“As my country no longer requires my services,” he writes, “I have made up my mind to leave it.” Expressing his determination forthwith to leave Tennessee and to start for the distant land of Texas, he says, “I have a new row to hoe, a long and rough one; but I will go ahead.” He adds as quaintly as ever, “I told my constituents they might all go to hell, and I would go to Texas.” We come now to the third and closing stage of the life of David Crockett, and in order to understand it we must bear in mind the nature of the opinions then current concerning the new land that to the Southerners of that time was “The Great West,” the land beyond the Mississippi. Texas, a magnificent realm eight hundred and twenty-five by seven hundred and forty-five miles in extent, already had an American population of nearly forty thousand; and of all wild populations ever gathered together at any place or time of the world, this was perhaps the wildest and the most indomitable. There was hardly a soul within the borders of that great land who was not a fighting man and who had not come to take his fighting chance. It was fate that Davy Crockett should drift into this far Southwest and take his chances also. As to the chances of it, they were not so bad. It was almost sure that Texas would ultimately be won from Mexico. In 1813 an expedition of Americans had fought Spain and killed some hundreds of Spaniards, on the strength of the general claim that the territory of Louisiana extended westward as far as the Rio Grande, and not merely to the neighborhood of the Sabine River, as was claimed by Spain. The latter river was in 1819 generally accepted as the boundary line, but this fact did not serve to stop the Americans. In 1823 Stephen A. Austin was settling his Mexican grant with his new colony. These families drew after them the inevitable train of relatives and friends, so that the great River Road to the South and Southwest soon began to be pressed by the feet of many pilgrims. In 1821 Lafitte made his rough settlement at Galveston, and the pirates of Lafitte were no worse than the average Texas population of that time. There were no schools, no courts, no law. One writer states that he sat at breakfast with eleven men, each of whom had pending against him in another state a charge of murder. Then originated the etiquette of the wild West that demanded that no one should inquire into his neighbor’s past, nor ask his earlier name.