"Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, Greenest state in the Land of the Free, Raised in the woods so's he know'd ev'ry tree, Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three. Davy -- Davy Crockett, King of the wild frontier!"*

BIRTH

Born on what mountain top?

"I stood no chance to become great in any other way than by accident."
-- David Crockett, 1834; "A Narrative in the Life of David Crockett"

Book Information Book Image Name: The Crockett Family and Connecting Lines Author: Janie Preston Collup French and Zella Armstrong Publisher: King Printing Co., Bristol, TN Year: 1928 View book

Detail of East Tennessee with pre-1796 County Lines, from Mathew Carey's "General Atlas" of 1814.

DAVID'S TRUE LINEAGE:

   David's paternal grandfather, also named David, was born between 1730 and 1740. He came from North Carolina to what is now Tennessee, where he and his wife were killed in their cabin by Creeks and Chickamauga Indians. Their son Joseph was shot in the arm, but escaped. (His arm was amputated, and he later wore an iron cuff at the end, in which a fork was inserted whenever he wanted to eat.) His deaf and dumb brother, James, was unable to escape and taken captive. All of the younger children were killed. But three older brothers were away at the time and survived: William, Robert and John.
   After the elder David and his family were massacred, his son Robert had an appraisal done of the estate in Carter's Valley, and it was valued at £100. Robert then sold the land to Joseph Rogers, who founded Rogersville, Tennessee, on that very land.
   But we are more concerned with Robert's brother, John Crockett, who was born about 1754. He served under Colonel Isaac Shelby in the battle of King's Mountain, the turning point of the Southern campaign in the Revolutionary War, and was a presiding magistrate when Andrew Jackson received his license to practice law. He was also a commissioner of building roads. In 1783, he was listed as a Frontier Ranger.
   John married Rebecca Hawkins and had six sons and three daughters. He owned some land on Linville Creek, below Thomas' Bridge, nine miles south of Bristol, Tennessee. (This was a grant from the state of North Carolina, which he sold in 1787.)

DAVID CROCKETT -- A BIOGRAPHICAL TIMELINE:

   David is born on August 17, 1786, in Greene County, Tennessee, near the mouth of Limestone Creek on the Nolichucky River. He is the fifth son to John and Rebecca Crockett.
   After David's birth, his family grows even larger by way of an odd reunion: Seventeen years after the death of David's grandparents, David's father and uncle, William, find their deaf and dumb brother, James among the Indians. They purchase him back from his captors and bring him back to civilization. Young David then spends his childhood assisting James in the woods, where they try unsuccessfully to relocate gold and silver mines that the Indians had hidden James in while he was their captive.
   David starts school at age 13, but soon gets into a fight with a bully. When he ambushes the bully after class, David then has to play hooky from the school in order to avoid punishment from the teacher. But soon his drunken father finds out -- and decides to punish him personally with a good caning from a two-year-old hickory sapling. David later writes: "We had a tolerable tough race for about a mile; but mind me, not on the school-house road, for I was trying to get as far the t'other way as possible."
   But as would become routine over the course of his remarkable life, David goes farther than any one thinks possible, and will be gone for a number of years.

   David travels the country, working odd jobs as a day laborer, helping run cattle drives, and, curiously for someone who would one day come to be known for his primitive fur headgear, worked as a hat maker's apprentice. Eventually he visits Baltimore and almost joins up with a sailing ship on the Chesapeake Bay as a deck hand, but his current employer won't release him. So he works his way back towards Tennessee, growing more and more homesick. He finally reaches the New River, but the waters are rough and no ferryman will cross. David finds a canoe and foolishly heads off by himself. The raging currents carry him two miles downstream. Soaked and freezing when he finally reaches the other side, he walks for an hour with his clothes freezing to his skin until he comes across a cabin where his host lets him sit by the fire and drink "a leetle of the creater."
   Finally in 1802, two years after David left home, the overnight guests are called to dinner at the Crockett tavern. David's sister Betsy notices a young man keeping nervously to the shadows. "Here is my long lost brother," she screams. It is David, now a young man. After a tearful reunion, David promises to never leave home again. "The joy of my sisters and my mother, and, indeed, all of the family, was such that it humbled me, and made me sorry that I hadn't submitted to a hundred whippings, sooner than cause so much affliction as they had suffered on my account."
   But David's father isn't so keen on having David back, and hires him out as an indentured servant to pay off a $36 business debt. Which David does -- and more. He surprises his father by working off another $40 debt to a Quaker, presents his father with the note, and with this declares his independence, as a full-grown man."
   David also realizes that manhood requires an education. He strikes a deal with a local schoolmaster, working a couple of days per week in exchange for lessons in reading and writing. He learns to read from excerpts of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which will have a major influence on his life. But spelling in the U.S. at this time is not yet standardized, so with no dictionaries, David (and everyone else on the frontier) learns to write phonetically, with comprehension more the goal than uniformity.

Newspaper Article Image Document:   Marriage License Year:   21 Oct 1805 Prospective Couple:   David Crockett (19); and Margaret Elder View image

   On October 21, 1805, David takes out a license to marry Margaret Elder of Dandridge, Jefferson County, Tennessee. But David jilted by Margaret, perhaps justly, since local legend intimates that he was a less than constant suitor, preferring hunting and horsing around to romancing, and had much too good of a time at a recent frolic. David is heartbroken, and according to his autobiography, practically bedridden with grief. But he recovers quickly enough...

POLLY:

In 1806, David courts Mary "Polly" Finley at a three day reaping (a community frolic, with dancing and partying). They stay together all night, then in the morning take part in the children's entertainments.
   While on a wolf hunt a few months later, David is separated from the group. At dusk he sees something rustling in the forest growth. It's Polly, who was looking for a lost horse. Tired and cold, they discover a path leading to the cabin of a friendly frontier family. David and Polly then spend the night on the porch of the cabin, and then marry in Jefferson County, Tennessee in August, despite the protests of Polly's mother ("as savage as a meat axe"), who thinks David is too poor, with few prospects for success in life.

"I thought I was completely made up, and needed nothing more in the whole world. But I soon found this was all a mistake--for now having a wife, I wanted every thing else; and, worse than all, I had nothing to give for it."
-- David Crockett, 1834; "A Narrative in the Life of David Crockett"

   They remain in the mountains of East Tennessee for just over five years. Then David begins a journey that will last his entire lifetime, moving west and searching for paradise and some semblance of success.
   The poor-but-happy Crockett family keep moving deeper into the frontier, into Indian land, where they can build a homestead without needing money to buy property. "In this time we had two sons, and I found I was better at increasing my family than my fortune," he later writes. Sometime after September 1811, David, Polly, and their two sons, John Wesley and William, settle on the Mulberry Fork of Elk River in Lincoln County, Tennessee, where game is plenty and David can hunt for food. Despite a lack of bear in the area, David begins to earn a reputation as a marksman and hunter.
   In 1813, after some skirmishes between white settlers and Native Americans, the family heads back east and settle in the Rattlesnake Spring branch of Bean's Creek in Franklin County, Tennessee, near what is now the Alabama border, but still in Creek Indian territory. Crockett names his homestead Kentuck. But David is more at home in the wilderness, not on a farm, and he longs for adventure. He is now what his mother-in-law feared: A poor, illiterate young family man, squatting on Indian land with no prospects for success.