David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [93]
Even Crockett’s presumed ace in the hole—Alexander’s support of a controversial tariff law—turned sour when the price of cotton skyrocketed. Alexander credited this rise on the tariff law and predicted it would raise the price of everything else they made to sell. “I might as well have sung salms [sic] over a dead horse, as to try to make people believe otherwise,” offered Crockett, “for they knowed their cotton had raised, sure enough, and if the colonel hadn’t done it, they didn’t know what had.”20
The election of August 1825 proved closer than anticipated. The margin was just 267 votes. Alexander polled 2,866 votes to Crockett’s 2,599.21 He took the defeat hard but he was not done for—not in the least. He headed to his place on the Obion. There he could make new plans. He could head out into the canebrakes and lick his wounds.
TWENTY-SIX
BIG TIME
ONLY WEEKS AFTER the disappointing election loss, a resilient Crockett already was regaining his confidence. He was back on his land, which, due to expansion, was no longer in Carroll County but newly formed Gibson County.1 Betsy and the children were a comfort, and so was the news of September 24, 1825: For service rendered in the War of 1812, Crockett would be issued a Military Land Grant for twenty acres in Lawrence County, his former home and place of enlistment.2 Sale of this new property would bring some welcome income. Not surprisingly, what Crockett needed the most was money—as much as it would take to pay off campaign debts and an impressive stack of other past-due bills.
Financially cornered at thirty-eight years old, Crockett tapped into another natural resource, the forest itself. His plan called for felling timber to be made into pipe staves that would be loaded into vessels and floated down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.3 From his travels as a state legislator, Crockett was aware that the manufacture of barrels was a huge industry. Cooperages stayed busy trying to keep up with the great demand for barrels, casks, and kegs. Practically every commodity and product had to be shipped and stored in wooden containers, including milled flour, turpentine, nails, dried meats, gunpowder, molasses, sugar, coffee, shoes, lobster, paints, pickles, rice, maple syrup, and even money. In Tennessee and neighboring Kentucky, barrels were in constant demand to hold the rivers of sipping whiskey that poured from commercial distilleries and moonshine camps.
During his hunts, Crockett sometimes encountered the rugged men whose livings were made on the rivers. They had stories about New Orleans, a major southern market and port, where heaps of rough staves shipped down the Mississippi cluttered the waterfront. Many of the staves were exported abroad and assembled into barrels while local coopers snapped up the rest.
Crockett found a likely place for his new enterprise on Obion Lake, just south of Reelfoot Lake, close to the Mississippi and about twenty-five miles due west of his abode.4 He rounded up a small crew of hired hands to assist him—promising them wages after the staves were delivered—and they went to work setting up a camp. They gathered timber for staves and for the two large flatboats needed to transport the finished staves downriver. Drawing on some of the boat building techniques he observed years before while visiting relatives in Fentress County, Crockett had some notion about the kind of flatboats he wanted, and he assigned a few helpers to that task. He dispatched the rest of the crew to bring in the wood.
The area around the lake was still cloaked with large stands of timber, including oak, gum, poplar, hickory, and maple. In years to come, as more sawmills sprang up, many of these trees would