David Crockett

American frontiersman and politician

• Born: August 17, 1786
• Birthplace: Greene County, Tennessee
• Died: March 6, 1836
• Place of death: The Alamo, San Antonio, Texas

As a congressman from western Tennessee and the author of a best-selling autobiography, Crockett became the most celebrated backwoodsman in the United States. His heroic death at the Battle of the Alamo transformed him into a legendary frontier hero.

Early Life

David Crockett grew up in the poverty-stricken frontier regions of eastern Tennessee, where his father operated a tavern. His formal education was limited to a six-month period during which he worked two days per week for the village schoolmaster in return for board and four days of schooling. Crockett’s manuscript letters prove that he learned basic literacy in the one hundred or so days he attended school, although his spelling was always erratic and his grasp of grammatical rules was uncertain. On August 14, 1806, shortly before his twentieth birthday, he married Mary Finley, with whom he had three children. Crockett moved to central and then west Tennessee in search of better land, supporting his family through subsistence farming and his skill as a hunter.

When the Creek Indian War broke out in 1813, Crockett enlisted and served as a scout until March of 1815, during which time he was promoted to sergeant. Crockett’s duties took him south into Alabama and eventually to Pensacola, Florida. The army was poorly supplied and constantly short of food; Crockett spent much time hunting to help feed his companions. He observed with some bitterness the effect of his lack of social rank when the commander of his regiment ignored his warning that an Indian attack was imminent but acted immediately when an officer reported the same information the next day.

Shortly after Crockett’s return from the war, his first wife died. Within one year he had remarried. His new wife, Elizabeth Patton, was a widow with two young children of her own, as well as a substantial inheritance of cash and slaves. Her funds enabled Crockett to move to Lawrence County and set up a gristmill and a distillery in the spring of 1817. For a while he seemed to prosper, but his businesses did not succeed. In 1831 he had to sell some slaves in order to reduce his debts. Crockett was appointed a justice of the peace by the state of Tennessee in November, 1817. The next year his neighbors elected him colonel of the fifty-seventh regiment of militia in Lawrence County. In 1821 he was elected to the state legislature and was reelected in 1823. He failed to win his bid for Congress in 1825, but in 1827 he went to Washington, D.C., for the first of his three terms in the House of Representatives.

Life’s Work

Crockett’s tall tales and backwoods humor entertained and attracted the press, which covered his activities, real or imaginary, in detail and spread his fame across the country. Many of the reports were intentional exaggerations, such as claiming that his reputation as a hunter had spread so wide among the animals that when he aimed his rifle at a treed raccoon the animal meekly climbed down and surrendered, or that while traveling to the 1829 session of Congress he had waded into the Ohio River and towed a disabled steamboat back to shore. He was reputed to have shot forty-seven bears in one month and was said to ride alligators for exercise. When Crockett supported President Andrew Jackson, the Whig papers sneered at him as an example of an uncivilized westerner and alleged that he drank the water from his finger bowl at a White House dinner. After Crockett broke with Jackson, the Whig papers began to compliment him while the Jacksonian press, which had praised his rustic wisdom and virtue, began to attack him.

As much as he enjoyed his celebrity status and was willing to perform the part of the ignorant but shrewd backwoodsman, Crockett took seriously his work as a congressman. He was frustrated by his lack of success in advancing the interests of his subsistence farming constituents. In the state legislature, he had championed the cause of the western Tennessee squatters against the eastern Tennessee landholding aristocrats. In Congress he broke with the Jackson forces when they failed to support his Tennessee Vacant Land Bill, which would have allowed those living on and improving federal lands in western Tennessee to secure title to the land. When Crockett opposed Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill in 1830 and also proposed using federal funds to aid poor American Indians living in his district, the break with Jackson was complete. Jacksonian opposition led to Crockett’s loss in the 1831 election; however, he succeeded in winning a third term in 1833.

After his break with the Jacksonians, Crockett wrote an autobiography with the assistance of Thomas Chilton, a Kentucky congressman who lived in the same Washington, D.C., boarding house as Crockett. Crockett freely acknowledged Chilton’s help and informed his publisher that Chilton was entitled to half the royalties from the work. The book was a campaign autobiography intended to help Crockett’s bid for reelection. Like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, a copy of which Crockett owned, the work described the rise of a self-made man who overcame hardships to achieve greatness.

Crockett’s own voice and language dominated the book, which was a fairly accurate account of his life, apart from some exaggerations about his military career in the Creek Indian War and his prowess as a hunter. Crockett described several battles during which he was not present. The work portrayed a humorous braggart and backwoods trickster who rose to national prominence as a congressman. The language of the autobiography faithfully reproduced southwestern frontier idioms, and the book included some of the first printed examples of frontier humor. For example, when Crockett returned from an extended hunting trip to discover that his companions had reported him dead, he remarked, “I know’d this was a whapper of a lie, as soon as I heard it.”

Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee appeared in 1834 and was an immediate success. Within one year, it went through seven editions, including one in London, England, and twelve new printings were released in 1835. Encouraged by the success of the autobiography, Crockett permitted the Whigs to publish, under his name, two books attacking the Jacksonians. An Account of Colonel Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (1835) described the reception of Crockett’s speeches attacking Jackson during his tour of Whig cities in the North. The Life of Martin Van Buren (1835) was a vitriolic satire of the Jacksonian candidate for president in 1836. Crockett wrote neither book, and they failed to attract the public.

The autobiography’s success as a literary work did little to advance Crockett’s political career. He reacted bitterly when he lost a hotly contested election for his House seat in August, 1835. He told his constituents that they could go to hell and that he was going to Texas. On November 1, Crockett and several of his friends left for Texas, where American settlers had revolted against Mexico. He hoped to find fertile land where he and his family could rebuild their fortunes and perhaps revive his political career in the new republic. Crockett was welcomed wherever he went in Texas, and in January, 1836, he took an oath of allegiance to the provisional government of Texas that entitled him to vote and run for office during the pending constitutional convention. He then joined the rebel army and moved south to San Antonio in early February.

The president of Mexico, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, determined to crush the Texan rebellion, arrived at San Antonio with some 2,400 troops. The Texan defenders, numbering 183, barricaded themselves in an old mission building, the Alamo, where they held out from February 23 to March 6. Santa Anna had ordered his men to take no prisoners, and none of the defenders survived. Crockett’s active role and bravery during the siege is attested in all authentic accounts. However, the legendary scene in which Crockett, out of ammunition and using his broken rifle as a club, dies surrounded by the bodies of a dozen Mexicans he has shot is mythical. Documentary evidence shows that Crockett, along with a half-dozen other defenders, was captured after resistance ceased and brought before Santa Anna, who angrily ordered him executed.

Significance

The process of turning David Crockett, eccentric backwoods congressman, into Davy Crockett, legendary superhero, began while Crockett was still alive. His colorful personality had made him one of the best-known politicians of the 1830’s. Even before his death, exaggerated stories about him, some based on tall tales he loved to tell to amused Washington reporters and congressmen, had begun to circulate. Many were included in a work that Crockett repudiated, although it was published under his name: Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee (1833). The work contained incidents that appeared to be based on Crockett’s anecdotes.

Crockett’s heroic death elevated him to almost mythic status. Crockett’s publisher immediately commissioned Richard Penn Smith to write a fictional diary of Crockett’s activities in Texas called Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas, Written by Himself (1836). Only the first two chapters, which were based on letters Crockett wrote to his publishers, are authentic. The fifty Crockett almanacs printed between 1835 and 1856 completed the transformation of Crockett into an American legend. These pamphlets, along with the usual calendars, weather predictions, domestic hints, and farming suggestions, included improbable Crockett hunting stories and endowed him with superhuman powers. Crockett is credited with saving the earth one winter when the entire planet froze: Crockett thawed the earth’s axis with hot bear grease and kicked it loose again. Another tale claimed that he deflected Halley’s comet from a collision course by climbing the Allegheny Mountains and twisting the tail off the comet.

Davy Crockett also figured as a fantastically successful hunter in six nineteenth century dime novels. A play that ran for over two thousand performances between 1874 and 1896 portrayed him as a handsome frontiersman whose gentlemanly conduct won the love of a wealthy neighbor’s daughter. The most influential presentation of the legendary figure was Walt Disney’s 1955 television production and film, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, which used many of the legends that had grown up over the years to portray him as an ideal frontiersman and martyr of the Alamo. The production set off an enormous fad: Every young boy seemed to need a coonskin hat and fringed Crockett-style jacket so he could copy his hero. Crockett had become an icon of American heroism, and historians who wrote about the factual Crockett were assailed for subverting the image of this truly American hero.

Bibliography

Crockett, David. Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee. A facsimile edition with annotations and an introduction by James A. Shackford and Stanley J. Folmsbee. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973. The insightful annotations make this the most useful version of Crockett’s autobiography.

Davis, William C. Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Davis examines the lives of these three disparate men, describing what brought them to Texas and how they died there.

Derr, Mark. The Frontiersman: The Real Life and the Many Legends of Davy Crockett. New York: William Morrow, 1993. Derr supplies an informative and entertaining narrative of Crockett’s life.

Hauck, Richard Boyd. Crockett: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. This book contains an excellent biography of Crockett and an analysis of the style and content of his writings.

Kilgore, Dan. How Did Davy Die? College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978. Kilgore provides a careful analysis of the evidence concerning the way Crockett died.

Lalire, Gregory J. “David Crockett.” American History 38, no. 6 (February, 2004): 16. A modern tribute to Crockett, the politician and soldier.

Lofaro, Michael A., ed. Davy Crockett: The Man, The Legend, The Legacy, 1786-1986. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. This volume deals mostly with the legends about Crockett, from the early almanacs through Disney’s television series of the 1950’s.

Lofaro, Michael A., and Joe Cummings, eds. Crockett at Two Hundred: New Perspectives on the Man and the Myth. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. This book contains ten scholarly articles on Crockett’s life, death, and writings, along with an extensive bibliography.

Shackford, James Atkins. David Crockett: The Man and the Legend. Edited by John B. Shackford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956. This is the definitive scholarly biography of Crockett, although it needs to be brought up to date by Kilgore’s book on Crockett’s death.