David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [53]
In that sanguinary autumn of 1813, a young man with so much still ahead of him heard only the cry for Fort Mims, and he answered accordingly. War fever was upon the land and Crockett had caught it.
FIFTEEN
“WE SHOT THEM LIKE DOGS”
ELEVEN DAYS AFTER THE MASSACRE at Fort Mims, David Crockett saddled his horse and rode the ten miles from his home, Kentuck, to the town of Winchester.1 Men from throughout the county gathered in the village square to join the campaign against the hostile Creeks.
Only the day before, far to the north of Tennessee, American Captain Oliver Hazard Perry had led his fleet of ten warships to victory over a British squadron in the three-hour Battle of Lake Erie. As the smoke began to clear, Perry sent General William Henry Harrison a hastily scribbled message: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”2 On the Tennessee frontier, no such boast could be made.
“There had been no war among us for so long, that but few, who were not too old to bear arms, knew anything about the business,” Crockett wrote of that day.
I, for one, had often thought about war, and had often heard it described; and I did verily believe in my own mind, that I couldn’t fight in that way at all; but after my experience convinced me that this was all a notion. For when I heard of the mischief which was done at the fort [Fort Mims], I instantly felt like going, and I had none of the dread of dying that I expected to feel. 3
Polly Crockett did not share her husband’s feelings or his point of view about the prospects of combat. Like any dutiful wife, even one somewhat hardened by frontier life, she feared for David’s safety but also fretted about the prospects of being left alone with three small children. Before he rode off for the muster in Winchester, Polly, perhaps not fully aware of her husband’s determination, begged him not to go to war.
“I reasoned the case with her as well as I could, and told her, that if every man would wait till his wife got willing for him to go to war, there would be no fighting done, until we would all be killed in our own houses; that I was able to go as any man in the world; and that I believed it was a duty I owed to my country.”
Crockett was not certain if his rationalization for going off to war satisfied Polly or not. But she could tell that he “was bent on it,” so she cried some more and then went back to her work. “The truth is,” Crockett admitted, “my dander was up, and nothing but war could bring it right again.”
At the muster in Winchester Square, vivid descriptions of the atrocities at Fort Mims circulated the crowd, and a young local lawyer, Francis Jones, addressed the men with a speech that thoroughly aroused Crockett and his friends. Afterward, Jones announced he was forming a company of volunteers and asked anyone willing to take up arms and go after the Red Sticks to step forward. “I believe I was about the second or third man that step’d out; but on marching up and down the regiment a few times we found we had a large company.”4
It appears that a celebration following the first muster got out of hand, and the recently built log jailhouse was burned to the ground during the night.5 Nevertheless, the blaze did not stop the business of war from moving forward. Jones was elected captain of the company—called Francis Jones’s Company of Mounted Riflemen—and Crockett was listed on the muster roll with the rank of private.6 Captain Jones appreciated Private Crockett’s ability with a rifle, and apparently the respect between them was mutual.
Jones was one of fourteen captains from nine Tennessee counties, including Franklin, assigned to the Second Regiment of Volunteer Mounted Riflemen. Under the command of Colonel Newton Cannon, along with Colonel John Alcorn’s regiment, the unit was part of General John Coffee’s brigade.7 When it soon became clear that most of the young men