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By Root 343 0

date that Polly passed away at the Bean Creek cabin. Medical care was limited and life expectancy short on the frontier. For many years, complications from childbirth were said to have brought about Polly’s death, based on the erroneous belief that daughter Margaret was not born until after David came home from the Indian Wars in 1815. But Margaret’s birth date was November 25, 1812, which meant the little girl was twenty-eight months old at the time her mother died, thus eliminating childbirth as her cause of death. Others have theorized that it could have been one of several maladies that plagued the frontier, including typhoid fever, dysentery, smallpox, streptococcal infections, pneumonia, or malaria, which also beset Crockett in the years to come.6

Another possibility for Polly’s death was a mysterious torment known as milk sickness. Also called “sick stomach,” “puking illness,” and “the slows,” milk sickness followed frontier migration patterns and for a time was rampant in Tennessee.7 It was only many years later, through the advancement of modern medicine, that it was determined that milk sickness was a vegetable poisoning caused by tremetol, an alcohol found in the white snakeroot plant.8 Grazing cattle or deer feeding in the woods ate the plant, and humans acquired the disease by drinking the milk or eating the flesh of affected animals. In a matter of days the victims showed symptoms—abdominal pain, vomiting, extreme constipation, and fatigue. Soon those stricken fell into a stupor, quickly followed by coma and death.

Polly’s death devastated Crockett. He had seen death up close many times during his service in the recent war, but he could not have been prepared to witness the passing of the woman he so dearly loved. “I met with the hardest trial which ever falls to the lot of man,” he later wrote of that sad time. “Death, that cruel leveler of all distinctions…entered my humble cottage, and tore from my children an affectionate good mother, and from me a tender and loving wife.”9

Crockett, never a particularly religious person, did, on occasion, make reference to a higher power. Polly’s death was one of those times. “It was the doing of the Almighty, whose ways are always right, though we sometimes think they fall heavily on us; and as painful as it is even yet the remembrance of her sufferings, and the loss sustained by my little children and myself, yet I have no wish to lift up the voice of complaint.”10

Polly’s corpse was washed and dressed in the best frock she had. David fashioned a coffin, and he dug a grave on a hillside near their homestead at Kentuck. He piled some fieldstones to mark the place. For about 140 years only the remnants of that stone cairn indicated the site of Polly’s grave. In 1956, in the wake of the revival of interest in all things Davy Crockett caused by the Walt Disney television shows, the Tennessee Historical Commission, with public donations, erected a granite monument with the inscription:

Polly Finlay [sic] Crockett

Born 1788 in Hamblen County

Married to

David Crockett

Aug. 12, 1806

Mother of

John Wesley Crockett—1807

William Crockett—1809

Margaret Finley Crockett—1812

Died 1815

Almost twenty-nine years old and trying to scratch out a living on a badly neglected farm, Crockett found himself alone with three small children, John Wesley, seven; William, six; and Polly, going on three. It was far from an enviable position, or, as Crockett put it, “my situation was the worst in the world.” He turned to his brother, John, the younger brother David had met near the end of the war when he was on his way home. John had married the former Sally Thomas in Jefferson County in 1812, and by the time Polly died they had moved to Franklin County.11 It is likely that Sally helped nurse and tend to Polly in her final days.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of scattering my children,” wrote Crockett, “and I got my youngest brother, who was also married, and his family to live with me. They took good care of my children as they well could, but yet it wasn’t like the care of a mother.