• Gives Birth: 1727, Maryland; Death: 1777, Tryon County [now Lincoln County], North Carolina. [2125]

• His father is probably William Crockett, b New Rochelle, NY. [2146]

• The man David [Davy Crockett] did not even know where his own father had been born, and believed it was either in Ireland or during the ocean passage to the colonies. More likely it was his grandfather, for whom he was named, who first set foot on American soil. When he came is lost among the thousands of anonymous arrivals in the generations before the Revolution, but he probably landed in Pennsylvania and migrated west to the Susquehanna before turning southwest through the Cumberland Valley along with the rest of the tide of Scottish immigrants, reaching Virginia’s lower Shenandoah Valley by 1755. The first David Crockett farmed there near Berryville, by then a married man with a new son, Robert, born there that August, and another son, John, probably already a few years old and perhaps born in Pennsylvania.
The tide of migration did not willingly yield any of the flotsam the rode its crest. The immigrants who first reached a new region took up the best land, and those like David Crockett who came after often had to keep moving until it seemingly became a habit. By 1771 he had moved his family, now including two boys in their later teens, to Tryon County, North Carolina, settling on the south side of the Catawba River. It was to be a brief stop, for by 1776 the Crocketts were over the western mountains into the valley of the Holston River. There was confusion about just which colony - North Carolina or Virginia - owned the region, and for a time the inhabitants simply governed themselves under the articles of what they called the Watauga Association. But then on July 5, 1776, aware of the revolt that had commenced the year before in Massachusetts but unaware of the momentous event of the day before in Philadelphia, David Crockett and other Wataugans petitioned the legislature of North Carolina to assume dominion and responsibility over the region. With the continent seemingly in upheaval, they sought some order, especially as the local aboriginal population launched occasiona attacks on isolated settlers. North Carolina annexed the area that same year, but, perhaps because of the hostile natives, the Crocketts moved northwest of the Holston to Carter’s Valley, another area of disputed sovereignty, and there David joined with neighbors in 1776 and again on November 6, 1777, in petitioning Virginia to annex the locality. [2119, p 10]

• He had but one last move in store, and it was the Creek or Chickamauga who sent him and his wife on their way. Already incensed at the influx of unwelcome settlers on their ancestral territory, the Indians had agreed to treaties that established definite boundaries protecting their land. But they reckoned without the rapacious appetite of settlers and the speculators, who even now saw the promise of profit on the bow wave of settlement. In an act that would be the hallmark of th epush west to the Mississippi and beyond, unscrupulous entrepreneurs ignored the existing occupants and began selling vast quantitites of Indian land to incoming settlers. The strain became intolerable, and the affronted victims struck back, often not at the speculators but at any isolated and convenient target. One day in the summer of 1778 they chose the Crockett homestead.
David and his wife were at home, along with Joseph and their youngest, James. The raid almost certainly took them by surprise. David and his older son were probably in their field tending crops, their rifles out of immediate reach. The attackers fired a ragged volley that brought Joseph down with a broken arm. His father fell either to bullets or swift tomahawk blows. James may have been with them, but he was both deaf and mute and knew little of what was happening until it was all over. His mother probably met death alone in the cabin. As quickly as they had come, the attackers left. In their idiosyncratic way, having killed the parents, they took the boy James with them and kept him for nearly eighteen years before returning him to white society. The wounded Joseph either played or looked dead or simply no longer interested the raiders, who left him behind. With him they left a memory that would become a legacy of hatred between the Crockett family and the Creek nation. [2119, p 11]