David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [41]
David accepted the offer and immediately sent off for Henry Bradford, the justice of the peace, to perform the ceremony.23 The anxious bridegroom “was afraid to wait long, for fear of another defeat.” That evening at the Finleys’ cabin, with a slew of witnesses looking on, David and Polly were wed. At long last, Crockett’s dream of having a wife had been realized. He was just one day shy of his twentieth birthday, a typical age then for a young man to marry.
TWELVE
FINLEY’S GAP
FOLLOWING THEIR WELL-ATTENDED wedding ceremony and the ensuing frolic, David and Polly Crockett spent their first night together as husband and wife beneath the roof of the Finleys’ snug cabin, hardly a honeymoon love nest with several family members sleeping in close proximity. Early the next morning the newlyweds departed for the Crockett Tavern at Morristown, where another large company of family and friends waited to celebrate the nuptials and mark David’s twentieth birthday.
“We passed the time quite merrily,” Crockett recalled, “until the company broke up; and having gotten my wife, I thought I was completely made up, and needed nothing more in the whole world. But I soon found this was all a mistake—for now having a wife, I wanted every thing else; and, worse than all, I had nothing to give for it.”1
That was not quite true, for upon the couple’s return to the Finley place, Crockett was pleasantly surprised to find his mother-in-law in the “finest humor in the world.” The Finleys gave David and Polly the gift of “two likely cows and calves,” which Crockett thought a modest dowry. Still, it was better than what he had expected to receive from them. The livestock was certainly more than what his father, John Crockett, apparently provided, beyond some food and horns of whiskey at the tavern party.
John Canaday, Crockett’s longtime employer and friend, who had not attended any of the festivities because of his strong Quaker beliefs, proved the most generous of anyone. He gave David and Polly an order for fifteen dollars’ worth of goods at a local store, a great deal of money at that time and a true indication of the depth of affection Canaday had for David.2 “With this [the Canaday gift], we fixed up pretty grand, as we thought, and allowed to get on very well,” wrote Crockett.
Like so many young frontier couples, David and Polly started out with only the barest necessities. They possessed no property and had no money. As the best land in the area had already been claimed and the game was quickly being thinned out, Crockett now faced a lifetime of growing a few crops on rented land and working for other people, just as he had done all of his life.
They set up housekeeping in a small rented cabin within sight of his in-laws’ place. The Finleys had established their home years before near where the headwaters of Long Creek and Dumplin Creek rise on either side of Bays Mountain, at a point that soon became known as Finley’s Gap. Nearby ran the Great Indian War Trail, the path used in 1776 by 1,800 frontier militiamen led by Colonel William Christian in the campaign against the Cherokees who had allied with the British.3 After seeing the rolling terrain and loamy soil during their march, many of those veterans came back with their families, resulting in heavy settlement activity.
By the early 1780s, communities were being established around Bays Mountain and along the Holston and French Broad rivers in what was soon to become Jefferson County. Some of those first white settlers included Thomas Jarnagin, owner of large tracts of rich bottomland on the north side of the Nolichucky River, who specialized