FIVE

“Mounted Gunman”

CROCKETT WOULD BE HOME for less than a year, just long enough to reacquaint himself with his young wife and two boys. He would hunt as much as he could through the cold rigors of winter, then with the spring thaw make a token effort at getting a few plants in that might realize an early harvest, before the war effort called again. Crockett would later claim that he had a hankering for a “small taste of British fighting,” though it is just as likely that the money he had earned on his first enlistment had whetted his mercenary appetite, and the cavalry work had certainly paid better than dirt farming. Plus, it suited his adventurous spirit, his growing notion of what it meant to be a frontiersman. For whatever combination of reasons, and certainly being paid to ride around on horseback and sometimes go hunting was among them, in early autumn—September 28, 1814—Crockett mustered again, this time signing on as one of the Tennessee “Mounted Gunmen.”

During his time at home, Crockett busied himself with farm chores, playing with the boys and perhaps showing them the rudiments of tracking and shooting, and no doubt telling them and Polly stories of his adventures. While Crockett was thus engaged, General Andrew Jackson had minor details like an ongoing revolution, and the subjugation of the entire Creek Nation, on his plate. First he endured near disaster at Emuckfaw Creek, where his resting troops were ambushed and nearly defeated. His rear guard collapsed, retreating shamefully until Jackson himself shored up the line under a volley of heavy fire. He barely managed to re-form his columns and organize them into a counterattack that yielded a decisive victory, though he lost some twenty men and more than seventy-five were wounded. After returning to Fort Strother to rest and regroup, Jackson was joined by the 39th Regiment of the U.S. Infantry and additional volunteers sent by Willie Blount of Tennessee. Jackson’s force had bulged to almost five thousand.¹ Finally outfitted as needed, General Andrew Jackson would level the blade of his “Sharp Knife”² at the Creeks. His plan was deviously simple and yet sinister: he would follow the Coosa River to Horseshoe Bend, where he would annihilate the large encampment of Creeks there and then proceed to the Holy Ground, the confluence of the Tallapoosa and Coosa rivers. Victory here would maim and kill not only physically, but spiritually. The Creeks held the Holy Ground (“Ecunchate”) sacred and protected by the Great Spirit, and “no white man could violate it and live.”³ Jackson would take pride in proving their savage religion to be mere superstition.⁴

On March 27, 1813, Jackson spurred his rejuvenated army to Horseshoe Bend (Tohopeka), a deeply wooded curve of the Tallapoosa River, where he found the Red Sticks well prepared for defense. They had situated their fort to use the natural peninsula and bluff for protection. Jackson was grudgingly impressed, noting the clever and efficient use of breastwork constructed of tree trunks, branches, and entire timbers laid upon one another in stacks. The Red Sticks had built the reinforcing wall between five and eight feet high, and left portholes through which to fire, leaving their attackers open and vulnerable in an advance. Jackson later praised their work, noting “it was a place well formed by Nature for defence & rendered more secure by Art.”⁵

But the opportunistic and tactical Jackson quickly saw that the situation could be turned to his advantage. He knew he had them significantly outnumbered. And they were so well garrisoned, with only one entry/ exit, as to be effectively penned up for slaughter.⁶ He quickly surrounded the fort, ordering Coffee’s cavalry of 700 men plus almost 1,300 Indians—Cherokees and friendly Creeks—to cross the river and fan out, surrounding the peninsula, hemming the Creeks in. At that, Jackson opened fire and began a bombardment of cannon fire, muskets, and rifles, riddling them for two full hours. The firing did little damage to the fortification, and it became evident that a costly frontal assault might be required. Then, without warning or orders, some of the Cherokees behind the bend hurled themselves into the frigid Tallapoosa and swam more than one hundred yards toward the opposite shore. There they absconded with Red Stick canoes, and, under heavy fire, returned to their men and began ferrying fighters across.⁷

It would prove the move that broke the attack wide open. As literally hundreds of friendly Indians now stormed the rear of the fort, the Red Sticks were forced to shift their attentions from Jackson at the front. Old Hickory seized the opportunity to drive his Tennesseans forward. The 39th Regiment, their bayonets thrust forward and glinting in the sun, were first to reach the breastworks. Taking close-range bullet fire and hearing the haunting drums and war whoops coming from inside, they poured forth. Major L. P. Montgomery clambered to the top of the barricade and waved his men on.⁸ As Montgomery frantically waved his hat for his men to follow, a Red Stick musket ball struck him in the head and dropped him in the dirt below. He died instantly.

Right behind Montgomery came a brave and precocious young lieutenant from Tennessee. Sam Houston’s adventurous spirit and wanderlust had led him to seek asylum from his uneventful farm life with the Cherokee. His adoptive Cherokee parents had nicknamed him “the Raven,” a symbol of good luck. He joined the U.S. Army in 1813 when he learned that they paid cash for enlisting. Now Houston took up the charge when Montgomery fell, inciting others to follow him up and over the barricade. Just moments later, Houston heard a whir above the screams and gunfire and felt the sharp and searing sting of a Red Stick arrow lodge deep in his right groin.⁹ With the arrow protruding from his inner thigh Houston fought on. With the Red Sticks pinched and trapped, the killing became incessant.

Houston enlisted help in extricating the arrow, forcing a fellow soldier to pull it out for him. The barbed arrow withdrew reluctantly, and it tore flesh and veins as it ripped away. Houston limped painfully to find a surgeon to staunch the blood flow. The massacre raged on while Houston lay still, wrapped and recovering, and Jackson himself happened by to commend him and order him to remain there—the day would be won. Then Jackson, calling for more volunteers to follow him and attack a log-roofed structure where more Creeks were hunkered in, departed. Houston, who had promised his family they would one day hear of his famous name, rose in great pain and staggered forward, musket in hand, challenging any in his outfit who were brave enough to follow him. Stumbling down the ravine toward the reinforcing earthwork, Houston was stopped short as two musket balls slammed into his right shoulder and arm.¹⁰ Field doctors tended to him, removing a lodged musket ball from his upper right arm, and dressing his bludgeoned groin with wraps and compresses. Blood issued forth in great spurts, and the doctors assumed he would be dead by morning, so they set him aside to work on others more likely to survive. Houston lay in agony all night, but he willed himself to live, and by morning he was still breathing.¹¹ He would recover, and his courage in battle, his willpower, and his obstinacy would become traits Jackson would utilize on the plains of Texas.

In the end, Jackson’s troops set the breastworks and redoubts ablaze and the killing became point-blank, then hand to hand. The Tallapoosa at Horseshoe Bend came to be called the “River of Blood,” and one private crossing the river right after the battle reported that his horse was stained blood red.¹² Perhaps recalling the atrocities of Fort Mims, some of Jackson’s soldiers mutilated the dead bodies of the fallen, brandishing their knives and severing long strips of skin to dry, then making bridle reins for their horses. “They started near the heel and cut parallel slits with a knife up the leg all the way to the shoulder blade, then across to the other shoulder and down the other leg.”¹³ The next day, the Indian fort now a smoldering graveyard, bodies piled high and strewn about the riverbanks, Jackson called for an accurate body count. To achieve this, his soldiers paced among the slain and, taking out a blade, sliced the nose from each fallen Red Stick so as not to double count. The count came to 557 dead, and another 300 or so impaled or shot in the river, setting the total at around 850.¹⁴ Amazingly, only twenty-six Tennessee soldiers lost their lives at Horseshoe Bend, with another 106, the tenacious Sam Houston among them, wounded. Houston would later observe of the carnage at Tohopeka with a sad and metaphoric finality: “The sun was going down, and it set on the ruin of the Creek Nation.”¹⁵

Certainly in the mind of Andrew Jackson, the slaughter at Horseshoe Bend signaled the end of the Creek War and the death knell of the Creek Nation.¹⁶ However, it would prove slightly more difficult than that. As he said he would, “Sharp Knife” marched on toward the Holy Ground, burning and pillaging all towns in a wide swath as he moved south, the Upper Creek country becoming a symbol of the wrath of Old Hickory. But a small and impetuous contingent of remaining Creeks, led by Peter McQueen and other mystics still loyal to Tecumseh and his teachings, had “already fled to Pensacola to seek sanctuary with the Spanish and to continue their war against the Americans.”¹⁷ For them, a battle had been lost but the war would be an ongoing struggle they would take with them to their graves if need be. While Jackson returned to Nashville to receive high praise, accolades, and ultimately the rank of major general in the United States Army for his decisive victory at Horseshoe Bend, McQueen, Josiah Francis, and a handful of other prophets ingratiated themselves with the Spanish governor in Florida, and managed to obtain British ammunition and arms to continue their resistance, small bands retreating to the mangrove swamps. These rogues needed to be dealt with, and the vengeful Jackson, acting with no direct orders from his government, called for a sort of “mop-up operation” in the South, along the Gulf. This became the operation—the Florida Campaign of 1814—that would lure David Crockett once more to serve under the now Major General Andrew Jackson.

Crockett hooked up again with Captain Russell, and his company followed on the heels of Jackson’s main army march south, through some familiar and foreboding territory.¹⁸ They passed Muscle Shoals, then the dilapidated wreckage of Black Warrior’s Town, and then they struck hard southeast to Pensacola. It was a hard march, the last eighty miles on foot (there being no forage for the horses), and Crockett recalled fondly their arrival: “My commander, Major Russel, was a great favourite with Gen’l Jackson, and our arrival was hailed with great applause.” Crockett later groused, a bit nostalgically and betraying some regret, that they had missed the real action. “We were a little after the feast; for they had taken the town and the fort before we got there.” Crockett would discover, through excited chatter among soldiers who had been there, that Jackson’s forces had taken the Spanish-held garrison of some 500 poorly armed, poorly trained, and rather passive soldiers on November 7. The takeover lasted only minutes, after which a white surrender flag appeared, flapping over the rooftops. Next to fall would be forts guarding Pensacola Bay, and Jackson knew these offered the real key to control of the region. He expected a serious skirmish of defense at Fort Barrancas, but the fleeing British and Spanish would not give him the satisfaction. Before Old Hickory could attack the next morning, the British and Spanish boarded ships and blew up the fort themselves, breaching a just-inked treaty.

Crockett remembered that evening of November 8 well, as he and some of the boys took pleasure in seeing the retreating British ships at sail out on the bay, slinking slowly away in defeat. The men procured a bottle and took a few “horns” before eventually returning to camp. Morale was momentarily high. Jackson withdrew his main troops, geared up, and headed west toward Mobile—and toward fame, glory, and military immortality at the Battle of New Orleans in a little over a year.¹⁹

In the meantime, David Crockett, under the direction of Major Russell and a Major Childs, was sent to the swamps to hunt down Indians who had dispersed under the advance of Jackson’s army. His job, as Crockett recollected it in his patented backwoods vernacular, was to “go to the south, and kill up the Indians on the Scamby river.”²⁰ Jackson wanted any hostile elements driven out, and he certainly did not wish them to remain in bands large enough to form and organize defenses again. Crockett, who had already shown his hunting, tracking, and scouting skills, seemed the perfect choice for such detail. The duty was hardly glamorous, and did not even constitute official “battles,” but it was deemed necessary and important, so off Crockett waded into the scrubby mangroves.

He went as part of a small special unit composed of some hired-out Indian guides, Major Russell, and sixteen men, including Crockett, who had been promoted to the rank of 3rd Sergeant. Back in Pensacola they had outfitted themselves with what beef they could secure by shooting stray cattle, and had purchased other goods like sugar and coffee, and even some liquor. The terrain they entered appeared foreign to Crockett, a “piney” place pocked with saline lakes and estuaries, briny marshes “where the whole country was covered with water, and looked like the sea.” They moved like apparitions through a dank and endless lattice of streams, basins, and tide pools choked by scrub oaks and thorny vines. They waded into the black and brackish water “like so many spaniels . . . sometimes up to our armpits, until we reached the pine hills, which made our distance through the water about a mile and a half.”²¹ The shivering men built a fire to warm themselves and dry out a little, then moved on, flanked and guarded front and rear by their Indian spies. Six miles up the Escambia River one of their scouts crashed through the brush in a whirlwind of panic, saying he had spied a small camp of Creeks ahead and that they ought to go kill them.

As Russell, Crockett and the men deliberated a course of action, their Indian spies readied for battle by ceremonially applying war paint. The scouts came over and told Major Russell that, being an officer and thus a warrior, he should be painted along with them. He consented, and soon he was painted just like the Indians. Russell then informed his spies how the attack would proceed: the white soldiers were to move ahead first, firing on the camp, then falling back to allow the Indians a chance to finish them off and scalp them, as was their custom. They all marched silently forward until they came within view of the camp, a small island, where they could see the Creeks working at “beating up what they called chainy briar root” on which they foraged and subsisted. Shots rent the air, followed by piercing war whoops, and Russell’s band of men hurried to the scene. They arrived to find their two lead scouts proudly holding the decapitated heads of two Creeks, blood dripping from their severed necks.

As Crockett learned, the scouts had come across two wayward Creeks out searching for their missing horses. Crockett’s spies spoke Shawnee, and tricked the Creeks into believing that they were escaping from General Jackson. The Creeks believed them, and informed the spies of a large Creek camp on the Conecuh River, an Escambia River tributary. With that, the spies thanked the Creeks and summarily killed them. Crockett arrived to find his spies taking turns smashing the severed heads with their war clubs. Soon all the Indians with them were “counting coup,” leveling violent blows on the bloody heads. Then their eyes fell expectantly on Crockett. Apparently it was his turn. “This was done by every one of them; and when they had got done, I took one of the clubs, and walked up as they had done, and struck it on the head also. At this they all gathered around me, and patting me on the shoulder, would call me ‘Warrior—Warrior.’ ” Crockett recalled such reminiscences dispassionately, without irony, pity, or surprise, acknowledging both the brutal facts of war and how easily a soldier found himself caught up in what would today be considered barbaric behavior. At the same time there was self-preservation involved with aligning himself with the “friendly” spies and acting as if he was essentially one of them. He needed them for trustworthy intelligence and reconnaissance, and participating in this way garnered their trust. Crockett’s personal communications skills were burgeoning; he was learning how to be an effective liaison.

The band then scalped the disfigured heads and moved along a sparse trail leading to the river. They skulked quietly down the trace, blood still drying on their hands, and came across an equally grotesque scene. A Spaniard, along with what they presumed to be his wife and four young children, lay recently killed and scalped. Crockett used his deft understatement to describe the situation: “I began to feel mighty ticklish along about this time, for I knowed if there was no danger then, there had been; and I felt exactly like there still was.” The group pressed noiselessly on, pushing through gnarled thicket, and the trace they followed came to the river, which they took downstream until they were across from the Creek encampment. The spooky place turned out to be entirely abandoned but for “two squaws and ten children.”

They were dismally low on provisions, and it was almost dark, the riverbanks and ground inland of them almost impassably thick with cane and vine. Russell determined that the best action would be to scout the camp on the Conecuh, and he selected Crockett to strike out in a canoe that night and search downstream for provisions of any kind. Crockett chose a man named John Guess, and a friendly Creek, and they paddled into the blackness. “It was very dark, and the river was so full that it overflowed the banks and the adjacent low bottoms. This rendered it very difficult to keep the channel, and particularly as the river was very crooked.”

In the end the plan to attack the camp on the Conecuh was scrapped by Major Uriah Blue of Virginia, and the scouting parties straggled down the Escambia to a place called Miller’s Landing. Then, after a brief skirmish that included the killing and scalping of a handful of prisoners by the Indian guides, they set out to traverse the panhandle country. Crockett had found little on his night foray, and had then been recalled, so that by now everyone was “in extreme suffering for want of something to eat.” They had originally departed with twenty days’ ration of flour and only eight days’ worth of beef, and had now been out for thirty-four days.²² They forded the Chattahoochee River, to the country toward the east, needing sustenance in the worst way. Coupled with near starvation, they were also suffering from exhaustion and overexposure to the hostile elements. One evening their spies returned to report they had found a village, and hoping for provisions to pillage, they made a gallant push to reach the place. The delirious men would surely have fantasized about food as they traveled all night. Around sunrise they could see the outline of the town, and they readied for battle, loading guns and snapping bayonets into place. The famished men charged the town, but to their deepest despair, they found not a single human being left to kill, the Indians having departed sometime before their arrival. They poked around, disconsolate, and when they found nothing, not a single pallet of corn or potatoes, they burned the place to the ground, then turned back toward their camp of the previous night, weather-beaten, and, as Crockett put it, “as nearly starved as any set of poor fellows ever were in the world.”

With the situation about as grim as it could get, they divided their regiment. Major Childs and his men headed for Baton Rouge, where they would eventually meet up with some of Jackson’s forces returning from victory in New Orleans. Major Russell took some of his men, and a few of the fittest horses, in the direction of Fort Decatur, along the Tallapoosa, in hopes of obtaining some food, for death by starvation had become a very real possibility. For fit hunters familiar with the region and its denizens, the country around there should have been rich with game—larger animals like deer and wild hogs roamed the higher, drier ground, and the bogs and marches teemed with smaller fare like turtles and squirrels and other rodents. The brackish waters might provide oysters and fish if one knew where to look, or how to harvest them.²³ But the hunting was difficult and not always productive, especially when conducted by diminished, even emaciated men unfamiliar with this hostile terrain. Days and nights blurred together into a surreal slog as the company struggled on through the marsh. Crockett, clearly the most accomplished and productive of his group, hunted every day now, and “would kill every hawk, bird, and squirrel” he could find. Others followed his lead, and when they would finally cease at night and slump over in exhaustion, the hunters would hurl their kill into a general pile to divvy up at mess.

By now the men were driven insane with hunger, with a few secretly hoarding food. Even raw or barely cooked meat parts like turkey gizzards were worth lying about, fighting for, even killing over. Cooperation, unity, and order unraveled, and Crockett rightly surmised that things had deteriorated to the point that “every fellow must shift for himself,” so he took the small company of his mess and decided to strike out from the other troops. Crockett rationalized it this way: “We know’d that nothing more could happen to us if we went than if we staid, for it looked like it was to be starvation any way; we therefore determined to go on the old saying, ‘root hog or die.’ ”²⁴

They kept on for three excruciatingly slow days, passing through ghostly remnant towns littered with the bodies of Indians, but still shooting very little game and finding nothing to eat, until at length, as Crockett related, they nearly gave up. “We all began to get ready to give up the ghost, and lie down and die; for we had no prospect of provision, and knew we couldn’t go much further without it.” Still Crockett kept hunting, and he managed a few small squirrels. He later fired on a hawk, and a group of wild turkeys broke from the thick cane, and a hunting partner of his dropped one. Crockett crept after the scattered flock, following the river bottom, energized with the prospect, at long last, of cooked game. He calmly lowered his rifle on a turkey sitting alongside the creek, and “blazed away . . . and brought him down.”

They ate a large turkey soup that night, their hollow bellies distending. Afterward, some of their messmates related that they had found a bee tree in their absence, so they all took out their tomahawks and hacked into the hives, scooping out handfuls of the honey, gorging themselves to near bursting, growing sick it had been so long since their stomachs had been full. They plopped down to rest, and when Crockett woke he struck out to hunt again, his belly full, hopeful that their luck was changing. He killed a deer that very morning, a fine buck, and flushed a large bear that made him regret he had no dogs to chase after it with, for he “always delighted most in bear hunting.” When he returned to camp with his buck, he found that his group had rejoined a division of his “starving army,” so he generously gave his deer to the men.

They were fourteen miles from Fort Decatur, where they figured to restock provisions. But when they arrived, they found things were sparse and hard at that fort, too, and after consuming one ration of meat “but not a mouthful of bread,” Crockett commandeered a canoe and paddled across the Tallapoosa to Big Warrior’s town to see what he could scrounge. Industry compelled him to trade ten bullets and some gunpowder for two hatfuls of corn, a deal which suited him just fine, since he couldn’t eat bullets. Crockett recollected that he prized that ration of corn so dearly he “wouldn’t have taken fifty silver dollars for it.” The next morning they struck out for Hickory Ground, the site of the treaty with the Creeks on August of 1814. Provisions there proved inadequate again, and they kept on, marching nearly fifty miles up the Coosa north to Fort Williams, where they were met with meager rations of parched corn and one ration each of flour and corn. Still, it was food, and they lived on the hope of finally arriving back at Fort Strother, where there were sure to be rations.

By now many of the horses, overworked and underfed, were dying. Crockett reckoned that as many as thirteen perished in a single day, and they were forced even to abandon good saddles and bridles—an unthinkable waste, but necessary—there simply was no way to carry them.²⁵ They wandered on day after day, measuring the miles by now familiar landmarks like Fort Talladega. Death and its reminders were all around them, including ghoulish and chilling scenes that only war can conjure: “We went through the old battle ground, and it looked like a great gourd patch; the sculls of the Indians who were killed still lay scattered all about, and many of their frames were still perfect, as the bones had not separated.”

Crockett and his mates looked near dead themselves, the few clothes they still possessed rotting off their bodies. The days were bone-numbing cold, the nights a huddled shiver that proved nearly unbearable. At the depth of winter, the creeks froze at their edges, and chill winds tore down from the northern ranges in violent gusts that the men would wince away from. Finally, one frigid morning, the knot of men came upon East Tennessee troops bound for Mobile, and to Crockett’s great surprise and happiness his younger brother Joseph was among them. The meeting was a fortunate and timely windfall, for Crockett fueled on fresh provisions and there was even food for his horse, which was about to give out. Crockett spent a rare happy evening with his brother and a number of “the boys” from their own neighborhood, hearing stories and anecdotes from back home near Bean’s Creek, which he now began to long for most painfully. The next morning Crockett said farewell to Joseph and the others, then crossed the icy Coosa and at long last arrived at the relative comfort and safety of Fort Strother. He had survived a nightmarish detail that nearly took his life, had participated in killing what few hostile Indians there were to be found, but mainly had been engaged in a protracted struggle for survival in an unfamiliar and inhospitable wilderness. He figured enough was enough, so after recuperating and eating for a few days, he struck out for home and shortly arrived to a joyous homecoming with Polly and the boys. Crockett reveals a modicum of sensitivity and softness in his character, as well as a hint of insecurity, when he recalled seeing them after so much hardship and such depravity:

 

I found them all well and doing well; and though I was only a rough sort of backwoodsman, they seemed mighty glad to see me, however little the quality folks might suppose it. For I do reckon we love as hard in the backwood country, as any people in the whole of creation.

 

Crockett had spent only a few happy days at home when he received unsettling news: he had orders to return to the front, and join an expedition to Alabama, along the Cahaba and Black Warrior rivers, “to see if there was no Indians there.” Having seen what he had, Crockett figured that there probably weren’t too many Indians to be found, and anyway, he needed to be home for a time. He arranged, in a move that was common, legal, and in no way considered suspect, to buy off his remaining time of one month to a young man raring to go. Crockett would later note, with a hint of “I told you so,” that on his return, the young man confirmed Crockett’s suspicions and they did not find any Indians, “any more than if they had been all the time chopping wood in my clearing.” This seemed to validate Crockett’s decision not to go back, and David Crockett’s military career was over. He received an honorable discharge from Brigadier General John Coffee, and concluded his six-month tour of duty as 4th Sergeant.²⁶

It was time to reconnect with his loved ones, to head back into the fields and try to make a go of farming if he could, to hunt the hollows and haunts around his cabin and see if he might prosper. He’d proven his worth as a backwoodsman and knew he could endure most any physical hardship that might come his way, and he’d seen some of the ways that politics play out, even on such a stage as a battlefield. He had served under the now famous General Andrew Jackson,²⁷ a notch on the leather belt certainly, and undoubtedly fodder for tall tales at taverns around Bean’s Creek. But mostly, at almost thirty years of age with practically nothing to show for it, David Crockett was glad to be back home. As it turned out, the joy of his reunion would be as fleeting as a rainbow after a spring squall.