Taking deliberate aim he fired, and immediately heard a loud outcry.  Rushing to the spot, he found that he had shot a neighbor, who was there gathering grapes.  The ball passed through his side, inflicting a very serious though not a fatal wound, as it chanced not to strike any vital part.  The wounded man was carried home; and the rude surgery which was practised upon him was to insert a silk handkerchief with a ramrod in at the bullet-hole, and draw it through his body.  He recovered from the wound.

Such a man as John Crockett forms no local attachments, and never remains long in one place.  Probably some one came to his region and offered him a few dollars for his improvements.  He abandoned his cabin, with its growing neighborhood, and packing his few household goods upon one or two horses, pushed back fifty miles farther southwest, into the trackless wilderness.  Here he found, about ten miles above the present site of Greenville, a fertile and beautiful region.  Upon the banks of a little brook, which furnished him with an abundant supply of pure water, he reared another shanty, and took possession of another four hundred acres of forest land.  Some of his boys were now old enough to furnish efficient help in the field and in the chase.

How long John Crockett remained here we know not.  Neither do we know what induced him to make another move.  But we soon find him pushing still farther back into the wilderness, with his hapless family of sons and daughters, dooming them, in all their ignorance, to the society only of bears and wolves.  He now established himself upon a considerable stream, unknown to geography, called Cue Creek.

David Crockett was now about eight years old.  During these years emigration had been rapidly flowing from the Atlantic States into this vast and beautiful valley south of the Ohio.  With the increasing emigration came an increasing demand for the comforts of civilization.  Framed houses began to rise here and there, and lumber, in its various forms, was needed.

John Crockett, with another man by the name of Thomas Galbraith, undertook to build a mill upon Cove Creek.  They had nearly completed it, having expended all their slender means in its construction, when there came a terrible freshet, and all their works were swept away.  The flood even inundated Crockett’s cabin, and the family was compelled to fly to a neighboring eminence for safety.

Disheartened by this calamity, John Crockett made another move.  Knoxville, on the Holston River, had by this time become quite a thriving little settlement of log huts.  The main route of emigration was across the mountains to Abingdon, in Southwestern Virginia, and then by an extremely rough forest-road across the country to the valley of the Holston, and down that valley to Knoxville.  This route was mainly traversed by pack-horses and emigrants on foot.  But stout wagons, with great labor, could be driven through.