David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [25]
The flood at Cove’s Creek devastated John Crockett and proved to be a crushing blow from which he never fully recovered. He and his family were left homeless and without any immediate income. Following the disaster, Thomas Galbraith and his wife, Elizabeth, took pity on the Crocketts, providing them with food and shelter until they could get back on their feet and find new quarters.18
John surely appreciated the hospitality of his partner, but he also had to feel somewhat ashamed that he and his family were forced to survive on the goodwill of others. In only a few weeks John dreamed up a new plan of action, and the Crocketts took their leave from the Galbraith residence and departed Greene County. They were bound for a three-hundred-acre tract on Mossy Creek, in neighboring Jefferson County, that John had purchased in 1792, shortly before he forged the partnership to build the ill-fated gristmill.19
The move brought the Crocketts no immediate relief. Soon after relocating to Jefferson County, John was forced to start selling parcels of the property he owned there. In November of 1795, the county sheriff auctioned off most of the rest of the land to settle an outstanding Crockett debt of $400. After losing title to the property in the bankruptcy sale, the Crocketts, by special arrangement, were able to relocate on a tract of land owned by John Canaday, a Quaker settler who lived in the Panther Springs area.20 At this site, John Crockett and his family operated a tavern to accommodate travelers on the old stage road connecting Knoxville, Tennessee, to Abingdon, Virginia, and other points east. The exact location of the Crockett tavern has long remained a confused and debated issue. At least three east Tennessee sites have been identified over the years, but more than likely it was built in Morristown, where a replica of it was constructed in 1959. “His tavern was on a small scale, as he was poor; and the principal accommodations which he kept, were for the waggoners [sic] who traveled the road,”21 David later wrote of his father and the roadside inn that also served as the Crockett family home.
At this tavern David learned his father’s true measure. The youngster already knew that John was capable of dire acts when it came to fending off creditors; he never forgot that his father was once so deep in debt that he bound out his eldest daughter. Over the years, John’s indebtedness only increased. A small amount of money owed Gideon Morris for thirteen bushels of Indian corn—the debt was incurred back in 1783—still had not been paid at the time of Morris’s death in 1798. A one-word comment from the account of the deceased man’s estate listed Crockett’s situation as “Desperate.”22
SEVEN
COMING OF AGE
IF JOHN CROCKETT HAD ANY TRUE sense of right and wrong, he allowed room for rationalization to justify his behavior when it came to his callous treatment of family. He was one of the Scots-Irish with a “Presbyterian conscience,” a term used by Sam Ervin, the native North Carolinian and folksy U.S. senator, who charmed national audiences when he became a national figure during the early 1970s Watergate investigation. Ervin, a self-described “old country lawyer” of Scots-Irish descent, said that such a conscience “won’t keep you from sinning, but it’ll keep you from enjoying your sin, and it will smite you unmercifully if you don’t do what it tells you is right.”1
No call for swift biblical justice, however, can be found in any of David’s writings about his father. Instead he paints a rather sympathetic portrait of a distraught man in need of luck—a beleaguered soul constantly faced with grinding out a sparse living but with only himself to blame for his misery. “His hardships were deepened by misadventures that brought debts and creditors rather than fortune,”2 is how one historian