Like many another pioneer of the American wilderness, Andrew Jackson found the task too hard. He died under the strain. The impression which his famous son had as to the immediate cause of his death was that he ruptured a blood vessel in the handling of a heavy log.
The body of the hero who had fallen in the fight for his wife and little ones--the fight to make a home for them in the wilderness--was buried in the graveyard of the Waxhaw Settlement church. In after years, when efforts were made to identify the spot it could not be done.
According to local tradition, there was held at the cabin-home of the dead man the grewsome “wake” which was customary among the Irish in the Old Country. Relatives from the Waxhaw settlement came out to Jackson’s “clearing,” when they learned that he was no more; and, after preparing the body for burial, their grief gradually wore itself out, and the whiskey-jug became the ruling factor of the occasion. As lamentation gave place to revelry, it is said that “the corpse came in for his share of the refreshments.” What this may mean, each reader shall judge for himself.
The same tradition claims that the body was hauled from the cabin to the graveyard upon a rough wooden frame or sled, and that such was the disorder of the journey that the corpse was jolted off the sled and “tumbled on its face in a little bottom,” on the banks of Waxhaw Creek, near the crossing.
The man who was riding the horse, which was hitched to the sled, had not known that he had lost his load until one of the funeral party in advance, happening to look back, saw “the sled bouncing up and down, in a very light way.”
They had to go back miles before they came to the spot where the body had rolled off the sled.
The numerous biographers of Andrew Jackson have shunned this local tradition as something entirely too horrible to put in print; yet books are only valuable to the extent that they tell the truth. The story is useful as an illustration of the extreme roughness of frontier conditions at that time; the poverty of the Jacksons, and the rude simplicity of border funerals.
The immigrant had gone into the unbroken wilderness to build his log cabin; and apparently there was no wagon road from his “clearing” to the Waxhaw Settlement.