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a thriving industrial region. By the middle of the seventeenth century the county of Ulster was almost totally populated by Scots-Irish. The marshes and bogs had been drained, and fertile lands were planted with a new crop—the potato—brought by Sir Walter Raleigh from the American Indians and soon a staple in the Irish diet. At the same time, the manufacture of woolen and linen products flourished until the English manufacturers tired of Scots in Ulster shipping goods to the American colonies. This resulted in the implementation of harsh trade restrictions, including a ban of the exportation of Irish wool products to anywhere in the world except England and Wales. The mostly English landlords of Ulster also employed a policy referred to as rack-renting, which doubled or even tripled the property rent. The word “rack” became a term of protest, evoking the medieval torture device, to denote excessive rents.

18 Ibid.

THREE • THE CROCKETTS ARRIVE

1 Crockett, Narrative, 14.

2 Ibid., n. 3.

3 Jim Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 133.

4 Swann, “The Early Life & Times.”

5 Ibid.

6 Webb, Born Fighting, 118. Although the term Scotch-Irish is commonly used in the United States, the author points out that in other countries, especially Scotland, it is considered rude to refer to a person as being Scotch. He explains that Scotch is a whiskey and that Scots are people whose roots go back to Scotland.

7 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

8 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 4. Located on the Potomac River, separating Virginia and Maryland, the ferry was established in 1744 and was named for Evan Watkins, the ferry owner who resided at his nearby home and farm, Maidstone-on-the-Potomac, a site well known to the Crocketts and other early Scots-Irish.

9 Ibid., 4. Frederick County, VA, Court Records, Order Bk. 2, 456.

10 Ibid., 4–5. It also has been suggested that Elizabeth may have been somehow related to a William Patterson who was mentioned in several deeds involving the Crocketts, and may account for the name Patterson bestowed on one of their grandsons.

11 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

12 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 4. Throughout the early 1770s, the names of David the elder and other family members appeared on legal documents and records in Tryon County and later when it became Lincoln County. These records include various Crocketts serving as witnesses for property deeds, codicils to wills, and mortgages. On at least two occasions David and his eldest son, William, served together as jurors, including on a January 1775 criminal trial in which the jury panel ruled in favor of the defendant and found Thomas Espey, a Tryon County justice of the peace, not guilty of a charge of extortion.

13 Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2007), 20.

14 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 39.

15 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”

16 Crockett, Narrative, 14.

FOUR • OVER THE MOUNTAIN

1 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 6.

2 John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 39–41.

3 Ibid., 39.

4 Wayne C. Moore, “Paths of Migration,” First Families of Tennessee: A Register of Early Settlers and Their Present-Day Descendants (Knoxville: East Tennessee Historical Society, 2000), 30.

5 J. G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee (Charleston, SC: Walkers & Jones, 1853; reprinted in 1967 for the East Tennessee Historical Society, Knoxville; reprinted in 1999 by Overmountain Press), 94.

6 Ibid., 96.

7 John Trotwood Moore and Austin P. Foster, Tennessee, The Volunteer State (Nashville and Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1923), v.

8 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 2, 6.

9 Wilma Dykeman, Tennessee, A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 43–44.

10 Ibid.

11 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 3, 6. The document signed by two David Crocketts was called the Washington County Petition. It provides additional proof that the David Crockett who is the subject of this book had an uncle named David Crockett Jr.

12 Crockett, Narrative, 15.

13 James