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Shortly after helping his daughter and son-in-law get settled, Billy Finley bid them farewell and retraced his journey back to his home at Finley’s Gap. It may have been the last time Polly saw her father.

One of Crockett’s first acquaintances in the new territory was the feisty James Burns Gowen, who was born in Virginia in 1785. An insane man, wielding an axe, had murdered his father, and Gowen’s mother was said to be a cousin of the Scottish poet Robert Burns.7 Two years Crocket’s senior, Gowen also was bound out, along with a brother, after their father’s slaying. Gowen and Crockett often were seen with their packs of dogs headed into the trees and loaded for bear. After an evening hunt, they pulled bones together from roasted bear ribs, and slept beneath a covering of tree branches with their rifles and hounds as their only companions.

“It was here, wrestling with the sassafras that adorned the summit of Hungry Hill[,] that the brawn and bravery was developed that afterward made [Davy] famous as a soldier as well as a hunter and backwoods statesman,” Gowen related to relatives before his death in 1880. “So here in the jungles of the forest living with his first wife, the faithful one who crossed the mountains of East Tennessee with him…this old pioneer no doubt spent his happiest days. He says himself that his reputation as a hunter was made on Mulberry.”8

This reputation eventually proved quite useful to Crockett, as it helped propel him into the limelight. His hunting expeditions, either alone or in the company of colorful backwoods characters, supplied the material for many of Crockett’s best stories, which he honed and polished for strategic use at public and private occasions.

“The forest and the mountain stream had great charms for him,” wrote John S. C. Abbott in his 1875 biography of Crockett. “He loved to wander in busy idleness all the day, with fishing-rod and rifle; and he would often return at night with a very ample supply of game. He would then lounge about his hut, tanning deerskins for moccasins and breeches, performing other little jobs, and entirely neglecting all endeavors to improve his farm, or to add to the appearance or comfort of the miserable shanty which he called his home.”9 In spite of his rather harsh critique of Crockett’s domestic habits, Abbot—the author of many popular nineteenth-century historical works and biographies—also pointed out some of what he considered to be Crockett’s strengths. “He had an active mind, and a very singular command of the language of low, illiterate life, and especially of backwoodsman’s slang,” wrote Abbot. “Though not exactly a vain man, his self-confidence was imperturbable, and there was perhaps not an individual in the world…whom he looked up to as in any sense his superior. In hunting, his skill became very remarkable, and few, even of the best marksmen, could throw the bullet with more unerring aim.”10 There was an abundance of deer, and much smaller game, in the area close to his homestead, but Crockett noticed that black bears had been hunted heavily and “were not so plenty as I could have wished.”11

Even when Crockett stalked game in those forests, the face of the land was changing due to the growing tide of settlers moving westward with the frontier. The earliest of these settlers claimed the lush valley land, so those who came later were forced to stake out less desirable sites on sides of mountains. As they cleared the land, the steep slopes eroded and became too poor to farm. The solution was to move on to yet another location. Crockett did not see the old-growth forests that flourished long before his family ever came to the shores of America. That was back in the time when it was said that a squirrel could travel the canopy of the woodlands from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without once touching the ground. Frontier settlers sliced down great mixes of hardwoods that spilled over the rolling old mountains in a multilayered carpet. The first people to enter the yet unbroken