David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [36]
Fortunately, those vanquished expressions did no lasting harm to the anguished seventeen-year-old. Having mastered the woods, he was both resilient and insightful. He analytically pondered his failure to win Amy’s heart, and concluded that it was going to take more than fresh trousers and shirts to achieve any success in love or, for that matter, in life. “I began now to think, that all my misfortunes growed out of my want of learning,” mused Crockett. “I had never been to school but four days…and did not yet know a letter.”6
One of the married Canadays lived a mile away and had opened a school in his home. Crockett was able to strike an arrangement with the Canadays allowing him to attend school for four days and then work on the family farm for two days to pay for his learning and board.7 On the seventh day, David, like everyone else, followed God’s lead and rested.
The work-study regimen worked well. David applied himself and became both a diligent student and a devoted farmworker. He kept up this routine for six months and learned enough to read his primer, write out his own name, and “cipher some in the first three rules of figures.” For the rest of his life Crockett was to continue to make improvements in his reading and writing skills. Several signed documents and letters in his hand attest to this. He also read various periodicals and books, including selections from Shakespeare; Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography; and, as it was later known, a rudimentary translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which must have provided ample, if not even salty, entertainment, with its amorous tales of spurned and passionate love.8
“And this was all the schooling I ever had in my life, up to this day,” Crockett wrote of his time in the Quaker school. “I should have continued longer, if it hadn’t been that I concluded I couldn’t do any longer without a wife; and so I cut out to hunt me one.”
In no time, Crockett found a young woman who could not have seemed more appropriate. She was living about ten miles from John Canaday’s farm, at the Dumplin community, not far from Dandridge in Jefferson County. Named Margaret Elder, she was from “a family of pretty little girls” whom David had known for many years. “They [the Elders] had lived in the same neighborhood with me, and I thought very well of them.”9 Margaret, described later as “a tall, buxom lass, with cherry bitten cheeks and luscious lips, mischievous eyes, and hands doubly accustomed to handling the spinning wheel or rifle trigger,”10 appeared to be everything David wanted in a frontier wife. He steadily courted her “until I got to love her as bad as I had the Quaker’s niece; and I would have agreed to fight a whole regiment of wild cats if she would only have said she would have me.” The increasingly frustrated Crockett, however, was unable to extract commitment from the always loving but also coy and elusive Margaret. Maybe she saw the inevitable in her future—a lifetime of waiting at home with a passel of kids while her husband stalked game, entered shooting matches, and caroused with the other menfolk.
In the late summer of 1805, David and Margaret were asked to serve as attendants at the marriage of Robert Canaday and Amy Summer, the beguiling Quaker girl Crockett had once desired.11 After he and his “little queen,” as he referred to Margaret, performed their duties, Crockett was inspired to press his case for them to wed. Margaret remained evasive, but Crockett persisted and “gave her mighty little peace,” until at last she caved in and agreed to marry him. He was ecstatic and later noted that marrying Margaret would make him “the happiest man in the created world.”
By this time, Crockett had become friendly with a young man from Kentucky who had been bound out to work for John Canaday. This fellow