Crockett of Tennessee Read online

  Chapter 30

  After the meal David rose and walked outside, knowing Persius would follow. The boys followed as well; David sent them off to play on the far side of the house. He and Persius cut and settled in fresh cuds of twist tobacco, and chewed and spat without-words for a minute or so.

  “Persius, I want to ask you something straight out,” David said.

  “You don’t need to say the words. I already know. You want to know if I really murdered Crider Cummings.”

  “Well … yes. I do.”

  “I killed him. But it wasn’t murder. If I hadn’t killed him, I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you today. He’d have cut my throat.”

  “So you was defending yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then for God’s sake, why did you run off? It made you look guilty. There ain’t a jury that could be rounded up in Jefferson County that wouldn’t find you guilty now!”

  “Think about it, Dave. Is there a jury that wouldn’t have found me guilty even if I hadn’t run? You know my reputation. I’d have been convicted and hung within a week, and you can’t deny it.”

  “All I know is, if a man ain’t guilty, he shouldn’t flee. It’s as good as a confession in the minds of most folks.”

  “That’s fine and easy talk, when the man doing the talking ain’t the one who would hang. If you’d been in my shoes, with the kind of name I had, you’d have run like a rabbit too.”

  David spat, thought it over, nodded. “Maybe you did what you had to do. I ain’t been in your circumstance before.”

  “Now you answer me straight out: Do you believe me when I tell you I didn’t murder Crider Cummings?”

  “Yes. I know how he felt about you. I have no trouble believing he would provoke you into killing him. I can generally tell when a man’s lying to me, and there’s plenty of them that has. You ain’t lying.”

  “I appreciate that. You’ve always seen the best side of me when nobody else would.”

  “There was a time when you seemed to see the best side of yourself, back with John Canaday, and you turning Quaker and all.”

  “I meant it when I tried that change, David. Truly I did. Wanted to be different and put aside my old ways. Somehow I just couldn’t make it hold, you know. It slid away on me, and I was the same old sinner I’ve always been and always will be.”

  David had no advice for his friend on that kind of subject; theology was beyond his scope. Religion was a part of his family heritage, but he hadn’t picked it up in a very significant or personal way; his attitude, felt rather than articulated, was that churchgoing and formal religion were more for women than men, unless the men were of the rare and admirable breed of John Canaday. But Persius’s words did harken up an old question in David’s mind, and offer the chance for him finally to verbalize it.

  “Persius, there was something about you during that time I never could quite figure. The story you told about what happened to you on the Clinch River … I have a notion there was more than what you said at the time. I’ve wondered if …”

  Words became halting, and Persius eyed David with lifted brow. “Go on and say it. I’m in no humor to hold it against you, whatever it is.”

  David cleared his throat and scuffed his right foot. “I’ve wondered if maybe you went back and killed them two who had throwed you into that pit of bones. Maybe it was killing them that stirred you so bad that you’d do something as, well, extreme as turning Quaker. You were mighty changed, Persius. More than I could account for from what you told us had happened to you.”

  Persius’s eyes narrowed as David spoke, and his lips made a hard line. But there was no anger in his voice when he responded. “No. There’s but one man I’ve killed in my life, and that’s Crider Cummings, and him I killed because I had no choice. That’s the truth. I hope you’ll believe it.”

  “I do,” David said. But his conviction wasn’t settled. He truly could tell, most times, when someone was trying to deceive him, and he strongly suspected that Persius was deceiving him right now. But there was no more to be said about it at the moment.

  “Where did you go, after you left Jefferson?”

  “South, into Georgia, then Alabama.”

  “Alabama! Where all the trouble with the Creeks is going on?”

  “That’s right. It was the Injun trouble that sent me back to Tennessee again. I seen more than enough of what them bloody savages do to white folks. I want to see no more of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was at Fort Mims when the massacre happened. I seen it all, and I’m hellacious lucky to have come out alive.”

  “Fort Mims!” David exclaimed. “God bless us all! You were at the very massacre?”

  “Yes. I scarcely survived it. The Red Sticks came within the breadth of a hair of finding me and doing me in.”

  “Finding you? You mean you …” Words became halting as David realized the delicacy of what he was asking. “You mean you … hid yourself from them?”

  “Yes. But don’t look at me that way. It wasn’t on purpose. I fought them hard, but they struck me senseless, and somehow I wound up with some dead folks falling on top of me; their bodies hid me. I woke up lying under corpses in brains and blood; at the first I thought they was my own.”

  By now the details of the bloody attack on Fort Mims were spreading like a blaze across the country. A runner had passed through Franklin County a few days before, giving the terrible news.

  Fort Mims, created as a defensive outpost near the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, had fallen in late August after an attack by a warlike Creek faction known as the Red Sticks. Though the fort, which enclosed an acre of land, was only a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and some three hundred miles distant from the area where the Crocketts now lived, the massacre there was so horrific that it had done more than anything else so far to stir local anger and fear. The local militia was already gathering in preparation to go to war against the Creeks.

  The trouble that led to the Mims incident had a partial origin in the hostilities between the United States and Britain that had broken out in the summer of 1812. The British desired support from the Indians; the United States, of course, desired to thwart this, and Fort Mims was a potential tool toward that end. But the main cause of the Fort Mims attack had more to do with Spain than Britain. The Spanish, resisting the Louisiana Purchase of West Florida, were vending arms to the Indians through Mobile and Pensacola. In the summer, a band of soldiers had attacked Indians who were caught hauling arms and other supplies out of Pensacola. The Indians were killed in an ambush at a creek called Burnt Corn. No one doubted that retaliation would result. And so in the shadow of fear cast by Burnt Corn, Fort Mims was built.

  The fort’s primary mission was to help protect settlers in southern Alabama, including many who had intermarried and bred children with Creeks. Its walls protected not only the garrison of soldiers, but hundreds of civilian men, women, and children, some of them of mixed white and Indian blood.

  Intermarriage and peaceable coexistence with the ever-growing white population were far from the universal ideals among the southern Indians. The Creeks were feeling squeezed by steady encroachments of white settlers onto lands reserved by treaty for them—settlers such as David Crockett and family, who lived on lands that technically were still Indian territory. Such intrusions were stirring much unrest among the Indians, who were divided as to how to deal with it.

  Stirring the waters in a different way was the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who traveled among the tribes and urged unity against the encroachers. Only by working together, he said, could the Indians hope to stem the white flow. Some Creeks were inspired by Tecumseh’s words, but on the whole most were wary of the notion of unity. Indians had been fighting among themselves far longer than they had fought the white men.

  And among the Creeks, many prominent men were inclined toward peace with the whites. One such, ironically, had been William Weatherford, or Red Eagle, Cre
ek leader of the Fort Mims attack. Weatherford had made a strong but futile attempt to argue down any violent response at all to the Burnt Corn killings. After his’ arguments failed, he accepted the next best course: a symbolic attack against Fort Mims. Symbolic was all it would be, of course; the fort was far too strong to be overrun. The Creeks could attack, fire off some noisy shots, and withdraw with anger expended and political point made. Weatherford could please the firebrands among his own people, maintain his own stature and reputation, and do little damage to relationships with the whites.

  One thing Weatherford had failed to count on: the ineptitude of Fort Mims’s commanding officer.

  Fort Mims had received warning of impending trouble, had even been told to strengthen the fort in every way. Yet when Weatherford and his Creeks approached the fort, they were stunned to see the front gate standing wide open, and virtually no sign of a guard. And there, in the open gateway, stood the commander himself, looking very surprised. He rushed to the big gate and tried to close it single-handedly, but sand bunched before it and clogged its course.

  Weatherford’s eyes gaped almost as wide as the gate, amazed and horrified with the realization that in one fateful moment, control of the situation had slipped beyond his grasp. There would be far more than mere symbolism in this attack after all.

  It was going to be violent and bloody, the very scenario that he had hoped to avoid, and the irony was that there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  Chapter 31

  The Creeks, one thousand strong, attacked Fort Mims with a wild and unrestrained glee. The commander fell first at the sand-bound gate, and after that the Indians invaded the stockade unimpeded.

  Incredibly, the officers were found playing cards, blinking almost stupidly as they saw the horde of Indians falling upon them. As for the soldiers who had been declared ready for battle, many were dancing with a group of young women and girls.

  The butchery began at once, and continued for several hours. The Indians paused to plunder for a time, then burned much of the fort and resumed the killing. When it was done, nearly five hundred people were dead. About a hundred of the dead were children. Only a few score, many of them blacks, were taken prisoner.

  With his eyes fixed on the dark line of the forest, Persius recounted in a quiet, steady voice how his path had led him to Fort Mims.

  After fleeing Tennessee, he had gone into Alabama. Not by design, not for reason. His footsteps had simply carried him that way, and there he had stayed. He worked some, stole some, gambled whatever he made, however he made it. It was a fitful existence, sometimes pleasant, sometimes miserable—the life he was accustomed to.

  He was heading for Mobile before the brunt of an angered fellow gambler when he met scores fleeing for security to Fort Mims. They told him of Indian trouble and urged him to join their flight. He did so.

  At Fort Mims he gambled with the soldiers, and won more than he lost. Fate had been kind to lead him here, he came to believe. The cards were lucrative, and surely, he reasoned, the Indian troubles must not be all that severe, considering that the soldiers were openly lax and the gate usually not closed.

  Then came the attack. Early on he took a head blow from a war club, and when he came to, covered by blood and corpses, he struggled out, commandeered a free-roaming horse that had belonged to one of the officers, and rode it hard toward Tennessee. Out of sheer arbitrary choice he made for the town of Winchester, and while there was astounded to hear mention on the street of the name of David Crockett. Inquiring, he found out David had moved here, with a family, no less.

  “I knew I had to see you. I’m sorry I scared your Polly so.”

  “It appears destiny throws us together quite a lot, Persius.”

  “So it seems. Not that I believe in destiny. Whatever happens, happens. Ain’t nothing to it beyond that.”

  “Maybe so. But I’ll say one thing: if there is a destiny, it must have it in store for you and me to become Injun fighters. There’s a militia gathering up to head into Alabama to avenge Fort Mims. After the savagery you watched, I know you’ll want to be part of it even more than me.”

  Persius looked at David as if he had gone insane. “If I had wanted to fight Injuns in Alabama, I’d have stayed down there instead of coming to Tennessee, wouldn’t I?”

  David’s face went blank. Something like a bad taste burned the back of his tongue. Persius was running from a fight, a fight that David believed every capable man had a duty to take part in—especially one who had seen firsthand the carnage that had sparked the war.

  “It’s our obligation to go,” he said.

  “I don’t believe in obligation no more than I believe in destiny.”

  “You’d turn and walk away while savages kill decent white folks?”

  “Why not? Every time I’ve been among ‘decent white folks’ for any time at all, somebody’s up and wanted to shoot me or hang me for something or other.”

  David felt a surging impulse to tell Persius Tarr to climb back on his horse, ride away, and never return. Persius’s conscience-free, unapologetic freedom, so alluring and awesome to David in his childhood days, took on a different aspect now that he viewed it from the perspective of an older, more responsible man. Persius had no principles, no sense of duty.

  Only his long friendship with Persius kept David from sending him away in rebuke. Living with John Canaday had influenced David Crockett more than he knew: like Canaday, he was looking for something salvageable inside Persius. He wouldn’t give up on him just yet.

  “Persius, I want you to mull on it awhile, if you would.”

  “Mull on what?”

  “On going with me to fight the Creeks. There’s women and children who’ll die if we don’t stop the savages. Little girls. Grandmothers. Women like my Polly, and boys like my sons. You say you don’t believe in obligation, but I ain’t so foolish a fish as to bite that hook. Somewhere inside you is a soul and a conscience. Stay the night with us, think on things awhile, and in the morning you can give your word.”

  “I ain’t going to change my mind. I done seen enough dead women and children at Fort Mims. I don’t want to see no more.”

  “You’ll see plenty if the Creeks ain’t stopped. This Injun war will spread if it ain’t squelched. Don’t run off from your duty, Persius.”

  “I don’t believe in—”

  David cut him off. “Don’t say no more. Mull on it tonight. In the morning, do what you want to do. Me, I’m riding in and putting my name on the line. I aim to fight me some Creeks, before it’s my wife and children lying dead.”

  Back in the cabin, David’s boys brought out clay marbles and began a lively game before the fireplace. David watched musingly, being in a serious mood, but Persius joined in the game, making a real show of it and prompting abundant laughter from his juvenile playmates. Eventually Persius’s clowning and wry faces had David chuckling too, and then even Polly joined in. David wasn’t surprised that Persius was beginning to win her over, bad reputation or not. He had a certain charm about him that couldn’t be denied.

  After the boys were in bed, it was Persius’s turn to grow quiet and philosophical. David knew his old friend was considering the challenge put to him earlier. He dared even to hope that maybe Persius was beginning to see the reality of duty after all. It was important to David that Persius go along on the Creek campaign. Running from duty would only make Persius harder, colder, even more estranged from the society of men. And it would mark the end of Persius’s friendship with him; this was something David had already decided. He could not keep fellowship with a man who would witness such an atrocity as the Fort Mims massacre, then run away without response.

  The next morning revealed Persius in a serious but friendly mood. He smiled easily and seemed at peace. After a generous breakfast of venison, Persius motioned for David to go outside with him.

  “I’ve made up my mind to go with you,” he said.

  David was honestly surprised. He smiled and
shook Persius’s hand. “What made you change your mind?”

  “Well, two or three things. Your boys was part of it. I got to thinking how bad it would be if the Injun trouble was to spread this far … and I thought some too about what I seen at Fort Mims. A man can’t see such as that and—” His voice became choked and emotional, surprising David. Persius rarely unmasked his feelings. “I want to tell you the truth about something, Dave. I wasn’t senseless the whole time I was beneath them corpses. I came awake, and saw some of the killing with my own eyes. Women and children all around me was murdered. Them Injuns, they had no mercy about them. They … God, I hate them, hate the very souls of them! I’ll be damned to hell before I’ll run or hide from one of them again. I want to kill as many as I can, David. I want to knock the brains out of them like they did all them innocent folks at Fort Mims. Yes sir, I’ll go with your militia! I’ll go and kill every redskinned devil I can put a ball or blade into!”

  Persius had become very wrought-up. Hatred poured from him like heat from a fire. David wanted to back away from him, and for a moment wondered if the fiery, virulent, hateful Persius Tarr standing before him now really was preferable to the selfish and cowardly version of the previous day. Persius had made a transition of attitude so tremendous that David wondered if he was stable of mind.

  But there was nothing he could do but pat Persius’s shoulder and praise his change of view. After all, it was he himself who had encouraged it.

  Polly was displeased and sad when David announced that he and Persius were riding into Winchester to join the force being raised there. But she did not argue; all her arguments had been voiced before, and she would not waste her time with more of it. As for the boys, they were excited and proud, declaring they wished they were old enough to go fight Indians themselves. Polly listened to them with a very sad expression on her face.

  David and Persius rode away to Winchester, and there found a great collection of men gathering for the fight. They joined the queue and put their names on the line, though Persius used the false surname of Campbell. He was very mindful of the murder suspicion against him over in Jefferson County. Their enlistment term was for sixty days.