David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [26]
The rough-and-tumble country tavern that John and Elizabeth Crockett maintained for so many years never completely freed the family from debt but eventually brought in enough income to keep at least a few creditors at bay. A steady stream of herders and teamsters traveling the “Big Road” stopped at the tavern to refresh themselves with dippers of icy water from the cedar-lined well. Travelers tromped inside for hot meals and drank newly made woods whiskey served in hollowed-out cow horns, then found a night’s rest beneath quilts and bearskins on bedding and mattresses stuffed with dried corn shucks and goose feathers.
All of the Crocketts, no matter their age, had duties to perform, and for David and his brothers that included hunting game for the tavern table. David learned the basics of handling firearms from his father and uncles. The need to make every shot count to conserve expensive ammunition was instilled in him. In the present-day community of Morristown, the reconstructed Crockett Tavern lies a few miles southeast of a long hill known as Crockett’s Ridge. Local tradition holds that this was where David most enjoyed hunting, eventually honing his marksmanship skills.3
In spite of his sharp hunter’s eye and contributions to the tavern’s larder, David was briefly bound out after his twelfth birthday. As he succinctly put it, “I began to make my acquaintance with hard times, and a plenty of them.”4 John Crockett, in need of quick revenue, traded seven weeks of labor from two of his eldest sons in exchange for credit for goods and supplies, including whiskey, at a local store.5 Just two years later, in 1798, John decided the time had come for twelve-year-old David to be used as a financial asset to whittle down the family’s mounting debts.
“An old Dutchman, by the name of Jacob Siler, who was moving from Knox county to Rockbridge, in the state of Virginia, in passing, made a stop at my father’s house,” David wrote. “He had a large stock of cattle, that he was carrying on with him; and I suppose made some proposition to my father to hire some one to assist him.” The boy was shocked when he learned that his father had bound him out to Siler but had made no arrangements for David’s eventual return home. “Young as I was, and as little as I knew about travelling, or being away from home, he hired me to the old Dutchman, to go four hundred miles on foot, with a perfect stranger that I had never seen until the evening before.”6
David offered no explanation of how his mother must have felt to see her young son walk out of her life and not know when, or if, she would ever see him again. There is a conspicuous absence of much mention at all of Elizabeth Crockett throughout her son’s Narrative. She apparently did not figure in any of the major decisions affecting the family and seems to have made little impression on David. As strong and tenacious as most frontier wives and mothers had to be, the reality was that they still resided in a world ruled by dominant males.
As David set out with Siler and the herd of cattle, Elizabeth and the rest of the family had no inkling that it would be several months before he would return to them. “The old Dutchman” was thirty-five, born Jacob Sëyler Jr. in Virginia in 1763, the youngest son of immigrants from northern Alsace-Lorraine, then a part of Germany.7
As David helped water and feed the cattle and keep them moving on the Abingdon Road, he found Siler a pleasant and thoughtful man who saw to the boy’s needs and treated him well. When they finally reached their destination, just three miles from the Natural Bridge, a landmark geological formation created when Cedar Creek carved out a gorge in the mountainous limestone, David was even provided lodging at the home of Siler’s in-laws, Peter and Elizabeth Hartley, and made to feel welcome.8
“My Dutch master was very kind to me, and gave me five or six dollars, being, pleased, as he said, with my services,” David wrote of Siler. “This, however, I think was bait for me, as he persuaded me to stay with him, and