no how; so I showed them to Peleg Longfellow, who has a first-rate reputation with us for that sort of writing, having some years ago made a carrier’s address for the Nashville Banner; and Peleg lopped of some lines, and stretched out others; but I wish I may be shot if I don’t rather think he has made it worse than it was when I placed it in his hands.  It being my first, and, no doubt, last piece of poetry, I will print it in this place, as it will serve to express my feelings on leaving my home, my neighbors, and friends and country, for a strange land, as fully as I could in plain prose.

“Farewell to the mountains whose mazes to me
Were more beautiful far than Eden could be;
No fruit was forbidden, but Nature had spread
Her bountiful board, and her children were fed. 
The hills were our garners—­our herds wildly grew
And Nature was shepherd and husbandman too. 
I felt like a monarch, yet thought like a man,
As I thanked the Great Giver, and worshipped his plan.

“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.

“Farewell to my country!  I fought for thee well,
When the savage rushed forth like the demons from hell
In peace or in war I have stood by thy side—­
My country, for thee I have lived, would have died! 
But I am cast off, my career now is run,
And I wander abroad like the prodigal son—­
Where the wild savage roves, and the broad prairies spread,
The fallen—­despised—­will again go ahead.”

A party of American adventurers, then called filibusters, had gone into Texas, in the endeavor to wrest that immense and beautiful territory, larger than the whole Empire of France, from feeble, distracted, miserable Mexico, to which it belonged.  These filibusters were generally the most worthless and desperate vagabonds to be found in all the Southern States.  Many Southern gentlemen of wealth and ability, but strong advocates of slavery, were in cordial sympathy with this movement, and aided it with their purses, and in many other ways.  It was thought that if Texas could be wrested from Mexico and annexed to the United States, it might be divided into several slaveholding States, and thus check the rapidly increasing preponderance of the free States of the North.

To join in this enterprise, Crockett now left his home, his wife, his children.  There could be no doubt of the eventual success of the undertaking.  And in that success Crockett saw visions of political glory opening before him.  I determined, he said, “to quit the States until such time as honest and independent men should again work their way to the head of the heap.  And as I should probably have some idle time on hand before that state of affairs would be brought about, I promised to give the Texans a helping hand on the high road to freedom.”