his element, and in fine form and high spirits. The malaria he had contracted twenty years before had troubled him periodically ever since, but now it was only a memory. As he explored Texas south of the Red River, no fever and aches plagued him; he felt in excellent health. And the country was everything he had heard: “I must say as to what I have seen of Texas it is the garden spot of the world the best land and the best prospect for health I ever saw is here and I do believe it is a fortune to any man to come here,” he wrote to his oldest daughter, Margaret.
Around the end of December, the party turned south toward Nacogdoches, crossed the Sabine River into Texas, and reached the old Spanish village early in January. At a banquet in his honor given by the ladies of the town, he again told the story that ended with “you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” (Crockett was never one to waste a good line.) A few days later he rode thirty miles east to the small village of San Augustine, where a cannon’s roar announced his arrival, and the requisite welcoming dinner provided another opportunity for a speech.
Already being touted as a local delegate to the constitutional convention scheduled for March 1 in San Felipe—which could not only revive his political career but also help him gain appointment as a land agent for part of the area he had traversed to the north—Crockett decided to make his loyalties official. He could have declined military service due to his age (he would turn fifty in August), or due to his likely election to the convention, but on January 12, Judge John Forbes administered his self-composed oath of allegiance to Crockett, Will Patton, and sixty-six other men. (Friends Lindsey Tinkle and Abner Burgin had decided to return to their wives and children.) They signed up for six months in the Volunteer Auxiliary Corps.
When it came time for Crockett to add his name to the list, he read the oath carefully:
I do solemnly swear that I will bear true allegiance to the provisional government of Texas, or any future government that may be hereafter declared, and that I will serve her honestly and faithfully against all her enemies and oppressors whatsoever.
Crockett told Forbes that he was only willing to support a “republican government.” Forbes inserted “republican” between “future” and “government,” and Crockett put his name to the document. With memories of “King Andrew the First” still vivid—and the recollections of life under George III not too far in the past—he had no desire to live under a monarchy, actual or virtual. Now a soldier in the army of Texas, he sent word home. In a letter to Margaret he made clear his enthusiasm for his new cause:
I am rejoiced at my fate. I would rather be in my present situation than to be elected to a seat in Congress for life. I am in hopes of making a fortune for myself and family bad as has been my prospects… do not be uneasy about me. I am with my friends.
The ex-congressman and his companions soon set out west along the Old San Antonio Road—the Anglo name for El Camino Real—for Washington, 125 miles away on the Brazos River. There they hoped to receive orders from Houston, the recently appointed commander in chief of the Texian army, as to their destination. With Crockett now rode fifteen or sixteen others—“almost all,” wrote Judge Forbes of these and other recruits, “gentlemen of the best respectability.” Most were educated professionals from Tennessee and Kentucky, several of them lawyers, men who were familiar with Crockett and were honored and delighted to ride with him. They began to call themselves the Tennessee Mounted Volunteers.
Some of these men had come to Texas seeking their fortune. Others came in sympathy with the plight of the people they perceived as their fellow Americans. Daniel Cloud, a young attorney from Kentucky, had journeyed through several states seeking gainful employment; in the Arkansas Territory, he had found what appeared to be a gold mine of opportunity. But upon hearing more about the situation in Texas, he had decided to continue to the Mexican province. “The reason for our pushing still further on,” he wrote his brother, “must now be told…. Ever since Texas has unfurled the banner of freedom, and commenced a warfare for liberty or death, our hearts have been enlisted in her behalf.” His friend and traveling companion Peter James Bailey, another Kentucky lawyer, shared his sentiments and agreed to join the cause.
For one of their number, the reason lay deeper.
Forty-one-year-old Micajah Autry had lived in a fine whitewashed house on the highest hill around Jackson, Tennessee, not far from the home of Andrew Jackson, a neighbor and friend, for whom the town was named. Though frail as a child, Autry had grown to be tall and slender, with dark hair and eyes. As a seventeen-year-old he had served in the army during the War of 1812. He had a loving wife and three children, and a large law practice. But when he gambled a great deal of money speculating in dry goods, the venture failed. He was forced to sell all the property he owned: his house, the land surrounding it, his carriage and horses, and his slaves. Then something far worse happened.
Autry, his wife, Martha, and his family attended a camp meeting a few miles from their house and left their little boy, Edward, in the care of a nurse. They returned home to find the child dead, drowned accidentally after climbing into a bathtub. When a grief-stricken Martha Autry awoke the next day, her glossy hair had turned snowy white. The change in Micajah Autry was no less extreme. “It was on one of his trips north that he became quite enthusiastic over Austin’s colony,” his daughter, Mary, remembered later, and he made up his mind to “view the prospects himself.” He left his wife and children with his stepdaughter—Martha’s daughter from her first marriage—and her husband, closed his law practice, and in November 1835 headed for Texas to find a new home for his family.
At Memphis, he boarded a boat and steamed down the Mississippi. Aboard were about twenty other Tennessee men bound for Texas, and Autry fell in with them. The word was that the fighting at Béxar would be over before they got there, but that Santa Anna would invade Texas in the spring. The men had no horses, but they were excited at their prospects. On December 13, they reached Natchitoches, Louisiana, on the Red River. When they found no mounts there, Autry determined to reach Nacogdoches, a hundred miles west, on foot. He followed the Old San Antonio Road to San Augustine, where he joined up with another small company of volunteers, four of whom were lawyers, including Cloud and Bailey, his fellow young Kentuckians. They continued west, slogging their way through torrents of rain, mud, water, and cold. Autry’s new companions alleviated his sorrows somewhat, as did the physical misery—“the very great fatigue I have suffered has in a degree stifled reflection and has been an advantage to me,” he wrote to his wife when he reached Nacogdoches:
I have reached this point after many hardships and privations but thank God in most excellent health…. I go the whole Hog in the cause of Texas. I expect to help them gain their independence and also to form their civil government, for it is worth risking many lives for. From what I have seen and learned from others there is not so fair a portion of the earth’s surface warmed by the sun.
About twenty miles west of Nacogdoches, the piney woods of east Texas gave way to rolling prairies dotted with clusters of trees. Along the road, Crockett and his companions found sustenance and shelter at regularly spaced “stands”—rough houses that supplied supper, lodging, and breakfast, as well as corn for the horses, for a dollar apiece. The food was simple and unvaried: cornbread and meat, never garden vegetables, and rarely butter or milk. But the stands provided shelter from the elements and an opportunity to relax after a long day’s ride—and gather around a fire with a cup of coffee or something stronger and listen to Crockett, in that distinctive drawl, spin more of his yarns.
Near the Trinity River, they left the old road and turned south toward Washington. There, on a steep slope on the west bank of the Brazos, the group entered a village of two crude hotels, a few shops and taverns, and several small residences—a place so new that there were still stumps standing in the middle of the only street in town, which was just an opening cut through the woods up from the ferry landing. Crockett and his men stayed at John Lott’s hotel, if it could be called that—“a frame house, covered with clapboards, a wretchedly made establishment, and a blackguard, rowdy set lounging about,” according to one visitor. There were not sufficient beds in the large one-room structure, so as many as thirty lodgers shared cots or slept on the floor. The dinner fare consisted of fried pork, coarse cornbread, and bad coffee. Breakfast was the same. The only saving grace was the presence of two large fireplaces, one at each end of the building.
There was another disappointment: Sam Houston was not in town. He had his hands full down near Goliad, trying to stop the Matamoros expedition. In his absence, Lott was the nascent government’s local agent, and the man charged with directing recruits to the places where they were needed.
A week or so later, Lott would receive orders from acting governor James Robinson to henceforth direct volunteers to Goliad, or the port of Copano—there were enough troops already at Béxar, or so the advisory committee determined. But now, before the end of January, Béxar was the destination. Word of the Mexican army preparing to march into Texas had recently reached the settlements on the Brazos, and Colonel James Neill was in sore need of men to garrison Béxar. The one thing both deposed governor Henry Smith and his replacement appeared to agree on was the importance of maintaining the post there. As the only town on the main road from Mexico, Béxar served as a picket guard to the Anglo colonies.
That is where Lott sent Crockett and the Tennessee Mounted Volunteers—to Béxar and the old mission turned military post called the Alamo.