David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [29]
David had no plans to tarry long in the same country where his grandfather David Crockett and other family had once lived before crossing over the mountains to what became Tennessee. After Cheek sold the herd to a local buyer, David and the other Cheek brother started back home in advance of the others, including David’s brother. With but one horse available for their return trip, David and his traveling companion agreed that they would share the steed equally so one of them would not have to walk more than the other. It was a failed plan. After three days on the road, David found that the Cheek brother hardly ever gave up his perch on the saddle.3 Unwilling to continue with someone so contrary, the footsore Crockett felt he would be better off looking for alternative transportation and, with four dollars of pay in his pocket, struck out on his own.
Crockett purchased a few provisions and had resumed his journey back to Tennessee when he encountered Adam Myers, a teamster hauling a wagonload of goods. Myers, from Greene County, Tennessee, where David was born, seemed “a jolly good fellow.”4 He proposed that Crockett reverse directions and go with him to his delivery destination in Gerrardstown, Virginia, now West Virginia, and then immediately return to Tennessee.
“On a little reflection, I determined to go back with him, which I did; and we journeyed on slowly as wagons commonly do, but merrily enough.” As the wagon slowly bumped down the road, Crockett concluded that he had made the right decision. “I often thought of home, and, indeed, wished bad enough to be there; but when I thought of the school-house and Kitchen, my master, and the race with my father, and the big hickory he carried, and of the fierceness of the storm of wrath that I had left him in, I was afraid to venture back; for I knew my father’s nature so well, that I was certain his anger would hang on him like a turkle [sic, turtle] does to a fisherman’s toe, and, if I went back in a hurry, he would give me the devil in three or four ways.”5
Just two days out on the eastbound trip, Crockett and Myers encountered the rest of the original Jesse Cheek drovers on their way home. The other Crockett son tried his best to talk David into going back to their family. Crockett’s brother “pressed him hard” and came up with several persuasive arguments, such as “the pleasure of meeting my mother, and my sisters, who all loved me dearly.”6 David came close to yielding and even shed tears, an uncharacteristic behavior for such an adventurous young man, but when the thought of that “promised whipping” came to mind, he finally “determined that make or break, hit or miss, I would just hang on to my journey, and go ahead with the waggoner.”
Crockett and Myers accordingly pressed on to Gerrardstown. After unloading the shipment, Myers tried to find some cargo to take back to Tennessee and learned that the closest goods available were to the southeast in Alexandria, near the new city of Washington. Crockett opted to stay in Gerrardstown and find temporary work until Myers returned with the back load.
Crockett hired on as a laborer with John Gray, a local farmer who in 1787 had helped lay out Gerrardstown with David Gerrard, whose father, John Gerrard, not only gave the village its name but also served as pastor of the first Baptist church west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. John Gray was Scottish to his fingertips, but he was willing to shell out twenty-five cents a day in wages to the young Scots-Irish hireling who plowed the grain fields as well as any man. “I continued working for him until the waggoner got back, and for a good time afterwards, as he continued to run his team back and forward, hauling to and from Baltimore.”7
In the spring of 1800, Crockett