David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [22]
It is believed by the most conscientious Crockett researchers that this incident on the Nolichucky took place much as described by Crockett in his autobiography. The waterfall is documented in old deeds, and the Crockett account seems plausible. However, it is even more probable that, in this particular instance, Crockett purposely took some liberties with the name of the man who rescued the boys from certain death in the river. Amos Kendall was, in truth, not a Tennessee farmer but the close confidant and intellectual force behind the administration of President Andrew Jackson, who was dramatically elected president in November of 1828 and whose decidedly expansionist westward gaze anticipated the government’s Manifest Destiny policy by numerous decades. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Kendall and Jackson were Crockett’s most bitter enemies and political rivals. Kendall not only served as U.S. Postmaster General under both Jackson and later Martin Van Buren but also wrote some of Jackson’s most important speeches.25
In the 1830s, when Crockett was dredging up his past with fellow author Thomas Chilton as they crafted his life story, the opportunity to take a dig at an old enemy and portray him as a common farmer was too good to pass up. By the same token, there is credible evidence that a George Kindle lived in the vicinity of the Crockett home about the time of the river incident. His name appears on two deeds for property on Little Limestone Creek.26 The case for this man as the rescuer is strong.
To this day, those who visit the Crockett birth site can still see the sandy shoal where the swift waters of the Nolichucky suddenly plunge in a turbulent sheer drop of at least five feet and the river makes a sharp bend against a massive limestone wall. It is not hard to visualize a canoe filled with panic-stricken boys hurtling through the water and a man pulling off his clothes as he races to their rescue, while on the bank a little boy with no breeches watches the scene unfold.
A BOY’S LEARNING
DAVID CROCKETT’S FAMILY left his ancestral birthplace near the mouth of Big Limestone Creek on the Nolichucky in 1792, and relocated just five miles to the northwest on a 197-acre tract of land purchased by John Crockett close to the headwaters of Lick Creek.1 The primary reason for this move was for the Crocketts to live closer to Rebecca’s brother Joseph Hawkins and his wife, Esther, who had already established their family homestead on a nearby 200-acre land grant.
The spacious abodes that now dot the Greene County area are a far cry from the cramped one-room utilitarian cabins that accommodated large frontier families. These dwellings were often built with packed dirt floors and were windowless except for tiny square openings near the chimney called “granny holes” (because they allowed an extra bit of light for a grandmother while she sewed on the hearth and tended the fireplace).2 The mountain views were just as scenic then, but there was not much time to enjoy them.
Soon after his family settled in a new log house, young David once again experienced an event “which made a lasting impression on my memory.”3 This episode, later described by Crockett in his autobiography, began on a September morning in 1793, when Absalom Stonecipher, a handsome twenty-five-year-old from one of the first pioneer families in the community, donned his favorite red flannel shirt, picked up a basket, and went out in search of succulent wild grapes that were ripe and in abundance by early autumn.4 Clusters of fat purple grapes hung from vines as big around as a man’s arm. The time was right for making sweet wine and jelly that would last all winter. Settlers also had learned from the Cherokees that grapes boiled with geranium root made a potent rinse to wash the mouths of infants suffering from thrush, a common infection that left painful lesions.
Stonecipher waded