Poor Davy spent two years in these wanderings, and was fifteen years old when all at once he again dawned upon the paternal grounds in eastern Tennessee. These two years had been spent in considerable physical discomfort and anguish of spirit, and the journey home was accomplished only after many dangers and difficulties. Crockett admits that at this time he did not know the letters of the alphabet. His father, shiftless as ever, had been lavish with his promissory notes. He offered Davy his “freedom” if he would work six months for a neighbor to whom he had given a note for forty dollars. Davy generously did so, and capped it off by working another six months and taking up another one of his father’s notes, for thirty-six dollars. This last he was not obliged to do, yet in spite of these bitter surroundings, there had flowered in the young savage’s heart a certain feeling of family honor. Now all at once the boy backwoodsman became conscious of his own infirmities. He went to school six months, the only schooling he ever had in his life. He learned to write his name, to spell to some extent, to perform a few simple sums in arithmetic. Twice blighted in love at eighteen years of age, he married a pretty little Irish girl, a daughter of a neighboring family. “I know’d I would get her,” says he, “if no one else did before next Thursday.” Crockett was married in his moccasins, leggings and hunting shirt. His bride was dressed in linsey-woolsey. There was no jewelry. The table on which the wedding feast was spread was made of a single slab. The platters were of wood, the spoons of pewter and of horn. In his own abode, as he first entered it, there was no bed and not a chair, a knife or a fork. Yet, after the expenditure of fifteen dollars, which he borrowed, Crockett and his wife “fixed the place up pretty grand,” and found it good enough for them for some years. Here two boys were born to them. At the ripe age of twenty years, that is to say in the year 1806, Crockett considered it necessary for the betterment of his fortunes that he should remove farther toward the West, this having been the universal practice of his kind. He journeyed for four hundred miles through the Western wilderness, taking his family and household goods with him. Their transportation, as we are advised, consisted of one old horse and two colts. These animals were packed with the household goods. In the wild journey down the Holston the family, children and all, camped out, enduring the weather as best they might. At last they came to a halt on Mulberry Creek, in Lincoln County, in what they took to be the Promised Land. The soil was generously rich, game and fish were abundant, the climate was all that could be asked. Crockett built him a cabin, and here he lived for two years, much as he had lived in eastern Tennessee. Then, in the easy fashion of the time, he moved once more, this time settling in Franklin County, on Bear Creek, still in the wilderness.