came 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.

As a day-laborer he grew up to manhood, and married a woman in his own
sphere of life, by the name of Mary Hawkins. He enlisted as a common
soldier in the Revolutionary War, and took part in the battle of King's
Mountain. At the close of the war he reared a humble cabin in the
frontier wilds of North Carolina. There he lived for a few years, at
but one remove, in point of civilization, from the savages around him.
It is not probable that either he or his wife could read or write. It
is not probable that they had any religious thoughts; that their minds
ever wandered into the regions of that mysterious immortality which
reaches out beyond the grave. Theirs was apparently purely an animal
existence, like that of the Indian, almost like that of the wild
animals they pursued in the chase.

At length, John Crockett, with his wife and three or four children,
unintimidated by the awful fate of his father's family, wandered from
North Carolina, through the long and dreary defiles of the mountains,
to the sunny valleys and the transparent skies of East Tennessee. It
was about the year 1783. Here he came to a rivulet of crystal water,
winding through majestic forests and plains of luxuriant verdure. Upon
a green mound, with this stream flowing near his door, John Crockett
built his rude and floorless hut. Punching holes in the soil with a
stick, he dropped in kernels of corn, and obtained a far richer harvest
than it would be supposed such culture could produce. As we have
mentioned, the building of this hut and the planting of this crop made
poor John Crockett the proprietor of four hundred acres of land of
almost inexhaustible fertility.

In this lonely cabin, far away in the wilderness, David Crockett was
born, on the 17th of August, 1786. He had then four brothers.
Subsequently four other children were added to the family.

His childhood's home was more humble than the majority of the readers
of this volume can imagine. It was destitute of everything which, in a
higher state of civilization, is deemed essential to comfort. The
wigwam of the Indian afforded as much protection from the weather, and
was as well furnished, as the cabin of logs and bark which sheltered
his father's family. It wou