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No man can make his name known to the forty millions of this great and busy republic who has not something very remarkable in his character or his career. But there is probably not an adult American, in all these widespread States, who has not heard of David Crockett. His life is a veritable romance, with the additional charm of unquestionable truth. It opens to the reader scenes in the lives of the lowly, and a state of semi-civilization, of which but few of them can have the faintest idea.
It has not been my object, in this narrative, to defend Colonel Crockett or to condemn him, but to present his peculiar character exactly as it was. I have therefore been constrained to insert some things which I would gladly have omitted.
A little more than a hundred years ago, a poor man, by the name of Crockett, embarked on board an emigrant-ship, in Ireland, for the New World. He was in the humblest station in life.
The family probably landed in Philadelphia, and dwelt somewhere in Pennsylvania, for a year or two, in one of those slab shanties, with which all are familiar as the abodes of the poorest class of Irish emigrants.
We can scarcely comprehend the motive which led this solitary family to push on, league after league, farther and farther from civilization, through the trackless forests.
The origin of these Indian tribes and their past history are lost in oblivion. Centuries have come and gone, during which joys and griefs, of which we now can know nothing, visited their humble lodges.
They did not want for most of what are called the necessaries of life.
Though this lost world, ever since the fall of Adam, has been filled to repletion with these scenes of woe, it causes one's blood to curdle in his veins as he contemplates this one deed of cruelty and blood.
Another little boy, who was deaf and dumb, was taken captive and carried by the Indians to their distant tribe, where he remained, adopted into the tribe, for about eighteen years. He was then discovered by some of his relatives, and was purchased back at a considerable ransom.
His childhood's home was more humble than the majority of the readers of this volume can imagine. It was destitute of everything which, in a higher state of civilization, is deemed essential to comfort.
The wigwam of the Indian afforded as much protection from the weather, and was as well furnished, as the cabin of logs and bark which sheltered his father's family.
It would be difficult to find any human being, in a civilized land, who can have enjoyed less opportunities for moral culture than David Crockett enjoyed in his early years.
There are few parents who could thus have treated a child of twelve years.
David's father had taught him, very sternly, one lesson, and that was implicit and prompt obedience to his demands. The boy knew full well that it would be of no avail for him to make any remonstrance.
David was impatient. As he watched the sluggish turns of the wheels, he thought that he could travel very much faster if he should push forward alone, leaving the wagons behind him.
Of David's mother we know nothing. She was probably a mere household drudge, crushed by an unfeeling husband, without sufficient sensibilities to have been aware of her degraded condition.
He was, by this time, too much accustomed to the rough and tumble of life to feel any anxiety about the future.
David
The promised whipping came slap down upon every thought of home."
David had then seven dollars in his pocket, the careful savings of the labors of half a year.
It does not appear that he had ever cherished any conception whatever of an overruling Providence. Probably, a religious thought had never entered his mind.
The boy had no more idea of where London was, or what it was, than of a place in the moon. But eagerly he responded, "Yes," for he cared little where he went or what became of him, he was so glad of an opportunity to see more of the wonders of this unknown world.
But it was not his nature to lay anything very deeply to heart. He laughed at misfortune, and pressed on singing and whistling through all storms.
I now began to think that in making me it was entirely forgotten to make my mate; that I was born odd, and should always remain so, and that nobody would have me.
The delicacy of the situation would not be very keenly felt by persons who were at but one remove above the native Indian.
She fell upon David in a perfect tornado of vituperation, and ordered him out of the house. She was "mighty wrathy," writes David, "and looked at me as savage as a meat-axe."
For once the termagant found herself baffled, and at her wits' end.
The etiquette of courts and cabins are quite different.
"Having gotten my wife, I thought I was completely made up, and needed nothing more in the whole world." He soon found his mistake, and awoke to the consciousness that he needed everything, and had nothing. He had no furniture, no cabin, no land, no money. And he had a wife to support. His only property consisted of a cheap horse. He did not even own a rifle,
No family need suffer from hunger here, if the husband had a rifle and knew how to use it. A few hours' labor would rear a cabin which would shut out wind and rain as effectually as the gorgeous walls of Windsor or Versailles. No jets of gas or gleam of wax candles ever illumined an apartment more brilliantly than the flashing blaze of the wood fire.
Whenever I had anything and saw a fellow-being suffering, I was more anxious to relieve him than to benefit myself. And this is one of the true secrets of my being a poor man to the present day. But it is my way. And while it has often left me with an empty purse, yet it has never left my heart empty of consolations which money couldn't buy; the consolation of having sometimes fed the hungry and covered the naked.
The two families came very harmoniously together, and in their lowly hut enjoyed peace and contentment such as frequently is not found in more ambitious homes.
They then, by very expressive signs, told him that if he did not take some nourishment he would die and be buried there—"a thing," Crockett writes, "I was confoundedly afraid of, myself."
The visitor to Versailles is shown the magnificent apartment, and the regal couch, with its gorgeous hangings, upon which Louis XIV., the proudest and most pampered man on earth, languished and died. Crockett, on his pallet in the log cabin, with unglazed window and earthern floor, was a far less unhappy man, than the dying monarch surrounded with regal splendors.
"At last I told them I was like a fellow I had heard of not long before. He was beating on the head of an empty barrel on the roadside, when a traveller, who was passing along, asked him what he was doing that for? The fellow replied that there was some cider in that barrel a few days before, and he was trying to see if there was any then; but if there was, he couldn't get at it. I told them that there had been a little bit of a speech in me a while ago, but I believed I couldn't get it out.
He was the fun-maker of the house, and, like Falstaff, could boast that he was not only witty himself, but the cause of wit in others. His stories were irresistibly comic; but they almost always contained expressions of profanity or coarseness which renders it impossible for us to transmit them to these pages.
they might stick an LL.D. on me before they let me go; and I had no idea of changing 'Member of the House of Representatives of the United States,' for what stands for 'lazy, lounging dunce,' which I am sure my constituents would have translated my new title to be. Knowing that I had never taken any degree, and did not own to any—except a small degree of good sense not to pass for what I was not—I would not go it.
"Why, sir," Crockett answered, "run down the Mississippi till you come to the Oberon River. Run a small streak up that; jump ashore anywhere, and inquire for me."
Crockett's heels were armed with very formidable Spanish spurs, with prongs sharp and long. The hunter writes: "To escape from the annoyance, I beat the devil's tattoo on his ribs, that he might have some music to dance to, and we went ahead right merrily, the whole drove following in our wake, head up, and tail and mane streaming.
"Surrender, or we fire!" shouted the fellow with the red feather. The pirate replied, with a piratic oath, "Fire away." "And sure enough," writes Crockett, "they took his advice, for the next minute we were saluted with a discharge of musketry, the report of which was so loud that we were convinced they all had fired.
Under date of March 4th and 5th, 1836, we have the last lines which Crockett ever penned. "March 4th. Shells have been falling into the fort like hail during the day, but without effect.
And thus was terminated the earthly life of this extraordinary man. In this narrative it has been the object of the writer faithfully to record the influences under which Colonel Crockett was reared, and the incidents of his wild and wondrous life, leaving it with the reader to form his own estimate of the character which these exploits indicate.
