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By Root 261 0

wilderness followed bison trails, the only breaks in the thick undergrowth. These trails were cut deep and wide by the hooves of the big lumbering animals seeking clear spring water, salt licks, and grassy meadows, much like the Indians and white men who hunted them. Old trails became well-used paths for restless pioneers such as Crockett and his kin. They were soon followed by land speculators and developers anxious to wrest the land from the Indians who dwelled there long before any whites even knew of the existence of the mountains blanketed with chestnuts, hemlocks, and fir. To the newcomers the wilderness was an adversary that had to be conquered and tamed. The land had to be dismembered and parceled out to families and town builders.

On November 25, 1812, Polly Crockett gave birth to her third child. This time it was a daughter. She was named Margaret, after David’s oldest sister. Crockett cherished the baby girl, who went by the nickname Polly, but he also had to wonder how he was going to feed yet another mouth. Although it was important for frontier families to be large so there were plenty of helping hands, there also was a price to pay before a child was old enough to earn its keep.

After less than two years in Lincoln County, Crockett was beginning to feel the itch to move once more. Besides the decline in the bear population, Crockett, not agriculturally inclined, was having problems making a go of it as a farmer. He spent much of his time out hunting, and not nearly enough behind the plow. Taking a chance by adding to his holdings to provide more crop fields, he put in a claim for an additional fifteen acres. The plan did not work. He soon fell behind on his taxes and in the end lost all of his land, including his original five-acre plot.12

By the time the delinquent tax payment resulted in foreclosure, Crockett had already moved the family away from Hungry Hill. In late 1812 or perhaps early 1813, the Crocketts established residency in adjacent Franklin County, formed in 1807 and named in honor of Benjamin Franklin. Lying in a portion of the valley of the Elk River, the county contained an abundance of streams, springs, and caves. David cleared land and built a cabin home on the Rattlesnake Spring Branch of Bean’s Creek, about ten miles southwest of the county seat of Winchester and a few miles north of the Alabama border.13 It is not clear if Crockett purchased part of a two-hundred-acre tract of land in late 1812 or leased it, as would have been the case for those without any money. Another common alternative would have been to settle on the land as squatters.

Whatever arrangement Crockett worked out in order to get his property, it is known that he named the new home Kentuck. The choice of this name, sometimes spelled Kaintuck, may have signaled a future move to the land of Daniel Boone, whom Crockett knew of only by reputation. By 1812, however, Boone was seventy-eight years old and long gone from Kentucky: he had been happily residing in Missouri for thirteen years.14

Crockett built a log cabin with just enough room for a family of five, while Polly stayed busy with her chores and tended two growing sons and an infant daughter. David cleared and cultivated some of the land, and put in corn and row crops, but he took to the woods as much as he could. Crockett, as we have seen, was a hunter first and farmer a distant second. He continued to go hunting with James Burns Gowen, and also stalked game with a new neighbor, Archard Hatchett. A Virginian by birth who settled in Tennessee in 1806, Hatchett farmed and raised livestock, as well as fourteen children fathered with two wives. The pair roamed far on long hunts, and along the way Crockett continued his practice of tattooing his initials with his hunting knife on the trunks of trees. Before dying on his family farm in 1852, Hatchett told stories of herding cattle with Crockett and of their hunting trips, and the old man made sure his son James knew the locations of some of the trees that Crockett had marked. More than thirty years later in the 1880s,