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into a thicket of heavy brush and gathered low-hanging fruit, unaware that only fifty yards away Joseph Hawkins, David’s uncle and Stonecipher’s neighbor and friend, had his Kentucky rifle at the ready while on the hunt for whitetail deer. Hawkins, too, was on a hunt of his own. Deer love nothing more than a meal of juicy grapes, and Hawkins figured he was in the right place to find some quarry for supper. Hawkins was a good shot, seldom known to miss. As Stonecipher pulled at the grapes, Hawkins picked up the motion and saw a reddish hue that he thought looked much like a feeding deer.5

“It was a likely place for deer; and my uncle, having no suspicion that it was any human being, but supposing the raising of the hand to be the occasional twitch of a deer’s ear, fired at the lump, and as the devil would have it, unfortunately shot the man through the body,” Crockett related in the Narrative.6

At the same time that Stonecipher heard the sharp report of the rifle, he felt a searing burn as the hot lead struck him just above the beltline and tore into his stomach. He screamed and fell hard to the ground. Hawkins—realizing his mistake—raced to his aid and managed to load the wounded man on a horse and take him to the nearby cabin of Samuel Humbert, in the glen at the head of Horse Camp Creek. As soon as Stonecipher was carried into the cabin, Hawkins sent for his brother-in-law, John Crockett, who lived in the vicinity and was respected and looked up to in the community for his woods wisdom and frontier skills.7

When John learned of the accidental shooting, he told David, 7, to help saddle horses and come along in case he was needed. On the way out of the Crockett cabin, John grabbed his own Kentucky rifle, and they rode off to tend to the gravely wounded man. After arriving and making a quick examination of Stonecipher’s wound, John determined that the rifle ball had passed through Stonecipher and had apparently not damaged any major organs. Still, Crockett knew that infection was always a possibility. If the young man was to survive being shot in the gut, bold action was needed at once.

Stonecipher was laid on a table before the cabin’s large hearth. The fire blazing in the fireplace was always tended and never allowed to go out. Samuel Humbert had brought the fiery embers to this place in 1777 from the old family home in Virginia when he followed his friends the Stoneciphers to the new frontier. Humbert believed that home fires were important to the family and clan because they were cleansing fires and connected one generation to the next.8

The fire in Humbert’s cabin had burned continuously for sixteen years, and by its light John Crockett pulled the ramrod from the barrel of his rifle and wrapped a silk handkerchief around the rod. With Joseph Hawkins, members of the Humbert family, and young David all gathered around the prone man on the table, John inserted the ramrod into the gunshot wound and pushed it through and out the exit hole on the other side. Then he took both ends of the silk handkerchief that remained in the wound and pulled it back and forth through the opening.9 The procedure, which John probably learned while serving in the militia, cleansed all debris from the wound and helped prevent infection.

Watching his father save a man’s life impressed David, who, over time, lost track of Stonecipher. “What became of him, or whether he is dead or alive, I don’t know; but I reckon he did’ent fancy the business of gathering grapes in an out-of-the-way thicket soon again,” Crockett wrote. When Crockett’s autobiography appeared in 1834, Absalom Stonecipher was very much alive. Humbert’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, whom Stonecipher married in 1796, had nursed him back to full health in front of the eternal fire.10

Eighteenth-century rural life anywhere in the new United States was challenging, but on the frontier of Tennessee it was especially perilous. Tending to gunshot wounds was but one of many skills one had to learn in order to survive. Just the basics of everyday life, such as felling timber and