David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [58]
At Camp Strother on November 7, a lone Indian runner emerged from the night shadows to tell Jackson of a large number of allied Creeks besieged by at least 1,100 Red Sticks in full war paint at Talladega, thirty miles to the south.3 The messenger had made a daring escape by covering himself with a hog’s skin and, in the darkness of night, got down on his hands and knees, grunting and rooting, and crawled through the hostile camp past guards who thought he was a hog looking for food.4 Fortunately, he shed his clever disguise before he got to Camp Strother, or he would have been taken for a tasty pig and picked off by Crockett or another hungry sharpshooter.
Armed with this fresh intelligence about the enemy, Jackson—his arm still in a sling from the slug that smashed through his shoulder while he caned Thomas Hart Benton—called for his senior officers and drew up a battle plan. Just after midnight, a force of 1,200 infantry and 800 cavalry forded the Coosa River and started for Talladega.5 Crockett, cradling his rifle and astride his horse, was among them. By the following evening the long column drew near the sleeping village.
As morning broke, Jackson and his officers positioned the troops and started the attack, using tactics employed a few days earlier at Tallushatchee. The results were the same, with even more Creeks killed. Crockett was right in the middle of the action and later remembered the Red Stick warriors “rushing forth like a cloud of Egyptian locusts, and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head.”6
War cries quickly turned to screams of agony as the warriors fell under withering fire from all sides. “We fired and killed a considerable number of them,” wrote Crockett. “They then broke like a gang of steers, and ran across to our other line, where they were fired on again; and so we kept them running from one line to the other; constantly under a heavy fire, until we had killed upwards of four hundred of them.”7 American losses amounted to 15 killed outright and 86 wounded. Among the dead were a few commissioned officers and a young man named James Patton, who had a wife and two small children and lived less than a mile from Crockett’s Kentuck home. “We buried them all in one grave, and started back to our fort; but before we got there, two more of our men died of wounds they had received; making our total loss seventeen good fellows in that battle.”8
Early on in the campaign against the Creeks, Jackson acquired a reputation for toughness among his soldiers. Some of them said that he was “as tough as hickory,” and it took no time for the name “Old Hickory” to stick.9 After the fight at Talladega and for many years to follow, another sobriquet seemed even more appropriate for Jackson. This new nickname came from the Creeks and also was used by the Cherokees and other tribes to describe him. The called him “Sharp Knife,” or sometimes “Pointed Arrow,” because of his keenness for killing their people. A few years after the Creek campaign, when Jackson invaded Florida, the terrified Spanish called him “the Napoleon of the woods.”10 All of the monikers fit Jackson as perfectly as his snug regulation moon-shaped officer’s hat, or chapeau de bras.
Back at Camp Strother after his latest victory at Talladega, “Sharp Knife” and his exhausted and half-famished troops found that additional provisions still had not been delivered. While contractors in Knoxville continued to search for a route to reach the troops, starvation threatened, and there were murmurs of growing discontent from suffering soldiers throughout the camp.
“I have been compelled to return here for the want of supplies, when I could have completed the destruction of the enemy in ten days,” a frustrated Jackson complained in a letter to one of the contractors. “I find those I had left behind in the same starving condition