Introduction

I.

It has been more than sixty years since Walter Blair, the distinguished scholar of American humor and folklore, established that there were at least “six Davy Crocketts.” They ranged from the Democratic congressman from Tennessee who set himself in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson to the “mythic” hero of comic almanacs published in the 1830s and ’40s, a figure essential to the tradition of southwestern humor that was brought to a fine art by Mark Twain. But perhaps the most enduring of the Crocketts has been the martyr-hero of the Alamo, who, with the other defenders of the fort in San Antonio, was killed in 1836 by the army commanded by General Santa Anna, president of Mexico. Texas was then Mexican territory, and Santa Anna was attempting to drive out American colonists because they were planning to establish a republic independent of his tyrannical rule.

And if there were six Crocketts then it must be said that five died defending the Alamo: the one who was shot and killed early in the battle as he crossed the fort’s parade ground, the one who fell surrounded by the bodies of the Mexican soldiers he had killed, the one captured and executed with four other Americans on the orders of Santa Anna, the one who tried to escape that fate by claiming immunity through virtue of his status as a U.S. congressman, and the one who, on being sentenced to die, attempted to assassinate Santa Anna before being killed by the general’s men.

The preferred version deep in the hearts of Texans is the second, and indeed it was the one reported firsthand by the two survivors of the massacre at the Alamo: Mrs. Susanna Dickinson, widow of a gunnery officer slain in the battle, and a slave named Joe, the servant of Colonel William B. Travis, who died while commanding the defense of the fort. The alternative versions may be traced to Mexican and other sources, some of dubious authority, many recounted well after the fact. Moreover, it must be said that the stories told by Mrs. Dickinson and Joe were filtered through a journalistic sieve. In short, the manner of Colonel Crockett’s death will never be known, but none of the contradictory accounts deny him his heroic stature, not even the story of his attempt to bluff his way to freedom, which is the kind of brass that passes for gold in Texas.

The point to be made is that the fame of Davy Crockett is inseparable from the name of the Alamo, and will last so long as the other endures in the national memory. “The Alamo,” wrote the journalist Richard Harding Davis in 1892, “is to the South-west what Independence Hall is to the United States, and Bunker Hill to the East; but the pride of it belongs to every American, whether he lives in Texas or in Maine” (Davis: 17). The occasion of this remark was Davis’s visit to San Antonio, and the irony of it is that, according to Davis’s biographer, Arthur Lubow, the reporter had only recently learned about the Alamo. At a dinner party in New York given by Theodore Roosevelt, then a young civil service commissioner, the host was politely but firmly indignant when his guest admitted his ignorance regarding that sacred site in Texas. TR forthwith informed Davis of the history of the Alamo, which the reporter dutifully included early in his account of his western travels.

Roosevelt in 1892 had only just begun his political career, which would be given a considerable boost by his role in the Spanish-American War, thanks in large part to the account of the fight for San Juan Hill written by Richard Harding Davis, but he was already associated with the American West in the minds, if not the hearts, of his fellow Americans. Roosevelt had written books about his adventures as a ranchman in North Dakota and the first two volumes of his Winning of the West had been published in 1889. More to the point, in 1895 he would write, in collaboration with his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Hero Tales from American History.

This was a book intended for “young Americans,” containing the stories of “some Americans who showed that they knew how to live and how to die; who proved their truth by their endeavor, and who joined to the stern and manly qualities which are essential to the well being of a masterful race the virtues of gentleness, of patriotism, and of lofty adherence to an ideal” (xxiii). This jingoistic, chauvinistic collection was in many ways a prolegomenon to the forthcoming war with Spain, and among Roosevelt’s contributions was an essay titled “Remember the Alamo,” the famous slogan that soon enough would be updated to “Remember the Maine.”

The hero who emerges from Roosevelt’s account of the Alamo siege was predictably Davy Crockett, who “was the last man” left standing: “wounded in a dozen places, he faced his foes with his back to the wall, ringed around by the bodies of the men he had slain” (86). But as Mexican lancers held him at bay, “weakened by wounds and loss of blood,” he was helpless against soldiers with carbines who “shot him down.” “Some say,” added Roosevelt, “that when Crockett fell from his wounds, he was taken alive and was then shot by Santa Anna’s order; but his fate cannot be told with certainty, for not a single American was left alive. At any rate, after Crockett fell the fight was over. Every one of the hardy men who had held the Alamo lay still in death. Yet they died well avenged, four times their number fell at their hands in the battle” (87).

In Hero Tales, Crockett keeps company with, among other notable Americans, Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark, whose stories were also told by Roosevelt, a man drawn to soldiers who were also frontiersmen and mighty hunters. As the revisionist historian Richard Slotkin has maintained, Roosevelt regarded Boone and Crockett as “feasible role models as well as heroic ideals,” and his “veneration of archetypal frontiersman . . . was an American equivalent of the Victorian gentleman’s playing at medieval chivalry” (Gunfighter Nation: 37). In 1888, Roosevelt and Lodge founded the Boone and Crockett Club, an organization whose members were devoted to “manly sport with the rifle” and who were dedicated to the preservation of large game animals through legislation (Morris: 383-84). In that same year Roosevelt published Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, which with his earlier Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) established his fame as a man in whose arms a rifle sat easy and whose walls were covered by trophy heads of formidable beasts he had killed.

David Crockett’s autobiographical Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (1834) contains several accounts of his encounters with large bears, the pioneer’s most ferocious four-legged adversary, from which he invariably emerged victorious. But in Hero Tales it was Crockett’s slaughter of Mexicans that Roosevelt celebrated in the name of “the freedom of Texas,” for the courageous Tennessean was representative of the other frontiersmen killed at the Alamo. They were “a wild and ill-disciplined band, little used to restraint or control, but they were men of iron courage and great bodily powers, skilled in the use of their weapons, and ready to meet with stern and uncomplaining indifference whatever doom fate might have in store for them” (85).

Slotkin notes that the battle for the Alamo occurred too late for inclusion in TR’s Winning of the West (1889-96), the chronology of which ends early in the nineteenth century. But drawing on Roosevelt’s account in Hero Tales, he observes that “Crockett’s death at the Alamo would have symbolized the transfer of all those qualities that the hunter personified to a new field of struggle in which the primary enemy is not a ‘savage’ race but a civilized (or ‘semicivilized’) nation formed by an inferior race in which Indian and Latin stocks are mixed” (51). Certainly, Roosevelt’s description of the defenders of the Alamo suggests the qualities of the western men he would bring together as the Rough Riders in 1898, warranting Slotkin’s assertion that the Alamo signified “the shift from one form of Frontier expansion to another . . . provid[ing] a metaphoric anticipation of Roosevelt’s polemic on behalf of overseas imperialism, which he saw as the necessary continuation of the ‘Winning of the West.’”

Roosevelt’s account of the Alamo drew in part on a book published in 1836, Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas, a first-person narrative supposedly based on a diary written by Crockett that was recovered by a Mexican general after the battle for the Alamo. Later found on the general’s body by an American after the subsequent battle of San Jacinto, in which an army led by Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna and took the Mexican president prisoner, the “diary” was rushed into print and was regarded as genuine for many years. Eventually the book was declared spurious and identified as a work of virtual fiction, but it was so vivid an account of Crockett’s last adventure that it continued to influence other writers. Thus the Walt Disney version of the Crockett story, filmed in the 1950s, starring Fess Parker as the “King of the Wild Frontier,” relied on Exploits and Adventures for its account of the hero’s journey across Texas toward the Alamo and immortality.

Most recently, a lengthy excerpt from Exploits and Adventures appeared in a collection of documents, Eyewitness to the Alamo, edited by Bill Groneman, with the explanation that although the book was “not written by Crockett,” it was accepted for years as authentic, and “has served as an eyewitness account of the Alamo in the past” (43). After all, Groneman argues, so many “other accounts are phoney, or at least suspect, there is enough reason to include this one.” The thesis underlying Groneman’s collection, borrowed from Thucydides, is that the historic record is made up of such a multiplicity of contradictory accounts of events, most of which are dictated by self (or other) interests, that the truth can never be known. Since the historical record is mostly fiction, why not include fiction presented as fact?

By 1884 the author of Exploits and Adventures had been identified as Richard Penn Smith, a Philadelphia author hired by the publishers Carey and Hart in 1836 to produce a book attributed to Crockett that would exploit his recent martyrdom. The hope was that its popularity might help the sales of another book credited to the famous Tennessee congressman, An Account of Colonel Crockett’s Tour of the North and Down East, issued by Carey and Hart the year before. It must be said that by 1836 ghostwritten autobiographical books credited to Crockett were not uncommon, starting with Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee (1833), a popular collection of hunting tales and humorous stories rendered in the first person that appeared later that same year as Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel Crockett of West Tennessee.

There is evidence that Crockett contributed to this book, which he later disavowed as his own work because he emerged from it as something of a backwoods buffoon. He attempted to correct this comic image with his Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, a text heavily revised by another hand, for the simple reason that Crockett was strategically unlettered. Though he became a congressman, his correspondence has the orthographic and syntactical resonance of the tall tales issued under his name as the “Davy Crockett” almanacs, the first of which was published the year of his death. Inspired by the boastful hunter and Indian slayer of The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett, the almanac anecdotes were entirely spurious, though they contributed greatly to Crockett’s subsequent stature as a folk figure.

Constance Rourke may be credited with Crockett’s twentieth-century elevation to mythic status, thanks to her biography that first appeared in 1934. In keeping with the nativist spirit of the times, her book is a melange of elements taken from the autobiographical narratives and the almanacs, and in the latter instance Rourke suggested that the fictional tall tales had parallels with traditional mythology. Rourke believed that the almanac stories were derived from authentic oral sources, originating in the backwoods and the frontier, and should be acknowledged as genuine American folklore. This uncritical stance was forwarded by Walter Blair, who also compiled material from the almanacs about the famous and soon fabulous Mississippi boatman Mike Fink, portrayed as Crockett’s boon companion. Blair conjoined them both with other “folk” figures like Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack; Mose, the courageous New York fireman; and Pecos Bill, the storied cowboy.

In time, the heroes of this pantheon were shown to be the creation of relatively sophisticated eastern writers, print-shop hacks for the most part who may have borrowed from European mythological sources but whose stories had nothing to do with any backwoods oral tradition. Indeed, the “heroes” they created were for the most part crude, violent, racist, and misogynistic braggarts and buffoons. These savage caricatures of primarily frontier types were satiric representatives of the democratic masses whose power was associated with the emergence of President Andrew Jackson. “Fakelore,” not folklore, as Richard Dorson came to style them, the comic almanacs were expressions of eastern elitism, uneasiness regarding the threat of Jacksonian democracy. This anxiety came to full flower a half-century later during the presidential contest between William McKinley, a Republican identified as the candidate of moneyed eastern elites, and William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat with a large western agrarian constituency, the heart and soul of Populism.

We may find the roots of the antipathy between East and West buried in the politics of the early 1830s, specifically with the emergence of the Whig party in reaction to the ascendancy of Jacksonian democracy. And it was out of the political broils of this decade that the mythic Davy Crockett first emerged, as a “hero” whose self-creation and self-contradictoriness are a register of the complex discontent that was sown by the ultra-democratic yet dictatorial policies of Andrew Jackson. As V. L. Parrington wrote, Crockett provides “a full-length portrait of the Jacksonian leveler, in the days when the great social revolution was establishing the principles of an equalitarian democracy” (II, 390-91).

Yet David Crockett, as he always styled himself, was a single-minded congressional advocate of an increasingly anti-Jackson policy; indeed his fame rose because it was fueled by his antipathy toward “Old Hickory.” Without that anger there would have been no legendary Davy Crockett and most definitely no hero of the Alamo, never mind of the book titled Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas. That is, to understand Davy Crockett of Texas fame we must start with David Crockett of Tennessee.

II.

The son of Rebeckah Hawkins Crockett and her husband, John, David was born in 1786 in eastern Tennessee, his parents having moved there from North Carolina, fleeing those familiar frontier specters, poverty and debt. John Crockett’s own parents had been slaughtered by Native Americans in 1777, shortly after they had relocated from North Carolina to land that would soon become Tennessee. John was married by 1780, and settled in Washington County, North Carolina. Court records supply the material of his early biography, which was typical of his generation, for like many he was the son of an immigrant Irishman who had sought prosperity in the West but found only hardship and sudden death. The son shared the familial (and generational) propensity for misfortune: with a partner John built a mill in 1794 that was subsequently destroyed by a flood. He also speculated in land, one parcel of which he sold for a profit, but another parcel in eastern Tennessee, to which he moved his family from North Carolina after losing his mill, was auctioned off in 1795 to satisfy his debts.

On a remnant of this land John built a tavern, and it was there, in Greene County, Tennessee, that David—namesake of his late grandfather Crockett—was born, a fifth son, well short of the blessed seventh, and with no great expectations. His youth, chronicled by himself in the Narrative of his life published in 1834, was a series of hardships and feats of endurance. At the age of eleven or twelve he was hired out by his father to a man driving a herd of cattle to Virginia who attempted to keep him on afterward as his employee, against the boy’s will. David escaped on a snowy evening, hiking through knee-deep snow for seven hours until he was rescued by travelers who, knowing his father, came to his aid.

Once again, one of the party tried to keep the boy with him, but David continued on by foot until he reached home. Then, in the fall of 1799, he ran away, fearing retribution by his father or his teacher (or both) for having fought with a school-mate, and hired himself out to a drover taking cattle to Virginia. David’s later attempts to return were balked by this and subsequent employers, who often swindled him out of his pay, and it was 1802 before he was able to reach his father’s tavern, with nothing to show for his experience save a greater awareness of the frequent meanness and occasional generosity of strangers.

The schoolyard episode had been forgotten, but, having been gone for more than two years, David had missed a critical period in his education. He was in effect illiterate, not even knowing the alphabet. For the next year he worked for hire, earning money to pay his father’s debts, but he later managed to acquire six months of further schooling by hiring himself out to a teacher in return for instruction. He could then read, write, and “cipher,” on a very basic level, sufficient for frontier conditions. Despite David’s poor prospects, he determined in 1805 to get married, again encountering obstacles, as the first young woman he courted married suddenly out from under him. But the second venture was successful.

In 1806, he married Mary Finley, called Polly, over her mother’s objections, and the couple rented a small farm that yielded a meager income. Two sons were born to them before David set out in 1811 with his father-in-law for central Tennessee to claim land in Lincoln County. Crockett supported himself by hunting (game in new country being plentiful), a skill at which he became adept over the next two years, but in 1813 he left the Finleys for Franklin County in western Tennessee, the frontier region with which he would be identified for the rest of his short life.

The War of 1812 was identified in the Southwest as a conflict with hostile Native Americans who were in league with the British. In Tennessee it was called the Creek War, during which Andrew Jackson first distinguished himself as a military leader before marching on to New Orleans and fame. It was during this war, also, that Crockett as an enlisted mounted volunteer first crossed paths with “the old general” while serving under his command during several important battles, service that took him as far as Tallahassee in Florida but not on to New Orleans. According to an early biographer, Crockett was present when the captain commanding his troop, which had been repeatedly insubordinate, went to Jackson for advice, that Crockett, upon returning to camp, distilled as “Be sure you are right, then go ahead,” a motto which he would famously make his own in future years (Shackford: 26).

In his “authorized” autobiography, Crockett claimed to have been involved in a mutiny against Jackson, identifying himself with those soldiers whose term of enlistment had expired, and who attempted to return home against the general’s orders but were turned back by Jackson himself. The facts were otherwise, David having been with his family on an approximate furlough at the time, and as his best biographer, James Atkins Shackford, observes, his claim that he had participated in the mutiny was inspired by his subsequent quarrels with President Jackson during his years in Congress.

Shackford also notes that Crockett’s account of his brief military career was somewhat exaggerated for political effect, but by all accounts, including his own, Crockett was a brave and diligent soldier. He underwent great hardship from hunger and cold while improving his hunting abilities by supplying his fellow militiamen with meat. He left the army somewhat short of his ninety days of contracted service, but he paid another man to serve out the remainder of his time. No deserter, despite his subsequent claim, David ended his enlistment with the rank of fourth sergeant.

Crockett returned home early in 1815, about the time that Mary gave birth to their third child, a daughter. In the summer of that same year Mary died, and David, now responsible for a growing family, soon remarried. His new wife, Elizabeth (“Betsey”) Patton, was herself a young widow with children, well-born in frontier terms and a woman of strong character who would be of great help to David, who was not much gifted with “managerial abilities” (Shackford: 34). His gifts were, like those of Cooper’s Leatherstocking, suited for the wilderness life and the hunting trail, and in subsequent years he had frequent opportunity for displaying them.

After an initial foray into Alabama in 1816, he took his family west the following year, to Lawrence County in Tennessee, newly created from land ceded by the Chickasaws, hence filled with wild game. There he became a justice of the peace and was elected colonel of the local militia, warranting the title by which he was thenceforth known, not an honorary but a genuine rank. It was also an indication of Crockett’s popularity, which was further testified to by his election to the state legislature in 1821 as a representative from his county.

Colonel Crockett’s military rank and elevation to political power are associated by Shackford with the same “squatter democracy” that swept Andrew Jackson into office in 1828. The reference is to Crockett’s frontier constituency, which in western Tennessee was often identified with settlers who had taken up lands without authentic claims. But in Jackson’s case it overlooks the support the president received from north-eastern Democrats, not only workers but elites represented by the historian George Bancroft and the author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that Crockett’s style of political campaigning was very different from that found in long-established communities in the Northeast and the South and resembles the depictions of stump speaking and election days in Missouri painted by George Caleb Bingham.

It was by Crockett’s account something of a game, staged between friendly adversaries who took pride in verbal athletics and pranks. It involved (as Bingham’s paintings suggest) the dispensation by candidates of free liquor to the electorate, and required a sense of humor and a fund of anecdotes. Elections, like camp meetings, were social affairs, providing relief from the isolation and tedium of life on the frontier. Democrats being virtually without competition in southwestern Tennessee, party was not the issue, and candidates vied with each other in promising prosperity for their people, whether by building roads or opening new lands for settlement. Crockett became as adept at electioneering as at hunting—nor were the two talents unrelated, the reputation as a skillful man with a rifle being highly valued by his frontier constituents—and he undoubtedly drew on his wilderness exploits for the stories he told during political campaigns.

During his first term of legislative office, moreover, Crockett became acutely aware that the interests of voters in western Tennessee were quite distinct from those in the east. Thus representatives from the eastern and middle sections of the state differed from representatives from the west over the matter of land warrants, made complex by Tennessee having been carved out of the western part of North Carolina. As in the similar creation of Kentucky from part of Virginia, a situation emerged in which a man might unknowingly claim land actually owned by another; then, having set up a cabin and made improvements, he could lose all to the original claimant. Daniel Boone, the grand original for hunter-pioneers like Crockett, had lost his Kentucky lands to absentee owners in Virginia, speculators who had bought large tracts with the intention of selling them after their value increased.

Shackford tells us that David, while serving as an enlisted man in the army, had come to resent the privilege and power engendered by mere rank. As a legislator representing western interests, it was easy to translate this inequity into the conflict between propertied elites in east and middle Tennessee and the poor settlers in his own region. Men like Andrew Jackson of Nashville not only lived on large plantations, they aped the manners of the southern aristocracy, including the assertion of personal honor by fighting duels, whereas differences on the Tennessee frontier, a region of struggling farmers rather than wealthy planters, were settled by the exercise of wits or fists.

It was during Crockett’s first term as a member of the state legislature that he was styled “the gentleman from the cane” (a reference to the unsettled regions where the tall stalks of wild cane grew in abundance, forming thickets called “brakes”) by an opponent during a debate, an epithet which he first found offensive but then turned into a joke against the other man. He subsequently made it a part of his emerging identity as a champion of the underprivileged settlers in the west, those other “gentlemen from the cane” who had elected him to office.

That is, Crockett had begun to form the backwoods persona that would make him famous, yet had he ended his political career in 1824 he would have followed a mute and inglorious career not much different from that of his constituents. Frontier life was often marked by financial failures inspiring a move farther west, an experience involving considerable hardship that could well be followed by subsequent failures. During the first legislative session in which he served, Crockett was called home because a grist-and-powder mill he had built had been destroyed by a flood along the very waters that were to turn the mill wheel and that also swept away a distillery connected with the operation. This disaster was similar to the one experienced by his father in 1794 and likewise inspired Crockett to plan a move with his family to lands newly opened west of the Tennessee River.

Before Crockett left for home, the legislature met in joint session to consider an issue of serious interest to settlers in western regions, a call for a convention to revise the state constitution, necessary to give due representation in the legislature of the rapidly settled districts in west Tennessee. A convention would also correct inequities in property taxes, which being uniform throughout the state, bore heavily on western settlers. Favored by the newly elected Governor William Carroll (and Colonel Crockett, soon to be of west Tennessee) the call for a convention was opposed by wealthy landowners in central Tennessee, and was tabled for the time.

No sooner had the state legislature adjourned in November than David headed out in search of a suitable site to which he could relocate his family. This he found on a branch of the Obion River, in a region that had experienced both hurricanes and earthquakes in 1812-13, resulting in tangled windfalls, large crevices in the ground, and a change in lakes and river courses that left great swamps behind. Though apparently hostile to the needs of settlers, the region was friendly to wildlife, which made it very attractive to men with Crockett’s talents.

On the other hand, his penetration of this wilderness involved wading and swimming through flood waters in order to bypass heavy thickets and windfalls, this in the winter months. David demonstrated the qualities of courage and hardihood shown by him as a boy and an enlisted man, but having staked out his new home, he returned to the old one to be confronted by lawsuits for the debts occasioned by the loss of his mill, along with other claims against him that required the sale of his house and land to satisfy. He moved his family to the cabin he had built on a branch of the Obion in September 1822, but in the meantime he responded to the newly elected governor’s call reconvening the General Assembly for a special session in July.

The Tennessee legislature met to vote on issues of serious interest to Crockett and his constituents, including a proposal to extend the date terminating the land warrants issued by North Carolina—which Crockett opposed—and a resolution to be sent to the United States Congress asking that a bill be passed that would allow Tennessee to sell off vacant lands, thereby acquiring funds to be used for fostering education in the state. Crockett voted for this resolution, apparently under the assumption that it would deal fairly with settlers already living on “vacant lands.” He likewise voted once again to issue a call for a convention to revise the state constitution, which he would continue to support during his career in the state legislature.

Crockett returned home to move his family across the Tennessee River to their new place of residence, where he began to kill game in such large quantities as to earn him a considerable local reputation as a great hunter in the tradition of Daniel Boone. Where before Crockett had lived in regions where bears had become scarce, this region of windfalls and deep holes in the earth was a virtual haven for the animals settlers greatly valued for meat and fur. In one year he claimed to have killed 105 bears, a figure that Shackford questions, but he accepts as probable Crockett’s story about crawling into a crevice left by an earthquake to kill a bear with a hunting knife as well as another tale about shooting a bear that was as large as a bull.

In the election of 1823, Crockett was returned to the Tennessee house of representatives, as before voting for bills favorable to “gentlemen from the cane,” especially those who had settled on lands still subject to North Carolina warrants, and he introduced a bill mandating the improvement of navigation in the western part of the state. He increasingly found himself at odds with representatives loyal to General Andrew Jackson, who had been nominated by the legislature in 1822 as their presidential candidate for the election of 1824, but who was identified by Crockett with eastern elites. In October of 1824 Crockett returned home, the second session of his term having ended, thus closing his career as a state representative.

The very next year, he offered himself as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives but was defeated and, seeking to augment his income, he set about building two flatboats loaded with a cargo of barrel staves intended for New Orleans. His skill as a frontiersman and hunter did not translate well into river navigation, and he was nearly drowned when the boats, lashed together and floating sideways down the Mississippi, grounded on an island of tangled logs. The boat on which Crockett was aboard began to sink, and being below decks, he barely escaped through a small hatch with the help of his friends, parting with his clothes and considerable skin in the process. Both boats and their cargoes were lost, along with the time and money invested in the venture, and he returned to hunting bears for a living, a hazardous but familiar trade.

In 1827 Crockett again ran for Congress, trailing the usual cloud of humorous anecdotes, dispensing free liquor to voters, and outwitting (and outlying) his opponents. This time he was successful, heralding his appearance on a much more prominent platform, which for Crockett was tantamount to a stage. By then he had mastered his public persona as something of a self-parodying backwoodsman; he was not in Washington long before he was discovered by newspapers, and anecdotes describing his eccentric behavior began to circulate, resulting in Crockett’s becoming what we now call a celebrity. Like many such, Crockett confused notoriety with true fame, at least for a time, and it was during this period, of about five years’ duration, that the mythic “Davy” began to cohere.

III.

Crockett’s emergence as a national figure came at a time when great changes were occurring in American politics: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died in 1826, and for all intents and purposes the Republican and Federalist parties were extinct. Monroe had been succeeded in 1825 by John Quincy Adams, a former Federalist who espoused many of the positions associated with Jeffersonian Republicans, including government funding of internal improvements. The popular vote in that election was won by Tennessee’s favorite son, Andrew Jackson, but the story was that Adams had cut a deal with Henry Clay, offering him the position of secretary of state in return for his support in the House of Representatives, where the close election was determined in Adams’s favor. Whether true or not, the story cast a shadow over Adams’s presidency, and in 1828 Jackson famously won.

From the wreck of the Adams administration emerged two great statesmen who would dominate American politics for twenty years: Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Both were eminently qualified for the presidency, which both coveted mightily; both were identified with the rise of the Whig party, which emerged in 1834, but neither man was able to convince the voters that he was a viable candidate. Moreover, the Whigs, taking their cue from General Jackson’s success in using his western origins and military fame as political capital, were forever searching for a like champion. In 1840 they were successful in their choice of General William Henry Harrison, celebrated as the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, a minor and indecisive skirmish preceding the War of 1812.

I rehearse what may be familiar facts to clarify the otherwise puzzling course of Crockett’s career in Congress. When he was first elected, Crockett maintained that despite his earlier differences with the general he was a Jacksonian Democrat but he ended his congressional career five years later a champion of the Whigs. It was Crockett’s claim that he had remained a true Democrat while Jackson had become a dictator, a familiar enough charge at the time, thanks to the old general’s aggressive and authoritarian personality. But as James Shackford maintains, Crockett’s defection was chiefly inspired by the same old issue of squatters’ rights, on which he and Jackson had taken opposing positions early in the 1820s. The matter of the disposition of vacant lands in Tennessee was made a national issue by James K. Polk, who had been elected to the state legislature during Crockett’s tenure and who in 1825 was elected ahead of Crockett to the U.S. House of Representatives. Polk was a powerful member of Congress by the time Crockett arrived and became even more powerful after the election of 1828, thanks to his friendship with and loyalty to Jackson.

As a representative from Tennessee, Polk heeded the resolution of 1822 and sought the sale of hitherto vacant lands there for the purpose of funding public education in his state; Crockett at first supported Polk’s Vacant Land Bill, operating as before under the assumption that the tracts already settled by farmers would be ceded to them without cost. But things turned out differently, and when Crockett learned that all of Tennessee’s vacant lands would be offered for sale, thereby shutting out impoverished squatters while opening up opportunities for speculation, he opposed Polk’s bill, which had the approval of President Jackson.

Throughout his subsequent career in Congress Crockett tried to advance substitute bills and proposed amendments to Polk’s bill that favored those who had already settled on the “vacant lands,” but to no avail, and his failure was increasingly a source of frustration and anger, increasingly aimed at Jackson and his supporters in the Democratic party. The congressman was undoubtedly sincere in his loyalty to the poor farmers of western Tennessee, but he also knew that his reelection depended on his success in protecting their rights to the land on which they had settled.

Another matter on which he disagreed with Jackson was the tangled and controversial issue of internal improvements—defined as building roads and canals as well as removing obstacles to navigation on rivers—identified in western states with facilitating the exchange of commodities. Although General Jackson had supported a system of national roads as important to the defense of the frontier, President Jackson, with the aid of Congressman Polk, consistently opposed the federal funding of internal improvements, nominally because it was unconstitutional—on the grounds that any such improvements would benefit some sections of the country at the expense of all—but also because his party anticipated that the cost would be met by imposing high tariffs on imported goods.

Henry Clay as early as 1810 had proposed his “American system,” in which tariffs would be used to protect American manufactures even while encouraging the use of American raw materials, a plan favored by politicians from the industrial eastern states. The agrarian South was opposed to tariffs as having no advantage to farmers while increasing the cost of manufactured goods, whether from abroad or from New England. This southern opposition came to a head when the tariff of 1828, the “Tariff of Abominations,” was followed by Henry Clay’s “compromise” tariff bill of 1832, regarded as inadequate by many southerners including Jackson’s vice president, John Calhoun of South Carolina. In response, Calhoun put forward the doctrine of nullification, which would allow individual states to ignore laws with which they disagreed. Anathema to the Whigs, the idea of nullification was also opposed by Jackson as unconstitutional, forcing Calhoun’s resignation as vice president even as he was elected to the Senate as a champion of states’ rights.

The point of all this is that internal improvements were linked inextricably to high tariffs, yet in 1830 David Crockett had supported a bill for building a national road, providing it ran from Washington to Memphis, in his home state, a position verifying Jackson’s opinion about sectional particularism. And in 1831, for similar reasons, Crockett sponsored a bill authorizing national support for improvements to navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, arguing that waterways that passed through many states would not otherwise be cleared of obstructions because interstate rivalry precluded cooperation. It was the president’s newfound opposition to the national funding of internal improvements that inspired Crockett’s remark in Congress in 1831 that although “our great man at the head of the nation has changed his course, I will not change mine. . . . I shall insist upon it that I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not” (Shackford: 112).

Crockett’s essentially populist views led him to oppose appropriations for the military academy at West Point, which he considered an institution favoring (and creating) elites, a position taken by many in the Tennessee legislature, and which was likewise supported by Congressman Polk. By contrast, Crockett spoke against the president’s proposal for the removal of all Native American tribes to reservations located west of the Mississippi, a measure that catered to the expansive spirit along the frontier. Since the colonel had proved to be no Indian lover during the Creek War, his opposition to a bill, which though unjust was favored by his constituents, has puzzled many commentators.

Shackford notes that opposition to the Indian Bill came mostly from the East, where the conflicts with Native Americans were long past. Indeed, in the 1820s novels and poems by eastern authors promoting a sentimental view of an essentially extinct people began to appear, heralded by Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. By 1830, Crockett had become increasingly friendly toward the positions of the anti-Jackson party which had begun to cast a hospitable eye in his direction as a Democrat who had become well known for his hostility toward the president. Since the anti-Jacksonians were especially strong in the Northeast, Shackford regards Crockett’s position on Indian removal as a first step toward his eventual alliance with the Whig party of Webster and Clay.

In 1830, Crockett opposed Jackson in the matter of political appointments, pointing out that the president had campaigned by promising retrenchment of the burgeoning government bureaucracy. Having won the election, Jackson was conducting business as usual, with the active help of Calhoun’s replacement as vice president, Martin Van Buren of New York. The Jackson administration sought to consolidate its power by appointing office holders friendly to its policies, creating by the spoils system what Crockett called “a Set of Jackson worshippers.” He maintained that he wore no collar around his neck that identified him as Andrew Jackson’s “dog” (Shackford: 118-19).

He had, he declared, in the same letter to a correspondent, been “herled” by Jackson supporters “from their party,” in effect throwing him in the direction of the opposition party. The specific charge Crockett made against Jackson was that he had removed the postmaster general appointed by President Monroe and kept by the Adams administration so as to replace him with a Democrat of his own persuasion. Later it was discovered that there was a huge deficit in the Post Office funds, the blame for which was laid on Jackson’s man—the “dog” in question—by the president’s opponents.

Shackford notes that this refusal to wear a collar with Jackson’s name on it also appeared in the anonymous Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, published in 1833 and credited to Matthew St. Clair Clarke, clerk of the House of Representatives from 1822 to 1833 and a friend of the president of the second National Bank, Nicholas Biddle. President Jackson regarded the bank with great hostility as an anti-democratic institution, and any friend of Biddle was no friend of Jackson. The book was the first of several connected with or credited to Crockett, and like the others, it was essentially a proto-Whig document attacking Jackson’s record, especially his removal of government deposits from the second National Bank in 1833.

The bank had been created during President Monroe’s administration at the behest of financial and manufacturing interests who thought of a centralized institution as an instrument for controlling the currency thereby stabilizing the national economy. But the bank was opposed by agrarian interests who thought it had been created chiefly for the benefit of eastern elites opposed to westerners’ desire for easy credit, which was regarded by the moneyed class as promoting inflation, thereby devaluing investments.

During Biddle’s leadership national prosperity boomed, but Jackson regarded the bank as an autocratic institution favoring his opponents whose power would be (and was) greatly reduced by his removal of government funds. The president redistributed the money to state banks, supposedly more responsive to local (agrarian) needs, a step that was both a decentralization maneuver and one that eastern Democrats saw as spreading the wealth while sapping the strength of the Whigs. But western farmers were not pleased with the removal and redistribution of the funds, which made the money more available to speculators than to impoverished settlers.

Given that Crockett was the representative of a poor region tenanted by farmers, and that he was ideologically a Populist, his loud and frequent attacks on Jackson’s removal of the “deposites,” as he spelled it, indicates that he was aware of the negative effect of the measure on his constituents. At the same time, his attitude toward the president and the removal of the deposits was in sympathy with the position of the Whigs. They obviously thought of the colonel as a backwoodsman from Tennessee useful to them as a spokesman for their opposition to the Tennessean now in the executive mansion; a mini-Jackson, Crockett in his hunting outfit of buckskins and fur hat was a version of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He may not have worn a collar identifying him as Jackson’s dog, but he soon became harnessed to a leash held in the hands of Nicholas Biddle; as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed more than fifty years ago, the “Davy” Crockett of popular fame was distinctly a Whig creation.

It has been pointed out by Shackford and others that the emergence of the comic Davy Crockett was helped along by the popular success of Major Jack Downing, the creation of Seba Smith, a newspaper editor and Democrat in Portland, Maine. Writing letters with an inimitable Down East flavor from Washington, the fictitious major became a humorous witness to the activities of Jackson’s administration, making shrewd observations that became increasingly satiric as the president’s hand tightened the reins of government while loosening the distribution of political largesse.

These letters were collected as a book in 1833, their publication hastened by the appearance of a second Jack Downing, the creation of Charles Augustus Davis, whose letters were much more critical of Jackson’s administration than were those of Smith’s creation. Collected in 1834, the letters of the alternative Jack Downing had first appeared in a New York newspaper and were addressed to its editor, Theodore Dwight. Dwight had been one of the Connecticut Wits, and was a sympathetic chronicler of the Hartford Convention, who even by the 1830s had remained an unreconstructed Federalist for whom Jacksonian democracy was anathema.

Also worthy of mention is another work of literature that assisted in the creation of Davy Crockett, The Lion of the West, a prize-winning play first produced in 1831. The comedy was written by the multitalented New Yorker James Kirke Paulding, who had collaborated with his friend Washington Irving, on the satiric periodical Salmagundi (1807-08), after which he had written a number of satires and poems. Because he was an author of a series of biographical studies of naval commanders in the War of 1812 and was throughout much of his career steadfastly hostile to Great Britain, Paulding was appointed by President Madison to the Board of Navy Commissioners in 1815. In 1824 he was made navy agent for New York by President Monroe and served President (and fellow New Yorker) Martin Van Buren—Jackson’s handpicked successor—as secretary of the navy. In sum, Paulding was a Democrat who made a successful transition from Jeffersonianism to Jacksonianism. He was in addition a northerner sympathetic to the pro-slavery cause, made clear by his Slavery in the United States (1836), and was friendly toward the people who kept slaves, as he demonstrated in Letters from the South (1817).

It is generally accepted that the protagonist of Paulding’s farce, Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, a congressman from Kentucky, was at least in part inspired by stories already in circulation about Colonel Crockett. Though in Letters from the South Paulding was uneasy about the backwoodsman type, describing a fight between a wagoneer and a riverboatman in satiric terms, in his play (as revised for production first by an American then a British dramatist) the characterization of the hunter from Kentucky was otherwise. Though uncouth in dress and manners (he wears a fringed leather hunting coat and an animal pelt for a hat) and given to boasting about his fighting abilities—claiming to be a “half horse half alligator” able to “lick his weight in wild cats”—the colonel is a courageous and gallant frontiersman with a heart of gold. As acted by James H. Hackett, who had commissioned the play, Wildfire proved to be a popular figure who held the stage for the next twenty years, and is an obvious source for the almanac version of Davy Crockett.

Perhaps anticipating a libel suit, Paulding saw to it, even before the play was first produced, that newspaper stories appeared denying that Wildfire was modeled after Colonel Crockett, who was after all from Tennessee, not Kentucky, and (unlike Andrew Jackson) was not notorious for fights with others, whether with fists or firearms. But it is also undeniable that there was a connection between the two colonels in the mind of the public, and when Paulding’s play was staged in Washington in 1833, the story went, Crockett attended a performance during which Hackett as Wildfire bowed in the congressman’s direction. When the “other” colonel responded in kind the audience applauded the gesture.

It was also in 1833 that Clarke’s Life of Crockett first appeared, in which the author borrowed an episode from Paulding’s play (the account of a fight between a backwoodsman and a boatman that had been previously used in the author’s book on the South, now put into the colorful language of Wildfire). Clarke included other anecdotes that firmly cemented the colonel to his wild-man stage counterpart, and since much of the Life contains biographical material that could only have been supplied by Crockett, Shackford concludes that he must have been a party to its composition, despite his subsequent declaration that he had nothing to do with the book. Subsequent scholars have agreed with Shackford that Clarke’s Life was part of a calculated plan by the anti-Jacksonians to exploit the image of the “other” Democrat and frontier hero from Tennessee (Shackford: 256-57).

By 1831, despite his continuing efforts on behalf of western Tennesseans on the vacant lands issue, Crockett was beginning to have problems with his constituents over his claim of being an anti-Jackson Jackson man. He published that year a Circular Letter setting forth the reasons for his several positions on retrenchment, internal improvements, and the like, but to no avail. Crockett was defeated in his bid for reelection that year, in part, Shackford believes, because his bitter antipathy toward the Jacksonian Democrats was beginning to diminish his good-natured and playful attitude toward politics.

In 1828, Crockett had acquired land in Weakley County, and having bought adjacent property with a house already on it, in 1831 he once more moved westward with his family. In 1833, he again ran for Congress, this time successfully, though he seems to have felt that his political career was not enhanced by Clarke’s Life, which was published that same year. Its portrayal of Crockett as a slangy, boastful hunter from the backwoods may have pleased the Whigs but it seems to have been regarded by the colonel as not very helpful to his increasingly ambitious plans for national office. Nor was it very flattering to the western constituency on whose votes he depended.

He therefore declared that he had no connection with the book, and set to work on his autobiographical Narrative, apparently with the help of an old (and literate) friend, Thomas Chilton, a member of Congress from Kentucky. The book covered much of the same ground as the Life, but gave more stress to Crockett’s military career and his heroic ordeals as a hunter and pioneer and had little of the broad humor and anecdotal style of the other book. In it he repeatedly attacked Jackson and Martin Van Buren and gave hints of his availability as a Whig candidate for president, the Narrative not being published until 1834, after he had been returned once again to Congress.

During Crockett’s absence from Washington, the battle between Jackson and Nicholas Biddle over the future of the National Bank had heated up, with the president attacking the bank as a monopolistic agent of corruption. (Shackford tells us that during his career in Congress, Crockett was one of many legislators granted loans by the bank that were in effect gifts, clear evidence of Biddle’s desire to curry favor with the legislature.) At the urging of Henry Clay, Biddle asked Congress to renew the bank’s charter, four years before it was to expire. As Biddle and Clay anticipated, Jackson vetoed the bill after it had passed the Senate and House, a show of executive force that they thought would cause Jackson to lose the forthcoming election. They were wrong, and no sooner had Jackson been returned to office than he removed the government funds deposited in the bank.

When he returned to Washington in 1833, Crockett had immediately set to work on behalf of his version of the Tennessee Land Bill, at the same time fulminating in private correspondence against Jackson because of the president’s naked display of power in removing the deposits, which had the effect of “deranging” the stability of currency and “destroying” the nation’s system of commerce (Shackford: 147). He repeatedly used the phrase “King Andrew,” popular with Whigs (who took their name from the anti-Tory party in England), and with them he maintained that the president was a despot indifferent to the will of the people.

With his “authorized” autobiography now in print, Crockett went on a tour of the Northeast in late April and early May of 1834, hoping to increase the sales of his book. The trip was also a test of the political waters in Whig country, first in the expectation of gaining support for his land bill, and second with some vague hope of making a run for the presidency against Jackson’s appointed heir, Martin Van Buren. The vice president was variously characterized by Crockett and the Whigs as “Old Kinderhook,” “the Magician,” and “the little Red Fox.”

But the only palpable result of this trip was another book, An Account of Colonel Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (1835), a first-person narrative published in his name but credited by Shackford to William Clark, a fellow congressman and a Whig. Shackford uncovers evidence that Crockett was active in contributing materials to Clark, but though faithful to the facts of the congressman’s tour, the book is a thoroughgoing piece of Whig propaganda. Thanks to a well-managed schedule of events during his tour, Colonel Crockett received a tumultuous welcome in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The event was comparable to President Jackson’s tour of the Northeast the year before; indeed it may have been arranged by the Whigs as a calculated response to the general’s trip.

We may not doubt the colorful congressman’s widespread popularity, but that much of the applause was politically inspired we may also accept, and the book that renders an account of the tour is filled with “Crockett’s” euphoric praise of progress in the places he visited, from improvements to navigation (the Union system of canals connecting Philadelphia to Pittsburgh) to the factory system in the Northeast. He also spoke of the necessity of protective tariffs to foster local manufacturers, and his description of the Lowell mills, with their miles of attractive young women tending looms, reads like an advertising brochure written by Abbot Lawrence himself. He claimed that in New York he had sat down to dinner with “Major Jack Downing,” and his account of the tour closes with an exchange of “letters” with the fictitious Yankee opponent of Jackson. Like the version of the “Major” created by Charles Augustus Davis, the western colonel, by the end of the account of his tour, had become a figment of the Whig imagination.

Much of the tour’s cost was covered by his hosts, and in Philadelphia Crockett was given a watch-chain seal engraved with his famous motto, “Go ahead,” sentiments beloved by Whiggish champions of progress (one of the first locomotives put in service in Massachusetts was named “Davy Crockett”). In Boston he was given a hunting coat of local manufacture. In Lowell he received a bolt of fabric spun in the mills from wool supposedly shipped from Mississippi, thus proving the value of factories in the Northeast (and tariffs) to farmers in the South—a major stress of Clay’s “American system,” the royal arch supporting the Whig notion of national union.

When Crockett returned to Philadelphia from Washington on the following 4th of July, he was given (by the “Young Whigs”) a new rifle crafted to his specifications, and in response to a heavy hint by the congressman he was at the same time presented with “a half a dozen cannisters of his best sportsman’s powder” by none other than the aging Éleuthère Irénée Du Pont (Tour, quoted in Shackford: 168). Independence Day in Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration of Independence had been written, was a special occasion, and Crockett shone, delivering rhetorical fireworks in an address denouncing the return to America of tyranny in the form of Andrew Jackson.

During his grand tour, Crockett had made similar speeches along the way, all printed in the Tour, all repeating the same themes, all walking the line dictated by the Whig party, and all apparently written for him to read aloud. The result is probably the most boring book associated with Crockett’s authorship, though the Life of Martin Van Buren, which appeared over his name later the same year, is a close rival, being a complex and at times incomprehensible recounting of the “Magician’s” political career. But these efforts were to no avail if Crockett expected to garner Whig support for his land bill, for it was defeated when the vote was called on February 18, 1835, as was Colonel Crockett in the congressional election later that same year.

His loss to Adam Huntsman—another hero of the War of 1812 whose artificial limb inspired Crockett’s unfortunate epithet, “timber-leg”—resulted in his declaration that the people of Tennessee could go to hell and that he was going to Texas. And so he did, his adventures inspiring one more ghostwritten book, a narrative written after his death but trailing inglorious clouds of defeat generated by Colonel Crockett’s congressional career. Out of those clouds, however, in part inspired by his martyrdom at the Alamo, sprung the phoenix called Davy Crockett, granting him an immortality he never sought but for which we may be sure he would have been grateful.

IV.

Richard Penn Smith, the author of Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas, was a well-connected Philadelphian; born in 1799, he was the grandson of William Smith, first provost of what would become the University of Pennsylvania. A lawyer with a creative bent inherited from his father, Smith had by 1836 written twenty plays and a novel, as well as sketches, short stories, and poetry. His first literary endeavor was a series of newspaper essays published in the early 1820s under the title “The Plagiary,” a meaningful coincidence given that his subsequent dramatic works were mostly adaptations of French plays.

As we shall see, Smith’s spurious account of Crockett’s apotheosis at the Alamo is likewise dependent on other men’s work and, having been written at a great rate of speed, is a tour de force of literary amalgamation. Though no great shakes in terms of style, the book managed to convince its readers that it was genuine, in part because Crockett’s autobiography is itself stylistically uneven and occasionally boring. Smith’s book was instantly popular, selling ten thousand copies in the first year of publication by Carey and Hart, and it received enthusiastic reviews in Great Britain, where it was regarded as a dependable account of the conflict in Texas. Smith’s twentieth-century biographer regards the book as superior to the author’s plays, which were overwrought and melodramatic, and regrets that he did not repeat his experiment in a realistic, humorous style. For whatever reason, Smith thenceforth abandoned his writing career, but his last book satisfied its immediate purpose: as the publishers had hoped, it emptied their shelves of unsold copies of Col. Crockett’s Tour.

Ever since the nativist enthusiasm for Davy Crockett in the 1930s, led by V. L. Parrington, Walter Blair, Franklin J. Meine, and Constance Rourke, most studies of popular culture in the United States have focused on the comic almanac adventures of the famed “Kentucky” hunter, which have been credited with creating a mythic Crockett. And yet, with their crude wood-cuts, raw humor, and emphasis on violence, the almanac stories bear little resemblance to the historic Crockett, who was of course from Tennessee. James Shackford’s biography, published in 1956, was intended to rescue the virtually forgotten original from the mythic version, but over the past fifty years it has continued to be the “Davy” of almanac fame who has monopolized scholarly attention.

Following the lead of Richard Slotkin, perhaps the most influential revisionist historian of the American West in recent times, modern students of popular culture have been drawn to literature that has attracted a large audience. It is a criterion clearly related to the populist tendency of democracy, which ranks the tastes and preferences of the general public higher than those of elites. Moreover, the distinction between the “two” Crocketts has been blurred by Slotkin himself, who confuses the chronology and contents of the “authorized” and ghostwritten Crockett autobiographies. As a result Slotkin gives the Sketches and Eccentricities undue emphasis, regarding its “folkloric” collection of “tall tales, trickster pranks, and magical triumphs” as having had the greater influence because it was published after Crockett’s own narrative of his life (Fatal Environment: 166).

Thus, in his discussion of Crockett’s death at the Alamo, Slotkin notes that his “publishers and editorial associates immediately increased the number and circulation of the almanacs that bore Crockett’s name, and published a sequel to his earlier biographies which purported to be the journal found on his dead body” (171). This conflates two quite distinct genres: whatever their origins, the almanacs were aimed at the masses, where Smith’s book, like the earlier accounts of Crockett’s life and adventures from which it derives, was intended for a relatively sophisticated readership. Moreover, the almanacs were ephemeral productions, and their great rarity today indicates how few escaped destruction at the end of the year for which they were published. On the other hand, Smith’s account of Crockett’s Texas adventures continued to be reprinted for nearly a century, often in tandem with Crockett’s own Narrative, and provided biographers and historians with what they assumed was authentic material.

In 1883 there appeared a compilation of biographies of celebrated western heroes by D. M. Kelsey, the frontispiece of which was a depiction of “Custer’s Last Rally on the Little Big Horn.” In celebrating “Pioneer Heroes” from de Soto to Generals Miles and Crook, Kelsey rendered an account of Crockett’s life that combined the authentic Narrative with Smith’s Exploits and Adventures, and it was shortly afterward that Theodore Roosevelt wrote “Remember the Alamo,” with its dependence on Smith’s account of Crockett’s final days. When in 1923 Hamlin Garland brought together Crockett’s autobiography and excerpts from the ghostwritten Tour, he also included the main body of Smith’s narrative despite a bibliographic note declaring that the book was spurious.

Garland himself seemed to be dubious about its authenticity, calling Smith’s an “apocryphal work,” but he also noted that it “remains the only account of the great woodsman’s death, and it is in character” (10). The bibliographic note takes a somewhat harder but still positive tack, noting that “this pseudo-Crockett . . . is itself interesting,” if only because “the existence of such a book that there was current at the time a popular legend and literature of the frontier which made it possible for catch-penny hacks to manufacture a reasonably characteristic, reasonably convincing ‘autobiography’ of a dead hero while his death was still in the news” (11).

This rationale still seems valid, for Smith’s fictional narrative bears witness not only to the contemporary popularity of Colonel Crockett, intensified by his martyrdom at the Alamo, but to the author’s skill in producing a convincing story from a patchwork of anecdotes borrowed from earlier books supposedly written by Crockett along with other elements popular at the time. Smith gave verisimilitude to his narrative by incorporating bona fide materials about the mounting friction between the Americans in Texas and the authorities in Mexico, binding the whole with a reasonably accurate description of the landscape through which Crockett had passed. As his biographer notes, Smith used a realistic, often slangy style, and he included a number of humorous and picaresque anecdotes; though the narrative is often sketchy and occasionally flat, anyone familiar with the other books credited to Crockett, including the bona fide autobiography, will recognize the terrain.

In 1933, Franklin Meine published his anthology, Tall Tales of the Southwest, and aroused the ire of James Shackford by ignoring the “real” David Crockett. Meine included “only a selection from the entirely spurious Exploits, the only Crockett book with which David had nothing to do” (viii). This, Shackford continues, “paved the way” for Constance Rourke’s “fictional” biography of Crockett in 1934, “which gave ‘Davy’ the identical tall-tale treatment Mr. Meine had given him.” This was what Parrington meant when he referred to Davy Crockett as “a mythical figure that drew to itself the unappropriated picturesque that sprang spontaneously from the crude western life,” only Shackford identified the mythmaking process with the 1930s, not the 1830s (II: 173).

Rourke used a number of anecdotes about her hero’s travels through Arkansas and Texas as told by Smith, and devoted a chapter to “the brightly colored story [about] the shadowy companions who joined Crockett somewhere along the way,” including Thimblerig (supposedly inspired by the famous gambler Jonathan Harrison Green) and the Bee hunter (179). Though aware that Smith had been identified as the author, Rourke felt that “a pattern of evidence may yet be woven to prove that it had a basis in fact. . . . The tale was—and remains—part of the spreading Crockett legend . . . and so must have a place in this narrative.” Indeed, Smith’s book is still of great relevance to anyone interested in the “mythic” Crockett, not because it may have been written by Crockett but because it is a self-conscious attempt to construct a narrative out of contemporary popular materials.

There is an early reference in Smith’s book to Sam Patch, who gained fame and a short-lived immortality by leaping from great heights into rivers and falls. A millworker in Rhode Island, Patch obtained local notice by his dives into the Pawtucket River, but he first caught the attention of a greater public after going to work in a factory in Paterson, New Jersey. Appearing high above the Passaic River where a crowd had gathered to watch as the span of a great bridge was being slowly drawn across the chasm, Patch stole the show by shouting what became his famous slogan, “Some things can be done as well as others!” then jumping into the water far below. He thereby commenced a career of sorts, the high point of which was reached when he leaped into Niagara Falls from a platform on Goat Island before a huge audience.

Patch’s series of breathtaking jumps ended with yet another, even greater leap, this time into the Genesee Falls in Rochester: Sam promoted the event with a poster declaring, “HIGHER YET! SAM’S LAST JUMP. SOME THINGS CAN BE DONE AS WELL AS OTHERS. THERE IS NO MISTAKE IN SAM PATCH” (Dorson, America in Legend: 94). The words proved prophetic: this was truly his last leap because it killed him. Smith works Patch’s slogan into his narrative at several junctures, thereby associating Crockett with another eccentric hero of the day, perhaps with a somber implication.

Like Patch, Crockett had been elevated suddenly from a humble station in life and then had become trapped in his own notoriety; moreover, his heroic stature, like Patch’s, was regarded as something of a joke: not even his Whig champions took Crockett seriously. Patch literally rose to a great height and suffered a great fall—his wooden tombstone read “Here lies Sam Patch; such is Fame”—and a similar epitaph could have decorated Crockett’s grave, had his body not been burned and buried with the other defenders of the Alamo. As I have already stated, had Crockett abandoned his political career after his second term as a state legislator, his fame would have remained local, but once elected to Congress, he gained a platform from which, like Patch, he took a fatal leap.

The first part of Smith’s Exploits and Adventures relies heavily on material in Clarke’s 1832 Life, and takes material as well from letters Crockett had sent to his (and Smith’s) publishers, Carey and Hart. The former includes the colonel’s account of his campaigning methods and the cunning trick played on a rum-seller, and though the victim is not a swindling Yankee like Job Snelling—a type that was then emerging in contemporary popular literature—several Yankee tricksters do appear in Clarke’s book. From Crockett’s letters to his publishers Smith took details of the colonel’s departure for Texas, and, as Constance Rourke notes, “whole passages were taken over from [Mary Austin] Holley’s ‘Texas’ and from David B. Edwards’s ‘History of Texas,’ among others” (267-68).

Smith soon introduced characters into the narrative that were apparently of his own creation, including both Thimblerig and the unnamed philanthropist-fiddler, a sentimental type perhaps inspired by Laurence Sterne. But the lovelorn Bee hunter was lifted from Cooper’s recent The Prairie, much as Crockett’s feat of marksmanship, first used in Clarke’s Life, is a parody of a famous episode in The Pioneers where Leatherstocking actually does hit the center of a bullseye twice. Crockett’s encounter with the young bumpkin rehearsing “a knock-down and drag-out fight” was taken from a sketch in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, published in 1835, indicating the extent to which Smith was up-to-date not only on major authors of his day but on southwestern humor as well.

Most narratives about Crockett’s martyrdom in the cause for freedom in Texas ignore the fact that one of the many objections American colonists had to arbitrary Mexican rule was the law against slavery incorporated in the Mexican constitution of 1824, the year that independence from Spain was finally achieved. The founders of the American colony had pinned their hopes for prosperity on raising cotton, from which fortunes were being made along the Mississippi delta, and cotton growing on a large scale depended on slave labor.

Crockett himself owned a few slaves, as did many small farmers in the Southwest, but he seems never to have been an ardent champion of pro-slavery during a time when advocates for abolition were beginning to make themselves heard. Smith, being from Philadelphia, could hardly have been unaware of the controversy. Because of its Quaker heritage the city had early on become a center for anti-slavery activities: both Ben Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush were presidents of the first anti-slavery society founded in America (1775), and Pennsylvania had been among the first states to abolish slavery (in 1780).

In his speech given aboard a Mississippi steamboat in chapter six of Exploits and Adventures, Crockett maintains that because he is in “a slave-holding state,” to avoid being lynched he should declare that “I am neither an abolitionist nor a colonizationist [i.e., a proponent of sending freed slaves to Africa], but simply Colonel Crockett of Tennessee, now bound for Texas.” But then he proceeds to raise a toast to “the abolition of slavery,” quickly clarifying his sentiments by maintaining that “there are no slaves in the country more servile than the [Democratic] party slaves in Congress.” Beyond this rhetorical trick, there is scant mention in Smith’s book of the slavery controversy.

Thimblerig’s vivid account of Natchez, “where nigger women are knocked down by the auctioneer, and knocked up by the purchaser,” and “where the poorest slave has plenty of yellow boys [mulatto children], but not of Benton’s mintage,” raised the specter of miscegenation, a source of ribald humor in the South and righteous indignation in the North. The reference is also to Missouri’s Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s championing of hard currency: the slang term for gold coins was “yellow boys” (“yaller boys” in Huckleberry Finn). Here as elsewhere in Smith’s book Crockett’s derisive reference to Benton was inspired by the Missouri Democrat’s support of President Jackson’s attack on the National Bank.

Though among Smith’s dramas was The Eighth of January, a melodrama celebrating the Battle of New Orleans and produced the year that Jackson became president, we may assume that the author was a Whig. He may even have been one of those “Young Whigs” of Philadelphia who gave Crockett his new rifle, mention of which is made in his Narrative, when in fact that valuable weapon was left at home. Most northern Whigs remained equivocal on the issue of slavery for fear of offending the southern Democrats to the point of secession, and Smith is no exception. Still, his Whig bias is chiefly shown by his frequent echoes of Crockett’s attacks on prominent Democrats in his autobiography and in the spurious Tour.

The speech the colonel gives attacking Van Buren is in the spirit of the biography of “Old Kinderhook” credited to Crockett, and his discontent with politics in general is echoed throughout, either directly in his “advice” to political candidates, or indirectly by allusion and figures of speech. Shackford declares that Smith’s book was in no way “related to the political exploitation of Crockett . . . but was instead a publisher’s exploitation of his name and fame in a literary type of sham” (281). And yet, the heavy Whig bias, though perhaps used by Smith to make his hoax convincing, most certainly kept the anti-Jackson spirit very much alive, an unintentional irony as we shall see.

As anti-Mexican propaganda, the spurious diary supported the expansionist cause, and was therefore a different political use of Crockett—a posthumous commemoration of his martyrdom gauged to arouse hatred of Santa Anna and sympathy for Texan independence. As Parrington long ago pointed out, the political exploitation of Davy Crockett came in three stages: “The exploitation of Davy’s canebrake waggery, the exploitation of his anti-Jacksonian spleen, and the exploitation of his dramatic death at the Alamo” (II: 173). In 1836 and thereafter, the greatest exponents of territorial expansion in the United States were southern Democrats, who sought to extend the agrarian frontier and thereby enlarge the slavery system. Whigs, by contrast, tended to oppose expansion, less because of the slavery issue than because they feared the lure of free land would reduce the pool of white factory workers. The leaders of the movement to make Texas an independent republic, like Sam Houston and Stephen Austin, were Democrats, and Houston in particular was a friend of Andrew Jackson. At least in private the president approved of the war for Texan independence, counting on eventual annexation by the United States. As a result, Smith’s book as a political document is divided against itself, expressing Whiggish hostility toward the Democratic party while championing the Democratic cause of Texan freedom from Mexican rule, meaning among other things the right to keep slaves.

The issue becomes even more complex if one accepts Shackford’s argument that the defenders of the Alamo were commanded by anti-Jackson Democrats, Colonels James Bowie and William B. Travis, who had been sent to San Antonio by General Houston with orders not to defend but to destroy the fort. Other accounts maintain that the two colonels were sent to determine whether or not the fort could be held, but whatever the truth, Houston’s strategy was the Fabian tactic used by George Washington, which was to retreat until the advancing enemy had extended itself too far, then attack—precisely what happened later at the battle of San Jacinto, resulting in the capture of Santa Anna.

Defying the odds (and perhaps Houston’s authority), Colonels Bowie and Travis decided to hold the Alamo against thousands of Mexican troops with a garrison of 185 men, some of whom were incapacitated by illness. Perhaps, as Shackford maintains, in joining the defenders of the Alamo Crockett was expressing his fierce hatred of Jackson—though no one doubts the sincerity of his desire for Texan independence. Moreover, Crockett must have realized that any political future he might have in Texas would be enhanced by his participation in the revolution.

He did not, however, set out from Tennessee with the aim of raising volunteers for the war with Mexico, as Smith (and John Wayne) would have it. Only after arriving in Nacogdoches did Crockett resolve to join the revolution, swearing to support a provisional government—famously adding the word “republican” to the oath. But if in joining Bowie and Travis at the Alamo Crockett was inspired chiefly by his hatred of Jacksonian Democrats, the defeat of the Americans by Santa Anna not only validated but strengthened Sam Houston’s strategy. Thus the martyrdom of the Alamo defenders was an unintended blessing for the cause of Texan independence: when Houston’s soldiers attacked the Mexican forces at San Jacinto, they were inspired by the cry, “Remember the Alamo!”

Smith includes in his last chapter an account of the manner of Crockett’s death, the one of five that puts Santa Anna in the worst light possible, a story that Bill Groneman has traced to a New York newspaper story for July 9, 1846. It was apparently copied, with some revisions, into Smith’s book, which actually ends with an account of the merciless butchery of the American soldiers under Colonel Fannin near Goliad. These stories of Santa Anna’s cruelty appeared while he was still held prisoner, and may have been a bid for the Mexican general’s execution, but once again Houston took the wisest course, setting Santa Anna free in hopes of gaining Texan independence. Moreover, the most popular and long-lived version of Davy Crockett’s death was printed in the Crockett Almanack for 1837 (composed in 1836), which is included here in an appendix, for most celebrants of the myth preferred that their hero had not surrendered but died fighting to the last.

Thus Teddy Roosevelt acknowledges that “some say that when Crockett fell from his wounds, he was taken alive, and was then shot by Santa Anna,” but TR clearly favored the story that “old Davy Crockett” was the last man alive at the Alamo, and that he died facing “his foes with his back to the wall, ringed around by the bodies of the men he had slain” (86, 87). Constance Rourke likewise, who may have read Hamlin Garland’s edited version of Smith’s narrative, which left out the final chapter, insists that despite the story told “in later years” about Crockett’s capture and execution, he “was not taken prisoner,” but died “fighting bitterly . . . in the thickest of the swift and desperate clash” (219-20). On the other hand, perhaps the most effective account is the one in Crockett’s fictional diary, which ends with the words “No time for memorandums now.—Go ahead!—Liberty and independence for ever!” The best response to questions for which there are no exact answers is silence.