David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [18]
FIVE
ON THE NOLICHUCKY
AFTER TAKING PART in the annihilation of the British and Tory forces at King’s Mountain, John Crockett and his brothers, fervently believing that God had ordained their victory, came home to Carter’s Valley, with the Overmountain Men’s war cry, “The sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” still echoing in their ears.1 It was time to tend to family matters that had been put on hold while the war raged around them. It was time to begin the search for a deaf and mute brother being held captive by the Cherokees, as well as dispose of their murdered and scalped parents’ property.
The Crockett brothers understood that they were not the only ones called upon to serve. “Every able bodied man in the county was required to go,” recalled Samuel Hill, a ranger whose family moved to the Nolichucky settlements at the outbreak of the Revolution.2 Militia duty meant serving multiple tours of anywhere from three to nine months at a time, which placed tremendous strains on relationships and left frontier families unprotected. Much like the Crocketts, another member of the militia came home to find his brother killed and his mother and two sisters taken captive by Indian raiders. After setting out with a pursuit party of neighbors, the man found his mother’s corpse “stripped naked, her head skinned.” He still managed to catch up with the war party and free his sisters.3
Atrocities involving not only men, but also the victimizing of women and children were common and committed by both sides in the long series of Indian wars that continued after the American Revolution. Death at the hands of warring Indians was so common that when one was told a man or woman had died, one did not ask the cause but only how the person was killed. Undoubtedly the same question was raised in Cherokee villages when a death was announced. Retaliation and fear drove the brutality and violence. During the War for Independence, white militia sought to eliminate the Cherokee as a British ally and punish them for attacking white settlements. These punitive actions continued after the Revolutionary War and well into the 1800s, as more whites moved into Indian lands. Whites were killed and brutalized, as were Indian men, women, and children. Dozens of Cherokee villages were left in ruins, hundreds of acres of crops destroyed, and livestock killed or seized. Many of the white soldiers shouted the Indian scalp cry in battle and took as many scalps for trophies as the Indian warriors they fought.4 Indian captives were sold as slaves and white prisoners were held for ransom. It became a deadly cycle of vengeance. Tales of scalpings and atrocities were told and retold, feeding the fires of intolerance and cultural division. Yet some veterans of these outrages, among them John Crockett, preferred silence to bragging. For the remainder of his life, he spoke very little of his experiences as a frontier ranger, even with young sons anxious to hear every gory detail of combat against both the British and the Indians.
“I have an imperfect recollection of the part which I have understood my father took in the revolutionary war,” David Crockett wrote in his autobiography of his father’s role in the War for Independence.
I personally know nothing about it, for it happened to be a little before my day; but from himself, and many others who were well acquainted with its troubles and afflictions, I have learned that he was a soldier in the revolutionary war, and took part in that bloody struggle. He fought at Kings Mountain against the British and tories, and in some other engagements of which my remembrance is too imperfect to enable me to speak with any certainty.5
John was spared a trip to the Washington County Courthouse in Abingdon, Virginia, when it came time for the disposition of his deceased parents’ estate. That task was left to his brothers William and Robert,