All the staves were gone, and the men were cold. Crockett was lucky he didn’t drown.Įveryone clung to a pile of driftwood. Both boats tipped over, and all the men were thrown overboard. The rafts crashed into a large tree that was stuck in the river. For a while, Crockett began to think they could make it all the way to New Orleans. Somehow they made it through a turn in the river known as the Devil’s Elbow. “The people would run out with lights, and try to get us to shore, but all in vain,” Crockett wrote in his autobiography.īut there was no use. People waved lanterns, trying to yell instructions on how to stop. They didn’t know what town it was, but they knew it was a town. They floated all night in the dark, huge river, with no idea what was in front of them. One night Crockett and his men tried to steer to the shore. Crockett had his men tie the rafts together. They had no idea how to control their rafts, steer their rafts or even stop their rafts. From the moment the two flatboats floated out onto the “mighty Mississip,” they felt like they were on a fast-moving ocean. When they hit the big river, now that was a different story. The only thing Crockett and his men had to do was use big sticks and the rudders to keep the rafts in the middle of the river. The river was high, and the current moved quickly. It was around March of 1826 when Crockett’s two rafts, loaded down with wooden staves, shoved off and headed down the Obion. And within a few months his hired hands had chopped 30,000 staves! In any case, Crockett brought in a lot of bear meat. Crockett was constantly pulling his dogs out of the cracks, and he had to be careful that he didn’t fall into one and never be heard from again. That’s why people called that part of Tennessee “the land of the shakes.” Because of these earthquakes, there were big open cracks in the earth. You see, there had been a lot of big earthquakes a few years earlier. This was his favorite thing to do, and he was a great hunter. While all the men were chopping down trees, Crockett was hunting with his dogs. He also promised to feed them all the bear meat they could eat while they worked. He couldn’t afford to pay them then, so he promised to pay them later, after he’d sold the staves. From there they would float downstream to New Orleans and sell the staves.Ĭrockett hired some men to help him chop down trees and cut them into staves and make the log rafts. They would then get on the rafts and steer them down the Obion River to where it meets the Mississippi River. They would stack the staves all nice and neat and put them on two huge log rafts. He and some other men would chop down trees and cut them up into pieces called staves. That was the hard part.Ĭrockett came up with a plan to make money. Even the wheels on horse carriages were made of wood.Īll you had to do was get the wood to a town, where the factories were located. Whiskey was shipped in big wooden barrels. But such was the life of Betsy Crockett.Ī lot more things were made of wood back then than there are today. His wife didn’t like it when he wandered off and wasn’t heard from for a week. His favorite thing to do was to hunt, sometimes for a few hours and sometimes for a few days. In 1825, David Crockett lived in a cabin in West Tennessee in what is now Gibson County.
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