He dressed himself in a new deerskin hunting-shirt, put on a foxskin cap with the tail hanging behind, shouldered his famous rifle, and cruelly leaving in the dreary cabin his wife and children whom he cherished with an “ocean of love and affection,” set out on foot upon his perilous adventure.  A days’ journey through the forest brought him to the Mississippi River.  Here he took a steamer down that majestic stream to the mouth of the Arkansas River, which rolls its vast flood from regions then quite unexplored in the far West.  The stream was navigable fourteen hundred miles from its mouth.

Arkansas was then but a Territory, two hundred and forty miles long and two hundred and twenty-eight broad.  The sparsely scattered population of the Territory amounted to but about thirty thousand.  Following up the windings of the river three hundred miles, one came to a cluster of a few straggling huts, called Little Rock, which constitutes now the capital of the State.

Crockett ascended the river in the steamer, and, unencumbered with baggage, save his rifle, hastened to a tavern which he saw at a little distance from the shore, around which there was assembled quite a crowd of men.  He had been so accustomed to public triumphs that he supposed that they had assembled in honor of his arrival.  “Strange as it may seem,” he says, “they took no more notice of me than if I had been Dick Johnson, the wool-grower.  This took me somewhat aback;” and he inquired what was the meaning of the gathering.

He found that the people had been called together to witness the feats of a celebrated juggler and gambler.  The name of Colonel Crockett had gone through the nation; and gradually it became noised abroad that Colonel Crockett was in the crowd.  “I wish I may be shot,” Crockett says, “if I wasn’t looked upon as almost as great a sight as Punch and Judy.”

He was invited to a public dinner that very day.  As it took some time to cook the dinner, the whole company went to a little distance to shoot at a mark.  All had heard of Crockett’s skill.  After several of the best sharpshooters had fired, with remarkable accuracy, it came to Crockett’s turn.  Assuming an air of great carelessness, he raised his beautiful rifle, which he called Betsey, to his shoulder, fired, and it so happened that the bullet struck exactly in the centre of the bull’s-eye.  All were astonished, and so was Crockett himself.  But with an air of much indifference he turned upon his heel, saying, “There’s no mistake in Betsey.”

One of the best marksmen in those parts, chagrined at being so beaten, said, “Colonel, that must have been a chance shot.”

“I can do it,” Crockett replied, “five times out of six, any day in the week.”

“I knew,” he adds, in his autobiography, “it was not altogether as correct as it might be; but when a man sets about going the big figure, halfway measures won’t answer no how.”

It was now proposed that there should be a second trial.  Crockett was very reluctant to consent to this, for he had nothing to gain, and everything to lose.  But they insisted so vehemently that he had to yield.  As what ensued does not redound much to his credit, we will let him tell the story in his own language.