American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett Read online

  This perceived betrayal would be the seed of a growing distrust in Crockett, a deep suspicion of rank and privilege that would eventually fester into near-hatred.19 At the time, Crockett simply took the insult quietly and went about his business, as immediate action was called for. Under orders, the troops erected breastworks nearly a quarter-mile long around the camp, and Colonel Coffee dispatched news of the developments via Indian runner to General Jackson, now stationed at Fayetteville.

  Jackson was in no mood for the information. He had only arrived the previous day, and his arm was bound and useless, injured by gunshots in the aftermath of the duel between Carroll and Benton. The wounds had been very serious, a bullet having pierced, and remaining lodged in, his upper left arm, another slug having shattered his shoulder. Using “poultices of elm and other wood cuttings as prescribed by Indians,”20 a doctor staunched the blood flow that might have killed him; it took Jackson almost a month before he was fit to rise from bed. But Jackson, as his men were coming to understand, was no ordinary man, and it would take more than a shattered arm to sideline him. As it turned out, he would carry that bullet with him through the Creek War, the Battle of New Orleans, and right into the White House, where it would finally be removed in 1832, in an operation without anesthesia, by a prominent Philadelphia surgeon.21

  So it was that Jackson mounted up and drove a furious forced march from Fayetteville, arriving at Crockett’s camp in some discomfort, his men’s feet raw and blistered from the speed of their journey. Already, for the last six months or so, Jackson’s men had privately been calling him by a nickname. Noting his toughness, willpower, and refusal to yield to anything, they dubbed him “Old Hickory,” and the name stuck.22 On October 10, 1813, acting on news conveyed to him by Colonel John Coffee but first iterated by David Crockett, an able volunteer of the Tennessee Mounted Militia, Old Hickory, his left arm slung tight to his body and his face stern and narrow but betraying no sign of pain, rode into camp and dismounted. The fight with the Indians he had longed for was about to begin in earnest.

  The breastworks that the troops had erected were never put to use in defense, for Jackson’s ire was up, and he quickly determined that the best tactic was to go on the offensive, to intercept the mobilizing Creeks to the south. Fatigued and hungry but now driven by the possessed Old Hickory—“Sharp Knife” to the Indians who faced his blade—the Tennessee Volunteers marched and rode for Creek country, essentially retracing Crockett’s reconnaissance by crossing the Tennessee River, moving through Huntsville, then fording the river again where it passed Muscle Shoals. Jackson had split his forces, sending about 800, Crockett among them, under Colonel Coffee. The river at Muscle Shoals was dangerous, nearly two miles wide, with a bottom so rough and rocky that a number of horses’ hooves became lodged between submerged stones. The riders leapt from them into the water and sloshed along on foot, leaving the panicked animals to founder, topple, and eventually drown in the muddy roil. The men drove on to the headwaters of the Black Warrior River, very near the present-day location of Tuscaloosa, and moved as quietly as a troop of 800 could into what was known as Black Warrior Town. It had recently been vacated, and the hungry soldiers proceeded to loot what stores remained, securing “a fine quantity” of beans and corn. Content with new food supplies, they then torched the town down to ash.

  Crockett noted that the fields surrounding the town were pocked with very fresh Indian tracks, and he surmised that the Indians had anticipated their arrival and fled not long before. They pressed on, a number of the men now gaunt and haggard, heading to meet Jackson’s main army at the fork where Crockett was originally to have made rendezvous with Major Gibson. The forces convened and reassessed the situation, realizing by the next day that they were completely out of meat. Jackson’s army had originally assembled and moved so fast that they had arrived insufficiently supplied, and Crockett’s division had used up all the provisions they had brought. Crockett took the opportunity to approach Major Gibson and ask him whether he might venture afield to hunt as they marched along, and Gibson consented, perhaps wishing to confirm the rumors of Crockett’s hunting skills and marksmanship. They certainly needed the food.

  Crockett left the main and had gone only a short distance when he came across a fresh-killed deer carcass, so recently dropped that the flesh was “still warm and smoking.” Crockett surmised that the Indian who had killed the deer would be very close at hand, perhaps still in shooting range, and though, as he put it, “I was never much in favor of one hunter stealing from another, yet meat was so scarce in the camp, that I thought I must go in for it.” Without hesitation he slung the bloody carcass in front of him across his horse and rode with his spoils until nightfall.

  Returning to camp, he distributed the deer among the men, keeping a small portion for his immediate group, and they gorged themselves on the venison and gnawed on small rations of parched corn. The next day Crockett hunted again, this time flushing a pack of hogs from a canebrake and shooting one, and in moments gunfire erupted all around, sounding like battle fire. When Crockett arrived back with his hog he happily discovered that the hogs had broken from the cane toward the camp, and the soldiers had harvested a good number of them, and a hefty beef cow as well. They were temporarily sated, but things would soon get worse again. “The next day we met the main army, having had, as we thought, hard times and a plenty of them, though we had yet seen hardly the beginning of trouble.”

  Crockett’s foreshadowing would prove accurate, as the men would soon face hardships so severe as to test their tenacity and patriotism and result in a famous mutiny. The convened armies plodded on, arriving back at Radcliffe’s place, only to find that Radcliffe had stashed and hidden all his provisions. Even more remarkable was the revelation that the runner who’d screamed in the night and claimed that the “Red Sticks” were on the move had actually been an elaborate and successful ruse by Radcliffe himself. They had been tricked, and Crockett noted that there was nothing much to do about it but march on to Camp Wells, between Tuscaloosa and Gadsden. They vowed retribution against the scheming Radcliffe, and for atonement they absconded with “the scoundrell’s two big sons . . . and made them serve in the war.” At length they came to Ten Islands, on the Coosa River, where Coffee’s troops erected a stockade named Fort Strother and began to send out small spy parties to get detailed and confirmed intelligence on the Creek activity and locations. These forays paid off, as it was soon determined that a fairly large contingent of Indians remained encamped at the town of Tallusahatchee only eight miles away. This was it; Jackson’s chance to avenge the atrocity of Fort Mims was now at hand.

  General John Coffee (he had just recently been given the raise in rank) divided his troops and cleverly marched one line on either side of the town, and in this way used a force of some 900 men to completely encircle a town, and within it, about 180 Creek warriors. They tightened their line. Clearly outnumbered, a good many Creek women began fleeing from houses and shelter and clinging to the soldiers, begging mercy, surrendering. But with Fort Mims still a vivid memory and rallying cry, Coffee’s men closed their ranks tight and Captain Eli Hammond, commanding a band of rangers, advanced straight on the town. Crockett remembered that “Indians saw him, and they raised a yell, and came running at him like so many red devils.” The outnumbered Indians fired guns and arrows when they could, then quickly retreated into houses and behind outbuildings, waiting. What followed was a scene as gruesome as Fort Mims. Crockett and his contingent chased a group of forty-six Creek warriors into a house, and arriving there, watched as a brave and unyielding Creek squaw drew a bow back with her feet and let fly an arrow that pierced and slew one of their men. It was the first man Crockett ever saw killed by bow and arrow, and the act enraged him and his men. “She was fired on, and had at least twenty balls blown through her. . . . We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six warriors in it.” Similar routs took place all around the town, and in a very fe
w minutes the attack was complete, with 186 Creek warriors dead and eighty taken prisoner. Just five of the white troops perished in the raid. Jackson would comment, “We have retaliated for the destruction of Fort Mims.”23

  The next day, November 4, 1813, Crockett and some of his men returned to the Indian town to see what provisions might be salvageable, for the men were by this time exceedingly hungry and without reinforcements or arriving supplies. Crockett witnessed a macabre scene of dead, bloated, and half-charred bodies strewn across the town. “They looked very awful, for the burning had not entirely consumed them, but given them a very terrible appearance, at least what remained of them.” Buildings creaked and groaned, half-toppled and smoldering, and they found one large house that had a big store of potatoes underneath, in its cellar, and Crockett noted that “hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had a little rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.”24

  The stores of found food proved insufficient, and Crockett returned with these men to Fort Strother, where everyone was near starvation. They rested and attempted to recuperate for a few days. Crockett noted that food was so scarce they were forced into “eating beef-hides, and continued to eat every scrap we could lay our hands on.” Men grew weak, sicker than they had already been, and morale fell dangerously low. Then, on November 7, news came from a runner that Fort Talladega, just thirty miles to the southeast, was under siege by a large band of hostile Creeks. The runner, the chief of a friendly band of Creeks ensconced in the fort, had escaped in a hogskin and himself run the thirty miles to take personal audience with General Jackson.25 Jackson did not delay, ordering his men to march immediately and not stop through the long night.

  At sunrise, Crockett and his cohorts arrived near the fort to find “eleven hundred painted warriors, the very choice of the Creek nation.” The hostile Creeks had surrounded the fort, which housed a good number of friendly Creeks, and the hostiles were attempting to coerce the friend-lies to join them in a fight against Jackson and his army, bribing them with the lure of guns, money, fine horses, blankets, and a host of other spoils of war, which were exaggerations given the army’s actual threadbare condition. The military tactic Jackson would employ was the same that had worked at the bloody massacre of Tallusahatchee: surround and encircle the enemy with two connecting lines of men, then tighten the circle and squeeze them into panic.

  Crockett and his men, under the direction of Major Russell, moved in on the fort, but they saw no activity; they heard only the voices of friendly Indians hooting and calling out, attempting to warn the soldiers about an ambush. Enemy scouts had signaled the soldiers’ arrival, and thousands of war-ready Creeks lay hunkered down, concealed under the riverbanks of a branch that curved around the fort “in the manner of a half moon.” They waited patiently, some almost fully submerged in the icy water, others lurking stealthily quiet in the woods between the stream and the fort. Finally, nervous friendly Indians, noting that the soldiers were not heeding their warnings, ran out from their positions around the fort to the front of the line. The disturbance halted the march, and not wishing to miss the opportunity, the Creeks hidden beneath the stream opened fire. When some of the soldiers began to retreat, Indians poured from the banks in waves, a thousand or more, and Crockett noticed with some trepidation that “they were all painted scarlet, and were just as naked as they were born.” The Indians fired as they ran, and “came rushing forth like a cloud of Egyptian locusts, and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, and the old devil of all at their head.” Some of Russell’s men dismounted and ran on foot to the security of the fort, and horses, cavalry soldiers, and Indians swirled in a chaotic mass of gunfire and screams. Crockett’s company waited until the Indians ran shrieking within close range, then lowered and let fire, killing many and sending them fleeing toward the other line. The Indians were caught in a downpour of deadly crossfire, and the soldiers killed “upwards of four hundred of them.”

  In the battle frenzy, the warriors retaliated with guns, bows and arrows, and tomahawks, and a large group managed to create enough sustained pressure to cause a rift in the army’s line. Crockett remembers that they were drafted militia whose line parted, and this gap let a considerable number of Indians escape and begin an effective counterattack, forcing a livid General Andrew Jackson to retreat. Jackson later fumed, “If the line had not given way, [we] would have repeated Tallusahatchee.”26 In a separate missive to Governor Blount, Jackson reiterated the gravity of his men’s blunder: “Had there been no departure from the original order of battle, not an Indian would have escaped.” The error had cost him a quick ending to the war; the breach allowed nearly 700 Creeks to escape and forced Jackson to retreat and regroup back at Fort Strother. In an official report to General Claiborne, Jackson’s seething rage is clear: “I was compelled by a double cause—the want of supplies and the want of cooperation from the East Tennessee troops, to return to this place.”27 His situation was most dire: his men were quite literally starving, he’d received no support or provisions, and a large number of his troops, who had been with him since the Natchez expedition clear back in January of 1813, were on expired terms—it was time for them to go home, and mumblings of discord echoed around the camp.

  What happened next—a mutiny—has become a matter of controversy, the versions shedding a good deal of light on the character of both David Crockett and Andrew Jackson. In his autobiography, which contains such convincing and accurate firsthand descriptions and observations of the attacks at Tallusahatchee and Talladega that they are considered suitable historical source material, Crockett tells the story of the mutiny and highlights his involvement in it. In Crockett’s version, he and a group of volunteers, half-starved and past their enlistment dates, requested of Jackson that they return home for fresh horses and clothing, and in this way they would be prepared and rejuvenated for another campaign. Crockett notes that “our sixty days had long been out, and that was the time we entered for.” According to Crockett, Jackson denied the men their wish, but in defiance of the general they saddled up and began to depart. “We got ready and moved on till we came near the bridge, where the general’s men were all strong along both sides. . . . But we had our flints ready picked, and our guns ready primed, that if we were fired on we might fight our way through, or all die together.”28

  Crockett relates how they arrived at the bridge and heard the guards cocking their guns, and through fog-thick tension the men marched on past the bridge, Jackson’s guns leveled on them: “But, after all, we marched boldly on, and not a gun was fired, nor a life lost.” As recounted, it was a defiant, dramatic, and defining act of mutiny, but it simply did not happen that way.

  In fact, Crockett and his volunteer cohorts had enlisted for ninety days rather than sixty.29 It’s true that the tattered troops were starving, destitute, and ready for home. On November 17, 1813, Jackson broke his camps and struck toward Fort Deposit, where provisions might be found. About twelve miles from camp they were met by a supply train of “150 beeves and nine wagons of flour,”30 and the troops halted to devour meat and bread. Jackson, viewing them as sufficiently replenished, then ordered them to march straight back to Fort Strother. But the men were mentally and physically broken, and they could not take the suffering anymore. Some were verbally defiant, barking violent protestations; others merely bowed their heads in silent disdain of their commander. One company, rather than returning toward Fort Strother, turned and continued in the direction of Tennessee.

  Jackson immediately mounted a horse and galloped in a long detour ahead of the deserting men. Along the way he met General Coffee and his cavalry (Crockett likely among them). Jackson ordered Coffee to fire on any men who refused orders. He sat tall and angry in the saddle, his eyes blazing with resentment and disgrace; he bellowed that he would shoot to kill any man who did not turn back.

  J
ackson’s fierceness must have been impressive, for the company, after very little deliberation, did an about-face, and as ordered, headed back.31 But there was even more widespread mutiny afoot at the main encampment, and Jackson returned to find a large brigade readying to leave. His left arm still in a sling from the Benton-Carroll duel injury, Jackson used his good arm to heft up a musket and level it across the neck of his horse. He trotted to the front of the brigade and pointed it at the line of men, raging in near-hysteria that he would kill the first man to move forward. Major Reid and General Coffee eased behind in support.

  Disconsolate, but realistic enough to see that Jackson and his supporters were deadly serious, the mutineers turned around and slowly, be-grudgingly, returned to their posts. The fiery, unyielding General Andrew Jackson had nearly single-handedly thwarted the mutiny, and Crockett was probably there to witness it.