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\author{John~S.~C.~Abbot (12345X)}
\title{David Crockett: His Life and Adventures}
\date{5 March 2007}

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\maketitle

\section*{Foreword}

Please find an extract of a classic work by John.~S.~C.~Abbot below.
You can read the rest at~\cite{crockett}.


\section{Parentage and Childhood.}

The Emigrant. -- Crossing the Alleghanies. -- The boundless
Wilderness. -- The Hut on the Holston. -- Life's Necessaries. -- The
Massacre. -- Birth of David Crockett. -- Peril of the Boys. --
Anecdote. -- Removal to Greenville; to Cove Creek. -- Increased
Emigration. -- Loss of the Mill. -- The Tavern. -- Engagement with the
Drover. -- Adventures in the Wilderness. -- Virtual Captivity. -- The
Escape. -- The Return. -- The Runaway. -- New Adventures.

A LITTLE more than a hundred years ago, a poor man, by the name of
Crockett, embarked on board an emigrant-ship, in Ireland, for the New
World. He was in the humblest station in life. But very little is
known respecting his uneventful career excepting its tragical
close. His family consisted of a wife and three or four children. Just
before he sailed, or on the Atlantic passage, a son was born, to whom
he gave the name of John. The family probably landed in Philadelphia,
and dwelt somewhere in Pennsylvania, for a year or two, in one of
those slab shanties, with which all are familiar as the abodes of the
poorest class of Irish emigrants.

After a year or two, Crockett, with his little family, crossed the
almost pathless Alleghanies. Father, mother, and children trudged
along through the rugged defiles and over the rocky cliffs, on
foot. Probably a single pack-horse conveyed their few household
goods. The hatchet and the rifle were the only means of obtaining
food, shelter, and even clothing. With the hatchet, in an hour or two,
a comfortable camp could be constructed, which would protect them from
wind and rain. The camp-fire, cheering the darkness of the night,
drying their often wet garments, and warming their chilled limbs with
its genial glow, enabled them to enjoy that almost greatest of earthly
luxuries, peaceful sleep.

The rifle supplied them with food. The fattest of turkeys and the most
tender steaks of venison, roasted upon forked sticks, which they held
in their hands over the coals, feasted their voracious
appetites. This, to them, was almost sumptuous food. The skin of the
deer, by a rapid and simple process of tanning, supplied them with
moccasons, and afforded material for the repair of their tattered
garments.

We can scarcely comprehend the motive which led this solitary family
to push on, league after league, farther and farther from
civilization, through the trackless forests. At length they reached
the Holston River. This stream takes its rise among the western
ravines of the Alleghanies, in Southwestern Virginia. Flowing hundreds
of miles through one of the most solitary and romantic regions upon
the globe, it finally unites with the Clinch River, thus forming the
majestic Tennessee.

One hundred years ago, this whole region, west of the Alleghanies, was
an unexplored and an unknown wilderness. Its silent rivers, its
forests, and its prairies were crowded with game. Countless Indian
tribes, whose names even had never been heard east of the Alleghanies,
ranged this vast expanse, pursuing, in the chase, wild beasts scarcely
more savage than themselves.

The origin of these Indian tribes and their past history are lost in
oblivion. Centuries have come and gone, during which joys and griefs,
of which we now can know nothing, visited their humble
lodges. Providence seems to have raised up a peculiar class of men,
among the descendants of the emigrants from the Old World, who, weary
of the restraints of civilization, were ever ready to plunge into the
wildest depths of the wilderness, and to rear their lonely huts in the
midst of all its perils, privations, and hardships.

This solitary family of the Crocketts followed down the northwestern
banks of the Hawkins River for many a weary mile, until they came to a
spot which struck their fancy as a suitable place to build their
Cabin. In subsequent years a small village called Rogersville was
gradually reared upon this spot, and the territory immediately around
was organized into what is now known as Hawkins County. But then, for
leagues in every direction, the solemn forest stood in all its
grandeur. Here Mr. Crockett, alone and unaided save by his wife and
children, constructed a little shanty, which could have been but
little more than a hunter's camp. He could not lift solid logs to
build a substantial house. The hard-trodden ground was the only floor
of the single room which he enclosed. It was roofed with bark of trees
piled heavily on, which afforded quite effectual protection from the
rain. A hole cut through the slender logs was the only window. A fire
was built in one corner, and the smoke eddied through a hole left in
the roof. The skins of bears, buffaloes, and wolves provided couches,
all sufficient for weary ones, who needed no artificial opiate to
promote sleep. Such, in general, were the primitive homes of many of
those bold emigrants who abandoned the comforts of civilized life for
the solitudes of the wilderness.

They did not want for most of what are called the necessaries of
life. The river and the forest furnished a great variety of fish and
game. Their hut, humble as it was, effectually protected them from the
deluging tempest and the inclement cold. The climate was genial in a
very high degree, and the soil, in its wonderful fertility, abundantly
supplied them with corn and other simple vegetables. But the silence
and solitude which reigned are represented, by those who experienced
them, as at times something dreadful.

One principal motive which led these people to cross the mountains,
was the prospect of an ultimate fortune in the rise of land. Every man
who built a cabin and raised a crop of grain, however small, was
entitled to four hundred acres of land, and a preemption right to one
thousand more adjoining, to be secured by a land-office warrant.

In this lonely home, Mr. Crockett, with his wife and children, dwelt
for some months, perhaps years -- we know not how long. One night, the
awful yell of the savage was heard, and a band of human demons came
rushing upon the defenceless family. Imagination cannot paint the
tragedy which ensued. Though this lost world, ever since the fall of
Adam, has been filled to repletion with these scenes of woe, it causes
one's blood to curdle in his veins as he contemplates this one deed of
cruelty and blood.

The howling fiends were expeditious in their work. The father and
mother were pierced by arrows, mangled with the tomahawk, and
scalped. One son, severely wounded, escaped into the forest. Another
little boy, who was deaf and dumb, was taken captive and carried by
the Indians to their distant tribe, where he remained, adopted into
the tribe, for about eighteen years. He was then discovered by some of
his relatives, and was purchased back at a considerable ransom. The
torch was applied to the cabin, and the bodies of the dead were
consumed in the crackling flames.

What became of the remainder of the children, if there were any others
present in this midnight scene of conflagration and blood, we know
not. There was no reporter to give us the details. We simply know that
in some way John Crockett, who subsequently became the father of that
David whose history we now write, was not involved in the general
massacre. It is probable that he was not then with the family, but
that he was a hired boy of all work in some farmer's family in
Pennsylvania.

\ldots

\begin{thebibliography}{99}
\bibitem{crockett}
John~S.~C.~Abbot (1874) {\it David Crockett: His Life and Adventures.} 
Available from Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, at
{\tt http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/AbbCroc.html}
\end{thebibliography}


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