d 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 be