Colonel Davy Crockett, recently defeated in his bid for a fourth term in the Congress of the United States, returned to one of his favorite hunting grounds–the taverns of Memphis–on November 1, 1835. He was accompanied by his teenage nephew William Patton, his brother-in-law Abner Burgin and friend Lindsy Tinkle. ‘These companions,’ Crockett had written on October 31 before departing his home, ‘will make our company–we will go through Arkinsaw and I want to explore the Texas well before I return.’

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By evening a large crowd had attached itself to Crockett, and a grand farewell tour of all of the Bluff City’s finest taverns was proposed. In the company of old friends and political allies such as Memphis Mayor Marcus Winchester, Gus Young and C.D. McLean, he made his way from the Union Hotel on Front Street to Hart’s Saloon on Market Street, the crowd growing larger and rowdier along the way. After Crockett had to intercede to prevent a fight between Hart’s bartender and Gus Young over the eternal question of cash or credit on drink purchases, Crockett’s party decided to stagger on to McCool’s Saloon next door. The happy crowd hoisted Crockett onto their shoulders, depositing him on Neil McCool’s bar counter and demanding a speech.

‘My friends,’ the colonel declared, ‘I suppose you all are aware that I was recently a candidate for Congress. I told the voters that if they would elect me I would serve them to the best of my ability; but if they did not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas. I am on my way now!’

The crowd shouted in delight–that is, all save the fastidious barkeeper, Neil McCool. The sight of Crockett in muddy boots atop his freshly oil-clothed counter was too much. In a rage, he lashed out with a club. Crockett had jumped down by then, and McCool managed only to fall over the counter into the arms of a dozen half-drunken revelers. Amid many oaths he ordered everyone out.

Crockett now advocated retiring for the night, for, while he admittedly ‘was in hunt of a fight,’ he said he ‘did not want it on this side of the Mississippi river.’ The crowd would have none of that, and they whisked their hero off to Cooper’s, on Main Street. Now Cooper only sold his liquor by the barrel or cask, but that proved scant problem for Crockett’s company. ‘It is needless to say we all got tight–I might say, yes, very tight,’ noted one eyewitness. ‘Men who never were tight before, and never have been tight since, were certainly very tight then.’

Early the next morning Crockett and his three companions walked their horses down to the ferry landing at the mouth of the Wolf River. His Memphis friends were still with him, and the group attracted the curious. Young James Davis watched the warm farewells, somewhat in awe of the noted hunter turned politician. ‘He wore that same veritable coon-skin cap and hunting shirt, bearing upon his shoulder his ever faithful rifle,’ Davis recounted. ‘No other equipment, save his shot-pouch and powder-horn, do I remember seeing.’ Crockett stepped onto the ferry-flat, and the elderly black ferryman, Limus, cast off and pushed away from the shore. Limus worked his snatch oars as the little flatboat floated lazily down the Wolf, into the Mississippi and toward the distant shore.

Despite the frivolity of his Memphis farewell, Crockett was a deeply troubled man. He had turned 49 in August, the same month of his electoral defeat. He might well have been one of the most celebrated men in America, but he was barely better off financially than when he had won his first electoral bid as militia colonel in 1818. He had always been restless, but now a new and uncharacteristic bitterness marked his temper as he cast about for new opportunities by which to rebuild his shattered fortunes. Texas was on every American tongue by 1835 as a land of grand opportunity. American settlers there were growing increasingly restless under Mexican rule that was at best incompetent and at worst despotic. Once the Mexican shackles were discarded, there would be plenty of free land for those bold enough to take it.

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