David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [28]
The next morning, fearful of the repercussions sure to follow when word of his ambush reached the schoolmaster, David only pretended he was going to school. Instead, he went out into the woods, only emerging at evening to walk home with his brothers, all of who were sworn to secrecy. This ruse went on for several more days until a curious Kitchen sent a note to John Crockett inquiring about his hooky-playing son. John demanded an explanation. “I knew very well that I was in a devil of a hobble,” Crockett related, “for my father had been taking a few horns, and was in a good condition to make the fur fly.”16 Vowing to whip David harder than Kitchen ever could, John cut a stout hickory switch and the chase was on. “I put out with all my might, and soon we were both up to the top of speed,” wrote David. He was thoroughly convinced that if his father or the schoolmaster got his hands on him he “would have used me up.” After being pursued by his father for more than a mile, David managed to escape by topping a hill and hiding in a clump of brush until his “huffing and puffing” father passed and gave up the hunt.
To avoid the wrath and hickory rods of either his father or his teacher ever again, David “cut out,” and went to the home of Jesse Cheek, only a few miles from the Crockett Tavern.17 In 1795, Cheek built a general merchandise store and stock pens at what was known as Cheeks Crossroads. The store sold a wide range of dry goods, supplies, foodstuffs, and as many as sixty different books, including Bibles, hymnals, almanacs, and primers. Locals and travelers purchased gun flints, axes, tobacco, chocolate, bulk tea and coffee, scythes, rat traps, saddlery, pewter candlesticks, fiddles and Jew’s harps, and a variety of spirits and liquors.18
At the store, David found one of his older brothers already there with Cheek, who was about to depart on a cattle drive. David was cheered by the presence of his brother, and, for his part, Cheek was only too happy to hire on both Crockett boys as drovers. They set out immediately, bound for Virginia to deliver Cheek’s herd of a cattle. For David it was the beginning of a two-and-a-half-year adventure that would introduce the teenager to new and distant places and expose him to people and experiences that would shape the rest of his life. In many ways, this interlude provided David with a more useful education than any he would have received in Benjamin Kitchen’s school. It was a journey to test the young man’s mettle and temper his courage.
EIGHT
THE ODYSSEY
EVEN FOR THE LATE EIGHTEENTH century, David Crockett did not have a typical adolescence. His journey into manhood commenced in the autumn of 1799, when he set out with Cheek, again bound for the state of Virginia. This trip was intended as a cooling-off period to give the angry John Crockett time to calm down and forgive David’s trespasses, in particular his dropping out of school after less than a week of attending classes. David originally had no intention of being gone so long. Before he finally did come home, in the spring of 1802, John Crockett, unsure if his prodigal son was even still alive, had forgiven David.
The party left on a crisp fall morning. Jesse Cheek’s small band of drovers included one of David’s brothers as well as one of Cheek’s brothers. They took the well-used route east out of Tennessee into northern Virginia, with stops along the way at Abingdon, Lynchburg, and Charlottesville.1 After flanking the Blue Ridge Mountains, they passed through Chester Gap, obscured by hanging clouds of morning fog as thick as wood smoke. They then moved on to the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. Their final stop was Front Royal, chartered in 1788 and often called “Hell Town