David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [70]
Crockett had been left at the home of a man named Jesse Jones, who, along with his wife, cared for the stricken man as if he was their own son. About the Jones family, Crockett later wrote that they “treated me with every possible kindness in their power, and I shall always feel thankful to them.”11 Without the attention he received at this modest frontier cabin, Crockett surely would have perished. For five days he was unconscious, and for at least two weeks he remained in a state of delirium. Finally, out of sheer desperation, Mrs. Jones poured an entire six-ounce bottle of Bateman’s Drops down Crockett’s throat. This was a drastic step. This patent medicine—it had been around since the 1720s—usually was taken in small doses of only a few drops at a time. The main ingredients were opium, aniseed, and camphor, and if swigged indiscriminately Bateman’s Drops could be toxic, if not lethal. The desperate Mrs. Jones had no other choice. She reasoned that Crockett was bound to die anyway, so why not take a gamble.12
“She gave me the whole bottle, which throwed me into a sweat that continued on me all night,” recalled Crockett, “when at last I seemed to make up, and spoke, and asked her for a drink of water. This almost alarmed her, for she was looking every minute for me to die. She gave me the water, and, from that time, I began slowly to mend, and so kept on till I was able at last to walk about a little.”
Gradually, Crockett’s health returned, and even though he was not fully recovered, he reached a point where the malaria did not seem debilitating. He had to get moving, so when a waggoner happened by the Jones cabin, he asked if he could hitch a ride as far as the man’s house, which Crockett found out was just twenty miles from his own place. “I still mended as we went along, and when we got to his stopping place, I hired one of his horses, and went on home. I was so pale, and so much reduced, that my face looked like it had been half soled with brown paper.”13
At the Crockett home, Elizabeth and the children grew more worried with each passing day. There had been no word at all from Crockett, and they were prepared for the worst. Robinson and Rich, her husband’s two friends, had returned weeks before, trailing three horses they found on the way; they were the same ones Crockett had been searching for when he was stricken with malaria. Perhaps out of embarrassment for leaving Crockett behind, when the two men brought Crockett’s horse to Elizabeth they said that her husband had met his death during the expedition.14 They told the stricken woman that they had come upon some men who watched Crockett draw his last breath and then buried him.
Elizabeth had already been widowed by war and understood the realities of life and death on the frontier. Yet she was not fully convinced that her highly resourceful husband was really dead. The practical Elizabeth wanted proof, so she hired a man to retrace Crockett’s journey. She directed the man to look for her husband and find out the truth of the matter. If David had left any money or personal effects behind, Elizabeth told the man to fetch them home to her and the children. The hired man was still on the trail and missed meeting up with Crockett before he slipped back into Franklin County.
Likely Elizabeth thought she was looking at an emaciated ghost when she discovered David standing in the doorway of the cabin. Her astonishment had to have been overwhelming. That all changed in an instant when David smiled, and her lost husband walked back into her life.
Almanac cover, 1854. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)
PART III
TWENTY
“ITCHY FOOTED