David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [14]
The early life of Rebecca Hawkins Crockett has been obscured, and many inaccuracies have been handed down. Some accounts list her birthplace as Baltimore and the year of birth as 1764. One source declares that she and John Crockett married in 1780. Much of the confusion resulted from Notable Southern Families, a work published in 1928 in which authors Janie French and Zella Armstrong claimed that the Crockett family was the offspring of French Huguenots who had migrated to Ireland and then to America. However, many more reliable researchers, including Crockett descendants, have questioned those findings and pointed out inaccuracies and glaring errors in the French and Armstrong work. Although the Huguenot information frequently resurfaces as well-documented fact, it is not. No link has been established between the Huguenot Crocketts and the family of David Crockett. Nor does any reliable information support the claims by French and Armstrong that Rebecca Hawkins Crockett was in any way related to Sarah Hawkins Sevier, the wife of John Sevier, a future governor of Tennessee and a U.S. congressman.15
In his 1834 autobiography, Crockett wrote what he knew of his mother: “She was an American woman, born in the state [colony] of Maryland, between York and Baltimore. It is likely I may have heard where they were married, but if so, I have forgotten. It is, however, certain that they were, or else the public would never have been troubled with the history of David Crockett, their son.”16
For Crockett, who never demonstrated a longing to learn more about his family’s past, that bit of information seemed to be enough.
FOUR
OVER THE MOUNTAIN
IN 1776—THE YEAR AMERICA declared its independence and the war against Great Britain produced a growing cohesion among the former colonies—the determined Crockett tribe, including John; his bride, Elizabeth; and led by David the elder—packed up its belongings and made its way over the formidable Appalachian barrier into what eventually became the northeastern tip of Tennessee.1
Like the waves of other settlers, land speculators, and squatters pouring into this territory, the Crocketts knowingly defied a royal decree that closed off the western frontier to colonial expansion. King George III had issued his Royal Proclamation of 1763 following Britain’s acquisition of French territory in North America at the end of the French and Indian War.2 This measure was intended to stabilize relations of various Indian tribes by making all lands west of the heads of rivers flowing into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or northwest off-limits to any white settlement. Instead of abiding by the proclamation—once described as “a triumph of naïveté, geographical ignorance, and wishful thinking”—restless colonists, eager to increase their holdings and gain new ground, simply ignored it.3 They were angered by the ban on expansion and followed the trails blazed before them by the Longhunters and other Overmountain Men, mostly Scots-Irish settlers who had come west over the Appalachians, or the Allegheny Mountains, as they were then called.
Longhunters—so named because of the duration of their wilderness hunts—came from Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, but most started in the Holston River Valley of Virginia or the adjacent valley of the Clinch River. They were the first American frontiersmen to go beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, making their living as hunters, trappers, and scouts for land surveyors. Throughout the 1760s and 1770s, Longhunters provided invaluable information for the settlers streaming into the future states of Tennessee and Kentucky.4 Although they often adopted the Indian way of life, including some of the dress, most Longhunters considered Indians as competition and, defying the government and more liberal East Coast sentiment, were known to shoot them on sight. They also poached game on Indian lands, disregarded treaties,