In his 1834 narrative, David Crockett recalled a childhood incident on the river when his brothers and a boy named Campbell left him on shore and took his father's canoe onto the water. Near a fall in the river, Campbell refused to let the younger boys paddle and mishandled the canoe until it drifted stern first toward the drop. A man named Kendall, working in a field on the bank, saw the danger, ran to the water, plunged in, and reached the canoe when it was only twenty or thirty feet from the falls. Despite the swift current and strong pull of the water, he stopped the canoe and drew it out of danger, saving the boys from what Crockett believed could have wiped out half the Crockett children. Around the time Crockett was born in the late eighteenth century, forty-five percent of children on the American frontier did not live beyond age five.