David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [121]
Houston, the hero of Horseshoe Bend, had himself enjoyed some success in politics but had been out of the mainstream since the spring of 1829, when his eleven-week marriage to nineteen-year-old Eliza Allen proved unworkable and suddenly ended. The emotionally depleted Houston had then abruptly resigned as the governor of Tennessee.2 He had journeyed across the Mississippi to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, and lived with the Cherokees, who had, long before, adopted him and named him the Raven. There he married Diana Rogers, a mixed-blood Cherokee from a powerful family. Together they ran Wigwam Neosho, a trading post near Cantonment Gibson, the farthest military outpost in the United States, commonly called Fort Gibson but also known as the “Hell Hole of the Southwest.”3
Soldiers posted there called it the “Graveyard of the Army,” and spent their off-duty time playing cards, racing horses, drinking, and carousing with loose women. The Wigwam was located right on the Texas Road, and all kinds of travelers—rough traders, zealous missionaries, and passing settlers—stopped to have a look at the “late governor of Tennessee.”4 If they were lucky, he was sober, for Houston swilled great quantities of the Monongahela whiskey, cognac, and rum he illegally traded. Much to his embarrassment, Houston became known by a new name—Oo-tsetee Ar-dee-tah-skee, Big Drunk. The name was not even Cherokee but Osage, an obvious way of denying the white man his Cherokee identity.5
During a brief period of sobriety in 1832, Houston returned to Washington and stayed at the Indian Queen Hotel while tending to some business on behalf of the Cherokee. While staying there, he took offense when he spied a less than flattering reference to him in a newspaper story. The comments were attributed to William Stanberry, an anti-Jacksonian representative from Ohio. Houston—described as being as “mad as a fighting cock”—vowed vengeance.6 That came several days later, when a still fuming Houston happened upon Stanberry strolling along Pennsylvania Avenue. Houston accosted him with a hickory cane that had been cut from a tree at Jackson’s Hermitage. He savagely beat the Ohio lawmaker, who managed to pull a pistol and press it against his attacker’s chest; but the weapon misfired. This enraged Houston even more, and the caning intensified until a limp Stanberry was left bloody and bruised. News of the altercation quickly spread in the rough-and-tumble political maelstrom of the 1830s, and President Jackson quipped that he wished “there were a dozen Houstons to beat and cudgel the members of Congress.”7
Houston, however, was soon arrested and brought before the House of Representatives, charged with contempt of Congress. Francis Scott Key, the esteemed composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was secured as his defense counsel, and Jackson footed the bill for a new suit of clothes for Houston, who usually wore colorful Cherokee dress or a rough buckskin coat.8 After four days of speeches and debate—which included Houston quoting the Apostle Paul and Shakespeare—and despite James K. Polk’s effort to defeat the measure, the House voted 106 to 89 for conviction. Houston received what was considered a slap-on-the-wrist reprimand and told to go and sin no more, at least when carrying a hickory stick. Junius Brutus Booth, the nation’s foremost Shakespearean actor and the father of a trio of famous stage performers, including future presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth, was in the gallery when Houston spoke. Afterward, as applause thundered through the crowded chamber in support of Houston, the elder Booth rushed to his side and embraced him, exclaiming, “Houston, take my laurels!”9
Two years later, in April of 1834, when Crockett and Houston—over a few horns—met in Washington, they more than likely recalled the famous caning incident, as well as other incidents from their past. By 1834 Houston had ended his self-imposed exile among the Cherokees in Indian Territory and made his first sorties south of the border, in the Mexican state