David Crockett (17 page)

By November 1, 1813, Brig. Gen. Coffee and his brigade of cavalry and mounted riflemen established a new camp on the Coosa River. The following day, Coffee ordered nine hundred mounted dragoons and some seventy Cherokee warrior allies to attack and destroy the nearby Creek village of Tallushatchee, where a large number of Red Sticks were known to be living. Crockett rode in the ranks of the attack force.
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On the morning of November 3, the sleeping village was completely encircled by troops, and, at one hour after sunrise, the attack was launched. Coffee’s surprise attack worked. Although the Creeks fought with great valor, the American force overpowered and viciously killed as many as possible, including men, women, and children. It was a sight that Crockett never forgot. His descriptions of the horrific scene at Tallushatchee are some of the most harrowing in his entire
Narrative
. Crockett wrote of seeing as many as forty-six Creek warriors seek cover in a house.

From the start of the assault until the last Red Stick was slaughtered, at least 186 Creeks were killed and about 84 more taken prisoner, mostly women and children. The total losses from Brig. Gen. Coffee’s brigade were 5 men killed and 41 wounded.
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After burning down the town, Coffee’s brigade returned to the camp at Ten Islands, where General Jackson had arrived and was there to greet them. Besides words of praise for their victory, Jackson had little else to offer the weary men. The contractors hired to feed the army failed to deliver fresh provisions, and the troops had eaten only half rations for several days. Hoping to find some overlooked food caches, the tired and famished troopers returned to the destroyed Creek village the next day. The scene sickened Crockett.

Crockett’s descriptions of the scene at Tallushatchee show him repulsed by the slaughter. The story, as he told it, unfolds without sentiment or hyperbole. The details and facts speak for themselves but are far from colorless. And that is what would be expected from any good storyteller, even one horrified by what he had witnessed.

O
NLY A FEW MONTHS
after enlisting as a Tennessee Volunteer, Crockett had to have realized that he was a hunter, not a soldier. That is not to say he failed to carry out his soldierly duties or refused to participate in assaults on Indian villages. He held his own in any skirmish or full-blown battle with Creek Red Sticks.

If confronted or challenged, Crockett never cowered or backed down from man or beast. Anyone armed only with a knife willing to fight a fully-grown bear to the death may have exhibited a great deal of recklessness but certainly had no coward in him. And that was just the point. Crockett was much more comfortable hunting and killing wild game than he was hunting and killing human beings. The role Crockett liked best during his military stint was the same one he preferred as a civilian, that of hunter-gatherer. And if Andrew Jackson or his underlings had just figured that out, a major morale problem could have been avoided when, by the winter of 1813, soldiers were so hungry and tired they were on the brink of all-out mutiny.

Throughout the entire campaign against the Creeks, Jackson’s greatest threat did not come from the outmanned and poorly armed Indians but from critical supply shortages and desertions by troops unhappy with both the lack of decent rations and the terms of their enlistments. Napoleon, who was simultaneously fighting and losing his own war in Europe, famously once said that an army marches on its stomach, meaning any army’s success depends not on courage or logistics but on adequate food. When preparing to invade Russia, the biggest obstacle Napoleon faced was not firepower and fortifications but food: it was difficult to find, and the winter was particularly cruel. Andrew Jackson was no Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet he managed to avoid ultimate defeat, like the one that awaited Napoleon in 1815.

In early November 1813, Jackson, trying to keep morale high, praised his troops’ resounding victory at Tallushatchee. Upset that his victorious soldiers had been forced to eat potatoes soaked with human flesh, he finally recognized that nourishing rations and forage were as important as powder and lead. But until contractors, hampered by low water in the Tennessee River, could find a way to provide fresh provisions, there still was a war to wage. To keep their minds off food, Jackson busied the troops with establishing another camp close to Ten Islands on the Coosa River.
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It was named Camp Strother, after Maj. John Strother, the chief topographer and surveyor for General Jackson.
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At Camp Strother on November 7, a lone Indian runner emerged from the night shadows to tell Jackson of a large number of allied Creeks besieged by at least 1,100 Red Sticks in full war paint at Talladega, thirty miles to the south.
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The messenger had made a daring escape by covering himself with a hog’s skin and, in the darkness of night, got down on his hands and knees, grunting and rooting, and crawled through the hostile camp past guards who thought he was a hog looking for food.
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Fortunately, he shed his clever disguise before he got to Camp Strother, or he would have been taken for a tasty pig and picked off by Crockett or another hungry sharpshooter.

Armed with this fresh intelligence about the enemy, Jackson—his arm still in a sling from the slug that smashed through his shoulder while he caned Thomas Hart Benton—called for his senior officers and drew up a battle plan. Just after midnight, a force of 1,200 infantry and 800 cavalry forded the Coosa River and started for Talladega.
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Crockett, cradling his rifle and astride his horse, was among them. By the following evening the long column drew near the sleeping village.

As morning broke, Jackson and his officers positioned the troops and started the attack, using tactics employed a few days earlier at Tallushatchee. The results were the same, with even more Creeks killed. Crockett was right in the middle of the action and later remembered the Red Stick warriors “rushing forth like a cloud of Egyptian locusts, and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head.”
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War cries quickly turned to screams of agony as the warriors fell under withering fire from all sides. “We fired and killed a considerable number of them,” wrote Crockett. “They then broke like a gang of steers, and ran across to our other line, where they were fired on again; and so we kept them running from one line to the other; constantly under a heavy fire, until we had killed upwards of four hundred of them.”
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American losses amounted to 15 killed outright and 86 wounded. Among the dead were a few commissioned officers and a young man named James Patton, who had a wife and two small children and lived less than a mile from Crockett’s Kentuck home. “We buried them all in one grave, and started back to our fort; but before we got there, two more of our men died of wounds they had received; making our total loss seventeen good fellows in that battle.”
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Early on in the campaign against the Creeks, Jackson acquired a reputation for toughness among his soldiers. Some of them said that he was “as tough as hickory,” and it took no time for the name “Old Hickory” to stick.
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After the fight at Talladega and for many years to follow, another sobriquet seemed even more appropriate for Jackson. This new nickname came from the Creeks and also was used by the Cherokees and other tribes to describe him. The called him “Sharp Knife,” or sometimes “Pointed Arrow,” because of his keenness for killing their people. A few years after the Creek campaign, when Jackson invaded Florida, the terrified Spanish called him “the Napoleon of the woods.”
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All of the monikers fit Jackson as perfectly as his snug regulation moon-shaped officer’s hat, or
chapeau de bras
.

Back at Camp Strother after his latest victory at Talladega, “Sharp Knife” and his exhausted and half-famished troops found that additional provisions still had not been delivered. While contractors in Knoxville continued to search for a route to reach the troops, starvation threatened, and there were murmurs of growing discontent from suffering soldiers throughout the camp.

“I have been compelled to return here for the want of supplies, when I could have completed the destruction of the enemy in ten days,” a frustrated Jackson complained in a letter to one of the contractors. “I find those I had left behind in the same starving condition with those who accompanied me. For God’s sake send me with all dispatch, plentiful supplies of bread and meat. We have been starving for several days and it will not do to continue so much longer. Hire wagons and purchase supplies at any price rather than defeat the expedition.”
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To stay occupied, the soldiers fortified their camp with protective palisades and blockhouses, and by mid-November Camp Strother was upgraded a notch and became Fort Strother. Facing almost certain famine, with still no real relief in sight, the men mostly stayed in their huts and tents when not on a guard or work detail. The large hog pen remained empty. For some sustenance, soldiers chewed on old boiled beef hides and supped on bitter broths of stewed acorns and mashed hickory nuts.
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Any scraps of dried meat they managed to finagle were so salty it only made their constant thirst that much worse. Whiskey rations were long gone, and tobacco was difficult to come by. To add to their misery, the temperatures were dropping by the day.

“The weather also began to get very cold,” wrote Crockett, “and our clothes were nearly worn out, and horses were getting very feeble and poor. Our officers proposed to Gen’L Jackson to let us return home and get fresh horses, and fresh clothing, so as to be better prepared for another campaign.”
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Jackson refused to let the men go home, which resulted in a near mutiny. Many years later, Crockett—no longer a lowly private—took a few liberties with the facts when relating the story of “Old Hickory Face,” as Crockett later called his former commanding general.
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Crockett claimed to have been a participant in the mutinous activity against Jackson, but it is doubtful he was. He described the mutiny as a success. In fact, Jackson actually triumphed after he called the mutineers’ bluff and rode out before them, brandishing a musket and personally threatening to shoot the first soldier who dared desert the ranks and go home. He stared down the whole brigade just as he done years before with Russell Bean.

“In the end Jackson was compelled to accede,” Jackson biographer H. W. Brands wrote of the aborted mutiny.

Despite documented evidence to the contrary, some researchers believe Crockett remained with Jackson’s army for several more weeks and did not return home until late January 1814. That was not the case. Crockett’s first term of enlistment officially ended on Christmas Eve 1813. Records show that he served three months and six days at eight dollars per month pay, plus allowance for use of his horse, and travelling expenses.
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The total due Crockett came to $65.59.

With his pay tucked away in his woolen hunting shirt, Crockett mounted up and turned northward to Tennessee and to his home. Polly and the boys, Wesley and William, were waiting, and so was his daughter, Margaret, or “Little Polly,” just a year old. All the way back on that long ride, Crockett had to wonder if the girl would even remember him.