David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [57]
After burning down the town, Coffee’s brigade returned to the camp at Ten Islands, where General Jackson had arrived and was there to greet them. Besides words of praise for their victory, Jackson had little else to offer the weary men. The contractors hired to feed the army failed to deliver fresh provisions, and the troops had eaten only half rations for several days. Hoping to find some overlooked food caches, the tired and famished troopers returned to the destroyed Creek village the next day. The scene sickened Crockett.
Many of the carcasses of the Indians were still to be seen. They looked very awful, for the burning had not entirely consumed them, but gave them a terrible appearance, at least what remained of them. It was, somehow or other, found out that the house had a potato cellar under it, and an immediate examination was made, for we were all hungry as wolves. We found a fine chance of potatoes in it, and hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.
Crockett’s descriptions of the scene at Tallushatchee show him repulsed by the slaughter. The story, as he told it, unfolds without sentiment or hyperbole. The details and facts speak for themselves but are far from colorless. And that is what would be expected from any good storyteller, even one horrified by what he had witnessed.
SIXTEEN
RIDING WITH SHARP KNIFE
ONLY A FEW MONTHS after enlisting as a Tennessee Volunteer, Crockett had to have realized that he was a hunter, not a soldier. That is not to say he failed to carry out his soldierly duties or refused to participate in assaults on Indian villages. He held his own in any skirmish or full-blown battle with Creek Red Sticks.
If confronted or challenged, Crockett never cowered or backed down from man or beast. Anyone armed only with a knife willing to fight a fully-grown bear to the death may have exhibited a great deal of recklessness but certainly had no coward in him. And that was just the point. Crockett was much more comfortable hunting and killing wild game than he was hunting and killing human beings. The role Crockett liked best during his military stint was the same one he preferred as a civilian, that of hunter-gatherer. And if Andrew Jackson or his underlings had just figured that out, a major morale problem could have been avoided when, by the winter of 1813, soldiers were so hungry and tired they were on the brink of all-out mutiny.
Throughout the entire campaign against the Creeks, Jackson’s greatest threat did not come from the outmanned and poorly armed Indians but from critical supply shortages and desertions by troops unhappy with both the lack of decent rations and the terms of their enlistments. Napoleon, who was simultaneously fighting and losing his own war in Europe, famously once said that an army marches on its stomach, meaning any army’s success depends not on courage or logistics but on adequate food. When preparing to invade Russia, the biggest obstacle Napoleon faced was not firepower and fortifications but food: it was difficult to find, and the winter was particularly cruel. Andrew Jackson was no Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet he managed to avoid ultimate defeat, like the one that awaited Napoleon in 1815.
In early November 1813, Jackson, trying to keep morale high, praised his troops’ resounding victory at Tallushatchee. Upset that his victorious soldiers had been forced to eat potatoes soaked with human flesh, he finally recognized that nourishing rations and forage were as important as powder and lead. But until contractors, hampered by low water in the Tennessee River, could find a way to provide fresh provisions, there still was a war to wage. To keep their minds off food, Jackson busied the troops with