David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [94]
Crockett faithfully supervised the stave-making operation for a time, but eventually the call of the hunt was too tempting. He rationalized that although the workers did not expect to get paid until they reached New Orleans, he had promised to provide all their meals. “I worked on with my hands till the bears got fat, and then I turned out to hunting, to lay in a supply of meat,”5 Crockett wrote. This memorable series of bear hunts stretched through the rest of 1825 and well into the spring of 1826. By his count, Crockett killed 105 bears, including 47 in a one-month period.
During that winter and spring, Crockett occasionally broke away from his hunting companions to check on the hired hands busily turning out staves and supply them with fresh meat. In the early spring of 1826, the hunting winding down, Crockett was pleased to find that in his absence both boats had been completed and were fully loaded with more than 30,000 barrel staves. Anxious to pocket a hefty profit in New Orleans and pay his workers, Crockett ordered the flatboats pushed off, and soon enough they were moving down the Obion River to the Mississippi.
Both of the boats were unwieldy craft built of rough lumber and intended only to get as far as New Orleans, where they would be disassembled and the lumber sold for scrap. From there Crockett and the crew, with money in their purses, would take a riverboat back to Tennessee.
The short trip on the Obion went well enough, but once they entered the broad and powerful Mississippi, it became apparent that none of the crew possessed the navigational skills to make the long journey ahead. Crockett had never before attempted to navigate such a great river. “I found all my hands were bad scar[r]ed, and in fact I believe I was scar[r]ed a little worse of any; for I had never been down the river, and I soon discovered that my pilot was as ignorant of the business as myself,”6 Crockett lamented.
The boats, top-heavy from all the staves, turned sideways and drifted out of control. Crockett ordered the men to lash the rafts together, but that only made a bad situation worse. They could no longer maneuver the boats nor land them. As night fell, crewmen on passing boats and people with lanterns on the riverbank shouted advice but nothing seemed to work.
“Our boats were so heavy that we couldn’t take them much any way, except the way they wanted to go, and just the way the current would carry them,” Crockett explained. “At last we quit trying to land, and concluded just to go ahead as well as we could, for we found we couldn’t do any better.”7
Sometime during the long night, Crockett went below in the cabin to rest and think about “how much better bear-hunting was on hard land, than floating along on the water.” He was still below deck when, just as the town of Memphis appeared on a distant bluff, the boats, still lashed together, crashed into a sawyer, a huge raft of drift timber lodged in the river bottom and pointed upstream. The impact separated the boats, and the lead barge was pulled under, while the second craft nosed beneath it, with Crockett still below the deck. He scrambled around, looking for a way to escape as water rushed into the cabin. The only exit he could find was a window, too small for him to crawl through.
“I began to think that I was in a worse box than ever,” recalled Crockett. “But I put my arms through and hollered as loud as I could roar, as the boat I was in hadn’t yet quite filled with water up to my head, and the hands who were next to the raft, seeing my arms out, and hearing me holler, seized them, and began to pull.”
Finally, just as the boat was