David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [34]
“I was certain enough that I should never get any part of the note,” Crockett wrote. “But then I remembered it was my father that owed it, and I concluded it was my duty as a child to help him along, and ease his lot as much as I could. I told the Quaker I would take him up on his offer, and immediately went to work.”11
For six months, he labored as hard as any field hand in Tennessee for Canaday, who, in turn, provided David with quarters and meals at the Canaday home. The Canadays treated David like one of their own. “I never visited my father’s house during the whole time of this engagement, though he lived only fifteen miles off. But when it was finished, and I had got the note, I borrowed one of my employer’s horses, and, on a Sunday evening, went to pay my parents a visit.”
Presently, David took the newly redeemed note from inside his shirt and handed it to his father, who, upon seeing it, straightaway thought Canaday had sent it for collection. John “looked mighty sorry” and told his son that he did not have the money to pay off the note and was not sure what he should do. “I then told him I had paid it for him, and it was then his own; that it was not presented for collection, but as a present from me. At this, he shed a heap of tears; and as soon as he got over it, he said he was sorry he couldn’t give me any thing. But he was not able, he was too poor.”12
Seeing his father sob, receiving finally some heartfelt gratitude for what he had done without being asked, proved payback in itself for David. For two backbreaking terms of servitude over the course of a year, David had voluntarily worked without any personal income to clear his father’s due notes. Now the ledger between them was finally wiped clean, and David had some options to weigh. Just after the emotional scene with his grateful father, David made up his mind about how to proceed. “The next day, I went back to my old friend, the Quaker, and set in to work for him.”13
For the next four years, until David was twenty years old and about to wed Polly Finley, he lived and worked for the Quakers on land they bought at the headwaters of Panther Creek, near the community of Panther Springs.14 David’s time with the Canadays was time very well spent. During those years he became literate and received the only formal schooling he ever had, excluding the few hectic days spent in Kitchen’s subscription school years earlier. David also found a true role model and enduring friend in John Canaday, who proved a counterbalance to his father. “The influence of John Canaday on David was profound,” according to Crockett historian Joseph Swann. “Although David continued to do many things of which Canaday did not approve, they both evidently thought enough of each other to be sensitive and tolerant. John Canaday was a father figure for David—one quite different from his natural father. John Canaday’s influence on David’s character development, in those formative years, should not be underestimated.”15
On the surface it appeared that the aging Quaker farmer and the upstart young man had little in common. Unlike the Canadays, the Crocketts seemed to avoid taking part in organized religion, even though it is likely that David’s mother was the “Rebecca Crocit” who, with eight others, was baptized at the Bent Creek Baptist Church on a cold February morning in 1803.16 It also could be assumed that, given their strong Scots-Irish bloodlines, both sides of the Crockett family had, at one time, ties with the Presbyterians. There was a marked difference between the culture and lifestyle of the Quakers and the Ulster Scots. Beyond the wide cultural gap between David and his mentor, there was also a generational gap of forty-five