DAVY CROCKETT HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1786

David Crockett was born in Tennessee.1

1. The movie “The Alamo,” perhaps to associate him more closely with the firearm known as “the Kentucky squirrel rifle,” would suggest that he had been born in Kentucky. REMEMBERING THE ALAMO HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1821

David Crockett was elected to the Tennessee legislature.

(He was on his way to being elected to the national Congress in 1827, on the basis, mostly, of a real gift for publicity.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1825

What had once been a nice 5-acre pond, “The Collect,” about which New-Yorkers had congregated for summer pic-nics and winter ice-skating, had by this point become a slum, and the worst of our nation. It was being referred to as “Five Points” because it was near the complex intersection of Baxter, Park, and Worth. It was under the control of gangs denominated, in the public press, the “Dead Rabbits” and the “Plug Uglies,” the thugs of which could travel underneath the tenements by means of secret tunnels. The “Old Brewery” tenement, which slept more than 1,000 persons in its 95 rooms, would average a murder per night for the next 15 years. Commenting on the Scorsese movie “Gangs of New York”: “In my own research of New York history, through first-person accounts and newspaper reports, I have found that our past was often at least as violent and squalid, if not more so, than the movie depicts.” — Kevin Baker

Charles Dickens, one of the notables who would go slumming there,2 would write:

Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points.... Where dogs would howl ... men and women and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.... All that is loathesome, drooping and decayed is here.

John Whitehead, a New-York deliveryman, began selling off parcels of his farm higher up on Manhattan Island to black New-Yorkers. A trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church who was earning his living as a common laborer, Epiphany Davis, either on his own initiative or for his church, purchased twelve of the lots in what would come to be known as “Seneca Village” for $578. A 25-year-old “shoe shine boy” named Andrew Williams purchased three lots for $125.00 and by 1832 his little farm would have been subdivided into more than 24 land parcels owned by black citizens. Due primarily to segregation, of the 100 black voters in New-York in 1845, 1 in 10 would live in Seneca Village, and of the 71 black property owners in New- York as of 1850, 1 in 5 would own their property there. The first stage in ethnic cleansing would therefore seem to be the segregation of the ethnics who are later to be cleansed. The second state of this ethnic-

2. Other notables who would go slumming there would include a Russian grand duke, Davy Crockett, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Abraham Lincoln. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT cleansing effort would be that this is the area which would be targeted for demolition by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1857 when they set out to create a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the real citizens of New-York. You can visit this Seneca Village area near the West 85th Street entrance to the present Central Park, where a spring now trickles picturesquely through picturesque rolling hills covered with picturesque white oaks.

In the course of creating these hills and this spring in 1871, and installing these trees, decomposed bodies would be dug up.3

Brillat-Savarin’s PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE described “Edward,” a sumptuary monster he had encountered in

3. And, may one presume, discarded? —The record which remains does not state. According to Roy Rosenzweig’s and Elizabeth Blackmar’s THE PARK AND THE PEOPLE (NY: Henry Holt, 1994), no historical village of the Senecas ever has been situated anywhere near this site — so that is not going to provide us with an explanation for the name. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT America during the mid-1790s on display in a tavern window on Broadway Avenue in New-York: Edward was at least six feet four in height, and as his fat had puffed him out in every direction, he was almost nine feet round the waist. His fingers were like those of the Roman emperor who used his wife s bracelets as rings; his arms and his thighs were tubular, and as thick as the waist of a man of ordinary stature, and he had feet like an elephant, covered with the thick fat of his legs. The weight of fat kept down his lower eyelids and made them gape; but what was hideous to behold were three round chins hanging on his breast, and more than a foot long, so that his face appeared to be the capital of a truncated column. Thus Edward passed his life, sitting at a window on the ground floor looking out on the street, drinking from time to time a glass of ale, of which a pitcher of huge capacity stood always near him. So extraordinary an appearance could scarcely fail to arrest the attention of the passers-by; but they had to take care not to stop too long, as Edward quickly put them to flight by saying to them in a sepulchral voice: “What are you staring at like wild cats? Go your way, you lazy bodies! Begone, you good-for- nothing dogs!” and other similar amenities. (MED. XXI) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1828

There is an 1828 speech entitled “Not Yours to Give,” by Tennessee Congressman David Crockett (1786- 1836, Congress 1827-1831), currently being quoted by libertarians and conservatives, that appears to be utterly spurious. The story is that under the influence of constituent Horatio Bunce, Congressman Crockett delivered this speech to Congress condemning public relief as inconsistent with the Constitution. Crockett was a darling of the Whigs (and their successors) after turning against Andrew Jackson in 1829-1830, splitting with Jackson over land reform and Indian removal among other issues, and even after his death he was used as a cats-paw to attack the Democrats. Crockett mythologized himself during his lifetime as frontiersman, and it is now difficult to separate any truth out of what has been put on the record from this political/popular media creation he enabled. This speech was first alleged in the January 1867 issue of Harper’s Magazine, as “Davy Crockett’s Electioneering Tour,” by a “James J. Bethune” (this was a nom de plume employed by Edward S. Ellis, 1840- 1916. This “Bethune” published another piece in Harper’s Magazine, “Walter Colquitt of Georgia,” also about a wonderful speech which was had not been recorded except in his own later reconstruction. He was most well known for his dime novel DEERHUNTER and other Wild West tales.) Although Edward S. Ellis also alleged that Bunce’s opposition to Crockett had originated in a vote Crockett made in favor of relief for victims of a fire in Georgetown, that fire had occurred not in Georgetown but in Alexandria and the vote in question had occurred on January 19, 1827 before Crockett had become a congressman. Edward S. Ellis positioned his 1867 “Bethune” article in his 1884 edition of THE LIFE OF COLONEL DAVI D CROCKETT although he had not included it in his original 1861 book about Crockett. We note that Ellis could not himself have been present at this unrecorded speech because it had been allegedly delivered some 12 years before his own birth. According to Gale and Seaton’s REGISTER OF DEBATES FOR THE HOUSE ON APRIL 1, 1828, although there had been a debate about whether to award funds to a Widow Brown after which Crockett had requested a roll-call vote and voted against that appropriation, this person had been the widow of a general rather than of a naval officer and Crockett had been absent during the discussion. Contrary to what the “Bethune” article in Harper’s Magazine asserted, this bill passed not only in the House but also in the Senate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1830

January 22, Friday: In the federal House of Representatives, Congressman David Crockett raised a class issue in regard to the military academy at West Point: “I want to know if it has been managed for the benefit of the noble and wealthy of the country, or for the poor and orphan.” It was his consideration that the graduates of this academy were “too delicate” to be real American macho men — like for one fine example he himself.

January 29, Friday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 29 of 1st M 1830 / This Morning the remains of our Schollar Timothy Gifford were removed from hence homeward: - His father accompanied by his neighbour & friend Isaac Lawrence & Ellis Gifford to drive the herse set out Wm Jenkins with the myself in a Chaise followed by teachers & large Schollars went as far as Moses Brown’s Bridge where we parted with them, leaving them to go a solitary & Mournful journey of 36 Miles the weather was very cold. The Thermometer standing when they set out at 5 above 0 - this with other circumstances have made them much the companions of my mind thro’ the day - as we returned from the Bridge Wm Jenkins & I stoped at Moses Browns & took breakfast with him. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

The initial issue of the Southern Times came out in Columbia, South Carolina, with James Henry Hammond writing: “We are opposed to internal improvements. We are opposed to the Tariff in every shape, and upon every ground.”

Congressman David Crockett’s committee introduced its bill giving squatters on public lands an entitlement to purchase, cheaply, land they had improved.

Frederick Llewellyn Hovey Willis was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Eleanor Hovey Willis and Lorenzo Dow Willis (the father prospered as a merchant until a partner absconded with the firm’s cash — wherewith he was clapped in debtors’ prison).

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

May 24, Monday: By a vote of 102 over 97, the federal Congress approved the Indian Removal bill. David Crockett, along with many northeasterners, had spoken strenuously against this bill. Congressman Crockett’s speech, however, would be “inexplicably left out of the Register of Debates.”

Work had proceeded apace on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Rail cars drawn by horses could make it all the way from the city of Baltimore to the town of Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland, which was 13 miles to the west of that city. This was the 1st public railroad in the United States, but it most definitely was not a “choo-choo.” The railroad company was hiring its horses from the local stagecoach companies and a horse could pull a “wagon” (their term for a railroad car) over the tracks only for about 6 or 7 miles before some employee needed to provide it with water, feed, and rest. The company calculated that this mode of locomotion was costing them $33.00 per day per “brigade” (“brigade” was their term for what we now know as a “train” of cars). They looked at the situation, and they looked at the number of rest stops and livery stables they would need to install between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ohio River, and they shook their collective heads and went “Hey, this isn’t going to work, it just isn’t going to work.”

David Crockett “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1831

January 31, Monday: Congressman Crockett started a fight in the US House of Representatives over which committee of the House would be the proper one to receive a petition that had been sent in by three Cherokees, that they be granted 640-acre land tracts.

DAVY CROCKETT

Gaetano Donizetti left Milan for Rome. He would find his destination city in turmoil.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 31 of 1 M / Today our friends Edw & Elizabeth Wing arrived at the Institution after a very hard travel in Snow & cold - to attend Quarterly Meeting & the Meetings of the School committee we were glad to see them & feel their devotion to the cause. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT February 13, Sunday: Gioachino Rossini conducted a production of Il barbiere di Siviglia before King Ferdinando and the Spanish court in Madrid, and became the toast of the court.

David Crockett wrote to a constituent: “Thare will be an explosion take place this week that will Tare their party into sunder Mr. Calhoun is coming out with a circular or a publication of the correspondence between him & the President that will blow their little Red Fox or aleaus Martin van buren into atoms.” Crockett’s optimism mirrored Calhoun’s hopes of exposing Van Buren as a Machiavellian, who had orchestrated all his troubles.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 13 of 2 M / Silent in the Morng - In the Afternoon Wm Almy was here & had good service RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

February 28, Monday: The Paris Opera was privatized through a leasehold agreement with the entrepreneur Louis-Desire Veron, who has no previous theater experience. The director would be watched over by a government-appointed Commission de Surveillance.

Congressman David Crockett, by this point an overt anti-Jackson man, made a speech and sent a circular letter accusing the federal government of mistreating the native Americans, pointing out that after having been urged to become farmers like the white man and having done so, they were being told that they needed to relocate to the far side of the Mississippi — and again become hunter/gatherers. CHEROKEE NATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1834

David Crockett published his autobiography of frontier life, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF DAVI D CROCKETT OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE:

Bear Hunting in Tennessee But the reader, I expect, would have no objection to know a little about my employment during the two years while my competitor was in Congress. In this space I had some pretty tuff times, and will relate some few things that happened to me. So here goes, as the boy said when he run by himself. In the fall of 1825, I concluded I would build two large boats, and load them with pipe staves for market. So I went down to the lake, which was about twenty-five miles from where I lived, and hired some hands to assist me, and went to work; some at boat building, and others to getting staves. I worked on with my hands till the bears got fat, and then I turned out to hunting, to lay in a supply of meat. I soon killed and salted down as many as were necessary for my family; but about this time one of my old neighbours, who had settled down on the lake about twenty-five miles from me, came to my house and told me he wanted me to go down and kill some bears about in his parts. He said they were extremely fat, and very plenty. I know’d that when they were fat, they were easily taken, for a fat bear can’t run fast or long. But I asked a bear no favours, no way, further than civility, for I now had eight large dogs, and as fierce as painters; so that a bear stood no chance at all to get away from them. So I went home with him, and then went on down towards the Mississippi, and commenced hunting. We were out two weeks, and in that time killed fifteen bears. Having now supplied my friend with plenty of meat, I engaged occasionally again with my hands in our boat building and getting staves. But I at length couldn’t stand it any longer without another hunt. So I concluded to take my little son, and cross over the lake, and take a hunt there. We got over, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT that evening turned out and killed three bears, in little or no time. The next morning we drove up four forks, and made a sort of scaffold, on which we salted up our meat, so as to have it out of the reach of the wolves, for as soon as we would leave our camp, they would take possession. We had just eat our breakfast, when a company of hunters came to our camp, who had fourteen dogs, but all so poor, that when they would bark they would almost have to lean up against a tree and take a rest. I told them their dogs couldn’t run in smell of a bear, and they had better stay at my camp, and feed them on the bones I had cut out of my meat. I left them there, and cut out; but I hadn’t gone far, when my dogs took a first-rate start after a very large fat old he-bear, which run right plump towards my camp. I pursued on, but my other hunters had heard my dogs coming, and met them, and killed the bear before I got up with him. I gave him to them, and cut out again for a creek called Big Clover, which wa’n’t very far off. Just as I got there, and was entering a cane brake, my dogs all broke and went ahead, and, in a little time, they raised a fuss in the cane, and seemed to be going every way. I listened a while, and found my dogs was in two companies, and that both was in a snorting fight. I sent my little son to one, and I broke for ttother. I got to mine first, and found my dogs had a two-year-old bear down, a-wooling away on him; so I just took out my big butcher, and went up and slap’d it into him, and killed him without shooting. There was five of the dogs in my company. In a short time, I heard my little son fire at his bear; when I went to him he had killed it too. He had two dogs in his team. Just at this moment we heard my other dog barking a short distance off, and all the rest immediately broke to him. We pushed on too, and when we got there, we found he had still a larger bear than either of them we had killed, treed by himself. We killed that one also, which made three we had killed in less than half an hour. We turned in and butchered them, and then started to hunt for water, and a good place to camp. But we had no sooner started, than our dogs took a start after another one, and away they went like a thunder-gust, and was out of hearing in a minute. We followed the way they had gone for some time, but at length we gave up the hope of finding them, and turned back. As we were going back, I came to where a poor fellow was grubbing, and he looked like the very picture of hard times. I asked him what he was doing away there in the woods by himself? He said he was grubbing for a man who intended to settle there; and the reason why he did it was, that he had no meat for his family, and he was working for a little. I was mighty sorry for the poor fellow, for it was not only a hard, but a very slow way to get meat for a hungry family; so I told him if he would go with me, I would give him more meat than he could get by grubbing in a month. I intended to supply him with meat, and also to get him to assist my little boy in packing in and salting up my bears. He had never seen a bear killed in his life. I told him I had six killed then, and my dogs were hard after another. He went off to his little cabin, which was a short distance in the brush, and his wife was very anxious he should go with me. So we started and went to where I had left my three bears, and made a camp. We then gathered my meat and salted, and scuffled it, as I had done the other. Night now came on, but no word from my dogs yet. I afterwards found they had treed the bear about five miles off, near to a HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT man’s house, and had barked at it the whole enduring night. Poor fellows! many a time they looked for me, and wondered why I didn’t come, for they knowed there was no mistake in me, and I know i they were as good as ever fluttered. In the morning, as soon as it was light enough to see, the man took his gun and went to them, and shot the bear, and killed it. My dogs, however, wouldn’t have anything to say to this stranger; so they left him, and came early in the morning back to me. We got our breakfast, and cut out again; and we killed four large and very fat bears that day. We hunted out the week, and in that time we killed seventeen, all of them first-rate. When we closed our hunt, I gave the man over a thousand weight of fine fat bear- meat, which pleased him mightily, and made him feel as rich as a Jew. I saw him the next fall, and he told me he had plenty of meat to do him the whole year from his week’s hunt. My son and me now went home. This was the week between Christmas and New- year that we made this hunt. When I got home, one of my neighbours was out of meat, and wanted me to go back, and let him go with me, to take another hunt. I couldn’t refuse; but I told him I was afraid the bear had taken to house by that time, for after they get very fat in the fall and early part of the winter, they go into their holes, in large hollow trees, or into hollow logs, or their cane-houses, or the hurricanes; and lie there till spring, like frozen snakes. And one thing about this will seem mighty strange to many people. From about the first of January to about the last of April, these varments lie in their holes altogether. In all that time they have no food to eat; and yet when they come out, they are not an ounce lighter than when they went to house. I don’t know the cause of this, and still I know it is a fact; and I leave it for others who have more learning than myself to account for it. They have not a particle of food with them, but they just lie and suck the bottom of their paw all the time. I have killed many of them in their trees, which enables me to speak positively on this subject. However, my neighbour, whose name was McDaniel, and my little son and me, went on down to the lake to my second camp, where I had killed my seventeen bears the week before, and turned out to hunting. But we hunted hard all day without getting a single start. We had carried but little provisions with us, and the next morning was entirely out of meat. I sent my son about three miles off, to the house of an old friend, to get some. The old gentleman was much pleased to hear I was hunting in those parts, for the year before the bears had killed a great many of his hags. He was that day killing his bacon hogs, and so he gave my son some meat, and sent word to me that I must come in to his house that evening that he would have plenty of feed for my dogs, and some accommodations for ourselves; but before my son got back, we had gone out hunting, and in a large cane brake my dogs found a big bear in a cane-house, which he had fixed for his winter-quarters, as they some. times do. When my lead dog found him, and raised the yell, all the rest broke to him, but none of them entered his house until we got up. I encouraged my dogs, and they knowed me so well, that I could have made them seize the old serpent himself, with all his horns and heads, and cloven foot and ugliness into the bargain, if he would only have come to light, so that they could have seen him. They bulged in, and in an instant the bear followed them out, and I told my friend to shoot him, as he was mighty HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT wrathy to kill a bear. He did so, and killed him prime. We carried him to our camp, by which time my son had returned; and after we got our dinners we packed up, and cut for the house of my old friend, whose name was Davidson. We got there, and staid with him that night; and the next morning having salted up our meat, we left it with him, and started to take a hunt between the Obion lake and the Red-foot lake; as there had been a dreadful hurricane, which passed between them, and I was sure there must be a heap of bears in the fallen timber. We had gone about five miles without seeing any sign at all; but at length we got on some high cony ridges, and, as we rode along, I saw a hole in a large black oak, and on examining more closely, I discovered that a bear had clomb the tree. I could see his tracks going up, but none coming down, and so I was sure he was in there. A person who is acquainted with bear- hunting, can tell easy enough when the varment is in the hollow; for as they go up they don’t slip a bit, but as they come down they make long scratches with their nails. My friend was a little ahead of me, but I called him back, and told him there was a bear in that tree, and I must have him out. So we lit from our horses, and I found a small tree which I thought I could fall so as to lodge against my bear tree, and we fell to work chopping it with our tomahawks. I intended, when we lodged the tree against the other, to let my little son go up, and look into the hole, for he could climb like a squirrel. We had chop’d on a little time and stop’d to rest, when I heard my dogs barking mighty severe at some distance from us, and I told my friend I knowed they had a bear, for it is the nature of a dog, when he finds you are hunting bears, to hunt for nothing else; he becomes fond of the meat, and considers other game as “not worth a notice,” as old Johnson said of the devil. We concluded to leave our tree a bit, and went to my dogs, and when we got there, sure enough they had an eternal great big fat bear up a tree, just ready for shooting. My friend again petitioned me for liberty to shoot this one also. I had a little rather not, as the bear was so big, but I couldn’t refuse; and so he blazed away, and down came the old fellow like some great log had fell. I now missed one of my dogs, the same that I before spoke of as having treed the bear by himself sometime before, when I had started the three in the cane break. I told my friend that my missing dog had a bear somewhere, just as sure as fate; so I left them to butcher the one we had just killed, and I went up on a piece of high ground to listen for my dog. I heard him barking with all his might some distance off, and I pushed ahead for him. My other dogs hearing him broke to him, and when I got there, sure enough again he had another bear ready treed; if he hadn’t, I wish I may be shot. I fired on him, and brought him down; and then went back, and help’d finish butchering the one at which I had left my friend. We then packed both to our tree where we had left my boy. By this time, the little fellow had cut the tree down that we intended to lodge, but it fell the wrong way; he had then feather’d in on the big tree, to cut that, and had found that it was nothing but a shell on the outside, and all doted in the middle, as too many of our big men are in these days, having only an outside appearance. My friend and my son cut away on it, and I went off about a hundred yards with my dogs to keep them from running under the tree when it should fall. On looking back at the hole, I saw the HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT bear’s head out of it, looking down at them as they were cutting. I hollered to them to look up, and they did so; and McDaniel catched up his gun, but by this time the bear was out, and coming down the tree. He fired at it, and as soon as it touch’d ground the dogs were all round it, and they had a roll-and-tumble fight to the fact of the hill, where they stop’d him. I ran up, and putting my gun against the bear, fired and killed him. We now had three, and so we made our scaffold and salted them up. In the morning I left my son at the camp, and we started on towards The harricane; and when we had went about a mile, we started a very large bear, but we got along mighty slow on account of the cracks in the earth occasioned by the earthquakes. We, however, made out to keep in hearing of the dogs for about three miles, and then we came to the harricane. Here we had to quit our horses, as old Nick himself couldn’t have got through it without sneaking it along in the form that he put on, to make a fool of our old grandmother Eve. By this time several of my dogs had got tired and come back; but we went ahead on fact for some little time in the hurricane, when we met a bear coming straight to us, and not more than twenty or thirty yards off. I started my tired dogs after him, and McDaniel pursued them, and I went on to where my other dogs were. I had seen the track of the bear they were after, and I knowed he was a screamer. I followed on to about the middle of the harricane; but my dogs pursued him so close, that they made him climb an old stump about twenty feet high. I got in shooting distance of him and fired, but I was all over in such a flutter from fatigue and running, that I couldn’t hold steady; but, however, I broke his shoulder, and he fell. I run up and loaded my gun as quick as possible, and shot him again and killed him. When I went to take out my knife to butcher him, I found I had lost it in coming through the harricane. The vines and briars was so thick that I would sometimes have to get down and crawl like a varment to get through at all; and a vine had, as I supposed, caught in the handle and pulled it out. While I was standing and studying what to do my friend came to me. He had followed my trail through the harricane, and had found my knife, which was mighty good news to me; as a hunter hates the worst in the world to lose a good dog, or any part of his hunting-tools. I now left McDaniel to butcher the bear, and I went after our horses, and brought them as near as the nature of case would allow. I then took our bags, and went back to where he was; and when we had skin’d the bear, we fleeced off the fat and carried it to our horses at several loads. We then packed it up on our horses, and had a heavy pack of it on each one. We now started and went on till about sunset, when I concluded we must be near our camp; so I hollered and my son answered me, and we moved on in the direction to the camp. We had gone but a little way when I heard my dogs make a warm start again; and I jumped down from my horse and gave him up to my friend, and told him I would follow them. He went on to the camp, and I went ahead after my dogs with all my might for a considerable distance, till at last night came on. The woods were very rough and hilly, and all covered over with cane. I now was compel’d to move on more slowly; and was frequently falling over logs, and into the cracks made by the earthquakes, so that I was very much afraid I would break my gun. However I went on about three miles, when I came to a good big creek, which I waded. It was very cold, and the creek was about knee-deep; HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT but I felt no great inconvenience from it just then, as I was all over wet with sweat from running, and I felt hot enough. After I got over this creek and out of the cane, which was very thick on all our creeks, I listened for my dogs. I found they had either treed or brought the bear to a stop, as they continued barking in the same place. I pushed on as near in the direction to the noise as I could, till I found the hill was too steep for me to climb, and so I backed and went down the creek some distance till I came to a hollow, and then took up that, till I come to a place where I could climb up the hill. It was mighty dark, and was difficult to see my way or anything else. When I got up the hill, I found I had passed the dogs; and so I turned and went to them. I found, when I got there, they had treed the bear in a large forked poplar, and it was setting in the fork. I could see the lump, but not plain enough to shoot with any certainty, as there was no moonlight; and so I set in to hunting for some dry brush to make me a light; but I could find none, though I could find that the ground was torn mightily to pieces by the cracks. At last I thought I could shoot by guess, and kill him; so I pointed as near the lump as I could, and fired away. But the bear didn’t come, he only clomb up higher, and got out on a limb, which helped me to see him better. I now loaded up again and fired, but this time he didn’t move at all. I commenced loading for a third fire, but the first thing I knowed, the bear was down among my dogs, and they were fighting all around me. I had my big butcher in my belt, and I had a pair of dressed buckskin breeches on. So I took out my knife, and stood, determined, if he should get hold of me, to defend myself in the best way I could. I stood there for some time, and could now and then see a white dog I had, but the rest of them, and the bear, which were dark coloured, I couldn’t see at all, it was so miserable dark. They still fought around me, and sometimes within three feet of me; but, at last, the bear got down into one of the cracks, that the earthquakes had made in the ground, about four feet deep, and I could tell the biting end of him by the hollering of my dogs. So I took my gun and pushed the muzzle of it about, till I thought I had it against the main part of his body, and fired; but it happened to be only the fleshy part of his foreleg. With this, he jumped out of the crack, and he and the dogs had another hard fight around me, as before. At last, however, they forced him back into the crack again, as he was when I had shot. I had laid down my gun in the dark, and I now began to hunt for it; and, while hunting, I got hold of a pole, and I concluded I would punch him awhile with that. I did so, and when I would punch him, the dogs would jump in on him, when he would bite them badly, and they would jump out again. I concluded, as he would take punching so patiently, it might be that he would lie still enough for me to get down in the crack, and feel slowly along till I could find the right place to give him a dig with my butcher. So I got down, and my dogs got in before him and kept his head towards them, till I got along easily up to him; and placing my hand on his rump, felt for his shoulder, just behind which I intended to stick him. I made a lounge with my long knife, and fortunately stock him right through the heart; at which he just sank down, and I crawled out in a hurry. In a little time my dogs all come out too, and seemed satisfied, which HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT was the way they always had of telling me that they had finished him. I suffered very much that night with cold, as my leather breeches, and every thing else I had on, was wet and frozen. But I managed to get my bear out of this crack after several hard trials, and so I butchered him, and laid down to try to sleep. But my fire was very bad, and I couldn’t find any thing that would burn well to make it any better; and I concluded I should freeze, if I didn’t warm myself in some way by exercise. So I got up, and hollered a while, and then I would just jump up and down with all my might, and throw myself into all sorts of motions. But all this wouldn’t do; for my blood was now getting cold, and the chills coming all over me. I was so tired, too, that I could hardly walk; but I thought I would do the best I could to save my life, and then, if I died, nobody would be to blame. So I went to a tree about two feet through, and not a limb on it for thirty feet, and I would climb up it to the limbs, and then lock my arms together around it, and slide down to the bottom again. This would make the insides of my legs and arms feel mighty warm and good. I continued this till daylight in the morning, and how often I clomb up my tree and slid down I don’t know, but I reckon at least a hundred times. In the morning I got my bear hong up so as to be safe, and then set out to hunt for my camp. I found it after a while, and McDaniel and my son were very much rejoiced to see me get back, for they were about to give me up for lost. We got our breakfasts, and then secured our meat by building a high scaffold, and covering it over. We had no fear of its spoiling, for the weather was so cold that it couldn’t. We now started after my other bear, which had caused me so much trouble and suffering; and before we got him, we got a start after another, and took him also. We went on to the creek I had crossed the night before and camped, and then went to where my bear was, that I had killed in the crack. When we examined the place, McDaniel said he wouldn’t have gone into it, as I did, for all the bears in the woods. We took the meat down to our camp and salted it, and also the last one we had killed; intending, in the morning, to make a hunt in the harricane again. We prepared for resting that night, and I can assure the reader I was in need of it. We had laid down by our fire, and about ten o’clock there came a most terrible earthquake, which shook the earth so, that we were rocked about like we had been in a cradle. We were very much alarmed; for though we were accustomed to feel earthquakes, we were now right in the region which had been torn to pieces by them in 1812, and we thought it might take a notion and swallow us up, like the big fish did Jonah. In the morning we packed up and moved to the harricane, where we made another camp, and turned out that evening and killed a very large bear, which made eight we had now killed in this hunt. The next morning we entered the harricane again, and in little or no time my dogs were in full cry. We pursued them, and soon came to a thick cane brake, in which they had stop’d their bear. We got up close to him, as the cane was so thick that we couldn’t see more than a few feet. Here I made my friend hold the cane a little open with his gun till I shot the bear, which was a mighty large one. I killed him dead in his tracks. We got him out and butchered him, and in a little time started another and killed him, which now made ten we had killed; and we know’d we couldn’t HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT pack any more home, as we had only five horses along; therefore we returned to the camp and salted up all our meat, to be ready for a start homeward next morning. The morning came, and we packed our horses with the meat, and had as much as they could possibly carry, and sure enough cut out for home. It was about thirty miles, and we reached home the second day. I had now accommodated my neighbour with meat enough to do him, and had killed in all, up to that time, fifty-eight bears, during the fall and winter. As soon as the time come for them to quit their houses and come out again in the spring, I took a notion to hunt a little more, and in about one month I killed forty-seven more, which made one hundred and five bears I had killed in less than one year from that time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT 4 David Crockett. A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF DAVID CROCKETT OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE. 1834. LIFE OF DAV ID CROCKETT

Facsimile edition with annotations and introduction by James A. Shackford and Stanley J. Folmsbee. Knoxville TN: U of Tennessee P, 1973

4. This book contains the first known use of the term “pinhook,” a synonym for “petty, small-time” meaning “to act as a pinhooker, ... a small-time speculator in farm products, esp. tobacco, esp. one who buys directly from farmers” (a little settlement locally known as Pinhook would develop roughly where the traffic circle of the Erwin Tower is in present-day Durham, North Carolina). HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

David Crockett declares in the preface to this “autobiography” that he means to correct the misinformation about his life that had been popularized by the preceding year’s THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF COLONEL DAVID CROCKETT OF WEST TENNESSEE (reprinted that same year as SKETCHES AND ECCENTRICITIES OF COLONEL DAVID CROCKETT OF TENNESSEE). Crockett claims not to have known the author of that work, but in fact, the author — Matthew St. Clair Clarke, a clerk in the House of Representatives — had operated as Crockett’s ghost writer on the book, just as Thomas Chilton, a congressman from Kentucky, would later ghost-write the NARRATIVE for Crockett. Despite Crockett’s assertion that the “whole book is my own, and every sentiment and sentence in it,” Chilton added many grammatical errors and colorful colloquialisms in order to add flavor to Crockett’s frontier stew. Still, the guiding spirit is Crockett’s, and the autobiography is the most authentic document we have of the historical Crockett. Folmsbee offers three reasons for the importance of the NARRATIVE: As a literary work, it is one of the earliest autobiographies to be published, only a decade and a half after the virtually complete version of the first of all, Benjamin Franklin’s. Another American success story, it belongs in the long series of autobiographies telling similar stories, from Franklin to Malcolm X. It is also a very early extended example of American humor, the first of the Southwest variety, appearing just a year after Seba Smith’s LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MAJOR JACK DOWNING OF DOWNINGVILLE (Boston, 1833), the first example of the Yankee variety. It is, furthermore, a document of importance in the history of American English, being replete with dialectical usages, proverbial expressions, and spellings representing non-standard pronunciations. Crockett is credited, in fact, with being the first to use in print some half a dozen such locutions. His NARRATIVE is, finally, a historical document. (ix) The NARRATIVE was designed as a campaign document to help Crockett win re-election to the US House of Representatives in 1835, but it was more effective as the impetus for the immensely popular Crockett almanacs that burst upon the scene that same year and for the widespread popularization of Old Southwest humor. (Crockett lost the election.) The text that Shackford and Folmsbee use is an authentic first edition. This is important because the best-known twentieth-century edition (AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DAVID CROCKETT, with an Introduction by Hamlin Garland, 1923) contains in addition to the original work two spurious accounts of Crockett’s life: AN ACCOUNT OF COL. CROCKETT’S TOUR OF THE NORTH AND DOWN EAST, comprised mainly of newspaper reprints, and COL. CROCKETT’S EXPLOITS AND ADVENTURES IN TEXAS, which purports to be the reproduction of a diary found at the Alamo. The facsimile pages are accompanied by extensive notes, primarily of a historical nature and somewhat deficient from a literary standpoint.

(Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT April: Congressman David Crockett began a political tour of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New-York, and Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1835

June 20, Saturday: The Liberator.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: On Seventh day Joshua Lynch finding his mind released from further service at present - disposed of his carriage & horses & returned in the Afternoon boat to NYork on his way to his home in Ohio, thinking way for further service in New England may open again at some future period. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

In the Capitol rotunda, a would-be assassin fired a percussion-cap pistol at President Andrew Jackson from a distance of approximately six feet. The cap failed to ignite the pistol’s charge of powder and balls. As the aged Chief Executive took after him with a cane, the assailant produced a second pistol, but was wrestled to the floor before he could fire, by Congressman David Crockett. I don’t know whether Congressman Davy was wearing his trademark coonskin at the time, or not. The failure of the pistol’s charge to ignite excited the religious fervor of some Americans, who would term this a providential miracle of God.

By 1830 the tombstone inscription of John Jack in the Old Hill Burying Ground near the Milldam had become SLAVERY weathered and worn, and Concord residents had decided that it needed to be replaced. The replacement gravestone was being written up in the Concord Freeman: God wills us free, Man wills us Slavers; I will as God wills, Gods will be done.

HERE LIES THE BODY OF JOHN JACK, A NATIVE OF AFRICA, WHO DIED MARCH 1773, AGED ABOUT 60 YEARS. Though born in a land of Slavery, He was born free. Though he lived in a land of Liberty, He lived a Slave, Till by his honest, though stolen labours, He acquired the source of Slavery, Which gave him his freedom — Though not long before, Death, the grand tyrant, Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with Kings. Though a slave to vice, He practiced those virtues, Without which Kings are but slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT We have copied from a tombstone in one of the burying places in this town the above inscription, which we thought might please some one of the many who at this time are deeply interested in the welfare of the slaves. The writer of it is understood to have been the late Hon. DANIEL BLISS, who for a time was in the practice of Law here and administered on the “goods and effects” of the slave; but at the commencement of the Revolution his principles inclining him to the side of Royalty, he left the country and lived and died a subject of the British government. The stone that originally indicated the grave of JOHN JACK was broken some years since by accident; but afterwards, at the suggestion of RUFUS HOSMER, Esq. of Stow, in this county, a native of this town and a gentleman of pure and generous feelings, a subscription was commenced by members of Middlesex Bar, which was completed by the people of this town and was sufficient to procure a very seemly and durable monument as a memorial to Jack the Slave. Those who are acquainted with the localities of this neighborhood will recollect, that the burying place is situated upon an abrupt rising ground. On the memorable 19th of April, 1775, the British officers who commanded the troops sent out from Boston to destroy the material of war collected at Concord, and whose was the first blood shed by American hands in the revolutionary struggle,5 selected this spot as a point of observation from which they could watch the movements of the Americans and indicate by signals to their own soldiery sent in different directions, the plan of operations which circumstances might require them to pursue. Whilst thus occupied, this humble inscription caught the eye of one of those officers who was observed to copy it, and sometime afterwards it appeared in an English Magazine which made its way across the great waters and was read in this country. The grave of this forgotten African is in a retired spot surrounded by a cluster of beautiful young locust trees — where his ashes will quietly repose, till the grand inquest of this world shall be summoned and its decisions proclaimed. It will then be known by what right this son of immortality was torn from his mothers arms, his native land, his home, and upon this soil of the free reduced to the condition of the beast that perisheth. It will then be known by what right millions of the race have been stolen from their father land and here converted into beasts of burden, into goods and chattels and retained in that condition of sorrow by human legislation from [sic] mere reasons of state. We have met with no one who recollects JACK; the tradition however is, that he belonged to a family by the name of Barns who lived on the Boston road some ways below the village, and that he died at the house of some member of that family to whom he gave his property.

5. On this point we are inclined to believe that an erroneous impression very extensively prevails. We know it was long the claim that British blood was first shed at Lexington, and we suppose from some circumstances of the late celebration in that town that the claim is still urged. We can only say that the fact may have been so, but as far as we have investigated the subject we can find no evidence of it. We take this opportunity to commend to our fellow citizens the perusal of a pamphlet prepared by the Rev. Dr. RIPLEY of this town and published in 1828. The respected writer has enjoyed the very best opportunity to acquire correct information on this subject — he has lived in this community more than half a century, been intimate with all classes of society and familiarly conversed with great numbers who took an active part in the scenes of that eventful day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT Professor Elise Lemire’s mom, Virginia Lemire, took a photo in Sleepy Hollow recently, getting the lettering of John Jack’s 1835 replacement memorial stone to stand out admirably by rubbing it with snow (see blowup on following screen). HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1836

February 8, Monday: Former Congressman David Crockett arrived in San Antonio de Béxar with a dozen volunteers.

REMEMBERING THE ALAMO Captain George Back was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal:

“The sinner is the savage who hews down the whole tree in order to come at the fruit.” Piickler-Muskau [Count von Piickler- Muskau, later Prince, a soldier, scholar, traveller, and prolific writer (1785-1871). His TOUR IN ENGLAND was translated by Mrs. Sarah Austin in 1832.] describes the English dandy. His highest triumph is to appear with the most wooden manners as little polished as will suffice to avoid castigation; nay, to contrive even his civilities so that they may appear as near as may be to affronts. Instead of a noble, high-bred ease —to have the courage to offend against every restraint of decorum: to invert the relation in which our sex stands to women so that they appear the attacking and he the passive or defensive party,” etc. Women have less accurate measure of time than men. There is a clock in Adam: none in Eve. The philosopher, the priest, hesitates to receive money for his instructions,—the author for his works. Instead of this scruple, let them make filthy lucre beautiful by its just expenditure. It becomes the young American to learn the geography of his country in these days as much as it did our fathers to know the streets of their town; for steam and rails convert roads into streets and regions into neighborhoods. Steam realizes the story of IEolus’s bag. It carries the thirty-two winds in the boiler. Sentences of Confucius (From Marshman’s Confucius) “Have no friend unlike yourself.” “Chee says, Grieve not that men know not you; grieve that you are ignorant of men.” “How can a man remain concealed? How can a man remain concealed?” “Chee entered the great temple. Frequently inquiring about things, one said, ‘Who says that the son of the Chou man understands propriety? In the great temple he is constantly asking questions.’ Chee heard and replied, ‘This is propriety.’” “Koong Chee is a man who, through his earnestness in seeking knowledge, forgets his food, and in his joy for having found it, loses all sense of his toil; who, thus occupied, is unconscious that he has almost arrived at old age.” “Chee was in the Chhi country for three months hearing Sun’s music, and knew not the taste of his meat. He said, ‘had no idea of music arriving at this degree of perfection.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT March 6, Sunday: In a predawn assault after an 11-day battle the garrison at the Alamo –an unfinished old Franciscan mission complex outside the pueblo of San Antonio in the “Texas” district of Mexico that had not been in use as a mission for a good deal of time and had been recycled as a fort of sorts– was eliminated by a Mexican army of 4,000 under General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.6 Davy Crockett, William Travis, Colonel James Bowie, and 143 other United States citizens and their slaves, led by William Travis, had through some inexplicable obtuseness stuck around to get killed.

James Bowie

Davy Crockett

A teacher on Long Island, Walt Whitman, himself not among the fallen, nevertheless found the Eastern

6. By this point the old mission of the Franciscans in the Mejican province of Tejas, the mission which had been founded under the name San Antonio de Valero, was being generally characterized as “the Alamo.” It had picked up this nickname because of a Spanish cavalry unit that had been using it as a headquarters, that having been the designation for this cavalry unit. (“Remember La Mission San Antonio de Valero!!” — well, it wouldn’t have worked very well as an Anglo-Saxon battle chant, would it?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT newspaper reports of this defeat to be of considerable interest (SONG OF MYSELF, 34):

REMEMBERING THE ALAMO ...I tell not the fall of Alamo, Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,... HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1 At that time the fee for teaching an older child was usually about a shilling or 12 /2 cents and teaching, for a male teacher, usually brought in an income of about $200.00 per year.7 Whitman was supplementing this teaching income by writing for various New-York papers: “Specimen Days”

MY PASSION FOR FERRIES Living in Brooklyn or New York city from this time forward, my life, then, and still more the following years, was curiously identified with Fulton ferry, already becoming the greatest of its sort in the world for general importance, volume, variety, rapidity, and picturesqueness. Almost daily, [Page 701] later, (’50 to ’60,) I cross’d on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath — the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day — the hurrying, splashing sea-tides — the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes, often a string of big ones outward bound to distant ports — the myriads of white-sail’d schooners, sloops, skiffs, and the marvelously beautiful yachts — the majestic sound boats as they rounded the Battery and came along towards 5, afternoon, eastward bound — the prospect off towards Staten island, or down the Narrows, or the other way up the Hudson — what refreshment of spirit such sights and experiences gave me years ago (and many a time since.) My old pilot friends, the Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere — how well I remember them all.

7. To read a story of a teacher/student sex scandal which may or may not have had Walt Whitman as its principal, see Reynolds, David, WALT WHITMAN’S AMERICA (Knopf):

That I could forget the mockers and insults! That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers! HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 6th of 3M 1836 / Our meeting this morning was indeed a very solid good one — tho’ mostly in Silence - it Seemed to me there was scarcely an Idle or irreverend mind present - Father had a short testimony to bear - soon after which the Meeting closed. — Good meeting again in the Afternoon & Father had a little to say — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1939

Richard M. Dorson, ed.’s DAVY CROCKETT: AMERICAN COMIC LEGEND (NY: Rockland Editions) “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Still the most complete collection of tall tales from the Crockett almanacs, although edited and reproduced without their accompanying almanac materials except for a few of the original illustrations. Says Dorson, somewhat grandiosely: The value of the Crockett almanacs is not readily discernible in their original issues, with their close-printed jumble of anecdotes and sketches. But skim off the better stories, group them in their natural pattern, and America’s most authentic folk literature emerges: most authentic because, in catching the rhythms of folk speech, the anonymity of the legend method and the supernatural inventions of mythology, the Davy Crockett myth is closest of our scanty legend literatures to the national epics. Infused with the bawdy humor of the frontier, it is, in a way, America’s own crude and grotesque epic. (xxv-xxvi) Contains some very limited textual and bibliographic notes. The tales themselves are grouped thematically rather than chronologically or geographically (by imprint). The group of tales in “The Legend Full-Blown” represents Crockett in his final, most mythic and superhuman phase. There are also sections on Crockett as backwoods braggart (”Ring-Tailed Roarers”), on the fabulous frontier she-males (”Doughty Dames”), on Crockett’s supposed companion and editor (”Ben Harding”), on Crockett as fighter (”Davy Conquering Man” and “Davy Conquering Beast”), on regional and other rivalries (”Pedlars and Pukes”), and on Crockett as clown (”Davy in Lighter Moments”). Although extensive, the compilation is selective and offers only a partial view of the Crockett Almanac phenomenon. In this regard, see Michael A. Lofaro’s essay, “The Hidden ‘Hero’ of the Nashville Crockett Almanacs,” cited under Lofaro, Davy Crockett: The Man, The Legend, The Legacy, 1786-1986 in this bibliography. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1955

Meine, Franklin J., ed. THE CROCKETT ALMANACKS: NASHVILLE SERIES, 1835-1838 (Chicago: The Caxton Club) “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Meine claims in the introduction that the authorship of the Crockett almanacs has never been determined and that as far as the first four (1835-1838) are concerned, neither is anything known for sure about the publisher or printer. It is possible that the almanacs excerpted in this collection were produced in the South or the West, he says, but it is a greater probability that they were produced in Boston. (For more recent research in this area, see John Seelye’s “A Well-Wrought Crockett, Or, How the Fakelorists Passed Through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky” and Richard B. Hauck’s CROCKETT: A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHY, both cited within this bibliography.) In an additional note, Harry J. Owens compares the Crockett almanacs of the 1830s to the Reader’s Digest of today in that both contain short pieces that can be read in fits and starts: On the frontier, the backwoodsman who traded a coon-skin for a copy of the CROCKETT ALMANACK could not soak it up at such a rate. He spelled out a “piece” laboriously, and sometimes it cost him an entire evening’s labor. Or, more likely, the toil of an afternoon, for the chances were that his cabin lacked illumination, except for the fitful fire on the hearth. (xxxv) Owens offers no evidence for this picturesque image of frontier readership. This is not a facsimile edition. Only the tall tales are reproduced, along with several of the fantastic woodcuts that illustrated the four original almanacs. This first series of almanacs (1835-1838) was based to a large degree on the writings and stories associated with the historical Crockett, liberally interspersed with backwoods local color, and are rather tame in comparison to what would come later. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1982

Richard B. Hauck’s CROCKETT: A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHY (Westport CT: Greenwood Press) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

This extremely useful book is divided into five main sections: “David Crockett — The Facts”; “David Crockett — The Fictions”; “The Crockett Idiom”; “The Crockett Record”; and “The Crockett Chronology.” Hauck selects, summarizes, and synthesizes the best research available on Crockett sensibly and persuasively. The first section on the historical Crockett is thorough but of limited applicability for this bibliography. Of more interest, for my purposes, is the second section of the book: “David Crockett — The Fictions.” Hauck begins the section by contrasting the notions of legend, myth, and folklore in relation to Crockett and concludes that the Crockett “histories” and tales constitute an American legend rather than an American myth, but he adds that this legend has its roots in three powerful nineteenth-century myths: that divine law was to be found in unspoiled Nature; that the self-reliant backwoodsman was the archetypal American hero; and that this hero’s quest was to lead America west toward its manifest destiny. According to Hauck, these myths were consciously exploited by the professional Eastern writers who were primarily responsible for the construction of the Crockett legend. These writers understood both the hold these myths had on an emerging national consciousness and the ironies of trying to impose these myths on real people and real places, which accounts somewhat for the odd mix of rough humor and satirical humor in the tales. These writers drew from Crockett’s own autobiographical writings and from an already flourishing backwoods tradition in the popular press to promote the Crockett legend. The audience for the Crockett yarns, which appeared in newspapers and anthologies as well as almanacs, included both Eastern urbanites whose only experience of frontier life came through these tales and rural Westerners who knew the reality of rural life but identified with the mythic West anyway. Although the Crockett legend has long been assumed to have folk origins, all evidence so far has shown the legend to be the result of deliberate exploitation. Therefore, says Hauck, understanding of the rise and spread of the Crockett derives not from the study of folklore but from the study of the various adaptations of Crockett’s image to existing forms — a process in which Crockett himself was an active participant. One aspect of this adaptation was the ease with which Crockett’s ostensible folk image could be conveyed by the technological media, especially the printed page and illustration. Under the subtopic of “The Style of the Man,” Hauck discusses the influence of Crockett’s personal style on the Crockett legend. In “Half Horse, Half Alligator,” Hauck looks at the tradition of ritualistic bragging and how it came to be associated specifically with Crockett. Before 1810, the braggart who claims to be “half horse, half alligator” is a frontier renegade; by the 1820s, he is called a Kentuckian or is identified with Mike Fink, the legendary keelboatman. In 1831, Nimrod Wildfire, the hero of James Paulding’s LION OF THE WEST, screams the boast from the New York stage and is immediately identified in the popular mind with Crockett. Two years later, the same speech, and other material plagiarized from the play, is directly attributed to Crockett in the spurious autobiography, SKETCHES AND ECCENTRICITIES OF COLONEL DAVID CROCKETT. (The author of SKETCHES, a Whig writer and politician named Matthew St. Clair Clarke, probably wrote the book, with more or less collaboration from Crockett himself, in order to put forth a true people’s alternative to the alleged excesses and failings of the Jackson administration.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Specific literary sources of the epithet “half-horse, half-alligator” include: Samuel Woodworth’s 1822 song, “Hunters of Kentucky,” about the heroism of General Jackson’s Kentucky militia at the Battle of New Orleans; Washington Irving’s A HISTORY OF NEW YORK, published in 1809; and a travel book by Christian Schultz, Jr., written in 1808 and published in 1810. In both Irving’s and Schultz’s accounts, the half-horse, half-alligator men are brutish, ignorant louts. Some strains of this seamy side of the backwoodsman persist into the Crockett legend, but for the most part Crockett is seen as a hero who just has an earthy sense of humor. The phrase “half-horse, half-alligator” becomes conventionalized in frontier humor because of the Crockett legend. For example, it recurs in Thomas Bang Thorpe’s famous short story, “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” and in Twain’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Analogues for “half horse, half alligator” may stretch back to the earliest stories of western civilization, but a more immediate source may have been the mock-heroic braggarts of seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte and the collected yarns of Baron Munchhausen, which first appeared in 1785. Hauck’s next subtopic is “The Almanacs.” He situates the Crockett almanacs within the larger almanac tradition; then summarizes John Seelye’s argument in “A Well-Wrought Crockett, Or, How the Fakelorists Passed Through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky” (cited in this bibliography). Most probably, the 1830s Crockett almanacs were written and printed by the New England publisher Nathan Ellms, who was also responsible for two other comic almanacs in the early thirties: the AMERICAN COMIC ALMANAC and the PEOPLE’S ALMANAC, from which he apparently borrowed illustrations and New England sailor lore for the Crockett almanacs. The political uses of the almanacs shifted over the years, from the anti-Jacksonian machinations of the early Whig writers to the jingoist, expansionist sentiments of the Democratic party. The portrayal of Crockett varied, too. At times, he is violent, racist, and crude. At other times, he is an American Olympian. In “Tall Tales,” Hauck looks at how Crockett’s comic persona was quickly adapted to stories already in circulation. Because some of these stories were folk tales, genuine folk elements did enter the Crockett legend, which helps to explain the popular conception that Crockett was an authentic folk creation. However, this assimilation of folk culture into the Crockett legend was in actuality a deliberate act of literary creation. The next subsection is titled “Actors Acting the Actor.” It takes up the two most notable theatrical avatars of Crockett after Nimrod Wildfire: Frank Mayo’s portrayal of Crockett in DAVY CROCKETT; OR, BE SURE YOU’RE RIGHT, THEN GO AHEAD (1872-1896), a long-playing sentimental melodrama; and Fess Parker’s impersonation of the frontiersman for Disney studios in the 1950s. In “Truthful Fictions,” Hauck examines the various narratives of Crockett’s life that have been published in the last century and a half which blur the lines between fact and fiction; in the process, some fictions get closer to the “truths” of the Crockett legend than do some of the histories. Hauck concludes the chapter with “The Continuing Invention of Crockett” that sums up the indistinct boundaries between oral folklore and the products of a modern mass media. The final three chapters consist of examples of the Crockett style (”The Crockett Idiom”), a survey of the best writing and scholarly research on Crockett (”The Crockett Record”), and a Crockett chronology. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1985

WALDEN was issued in the boxed hard-cover Princeton University Press edition with photographs.

Jean Fleming’s BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND (Navpress). “For author Jean Fleming, life as a Christian seemed increasingly characterized by a whirlwind of disciplines and demands, which threatened to sweep away the quite center of intimacy with God so long for. Struggling to reconcile the desire to draw apart with God –to find a personal, spiritual ‘Walden’ – with the demands to spend energy n the whirlwind of ministry to others, Jean set a major, year-long goal: ‘to simplify my life … to tame my schedule and to unclutter my environment.’ But, instead of resolving the dilemma, Jean’s ‘search for simple’ raised deeper questions: Did living ‘simply’ mean on a change in lifestyle? Was it an escapist attempt to avoid stress and pressure? Or was it actually just a demand for control over circumstance? BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND sets forth the major discover of Jean’s search: focusing life, not simplifying it –or even balance it– is the key to truly Christ-centered living. Fleming’s thoughtful and perceptive insights are rich in practical value: learning from Jesus’ life by making God our Director and Audience; living decisively; discerning when ‘busy’ is too busy; the marrying of service and solitude and the importance of each; learning the secret of contentment from Paul’s life; developing Abraham’s pilgrim perspective. This book is for Christian struggling to live a Christ- like life in the midst of a whirlwind of activities, demands, and responsibilities; for those seeking to develop a deeper, secret, inner life while remaining intensely involved in our needy world. It is for those who long to make Christ their center, to be focused on the God who ministers to us as well as through us.”8 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

A WASHINGTON POST reporter interviewed residents of “Walden Breezes” near Walden Pond. Some resident in one or another trailer of that trailer park was heard to characterize Henry Thoreau as “that old drunk who used to live in a shack over on the cove.”

Sharon Cameron’s WRITING NATURE: HENRY THOREAU’S JOURNAL (NY: Oxford UP) discovered that Thoreau had utilized a writerly persona rather noticeably distant from himself (duh, yeah):

WALDEN’s philosophic position is difficult to get hold of precisely because it theatricalizes attitudes in which, from the vantage of the JOURNAL’s language, it appears Thoreau did not believe. In WALDEN we are conscious of postures of credence.

8. Fleming, Jean. BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND. Navpress, 1985 HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT Speaking of writers who create an authorial persona: Michael A. Lofaro in this year edited a study of the Brother Jonathan tradition of American humor as it exemplified itself in DAVY CROCKETT: THE MAN, THE LEGEND, THE LEGACY, 1786-1986 (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P). “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Contains eight essays on Crockett and his legacy, as well as a Crockett chronology, filmography, and bibliography (of the “Crockett Craze” in the 1950s), a checklist of printed twentieth-century versions of traditional “Davy Crockett” songs, and a checklist of commercial and noncommercial recordings of “Davy Crockett/Pompey Smash” songs. In the first essay, entitled “The Man in the Buckskin Hunting Shirt: Fact and Fiction in the Crockett Story,” Richard B. Hauck writes on the interrelationships between the biographical Crockett and the fictional Crockett. Hauck notes the virulent racism and jingoism in the Crockett almanacs and concludes: “Some scholars give the Crockett almanacs great credit for their role in building the Crockett legend; I have often wondered how the legend managed to survive the almanacs” (14). Hauck also points out that the frontier woodsman was already a stock character before Crockett came along: “The type had been solidified by the fame of Daniel Boone and widely popularized by ballads and theatrical skits celebrating the role of the ‘Kentuckians’ in the Battle of New Orleans” (14). Michael Lofaro analyzes Richard Dorson’s selections of tales from the Nashville almanacs for Dorson’s 1939 collection, Davy Crockett: American Comic Legend to show how Dorson presents only a partial view of the Crockett legend. Lofaro argues that “The Hidden ‘Hero’ of the Nashville Crockett Almanacs” is the shape-shifting, trickster-transformer Crockett. In “Davy Crockett and the Wild Man, Or, the Metaphysics of the Longue Duree,” Catherine L. Albanese borrows the historical methods of the French Annales school — and, in particular, Fernand Braudel’s notion of la longue duree (the study of long duration) — to locate the legendary Crockett within the global history of Wild Man mythology. Richard Hauck describes various manifestations of the Crockett figure on stage and screen in “Making It All Up: Davy Crockett in the Theater.” Hauck points out that the Crockett-like character, Nimrod Wildfire, in “The Lion of the West” (1830) was not an original creation but part of an established theatrical tradition of backwoods characters, the earliest variant being a Down- East character, the rude Yankee bumpkin, that can be traced back at least to 1787 and Royall Tyler’s play, “The Contrast.” (That character was named Brother Jonathan.) The sixth essay is a reproduction of an article from Motion Picture Magazine, dated September 1916, on a silent film about Davy Crockett. It is followed by Margaret J. King’s look at Walt Disney’s treatment of the Crockett legend (”The Recycled Hero: Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett”). The final essay, “Davy Crockett Songs: Minstrels to Disney” by Charles K. Wolfe, takes up the history of popular music in relation to the Crockett legend. John Seelye’s essay, “A Well-Wrought Crockett, Or, How the Fakelorists Passed Through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky” seems of particular importance to me and is cited separately within this bibliography.

John Seelye’s “A Well-Wrought Crockett; Or, How the Fakelorists Passed Through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky,” pages 21-45 in DAVY CROCKETT: THE MAN, THE LEGEND, THE LEGACY, 1786- HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT 1986 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Seelye’s ingenious and careful literary detective work leads him to relegate the early folklore of David Crockett to “fakelore”: “No longer regarded as directly derived from folk tales, the Crockett almanacs are seen as an early version of popular literature: relying on oral conventions, the comic ‘legends’ were the invention of literary hacks who consciously introduced mythic (archetypal) elements” (24). Seelye identifies these hacks as anti-Jacksonian, anti-Democratic Eastern-based Whigs — “a moneyed elite”; and he claims that “the ‘legendary’ Davy Crockett like the literary ‘Jack Downing’ may, like the wit and wisdom of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, be traced to Whiggish origins” (25). Especially clever is Seelye’s analysis of various woodcut illustrations to determine that the probable publisher of the Nashville Crockett almanacs was Charles Ellms, an illustrator- editor residing in Boston in the 1830s and 1840s, who also published the American Comic Almanac and The People’s Almanac. This New England connection also helps to explain what a New England sailor named Ben Harding is doing out west in the company of Davy Crockett. (Harding is the ostensible editor of the Nashville almanacs.) (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1987

[THE] TALL TALES OF DAVY CROCKETT: THE SECOND NASHVILLE SERIES OF CROCKETT ALMANACS, 1839- 1841 (Facsimile edition, Knoxville TN: U of Tennessee P) “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

TALL TALES contains a useful preface and introduction by Michael Lofaro, a chronology of the life of the historical Crockett, bibliographical notes, a checklist of the locations of the second Nashville series of Crockett almanacs, and complete reproductions of the 1839, 1840, and 1841 Nashville Crockett almanacs, including illustrations and astronomical charts. According to Lofaro, these three almanacs represent a transitional period in the mythologizing of Davy Crockett: They contain none of the “autobiographical” stories that echo those that appeared in “Crockett’s” major books nor any of the descriptions of wildlife or of other unusual or interesting occurrences in the backwoods that so distinguished the first series. And neither do they yet depict him as fully evolved into the nearly invulnerable comic superman who ranged over the whole world doing impossible deeds. What these three Nashville almanacs do establish, however, through the plots, language, and humor of their tales, is a pattern of oppositions that would define Davy as one of the legendary trickster characters of folklore and as a cultural mirror of his times. (xxxiv) Given the limited availability of these texts, this book is a valuable research tool. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1988

Lucy J. Botscharow’s “Davy Crockett and Mike Fink: An Interpretation of Cultural Continuity and Change,” pages 75-93 in Fernando Poyatos, ed.’s LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY: A NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO PEOPLE, SIGNS AND LITERATURE (Philadelphia PA: John Benjamins) “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Botscharow assumes what I believe to be an over-simplified equivalency between two nineteenth-century frontier legends, Davy Crockett and Mike Fink, and then explores the cultural reasons for Crockett’s persistent popularity and Fink’s relative obscurity. Despite its occasional lapses into superfluous structuralist jargon and the inadequacies of its premise, the essay does make a few interesting points, the most intriguing one being that Crockett, unlike Fink, represents a balance between the wild and the civilized, between the undercivilized and the overcivilized, between the individual and the community. It seems to me that this sort of balance may have been what attracted Waldo Emerson to the tall tales of the Crockett almanacs. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT David S. Reynolds’s BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: THE SUBVERSIVE IMAGINATION IN THE AGE OF EMERSON AND MELVILLE (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

VERSION ONE: Reynolds peers beneath the American Renaissance for two reasons: in order to analyze “the process by which hitherto neglected popular modes and stereotypes were imported into literary texts” and to discover “forgotten writings which, while often raw, possess a surprising energy and complexity that make them worthy of study on their own” (3). Of particular importance for my purposes is Part Four of the book, entitled “The Grotesque Posture: Popular Humor and the American Subversive Style.” In fact, Reynolds’ readings of Emerson and Thoreau in relation to what he calls “American subversive humor” inform my bibliography at every step. In Chapter 15, “The Carnivalization of American Language,” Reynolds notes that antebellum American humor is commonly divided into two styles: subtle, low-key Yankee humor and grotesque, macabre backwoods humor. (This distinction seems problematic to me. “Down East Humor” of the sort practiced by Seba Smith and the “Old Southwest Humor” of the Crockett almanacs are contemporaneous and share many qualities. Emerson, for one, does not distinguish between the two. He conflates Seba Smith’s writings with Boone, Crockett, and Kentucky stump-oratory as examples of western literature. [See quote below.] It is also very likely that a great deal of so-called frontier humor was written by Easterners, printed by Easterners, and distributed by Easterners, so that, in all probability, the West as represented in backwoods humor was more of a Northeastern construction than a product of frontier folk culture.) Reynolds labels the two styles of American humor “reputable” and “subversive” after the manner of Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill — labels that neatly parallel the distinction Reynolds has drawn earlier in the book between Conventional and Subversive non-humorous texts. Bahktin’s notion of “carnival” is invoked to describe the imagistic strangeness and linguistic indeterminacy of the subversive style, a particularly “democratic” form of American humor that arose on the American frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century. According to Reynolds, the subversive style began with Washington Irving. Brom Bones, Ichabod Crane’s nemesis in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “is an early example of the nineteenth-century frontier ‘screamer’ who would become a central figure in American humor” (448). (Hauck points out in Crockett: A Bio-Bibliography that Irving was one of the first writers to use what would later become the classic frontier epithet, “half-horse, half-alligator.” The phrase appears in A HISTORY OF NEW-YORK in 1809 in a description of Gallows Dirk, a half-breed outlaw.) The violent, boastful “screamer” (or “ring-tailed roarer”) was the most popular figure in frontier humor, and the most popular screamer was Davy Crockett (as represented in the Crockett almanacs published between 1835 and 1856). The legendary Crockett was the quintessential frontier folk hero: “an exaggerated version of the mixed figures that were appearing in popular sensational literature of the day” — part criminal, part reformer, part comic demigod. In content, Old Southwest humor was characterized by brutality, racism, eroticism, and anti- intellectualism. Rhetorically, the style was marked by hyperbole, colorful regional dialects, and unrestrained wordplay — in other words, by tall talk. More sophisticated examples of the frontier hero included Johnson Jones Hooper’s Captain Simon Suggs, James Glover Baldwin’s Ovid Bolus, Esq., and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood. Reynolds traces the influence of Old Southwest humor into northern urban areas where, in the 1840s, the screamer was transmuted into the “b’hoy” figure — a street-savvy, lower- class, urbanized version of the frontier hero. Reynolds calls the fusion of frontier idiom and working-class sensationalism “radical-democrat humor,” and among its practitioners he names Mike Walsh, George Lippard, George Foster, and George Thompson. Reynolds also identifies another, more sophisticated brand of urban humor that he associates with several prominent New York humor sheets of the forties and fifties. According to Reynolds, this more self-conscious, often parodistic form of urban humor was politically conservative but stylistically radical. Reynolds argues that it was this brand of humor in particular that greatly affected the major writers of the day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

VERSION TWO: In Chapter 15, “The Carnivalization of American Language,” Reynolds notes that antebellum American humor is commonly divided into two styles: subtle, low-key Yankee humor and grotesque, macabre backwoods humor. He labels the two forms “reputable” and “subversive” after the manner of Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill — labels that neatly parallel the distinction Reynolds has drawn earlier in the book between Conventional and Subversive non-humorous texts. Bahktin’s notion of “carnival” is invoked to describe the imagistic strangeness and linguistic indeterminacy of the subversive style, a particularly “democratic” form of American humor that arose on the American frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century. According to Reynolds, the subversive style began with Washington Irving. Brom Bones, Ichabod Crane’s nemesis in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “is an early example of the nineteenth-century frontier ‘screamer’ who would become a central figure in American humor” (448). The violent, boastful “screamer” (or “ring-tailed roarer”) was the most popular figure in frontier humor, and the most popular screamer was Davy Crockett (as represented in the Crockett almanacs published between 1835 and 1856). The legendary Crockett was the quintessential frontier folk hero: “an exaggerated version of the mixed figures that were appearing in popular sensational literature of the day” — part criminal, part reformer, part comic demigod. In content, Old Southwest humor was characterized by brutality, racism, eroticism, and antiintellectualism. Rhetorically, the style was marked by hyperbole, colorful regional dialects, and unrestrained wordplay. More sophisticated examples of the frontier hero included Johnson Jones Hooper’s Captain Simon Suggs, James Glover Baldwin’s Ovid Bolus, Esq., and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood. Reynolds traces the influence of Old Southwest humor into northern urban areas where, in the 1840s, the screamer was transmuted into the “b’hoy” figure — a street-savvy, lower-class, urbanized version of the frontier hero. Reynolds calls the fusion of frontier idiom and working-class sensationalism “radical-democrat humor,” and among its practitioners he names Mike Walsh, George Lippard, George Foster, and George Thompson. Reynolds also identifies another, more sophisticated brand of urban humor that he associates with several prominent New York humor sheets of the forties and fifties. According to Reynolds, this more self-conscious, often parodistic form of urban humor was politically conservative but stylistically radical. Reynolds argues that it was this brand of humor in particular that greatly affected the major writers of the day. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) [VERSION ONE of BENEATH… is not identified by the name of the graduate-student author, or by date.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

VERSION ONE: In Chapter 16, “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Reynolds examines in detail the influence of American subversive humor on Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson was widely regarded by his contemporaries as an able wit and humorist. Reynolds quotes Emerson’s praise of the vigor and originality of frontier humor from an 1842 essay in the Dial: Our eyes will be turned westward, and a new and stronger tone in our literature will be the result. The Kentucky stump-oratory, the exploits of Boone and David Crockett, the journals of the western pioneers, agriculturists, and socialists, and the letters of Jack Downing, are genuine growths, which are sought with avidity in Europe, where our European-like books are of no value. (489) Attracted by the egalitarianism, nativism, individualism, and linguistic fertility of frontier humor, Emerson, according to Reynolds, adapted certain aspects of the subversive style to his own writing. The result was a philosophical and stylistic “fusion of Transcendentalist philosophy and popular image.” Some aspects of this fusion can be seen in Emerson’s occasional use of grotesque metaphors, jarring juxtapositions, and weird images. (I think it is more likely that Emerson simply admired, with some significant reservations, those aspects of frontier humor that fit with his stylistic and philosophical predilections than that he actually adopted and adapted those aspects to his own work. But I would agree that Emerson’s occasional humor and wit do partake in a general sense of the subversive style.) Although in some ways more critical of popular culture than Emerson, Thoreau also was strongly influenced by American subversive humor, especially by radical- democrat and urban humor. Like Emerson, Thoreau refines and elevates — ”reconstructs” — the subversive style for his own unique philosophical purposes. At times, Thoreau’s language may seem grotesquely or violently comic on the surface, but it is always suggesting something fundamentally serious and spiritual underneath. VERSION TWO: Attracted by the egalitarianism, nativism, individualism, and linguistic fertility of frontier humor, Emerson adapted certain aspects of the subversive style to his own writing. The result was a philosophical and stylistic “fusion of Transcendentalist philosophy and popular image.” Some aspects of this fusion can be seen in Emerson’s occasional use of grotesque metaphors, jarring juxtapositions, and weird images. Although in some ways more critical of popular culture than Emerson, Thoreau also was strongly influenced by American subversive humor, especially by radical-democrat and urban humor. Like Emerson, Thoreau refines and elevates — “reconstructs” — the subversive style for his own unique philosophical purposes. At times, Thoreau’s language may seem grotesquely or violently comic on the surface, but it is always suggesting something fundamentally serious and spiritual underneath. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT

1989

Paul A. Hutton’s “Davy Crockett: An Exposition on Hero Worship,” pages 20-41 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED (Knoxville TN: U of Tennessee P)

William E. Jamborsky’s “Davy Crockett and the Tradition of the Westerner in American Cinema,” pages 97- 113 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED

Dan Kilgore’s “Why Davy Didn’t Die,” pages 7-19 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Kilgore describes how the Crockett almanacs exaggerated the circumstances of Crockett’s death and how the American public has resisted efforts to revise these legendary accounts. Most likely, Kilgore says, Crockett did not die heroically in battle but was captured, tortured, and executed after the Alamo fell on March 6, 1836. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)

Michael A. Lofaro’s “Riproarious Shemales: Legendary Women in the Tall Tale World of the Davy Crockett Almanacs,” pages 114-52 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Lofaro argues that the female characters in the Crockett almanacs both uphold and subvert conventional 19th-Century attitudes about women. On one hand, the almanacs “give the reader a clear subtext of the secondary status of women by praising traditional roles and, on the other, break women loose from those confining patterns to act out male adventures and fantasies with a freedom that only life in a wilderness state can allow” (116). In particular, it is the sentimental tradition — the notion of the “true woman” — that the tales most effectively lampoon. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)

Miles Tannenbaum’s “Following Davy’s Trail: A Crockett Bibliography,” pages 192-241 in CROCKETT AT HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT TWO HUNDRED “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Tannenbaum’s bibliography is divided into ten categories: primary documents, including Crockett’s letters; works dealing with the historical Crockett; works dealing with the Alamo and Texas independence; selected newspaper articles dealing with Crockett; works dealing with the legendary Crockett, including poems about Crockett; works dealing with the Walt Disney-inspired Crockett craze and with television’s effects on American culture; works dealing with Crockett films and a Crockett filmography; works dealing with Crockett songs; children’s and juvenile literature dealing with David Crockett, including comic books and dime novels; and general, thematic, and reference works. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)

Charles K. Wolfe’s “Crockett and Nineteenth-Century Music,” pages 83-96 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Not surprisingly, the Crockett legend found its way into nineteenth-century popular music (particularly the minstrel shows of the 1830s and 1840s) just as it found its way into the popular literature and theater of the time. Some of the Crockett songs were probably in circulation before his death. Crockett may have contributed in his own way as a fiddler. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)

Joe Cummings’s “Celebrating Crockett in Tennessee,” pages 67-82 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

An examination of Crockett’s status as Tennessee’s only state hero. Primarily of local interest. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)

Richard B. Hauck’s “The Real Davy Crocketts: Creative Autobiography and the Invention of His Legend,” HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT pages 179-91 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Hauck problematizes scholarly efforts to scrape away the layers of legend that cover and conceal the real “historical” Crockett. The problem starts, he claims, with the common confusion between history as “that which happened” and history as “any record of that which happened.” For Hauck, the legendary Crockett is just as real as the historical one: “In short, there once was a real David Crockett, but now his life can be retrieved only as a story.” He compares Crockett’s autobiography with Franklin’s, which he calls “the first great American comic novel.” (Crockett read and admired Franklin’s Autobiography, which was not published in America until 1818.) Hauck argues that both autobiographies are imaginative creations and that Crockett’s popular image shaped and guided his real-life actions, including his final fatal decision to join the fight for Texas independence. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)

Michael Montgomery’s “David Crockett and the Rhetoric of Tennessee Politics,” pages 42-66 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Montgomery traces the history of Crockett’s influence on Tennessee politics. A brief but useful analysis of the fanciful rhetoric of the tall tale tradition is appended to the end of the article. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)

John Seelye’s “Cats, Coons, Crocketts, and Other Furry Critters — Or, Why Davy Wears an Animal for a Hat,” pages 153-78 in CROCKETT AT TWO HUNDRED “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Seelye links up early Crockett iconography with European “Wild Man of the Woods” lore. In Seelye’s view, Crockett represents a kind of Americanized version of William Tell. Seelye explores this Rousseauian [Jean-Jaquest Rousseau] Child of Nature theme and iconography in “Lion of the West” (1831), a popular melodrama about a character widely perceived to represent David Crockett; in Cooper’s LEATHERSTOCKING TALES; in Owen Wister’s THE VIRGINIAN; and in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ TARZAN novels. A wide-ranging and perceptive essay that should be read in conjunction with Catherine Albanese’s “Davy Crockett and the Wild Man; Or, The Metaphysics of the Longue Duree,” cited under Lofaro, DAVY CROCKETT: THE MAN, THE LEGEND, THE LEGACY, 1786-1986, in this bibliography. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: December 12, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVY CROCKETT DAVID CROCKETT the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.