David Crockett was born in the wilds of Tennessee, August 17, 1786. He toughened rapidly, like a bear’s cub, but he showed in addition to the usual woodsman’s instincts the unusual qualities of great tenderness of feeling and generosity, with a remarkable gift of wit and love of fun. The incredible stories of his hardships at the age of twelve and thereafter we have not room to recount. In the best sense he was a tough boy. The closing scene of his home life—if a hut presided over by a drunken father, and a mother who left no impression on the boy’s character that showed itself in after years can be by any courtesy called a home—was a dissolving view of a ragged, bare-footed urchin of fourteen chased through the brush by a father with a large goad and a large load of liquor. Thus David Crockett set out upon the world for himself. With Crockett’s story as a bear-hunter, nomadic woodsman, soldier and Indian-fighter, exciting and marvelous as are these incidents of the first thirty years of his life, we shall not much concern ourselves. But I do wonder that his life-like, quaint narrative of these has not become standard juvenile literature, along with Robinson Crusoe and Mayne Reid’s stories of adventure. Through all these exciting though isolated years, the young woodsman picked up a good deal of practical knowledge, not one scrap of which he ever forgot; and withal was developing a strange quality of unpretentious self-esteem. “The idea seemed never to have entered his mind that there was any one superior to David Crockett, or any one so humble that Crockett was entitled to look down upon him with condescension. He was a genuine democrat, and all were in his view equal. And this was not the result of thought, of any political or moral principle. It was a part of his nature, like his stature or complexion. This is one of the rarest qualities to be found in any man.”[H] He also was developing oratorical powers. He acquired unbounded popularity at musters and frolics, in camp and in the chase by his fun-making qualities, his homely, kindly, keen wit. His retentive memory was an inexhaustible store-house of anecdote, and he always had an apt illustration for any point he wanted to make. He began to taste the sweet consciousness of power over his fellows, and to easily fall into the position of leadership, for which nature designed him.