David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [95]
At just about sunrise, the bedraggled crew hailed a passing boat headed for Memphis, where spectators lining the bluff greeted them. In the cheering crowd was Marcus Brutus Winchester, a gentleman ten years younger than Crockett, and the eldest son of General James Winchester.9 Marcus had left school at age sixteen to fight alongside his father in the War of 1812, where they both were captured by the British at the Battle of River Basin and sent to prison in Quebec. In 1819, General Winchester was one of the founders of Memphis along with some others, including Andrew Jackson and John C. McLemore, one of Crockett’s chief creditors.10 The elder Winchester, a great lover of history, named the city Memphis after the ancient Egyptian city on the Nile.
In the spring of 1819, Marcus came to Memphis on a flatboat, but his craft dodged the sawyers and snags. With financial help from his father, he opened the town’s first store, a fashionable place of business on Front Street, just south of Jackson Street, where he erected one of the finest houses in town.11 When he and Crockett met in 1826, Marcus was on the verge of becoming the newly incorporated city’s first mayor and was said to be “the most graceful, courtly, elegant gentleman that ever appeared upon Main Street.”12
At first glance, it seemed that young Winchester and Crockett had so little in common that any sort of friendship was highly unlikely. Besides the great disparity in lifestyle, upbringing, and personal wealth, the Winchesters were Jacksonians and had no use for anyone who did not fully support Old Hickory. But Marcus Winchester was his own man and, despite his many civic duties and business accomplishments, possessed a definite streak of rebel. In 1823 he had thrown caution to the wind and wed Amarante Loiselle, brilliant and educated in France, and reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in the South. She was one-sixteenth black, which was why the wedding took place in her hometown of New Orleans, where mixed-race marriages were legal. Eventually being wed to “a woman of color” would prove Winchester’s undoing in Memphis. Yet even when the nasty racial slurs began after he served as mayor, Winchester remained steadfast with his beloved wife, even if it meant his certain ruin.13
On the calamitous morning in 1826, Winchester, seeing Crockett’s distressful situation, ran to his nearby dry goods store and returned with trousers for him. Later he brought Crockett and the rest of the crew to the store and provided them with completely new outfits, hats, and shoes. Then they went to the Winchester residence, where the lovely Amarante welcomed their guests with as fine a meal as they had ever eaten. Crockett regaled his hosts with some of his best stories, and later, at a tavern, he and his crew were toasted for having survived their ordeal on the river.14
A few days later, Crockett and one of his crew booked passage on a steamboat—the first that Crockett had ever boarded—and went downriver as far as Natchez, the town of antebellum mansions perched on the river bluffs, in the hope that they might discover some of the 30,000 staves. The search proved fruitless.15 Crockett went back to Memphis and spent a bit more time with his new friend Marcus Winchester. The two men discussed Crockett’s future and what might lie ahead. When Crockett left Memphis on a boat headed upriver to his home, Winchester gave him some money. It was not charity, nor did he feel sorry for his new backwoods friend. The money