CHAPTER I.

Parentage and Childhood.

The Emigrant.—­Crossing the Alleghanies.—­The boundless
Wilderness.—­The Hut on the Holston.—­Life’s Necessaries.—­The
Massacre.—­Birth of David Crockett.—­Peril of the
Boys.—­Anecdote.—­Removal to Greenville; to Cove Creek.—­Increased
Emigration.—­Loss of the Mill.—­The Tavern.—­Engagement with the
Drover.—­Adventures in the Wilderness.—­Virtual Captivity.—­The
Escape.—­The Return.—­The Runaway.—­New Adventures.

A little more than a hundred years ago, a poor man, by the name of Crockett, embarked on board an emigrant-ship, in Ireland, for the New World.  He was in the humblest station in life.  But very little is known respecting his uneventful career excepting its tragical close.  His family consisted of a wife and three or four children.  Just before he sailed, or on the Atlantic passage, a son was born, to whom he gave the name of John.  The family probably landed in Philadelphia, and dwelt somewhere in Pennsylvania, for a year or two, in one of those slab shanties, with which all are familiar as the abodes of the poorest class of Irish emigrants.

After a year or two, Crockett, with his little family, crossed the almost pathless Alleghanies.  Father, mother, and children trudged along through the rugged defiles and over the rocky cliffs, on foot.  Probably a single pack-horse conveyed their few household goods.  The hatchet and the rifle were the only means of obtaining food, shelter, and even clothing.  With the hatchet, in an hour or two, a comfortable camp could be constructed, which would protect them from wind and rain.  The camp-fire, cheering the darkness of the night, drying their often wet garments, and warming their chilled limbs with its genial glow, enabled them to enjoy that almost greatest of earthly luxuries, peaceful sleep.

The rifle supplied them with food.  The fattest of turkeys and the most tender steaks of venison, roasted upon forked sticks, which they held in their hands over the coals, feasted their voracious appetites.  This, to them, was almost sumptuous food.  The skin of the deer, by a rapid and simple process of tanning, supplied them with moccasons, and afforded material for the repair of their tattered garments.

We can scarcely comprehend the motive which led this solitary family to push on, league after league, farther and farther from civilization, through the trackless forests.  At length they reached the Holston River.  This stream takes its rise among the western ravines of the Alleghanies, in Southwestern Virginia.  Flowing hundreds of miles through one of the most solitary and romantic regions upon the globe, it finally unites with the Clinch River, thus forming the majestic Tennessee.

One hundred years ago, this whole region, west of the Alleghanies, was an unexplored and an unknown wilderness.  Its silent rivers, its forests, and its prairies were crowded with game.  Countless Indian tribes, whose names even had never been heard east of the Alleghanies, ranged this vast expanse, pursuing, in the chase, wild beasts scarcely more savage than themselves.