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

alienated Grundy in the previous legislative session when he voted in favor of Williams over Jackson for senate, and Crockett would quickly come to understand that such decisions came with consequences. In politics, allegiances mattered, and people tended to hold grudges.
    A number of factors conspired to doom Crockett in that first attempt at Congress, though he would later blame it all on the price of cotton. It’s true that cotton prices ran miraculously high in 1825, up to $25 per hundredweight, nearly five times the average price, and it’s true that Alexander was quick to jump on this fact, taking credit for it in the two main papers, with which he had connections and influence while Crockett did not. 4 To complicate matters, John Overton began to have some fun at Crockett’s expense, partly in retaliation for Crockett’s vocal opposition two years earlier to moneyed planters and speculators, of which Overton was both. Writing under the nom de plume of “Aristides,” he took Crockett to task for attempting to change court days and to add an East Tennessee brigade to the militia of the Western District. 5 Overton made a convincing case against Crockett with sustained newspaper postings, an onslaught that lasted over three months and kept Crockett constantly on the defensive. In the end, with the peoples’ purses bursting from the high cotton prices, and Alexander promising that there would be equally high prices for everything else they manufactured and sold, Crockett’s entreaties fell on deaf ears. “I might as well have sung salms over a dead horse, as to try to make the people believe otherwise; for they knowed their cotton had raised, sure enough, and if the colonel hadn’t done it, they didn’t know what had.”
    He was unable to persuade the voters differently, and this, combined with his general political naïveté, cost him dearly. Though years later in his autobiography Crockett would remember incorrectly that he lost by “exactly two votes,” the real tally difference that August was not two, but 267. Given his lack of preparation, Crockett’s showing was better than he let on; he had received 2,599 votes of the 5,465 total cast. 6 But he was not accustomed to losing, and the fact that he later fudged the poll figures suggests that he took defeat hard. In a move that would become a pattern, Crockett chose to pacify his hurt pride by heading back out into the canebrakes to hunt, out into open country where he conjured schemes for making easy profits to get ahead, always dreaming of ways to make his fortune.
    One such enterprise involved some speculation of his own, for no sooner had Crockett returned home from his defeat than he made a trip of some twenty-five miles to Obion Lake, where he hired a small crew and put them to work building two large flatboats, which he intended to pile high with cut barrel staves and float to market in New Orleans. The plan seemed sound, if a bit ambitious for the self-described landlubber Crockett, and he felt confident enough to leave the construction of the craft to his men while he got down to the more serious and enjoyable business: “I worked on with my hands till the bears got fat, and then I turned out to hunting, to lay in a supply of meat.” It would be his most productive winter hunt ever, and he ended up supplying not only his family, but many other friends and relatives, with an abundance of meat, sustaining, and even augmenting, his backwoods legend. Crockett by this time had acquired an impressive pack of “eight large dogs, and as fierce as painters [panthers]; so that a bear stood no chance at all to get away from them.” Crockett took his dogs and hunted for a few weeks with a good friend, and when he’d filled the friend’s larders he spent some time helping his boys with the flatboats and the collection and cutting of barrel staves, but the work grew tedious and his mind wandered. “At length I couldn’t stand it any longer without a