One day the scouts came across nine Indians.  We are not informed whether they were friends or enemies, whether they were hunters or warriors, whether they were men, women, or children, whether they were in their wigwams or wandering through the forest, whether they were all together or were found separately:  we are simply told that they were all shot down.  The circumstances of the case are such, that the probabilities are very strong that they were shot as a wolf or a bear would be shot, at sight, without asking any questions.  The next day the scouts found a frail encampment where there were three Indians.  They shot them all.

The sufferings of the army, as it toiled along through these vast realms of unknown rivers and forest glooms, and marshes and wide-spread, flower-bespangled prairies, became more and more severe.  Game was very scarce.  For three days, Crockett’s party killed barely enough to sustain life.  He writes: 

“At last we all began to get nearly ready to give up the ghost, and lie down and die, for we had no prospect of provision, and we knowed we couldn’t go much farther without it.”

While in this condition they came upon one of those wide and beautiful prairies which frequently embellish the landscape of the South and the West This plain was about six miles in width, smooth as a floor, and waving with tall grass and the most brilliaintly colored flowers.  It was bordered with a forest of luxuriant growth, but not a tree dotted its surface.  They came upon a trail leading through the tall, thick grass.  Crockett’s practised eye saw at once that it was not a trail made by human foot-steps, but the narrow path along which deer strolled and turkeys hobbled in their movement across the field from forest to forest.

Following this trail, they soon came to a creek of sluggish water.  The lowlands on each side were waving with a rank growth of wild rye, presenting a very green and beautiful aspect.  The men were all mounted, as indeed was nearly the whole army.  By grazing and browsing, the horses, as they moved slowly along at a foot-pace, kept in comfortable flesh.  This rye-field presented the most admirable pasturage for the horses.  Crockett and his comrades dismounted, and turned the animals loose.  There was no danger of their straying far in so fat a field.

Crockett and another man, Vanzant by name, leaving the horses to feed, pushed across the plain to the forest, in search of some food for themselves They wandered for some time, and found nothing.  At length, Crockett espied a squirrel on the limb of a tall tree.  He shot at the animal and wounded it but it succeeded in creeping into a small hole in the tree, thirty feet from the ground.  There was not a limb for that distance to aid in climbing.  Still the wants of the party were such that Crockett climbed the tree to get the squirrel, and felt that he had gained quite a treasure.

“I shouldn’t relate such small matters,” he writes, “only to show what lengths a hungry man will go to, to get something to eat.”