David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [43]
The Crocketts’ first two children were John Wesley Crockett, born on July 10, 1807, and William F. Crockett, born on November 25, 1808. It is likely that David and Polly named the boys for their own fathers. “In this time we had two sons, and I found I was better at increasing my family than my fortune,”11 Crockett mused.
David scratched out a bit of a living by tenant farming his small crop patch, and picked up a little more income hiring out to others in the area. “Crockett was a poor man when I first saw him,” recalled John L. Jacobs, a neighbor of the Finleys. “He was then a married man, lived three-fourths of a mile from my Father in Findley’s [sic] Gap. He was then making rails for my father. I went to him where he had cut a very large yellow pine tree. He frequently called on me to hand him the wedge or glut, whichever he needed.”12
By far, Crockett’s best method of getting food was ancestral. His ability with a rifle constantly improved, and whenever possible he took to the woods and hills to track and kill both small and large game. Toting home a deer or turkey meant David, Polly, and their two little boys would eat well for a while, but bagging a black bear provided them with an abundance of edible flesh as well as valuable fat and fur. Both bear meat and oil from the layers of fat were in great demand across the American frontier and well beyond. Bear pelts were fabricated into a variety of goods, including rugs, bed robes, coats, and tall dressy fur caps—fashioned from the prized thick, glossy fur of a mother bear with cubs and proudly worn by various army regiments.13 As early as the mid-1700s, colonial America exported thousands of bear pelts. By the time Crockett took to the woods with his hounds and long gun, great quantities of bear fat and oil—stowed in barrels or sewn up in deerskins—were being shipped by barges down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, eastern seaboard cities, and European markets.14 In the field following a kill, hunters wrapped the butchered meat in the bear’s own skin and carried the oil home in the bear’s bladder. The oil was clarified by boiling it with shaved slippery elm bark, then stored for later use. The bladder could be used as an oilcloth for wrapping packages, and the fat served as cooking oil, lamp fuel, various home remedies, and insect repellent.15 Smart hunters such as Crockett sometimes followed the example of many Indian tribes and slathered on bear fat to protect their bodies from the cold.
Along with jerked venison, wild turkey, rabbit, squirrel, cured hams, and slabs of bacon, generous cuts of bear meat hung from the rafters of Crockett’s smokehouse and were staples in his family’s diet. Supposedly, the choicest cuts from bear came from the paws and thighs, although cured side meat and the spareribs of young bears also were favored.16 Generally, no matter which part of the bear was consumed, those who partook agreed that the taste was dependent on the diet and age of the animal. Before he left Finley’s Gap, Crockett was said to own “seven of the most vicious bear dogs in the South.”17 The only problem for hunters such as David was that the bear population was beginning to dwindle due to all the settlers moving into the region. He needed new hunting grounds and fewer folks around him.
“We worked on for some years, renting ground, and paying high rent, until I found [hunting] wasn’t the thing it was cracked up to be; and that I couldn’t make a fortune at it just at all,” wrote Crockett. “So I concluded to quit it, and cut out for some new country…as I knowed I would have to move at some time, I thought it better to do it before my family got too large, that I might have less to carry.”18
Before Crockett could make a move, a crisis erupted on Polly’s side of the family that required urgent attention. One