The howling fiends were expeditious in their work.  The father and mother were pierced by arrows, mangled with the tomahawk, and scalped.  One son, severely wounded, escaped into the forest.  Another little boy, who was deaf and dumb, was taken captive and carried by the Indians to their distant tribe, where he remained, adopted into the tribe, for about eighteen years.  He was then discovered by some of his relatives, and was purchased back at a considerable ransom.  The torch was applied to the cabin, and the bodies of the dead were consumed in the crackling flames.

What became of the remainder of the children, if there were any others present in this midnight scene of conflagration and blood, we know not.  There was no reporter to give us the details.  We simply know that in some way John Crockett, who subsequently became the father of that David whose history we now write, was not involved in the general massacre.  It is probable that he was not then with the family, but that he was a hired boy of all work in some farmer’s family in Pennsylvania.

As a day-laborer he grew up to manhood, and married a woman in his own sphere of life, by the name of Mary Hawkins.  He enlisted as a common soldier in the Revolutionary War, and took part in the battle of King’s Mountain.  At the close of the war he reared a humble cabin in the frontier wilds of North Carolina.  There he lived for a few years, at but one remove, in point of civilization, from the savages around him.  It is not probable that either he or his wife could read or write.  It is not probable that they had any religious thoughts; that their minds ever wandered into the regions of that mysterious immortality which reaches out beyond the grave.  Theirs was apparently purely an animal existence, like that of the Indian, almost like that of the wild animals they pursued in the chase.

At length, John Crockett, with his wife and three or four children, unintimidated by the awful fate of his father’s family, wandered from North Carolina, through the long and dreary defiles of the mountains, to the sunny valleys and the transparent skies of East Tennessee.  It was about the year 1783.  Here he came to a rivulet of crystal water, winding through majestic forests and plains of luxuriant verdure.  Upon a green mound, with this stream flowing near his door, John Crockett built his rude and floorless hut.  Punching holes in the soil with a stick, he dropped in kernels of corn, and obtained a far richer harvest than it would be supposed such culture could produce.  As we have mentioned, the building of this hut and the planting of this crop made poor John Crockett the proprietor of four hundred acres of land of almost inexhaustible fertility.

In this lonely cabin, far away in the wilderness, David Crockett was born, on the 17th of August, 1786.  He had then four brothers.  Subsequently four other children were added to the family.