John Crockett moved still westward to this Holston valley, where he reared a pretty large log house on this forest road; and opened what he called a tavern for the entertainment of teamsters and other emigrants.  It was indeed a rude resting-place.  But in a fierce storm the exhausted animals could find a partial shelter beneath a shed of logs, with corn to eat; and the hardy pioneers could sleep on bear-skins, with their feet perhaps soaked with rain, feeling the warmth of the cabin fire.  The rifle of John Crockett supplied his guests with the choicest venison steaks, and his wife baked in the ashes the “journey cake,” since called johnny cake, made of meal from corn pounded in a mortar or ground in a hand-mill.  The brilliant flame of the pitch-pine knot illumined the cabin; and around the fire these hardy men often kept wakeful until midnight, smoking their pipes, telling their stories, and singing their songs.

This house stood alone in the forest.  Often the silence of the night was disturbed by the cry of the grizzly bear and the howling of wolves.  Here David remained four years, aiding his father in all the laborious work of clearing the land and tending the cattle.  There was of course no school here, and the boy grew up in entire ignorance of all book learning.  But in these early years he often went into the woods with his gun in pursuit of game, and, young as he was, acquired considerable reputation as a marksman.

One day, a Dutchman by the name of Jacob Siler came to the cabin, driving a large herd of cattle.  He had gathered them farther west, from the luxuriant pastures in the vicinity of Knoxville, where cattle multiplied with marvellous rapidity, and was taking them back to market in Virginia.  The drover found some difficulty in managing so many half wild cattle, as he pressed them forward through the wilderness, and he bargained with John Crockett to let his son David, who, as we have said, was then twelve years of age, go with him as his hired help.  Whatever wages he gave was paid to the father.

The boy was to go on foot with this Dutchman four hundred miles, driving the cattle.  This transaction shows very clearly the hard and unfeeling character of David’s parents.  When he reached the end of his journey, so many weary leagues from home, the only way by which he could return was to attach himself to some emigrant party or some company of teamsters, and walk back, paying for such food as he might consume, by the assistance he could render on the way.  There are few parents who could thus have treated a child of twelve years.

The little fellow, whose affections had never been more cultivated than those of the whelp of the wolf or the cub of the bear, still left home, as he tells us, with a heavy heart.  The Dutchman was an entire stranger to him, and he knew not what treatment he was to expect at his hands.  He had already experienced enough of forest travel to know its hardships.  A journey of four hundred miles seemed to him like going to the uttermost parts of the earth.  As the pioneers had smoked their pipes at his father’s cabin fire, he had heard many appalling accounts of bloody conflicts with the Indians, of massacres, scalpings, tortures, and captivity.