He enlisted as a common soldier in the Revolutionary War, and took part in the battle of King's Mountain.

At the close of the war he reared a humble cabin in the frontier wilds of North Carolina.

There he lived for a few years, at but one remove, in point of civilization, from the savages around him.
It is not probable that either he or his wife could read or write.

It is not probable that they had any religious thoughts; that their minds ever wandered into the regions of that mysterious immortality which reaches out beyond the grave.

Theirs was apparently purely an animal existence, like that of the Indian, almost like that of the wild animals they pursued in the chase.
At length, John Crockett, with his wife and three or four children, unintimidated by the awful fate of his father's family, wandered from North Carolina, through the long and dreary defiles of the mountains, to the sunny valleys and the transparent skies of East Tennessee.