American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett Page 7
Of Crockett’s entire 211-page autobiography, only the mutiny—and two small subsequent skirmishes which he records, but in which he did not participate—are thought to be intentionally falsified for political purposes. Writing in 1833, perhaps eyeing the presidency himself and certainly considering an audience that was politically educated, Crockett by this time had become nearly rabid in his anti-Jackson rhetoric, and he would have his readers see him as scathingly independent, a man not tethered to the command of another; not a party man. In reconstructing the events, Crockett clearly understood the implications of his historical past and his political future. Later, he would express this independence by pointing out that around his neck you would find no collar with MY DOG printed on it, belonging to Andrew Jackson. The fabrication of the mutiny details suggests yet again that Crockett possessed a keen awareness of how he was perceived—freewheeling, an individual and independent thinker, a man who made his own decisions and stuck by them. His “boasts” also show that he was not beyond what he must have considered a small “white lie,” a yarn or tall tale that was very much the domain of the frontier. In his recollection of the mutiny, storyteller Crockett had spun a pretty good one.
In truth, Crockett served out his full enlistment and did not depart until his official expiration on December 24, 1813.32 But what he had seen in the command of Andrew Jackson must surely have impressed him: a steadfast resolve, an ability to lead men—with violence and fear tactics if necessary, beyond limits they thought they were capable of themselves, “a hard and determined disciplinarian.”33 Crockett would certainly remember the man he’d seen in the fields, a leader whose
very physical appearance announced his character and personality. His face was long and narrow, his frame gaunt, indeed emaciated. But his manner radiated confidence, enormous energy, and steely determination. It bespoke a spirit that willed mastery over his damaged body. His presence signaled immense authority.34
David Crockett had observed this man and been moved by him. He was even, perhaps, envious of Jackson, of his ability to lead, of the respect and deference he commanded, of the way others acted in his presence. It was an envy that would ultimately fester and turn to vehement hatred, a kind of poison that would come to affect and even drive his decisions in Congress, where he would one day oppose Jackson’s long-developed position on the Indians. But for the moment, Crockett would take his experiences and war-weakened body back home to Bean’s Creek. His first tour of duty was officially up; it was time to head home to Polly and the boys to see how they were keeping.
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 p
inched 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 t
hem. 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.