working for a good Quaker neighbor. The boy asked permission to work two
days a week, just to pay his board, and spend the other days in school.
Young Crockett learned “the three R’s--Readin’, ’Ritin’,
’Rithmetic”--well enough to do the simple business of pioneer life.
Davy’s highest ambition was to own a horse and a gun. When he had a
rifle and a pony he thought he was old enough to marry a girl of
seventeen. He seems not to have thought much about having a home of his
own. The boy bridegroom took possession of a deserted log cabin. The
bride’s father gave them a cow, and the good Quaker lent the young
couple fifteen dollars to start housekeeping. Davy Crockett wrote, after
they had bought many fine things with that fifteen dollars, “We were
then fixed up pretty grand, so we thought.”
After three years the young Crocketts owned, besides the horse and gun,
two cows, two calves, two colts and two children. But now that he had a
home of his own, the young hunter was too restless to stay in it. When
that region became so thickly settled that neighbors lived within a mile
or two of one another, the nervous young pioneer moved hundreds of
miles, to a newer country where he could find “elbow room.” His devoted
wife took their little children and went with him to the rougher region
among Indians, bears, and other wild animals.
Davy Crockett found friends wherever he went. He was happy-hearted and
full of funny stories. He had a humorous way of saying things that
pleased those rough-and-ready western people. His homely yarns had a
meaning deeper than the surface, like those told twenty years later by
a young man named Abe Lincoln. Crockett’s backwoods stories and western
slang were quoted all over the country. He told of “treeing a coon”
once, and of how, as he was about to shoot, the raccoon exclaimed,
“Don’t shoot, I’ll come right down. I know I’m a gone coon!” “I’ll come
right down” and “I’m a gone coon” became popular expressions everywhere.
Crockett became a great hunter. He killed all the bears in the country
around him and had exciting times hunting big game wherever he lived. He
was wise and sensible in helping and advising his neighbors. The people
in that pioneer country elected David Crockett a justice of the peace.
They did not care whether he knew much about common law so long as he
was possessed of common sense.
When the Creeks and other Indians in the southern states went on the
warpath and murdered hundreds of people, General Jackson, the great man
of Tennessee, led thousands of white men to kill all the Indians known
to have taken part in that massacre, just as he would have tried to rid
the country of dangerous bears or snakes. When Davy Crockett got the
word he told his patient little wife, “I’m going to help fight the
Indians.”
“Oh, Davy,” she exclaimed, “what will become of us--hundreds of miles
from all my friends? The Indians will come and kill us while you are
away.”
But Davy Crockett could not stay. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “My country
needs me, and if we don’t fight and kill the Indians they will come and
kill us all, that’s sure.”
Even when fighting in General Jackson’s army, Davy Crockett was “a law
unto himself.” The officers decided to let him do as he liked, for he
seemed to wish to do the right thing by them all. He would be missing
for hours, and then come back with some game, big or little, to feast
the company. Food was very scarce on the long march. When they got to
fighting the Indians, Crockett knew exactly what to do. His aim was as
sure then as it was when hunting bear or deer. Many a time when a big
brave had his tomahawk raised to kill a fallen white man, the savage
suddenly dropped dead where he stood. The astonished soldier would rise,
look around, and mutter, “Davy Crockett must be somewhere around.”
Davy’s bear-hunting, sharpshooting, and Indian fighting were so
remarkable that his life was a strong proof of the saying, “Truth is
stranger than fiction.”
After General Jackson had put all the hostile savages out of the way and
made it safe to live in those western states, the people were so
grateful to Davy Crockett for his part in it that they put him up for
election to Congress. Rival candidates, who felt much more fitted to go
to Washington, made all manner of fun of Davy Crockett, and said the
people ought to be ashamed to send a man like that to represent them in
Congress. But the people said, “Davy Crockett ain’t much on
book-l’arnin’ an’ spoutin’ poetry, but neither are we. He knows our life
and just what we want. He ain’t much of a lawyer, but he’s got good
sense, an’ he can represent us better’n a dozen lawyers.”
Those people knew what they were doing. Though Davy Crockett did not
know much about books, he was not ignorant, for he was well-educated in
the real life of that western frontier. So the people elected him three
times to Congress, and he came to be loved and admired there for his
homely wisdom and his quaint way of making others understand just what
he meant. While he was a member of Congress he traveled up and down the
eastern states. Wherever he went he was cheered and feasted. In
Philadelphia, the home of American independence, the people presented
him with a beautiful rifle and a hunting-knife and tomahawk of razor
steel. He told the people he would love and cherish that rifle as he
would a daughter. Then and there he named the gun “Betsy.”
While he was away in Congress and the east, Crockett’s enemies worked
against him, and he was defeated in the fourth election. The boyish
longing for home came over him then, and he wrote:
“In a short time I set out for my own home; yes, my own home, my
own soil, and my own humble dwelling; my own family, my own hearts,
my own ocean of love and affection which nothing else nor time can
dry up. Here, like the wearied bird, let me settle down for a while
and shut out the world.”
Yet, much as Davy Crockett loved his home, he loved his country more.
With this spirit he had also such reckless love of adventure that he
could not bear to live at ease when his country needed him.
The American settlers were having terrible times down in Texas.
Thousands of Americans in that country were struggling with the
Mexicans, to decide who should control and own the Texas territory.
General Santa Anna, the President of Mexico, had sent thousands of
soldiers into that region, captured a brave little army of Americans,
and, when these had been disarmed, coolly shot them down as if they had
been cattle in a slaughter-house.
All these things were more than Davy Crockett’s flesh and blood could
bear. In his opinion “such cattle as those Mexicans” should be treated
like bears or murderous Indians. Armed with “Betsy,” his new rifle, “to
use if need be for his country’s glory,” he was ready to leave for
Texas. He was now fifty-four years old, but his heart was young. When
his friends tried to convince him that the trouble in Texas was no
affair of his, Crockett replied that the news from those struggling
heroes down there wrung his heart. “Sorrow will make even an oyster feel
poetical,” and Davy left behind him a farewell poem, of which this is a
small part:
“The home I forsake where my offspring arose;
The graves I forsake where my children repose;
The home I redeemed from the savage and wild;
The home I have loved as a father his child;
The corn that I planted, the fields that I cleared,
The flocks that I raised, and the cabin I reared;
The wife of my bosom--Farewell to ye all!
In the land of the stranger I rise or I fall.”
When Davy Crockett arrived at San Antonio, Colonel Travis, the commander
of the Americans, had turned an old Spanish mission called the Alamo
into a fort. Santa Anna was near at hand with a large army to capture
the one hundred and eighty men who were waiting in the Alamo.
It would have made the hearts of that brave garrison glad if they could
have looked into the future far enough to see that General Sam Houston
would soon come there and drive the Mexicans out of the country; and
that with the war-cry, “Remember the Alamo!” American soldiers would
free Texas from Mexico’s cruel rule, and finally add the vast territory
of Texas, New Mexico, and California to the United States. But they only
knew that Santa Anna was near with five thousand Mexican soldiers and
that there was no hope of relief.
When Santa Anna and his army had arrived and surrounded the flimsy
Spanish convent-fort, he called on Colonel Travis to surrender. The
American answer was a cannon-shot. Then the Mexicans raised a red flag
as a signal that “no quarter” would be given; that is, that no American
could expect anything but death at their hands.
Then the battle began. The walls of the Alamo were not strong, for the
convent was not built for a fort. Yet it took that great Mexican army
eleven days to capture it. Among the Americans were thirteen backwoods
hunters like David Crockett and Colonel James Bowie, the inventor of the
famous Bowie knife then much used in frontier fighting. Bowie was ill,
but he fought like a hero, as did each of the others, to sell his life
as dearly as possible. On the last day Colonel Travis offered to let the
few men who were left go out with a white flag and ask the Mexicans to
spare their lives, but not a man would go.
At last the walls of their frail fortress were battered down and four
thousand Mexicans came rushing in. They found Crockett with only five
men left--their backs to the wall fighting to the bitter end. It is said
that Crockett was the last to fall. When beset by too many Mexicans to
reload and fire “Betsy,” he took his gun by the barrel and clubbed
several Mexicans to death before they shot him down.
The Alamo fell on the 6th of March, 1836.
When they found the journal Davy Crockett had kept during the fight,
they read his last words in it, written late the night before:
“March 5. Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom!--throughout the day. No
time for memorandums now. Go ahead! Liberty and independence
forever!”
FAMOUS INVENTORS
HOW ELI WHITNEY MADE COTTON KING
Eli Whitney began to make things when he was a small boy. He was called
a genius because he was so ingenious. But he was not satisfied with
doing things with his hands. He had a strong desire to make the most of
his mind. So he went to Yale College and studied philosophy. One day the
professor said he could not show a certain method to the class because
the machine he kept for the purpose was broken. He could not teach that
lesson until a new apparatus could be brought from England or France.
But the ingenious student looked at the machine, and said, “Let me fix
it.” The professor thought it could do no harm to let him try. Eli made
the fine machine work just as well as it did when it was new.
One of the bravest officers in the Revolutionary War, which ended a few
years before this time, was General Nathanael Greene. After the war
General Greene lived on a beautiful estate near Savannah, Georgia, and
died there. When young Whitney finished his college course, he was
engaged to teach a school in Savannah; but when he went down there he
found that the school was not what he expected. So he acted as tutor in
the family of General Greene’s widow.
While he was tutor, Whitney made playthings for the children, and fixed
many handy things for Mrs. Greene to use about the house. She told him
he ought to make a machine that would take the seeds out of the bolls,
or fluffy heads, of the cotton plant. Great machines had been contrived
for spinning and weaving cotton, but it took a man or a woman all day to
pick the seeds out of a pound of cotton wool.
[Illustration: ELI WHITNEY, INVENTOR OF THE COTTON GIN.]
Eli Whitney went to work to make something that would do what in those
days seemed impossible. He not only had to invent a cotton-gin, as the
new machine was called, but he was obliged to make tools for making the
machine itself, and even tools for making the other tools. But within a
short time he had invented and built a machine which worked quite well.
Still he was not satisfied. He locked himself up in a room and worked
day and night until he had built a perfect cotton-gin which would work
very fast and would clear out all the fine cotton seeds. This was in
1793, while Washington was President, and Philadelphia was the capital
of the United States.
Whitney would not let any one but Mrs. Greene and a friend named Miller
see the model, or pattern, of his cotton-gin until he could take out a
patent for it. But before he could get money enough to have his gin
patented, someone broke into his little shop and carried off his
precious model.
Then the poor inventor had to begin again and make another machine, to
prove to the officials in the Patent Office that the cotton-gin was his
invention, before they could make out for him the patent right, which
said he was the only person allowed to make and sell that machine in the
United States. Before he could get this patent he found that others were
making, selling, and trying to get a patent for machines made like the
stolen pattern.
[Illustration: WHITNEY’S FIRST COTTON GIN.]
Young Whitney’s friend Miller furnished him money, not only to secure
his patent rights and make the machines, but to go into the courts and
fight those who were trying to steal his rights as they had stolen his
model. These people made him so much trouble and expense that it took
thirteen years to beat them by lawsuits. A patent protected an inventor,
by keeping others from making and selling that machine, for only
fourteen years. When his rivals were beaten, Whitney had but one year
left in which he and his friends could sell the machine so as to pay for
all his time, labor, and expense. In that year he just made his
cotton-gin pay for itself. But he had the great satisfaction of making
the land in the southern states known as the cotton belt (because cotton
could be grown in those states) worth hundreds of millions of dollars
more than before. The raising of cotton grew to be such a great industry
that negro slavery became more and more necessary in the cotton-growing
states. So, without knowing it, Eli Whitney, by increasing the
production of cotton, increased the number of black slaves in the south,
and helped to cause the struggle for and against slavery, many years
later. But as the inventor did not know that his cotton-gin would make
slavery a curse to the United States, he was not to blame.
After his patent had run out and he could make no more money by selling
his cotton-gins, Whitney got a government contract for the making of
guns. He invented new machinery to make the parts of his guns and was
the first to have each part made by a different man according to an
exact pattern. When the parts were put together to make a complete gun
no special fitting was necessary because each piece was exactly like
every other piece for that same part. If a part of the gun was broken it
could be replaced with a new one without any difficulty. Before that
when one man made an entire gun all the parts were specially fitted and
if one got broken a new one had to be made and fitted by hand, which
took a long time and made repairs very expensive. His factories and the
homes of his workmen formed a suburb of New Haven called Whitneyville.
Eli Whitney furnished hundreds of thousands of men with the weapons they
used in putting down the slavery which his cotton-gin had been made the
innocent cause of increasing.
“FULTON’S FOLLY”
Robert Fulton was a Pennsylvania boy. His father, a Quaker, died when
Robert was a baby. His mother was a beautiful Irish lady, whose mind was
as lovely as her face. She taught little Robert, and he knew much that
was worth while before he began to go to school at the age of eight
years.
In those days school teachers were often strict and harsh with young
children. Parents seemed to think their children would not learn fast
unless they were whipped or beaten with a ruler. Though little Robert
was not a bad boy in school, he sometimes seemed to be idle because he
was thinking of something else. So his strict Quaker teacher punished
him one day by striking his hands with a ferule. Robert’s boyish sense
of fairness rose up within him, and he exclaimed, “I came here, sir, to
have something beaten into my _head_--not my _hands_!”
[Illustration: ROBERT FULTON, INVENTOR OF THE STEAMBOAT.]
One of the pupils brought some artist’s brushes and paints to school,
and Robert, who already showed real talent for drawing, was allowed to
use them. He made such fine pictures that the other boy gave him the
paints. This was the beginning of young Fulton’s career as a painter.
But Robert was not content with painting pictures. He was always trying
to make things, or to find ways of doing things more easily.
Robert was eleven when the American colonies went into the War for
Independence. During this war, when candles were scarce, people were
warned not to waste them in lighting up for the Fourth of July. It was
to be a saving rather than a safe and sane holiday. The Fulton boy made
up his mind to celebrate the day. So he got some gunpowder and
pasteboard and made little tubes with a stick pointing out at one end of
each. The neighbors were astonished on the night of the Fourth of July
to see these tubes, one after another, go whizzing up in the sky,
leaving a trail of sparks behind them. They said to one another, “That
Fulton boy’s a genius!” Robert had made the first skyrockets these
Americans had ever seen.
Robert Fulton afterward became acquainted with Dr. Benjamin Franklin and
learned much from the kind old inventor. When Fulton was a young man he
went to London and studied painting with Benjamin West, the greatest
American painter up to that time. He went also to France to study art.
Meantime he kept on inventing things. The French were at war with many
of the countries of Europe at that time. Fulton had always been
interested in boats; and we have seen that he knew how to use gunpowder.
He planned a new kind of boat, which he thought would help the French in
their war. It was a submarine, and was provided with torpedoes which
could be shot under water. They would have pierced the wooden sides of
the best ships built in those days. Fulton’s diving boat was shown to
the French minister of war, but the government experts could not
understand its great value in war and refused to make use of it in the
war. Shortly after, a British officer remarked that Napoleon’s loss of
Fulton’s diving boat was the most important event of the century.
Napoleon, who was then emperor of the French, wrote to one of his own
advisers:
“I have just received the project of Citizen Fulton, which you have
sent me too late--since it may change the face of the world!”
But, harmful as Fulton’s submarine might have proven to Napoleon’s
enemies, the chance which Napoleon missed was not important compared
with the results of Robert Fulton’s next invention.
Robert Fulton had, as a lad, gone fishing with some neighbors on a
flatboat in the river. This craft they had to push along with poles,
which was very slow, hard work. Bob began at once to try to fix
something which would make the boat go faster and more easily. He
arranged paddles at the stern which worked quite well. Then he improved
this by making paddle wheels. After that he attached the wheels to an
engine. He went on working with engines and wheels until at last, while
he was in Paris, he succeeded in building a boat with a steam-engine to
make it go. He tried it on the River Seine, which flows through Paris.
The boat did go a little; but the engine was too heavy, and the watching
crowds saw Fulton’s queer boat sink to the bottom.
After he returned to America, Fulton went on improving his steamboat
until he had built one which he thought would run up the Hudson River
from New York City to Albany. He named this odd-looking craft the
_Clermont_, and invited a few of his friends to make the trial trip. A
great crowd came down to the wharf in New York City to have a little fun
watching “Fulton’s Folly,” as they called the steamboat. People laughed
at the idea that a heavy iron engine could make a boat go anywhere but
to the bottom.
Even Fulton’s friends, waiting on the deck of the queer-looking vessel,
felt foolish and looked anxious. The boat, however, started off, and the
people on the shore began to cheer. Out in the river it stopped like a
balky horse, and the cheers were turned to jeers. Fulton looked
hurriedly at the engine, found out what was the trouble, and soon fixed
it. Then the boat went puffing away up the river against the current at
the rate of six miles an hour, and the friends on deck thought they were
going very fast, as there were no railroads then and this was faster
than a sailboat could go. Fulton kept on improving his boats so that
within a few years there were steamboats on other rivers of the country.
Within a century “ocean greyhounds” were racing across the Atlantic, and
“superdreadnoughts,” the largest battleships, were being built for the
great navies of the world. Submarines were used by many nations in the
World War, but their invention, important as it was, could not well be
called the greatest event of the century. It was the sailing of
“Fulton’s Folly” which might have been said to change the face of the
world, because it was the first step on the way to the wonderful
steamships of to-day.
Just as that ingenious little boy tried to help his friends by making
their flatboat run faster so Robert Fulton, as a man, had made the
people of the world richer, happier, and better for all the ages to
come.
[Illustration: THE “CLERMONT,” FULTON’S FIRST STEAMBOAT.]
HOW MORSE SENT LETTERS BY LIGHTNING
Into the family of Doctor Morse, a much respected minister living on the
side of the hill on which the battle of Bunker Hill was fought, there
came a little baby boy. They named him Samuel Finley for his
great-grandfather, a president of Princeton College. To this was added
Breese, the maiden name of the boy’s mother. When this baby grew up, he
was known all over the world as S. F. B. Morse.
This Morse boy had the best kind of schooling at home. His father was a
teacher as well as a preacher, and wrote the Morse geographies which
were used in the schools of that day. Finley, as he was called at home,
showed real talent as a boy for drawing and painting. One of his first
pictures showed the Morse family around a table, with the father
teaching them from a large globe showing all the countries of the world.
Finley Morse was sent to Yale College, where he was much interested in
science and philosophy. But he kept at his drawing and coloring, and
became a successful painter. That was years before any one knew how to
take photographs; so Mr. Morse painted a great many portraits and did
such good work that he received high prices for them. Believing that the
artists of America could help one another, he influenced some of them to
organize the National Academy of the Arts of Design, and they elected
him their first president. When Lafayette, who had been a young officer
on General Washington’s staff nearly fifty years before, came to America
again as an old man, the people of America wished to have the best
portrait that could be painted of the Frenchman who had helped the
Americans in the War
[Illustration: S. F. B. MORSE, INVENTOR OF THE TELEGRAPH.]
for Independence. Finley Morse was chosen to paint this picture of
General Lafayette.
While Mr. Morse was in Washington at work on this picture, he received
word from his home in New Haven that his young wife had died suddenly of
heart disease. Before he could receive the letter she was buried. People
in those days traveled by stage-coach, and it took at least a week for a
letter to go from Boston to Washington. When the sorrowing father went
home to arrange for the care of his three motherless children, he spoke
of the slowness of sending word from place to place, and said he hoped
the time would come when news could be sent long distances in an
instant. But of course he had no idea then that he would have anything
to do with bringing that blessing to mankind.