David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [15]
A particularly well known Longhunter was Daniel Boone, who explored the upper Holston River valley for a land speculator, later playing a key role in the early settlement of Tennessee. One of Boone’s camps on Boon’s Creek, a tributary of the Watauga River, become the home of his friend and hunting companion Captain William Bean, Tennessee’s first known permanent white settler, who built his log cabin at the site in 1769.5 That same year, Robert Crockett, a rugged Longhunter and kinsman of David Crockett the elder, was ambushed and killed by Indians near his camp on the headwaters of Roaring River on the old war trail leading from Cherokee territory to Shawnee land.6 It was an act that would be deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the Crockett clan.
An ethnic mélange of settlers followed the Great Wagon Road and the well-trodden routes of the Longhunters, including English, Welsh, Irish, German, Swiss, French Huguenot, and some African slaves. Most of the newcomers, however, were Scots-Irish, such as the Crocketts. Reflecting early class division in the fledgling Republic, all of them had long detested the autocratic power of the British king and resented what they considered a conspiracy to take away their God-given freedom.
“If abused, they fight; if their rights are infringed they rebel; if forced, they strike; and if their liberties are threatened, they murder,” wrote Tennessee historian John Trotwood Moore. “They eat meat and always their bread is hot.”7 It was frequently said that the Scots-Irish in Tennessee feared only God himself. And yet another adage about these early pioneers suggested that they kept the Sabbath, as well as anything else they could get their hands on. For the Crocketts, that meant getting their hands on the new lands that waited over the mountains.
The principal communities that were being established in the region of what became east Tennessee were on the North Holston, Watauga, and Nolichucky rivers, and in Carter’s Valley, a settlement named for merchant John Carter. In fact, the Crockett family chose Carter’s Valley as their new home.8 They found thick forests and distant mountains—the oldest east of the Mississippi—sitting “like dethroned kings,” as poet Sidney Lanier put it. The Crocketts and other settlers built one-room log cabins with dirt floors and mud and stick fireplaces close to the swift-flowing streams threading from the highlands. They found hidden springs, cleared land for planting, and, working together, carved settlements out of the land with their own hands.
David Crockett, his sons, and the other newly arrived white settlers believed they had moved to within the boundary of the Virginia Colony, but a survey revealed that almost all of the settlements were south of North Carolina’s western claims in land that had been guaranteed to the Cherokee Nation. In 1772, when ordered to disband and relocate to north of the boundary, the settlers, who were living beyond the bounds of any organized government, formed an alliance they called the Watauga Association, with John Carter being made one of the commissioners. At the same time, the audacious Wataugans, as they called themselves, schemed to get around the sanctions for purchasing land imposed on them by the British.9 In 1775, they dispatched a delegation, loaded down with gifts and trade goods, to a parley with the Cherokee leader Attakullakulla to see about leasing Indian land. Despite pleas from the aging Indian leader’s son, Dragging Canoe, who eloquently but forcefully protested that tribal land was melting away “like balls of snow in the sun,” a deal was struck that eventually led to whites purchasing Cherokee land. “You have bought a fair land, but there is a cloud hanging over it,” Dragging Canoe told the Wataugans. “You will find its settlement dark and bloody.”10 Dragging Canoe’s prediction would prove true, and eventually there would be serious repercussions for the white settlers, including the Crocketts.
The estimated two thousand white émigrés soon transformed much of the Cherokee