Davy Crockett

Davy Crockett Library of Congress David Crockett, frontiersman, Tennessee legislator and U.S. congressman, folk hero, and icon of popular culture, was an intriguing composite of history and myth. Both the historical figure who died at the Alamo and the legendary hero kept alive in the media of his day and ours, Crockett partly invented his own myth. History melted even more easily into legend as eager writers, editors, and producers provided an omnivorous public with an increasing number of remarkable tales about the heroic frontiersman and turned the flesh-and-blood David into the legendary Davy. Born on August 17, 1786, in Greene County in East Tennessee, Crockett grew up with the new nation and helped it grow. He lived in Tennessee for all but the last few months of his life and promoted the gradual westward expansion of the frontier through Tennessee toward Texas. In his search for a better life for himself and his family, he participated in a process that we now call the American dream. David was the son of John Crockett, magistrate, unsuccessful land speculator, and tavern owner, and Rebecca Hawkins Crockett. Preferring to play hooky rather than attend school, he ran away from home to escape his father's wrath. His "strategic withdrawal," as he called it, lasted about thirty months. When he returned home in 1802, he had grown so much that initially his family did not recognize him. He soon found all forgiven and reciprocated their generosity by working for a year to settle his father's debts. David married Mary “Polly” Finley on August 14, 1806, in Jefferson County. They remained in East Tennessee until 1811, when the Crockett’s and their two sons, John Wesley and William, settled in Lincoln County. In 1813 they moved again, this time to Franklin County, where Crockett twice enlisted as a volunteer in the Indian wars from 1813 to 1815; following the wars, he was elected a lieutenant in the Thirty-second Militia Regiment of Franklin County. Soon after his discharge, Polly gave birth to Margaret, their third child; Polly died that summer. A year later, he married Elizabeth Patton, a widow with two children. The family moved to Lawrence County in the fall of 1817. Although he served as a justice of the peace, Lawrenceburg town commissioner, and colonel of the Fifty-seventh Militia Regiment of Lawrence County, Crockett was relatively unknown before his 1821 election to the Tennessee legislature, representing Lawrence and Hickman Counties. Reelected in 1823, but defeated in 1825, he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from his new West Tennessee residence in 1827. He campaigned as an honest country boy and an extraordinary hunter and marksman--someone who was in every sense a “straight shooter.” Reelected to a second term in 1829, he split with President Andrew Jackson and the Tennessee delegation headed by James K. Polk on several important issues including land reform and the Indian removal bill. Crockett was defeated in 1831, when he openly and vehemently opposed Jackson's policies, but was reelected in 1833. Notoriety gave Crockett's image a life of its own. By 1831 Crockett had become the model for Nimrod Wildfire, the hero of James Kirke Paulding's play, The Lion of the West, as well as the subject of numerous books and articles. In fact, Crockett claimed he was compelled to publish his 1834 autobiography A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee , which he wrote with the help of Thomas Chilton, to counteract the outlandish stories printed in Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. Crockett, of West Tennessee a year earlier. He clearly recognized the power of his popular image and sought to manipulate it for political gain. Anonymous eastern hack writers took up the more outrageous stories and spun out tall tale yarns for the Crockett Almanacs (1835-56). In their hands, the fictional Davy became a backwoods screamer. With the death of the historical Crockett at the Alamo in 1836, the floodgates opened for the full-blown expansion of the legend. Crockett could not only “run faster, -jump higher, - squat lower, -dive deeper, -stay under longer, -and come out drier, than any man in the whole country,” but he could save the world by unfreezing the sun and the earth from their axes and ride his pet alligator up Niagara Falls. Touted by the Whigs as the candidate to oppose Jackson's hand-picked successor Martin Van Buren in the 1836 election, Crockett was defeated in his 1835 congressional bid with the help of Jackson and Governor William Carroll. The election of Adam Huntsman, a peg-legged lawyer, temporarily disenchanted Crockett with politics and his constituents, prompting him to make the now-famous remark: “Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” His last letters spoke of his confidence that Texas would allow him to rejuvenate his political career and finally make his fortune. He intended to become land agent for the territory and saw the future of an independent Texas as intertwined with his own. On November 1, 1835, with William Patton, Abner Burgin, and Lindsey K. Tinkle, he set out to the West, as he wrote on the eve of his departure, “to explore the Texes well before I return.” At this point he had no intention of joining the fight for Texas independence. Their route was down the Mississippi River to the Arkansas and then up that river to Little Rock; overland to Fulton, Arkansas, and up the Red River along the northern boundary of Texas; across the Red River, through Clarksville, to Nacogdoches and San Augustine; and on to San Antonio. At San Augustine the party evidently divided. Burgin and Tinkle went home; Crockett and Patton signed the oath of allegiance, but only after Crockett insisted upon the insertion of the word “republican” in the document. They thus swore their allegiance to the “Provisional Government of Texas or any future republican Government that may be hereafter declared.” Crockett had balked at the possibility that he would be obliged to support some future government that might prove despotic. That Texas had changed his plans was indisputable. His last extant letter, written on January 9, 1836, was quite clear: I must say as to what I have seen of Texas it is the garden spot of the world. The best land and the best prospects for health I ever saw, and I do believe it is a fortune to any man to come here. There is a world of country here to settle. I have taken the oath of government and have enrolled my name as a volunteer and will set out for the Rio Grand in a few days with the volunteers from the United States. But all volunteers is entitled to vote for a member of the convention or to be voted for, and I have but little doubt of being elected a member to form a constitution for this province. I am rejoiced at my fate. I had rather be in my present situation than to be elected to a seat in Congress for life. I am in hopes of making a fortune yet for myself and family, bad as my prospect has been. Stone engraving of David Crockett, 1834. Tennessee State Library and Archives Government service in Texas would rejuvenate his political career and, as he stated elsewhere, provide the source of the affluence he had unsuccessfully sought all his life. He intended to become land agent for the new territory. Crockett and his men joined Colonel William B. Travis at San Antonio De Bexar in early February 1836. Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna arrived on February 20 and laid siege to the Alamo. The siege of thirteen days ended on March 6, 1836, when Mexican troops overran the Alamo at about six o'clock in the morning. Crockett died in battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. The manner of his death was uncertain, however, until the publication in 1975 of the diary of Lt. José Enrique de la Peña. Susanna Dickinson, wife of Almaron Dickinson, an officer at the Alamo, said Crockett died on the outside, one of the earliest to fall. Joe, Travis's slave and the only male Texan to survive the battle, reported seeing Crockett lying dead with slain Mexicans around him and stated that only one man, named Warner, surrendered to the Mexicans (Warner was taken to Santa Anna and promptly shot). When Peña's eyewitness account was placed together with other corroborating documents, Crockett's central part in the defense became clear. Travis had previously written that during the first bombardment Crockett was everywhere in the Alamo “animating the men to do their duty.” Other reports told of the deadly fire of his rifle that killed five Mexican gunners in succession, as they each attempted to fire a cannon bearing on the fort, and that he may have just missed Santa Anna, who thought himself out of range of all the defenders' rifles. Crockett and five or six others were captured when the Mexican troops took the Alamo at about six o'clock that morning, even though Santa Anna had ordered that no prisoners be taken. The general, infuriated when some of his officers brought the Americans before him to try to intercede for their lives, ordered them executed immediately. They were bayoneted and then shot. Crockett's reputation and that of the other survivors was not, as some have suggested, sullied by their capture.

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