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who had been named administrators of their father’s last will and testament.6 Both of them acted as the legal guardians of their younger brothers when it came to putting four hundred acres of land in the names of “Alexander and James Crockett Orphans of David Crockett Decesd on the waters of the Holston on the head Waters of Black Creek including said Crockett Decesd Improvement.”7 The older brothers also arranged for the sale of their father’s other holdings in Carter’s Valley. In the inventory and appraisal of the estate were several horses, a small herd of yearling cattle and bulls, saddles and bridles, a wagon, a musket, plows and sickles, a spinning wheel, bedding and furniture, clothing including a man’s great coat, a bell, and kitchen utensils.8 It had to have been difficult for the Crockett siblings to sell off their slain parents’ personal belongings and the everyday objects that they had used as children, such as the saddles they learned to ride on and the muskets they fired when their father taught them how to shoot.

Amid an assortment of tools and implements was found a hackle, a comblike tool through which raw hair was passed in preparation for the weaving that Elizabeth Crockett had done for many years. Like some of the other precious items, it was given to a family member in remembrance of the woman who helped raise all of them. There also was an unknown quantity of brimstone, or sulfur, one of the key ingredients, along with saltpeter and charcoal, used in the making of black powder.9 Most gunpowder came from England, and even though the 1777 ban on importation by the British Parliament was eventually lifted, it remained one of the most precious commodities on the frontier. Almost forty-five years later, the then adult David Crockett would try his hand at manufacturing gunpowder, an ill-fated venture.

Yet despite the celebrated failures and mishaps that David Crockett may have had to endure during his life, he fared far better than did his father. Try as he might, it seemed that John Crockett was never quite able to improve his own life and livelihood. Some folks said that John was snake-bit, an old expression in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere for a person plagued with hard luck. “Poverty, as well as danger, was the birthright of the pioneer; and John Crockett inherited his full share of it,” observed historian James Shackford.10

Still, by the spring of 1783, after the surrender at Saratoga and when Congress officially declared an end to the Revolutionary War, John and Rebecca Crockett, along with their growing brood of children, had already moved on. They pulled up stakes in Carter’s Valley and relocated to Washington County, soon to become Greene County, North Carolina.11

Traversed by a series of valleys and ridges, Greene County was situated between the Unaka Mountains on the south and Bays Mountains on the north. Rising as the confluence of the North Toe River and the Cane River in western North Carolina, the Nolichucky River—principal stream of Greene County—trended westward. Called the “Chucky River” by early settlers, the Nolichucky flanked ranges and cut between mountains as it flowed in a curving course, fed by tributaries such as Lick Creek, Horse Creek, and Camp Creek. At the border of Greene County, one of the larger tributaries, Big Limestone Creek, joined the river. It was here that the Crockett property was located, and it was here that David, the sixth of Rebecca and John Crockett’s nine children, was born, on August 17, 1786.12

In the years just prior to David’s birth, it appeared that John’s fortunes had changed. In April 1783, he was appointed a constable in the newly formed county, establishing a family political tradition. He was to be reappointed in 1785 and 1789.13 Even though, as David put it in his autobiography, John was “by profession a farmer,” it seems he tried his hand at many tasks, and was a respected, moderately influential man in Greene County.

John also took a stab at speculating in land when David was just ten months old, learning to walk in his family’s log