American Legend

That, coupled with the burning questions of an unfulfilled and disgruntled constituency, kept Crockett traipsing around the East for the time being. And he could justify it with some legitimate business he had there, including a meeting with his publishers. The rifle that he’d been fitted for would be presented to him on July 1, and ahead of his visit he had sent a letter addressing some shooting specifications: “I am much pleased to see that she Bunches her Balls,” he wrote, no doubt daydreaming of the time when her shot would ring true on a bear or deer, but he added that some sighting adjustments were still necessary. “She shoots too low, but that will be altered by Raising the hind sight.”² Crockett figured he could get a number of details taken care of, and he intended to pick up many tins of superior gunpowder, a variety not available in his county, to be packed in with a shipment of books he would retrieve at Carey & Hart’s.

On the first of July, Crockett officially received the handcrafted weapon in a ceremony presided over by Mr. J. M. Sanderson. Crockett grinned as he accepted the gift, marveling at the workmanship and detail. On the barrel of the gun, by the sight, was inscribed his motto GO AHEAD; the stock was inlaid with a silver plate portraying a deer, an opossum, and an alligator, all lifelong quarry of the famed hunter.³ Into the muzzle the clever gunsmith had also inlaid a gold hunting arrow, conjuring Crockett’s time spent in Indian country. Along with the fine hand-hewn hunting rifle, Crockett received some tools and cleaning accessories, a shot pouch, a tomahawk, and an ornate liquor flask that would come in handy for taking horns with hunting compatriots. Crockett graciously accepted the haul, making a short speech in which he vowed to employ his newly dubbed “Pretty Betsey” in defense of his country if forced to, and to pass it down to his able sons when the time came, and they would do the same.⁴

The Fourth of July festivities upon him, Crockett rallied his spirits and perhaps a bit of his theatrical expertise to arrive in fine form, mingling and appearing with some of the nation’s significant figures, among them Daniel Webster, whom Ralph Waldo Emerson had recently heralded as “a true genius.”⁵ The staunch federalist Webster shared the vitriol that Crockett was expected to sling, though in his attacks on Jackson, Webster spoke with more refined cadence and elocution, with a kind of “majesty of oratory.”⁶ Crockett certainly understood that he was in the presence of true political greatness, but he was rarely intimidated, and the ceremony, the formality of the situation, would hardly have prevented him from being himself. Bolstered by senators Webster, Poindexter, Ewing, and others, Crockett took the stage and bellowed a thundering and inspired oration bewailing the tyranny of Jackson’s leadership, its despotism and danger.⁷ He underscored his own devout patriotism, his deep and unbending love of land and country, his fierce independence. It was vintage Crockett, even if many in the audience had heard it before.

Crockett and the rest of the retinue were featured later that day, first at the Hermitage in the First District, and later at the Chestnut Street Theatre, both to large and appreciative audiences.⁸ Crockett apparently brought only one canned speech with him, or at any rate cared not to alter his first remarks much, and he set forth with much the same hackneyed address, though no one seemed to mind.

The next day Crockett received a visit from a major captain of industry, the aging (and failing, for he would die later in the year) gunpowder maker Éleuthère Irénée Du Pont. The noted Du Pont was the first true chemical industrialist and a renowned businessman, and Crockett later acknowledged how pleased and awed he was at the visit: “He had been examining my fine gun, and . . . wished to make me a present of half a dozen canisters of his best sportsman’s powder. I thanked him, and he went off, and in a short time returned with a dozen, nicely boxed up and directed to me.”⁹ Crockett thanked him again, no doubt excited by now with the prospect of trying out Pretty Betsey, with its novel “cap and ball” firing mechanism, and the high-octane powder.¹⁰ He collected a few more gifts, including a fine imported China pitcher he intended to give to Elizabeth, and then rested for his journey home.

It was finally time to head home, such as it was. He boarded a train and transected Pennsylvania heading for Pittsburgh, where he loaded a steamer aptly named the Hunter and chugged down the Ohio all the way to Wheeling, West Virginia.¹¹ At the few stops along the route fans waited expectantly, hoping to see the famed “Lion of the West,” resplendent in his full hunting regalia. A newspaper account records what they actually saw when he consented to step out onto the deck and down a horn or two:

He talked warmly on politics, and did not seem pleased with the Jackson men of Lancaster, for putting up a hickory pole. He went ‘ahead,’ after a delay of fifteen minutes, and leaving persons who expected to see a wild man of the woods, clothed in a hunting shirt and covered with hair, a good deal surprised at having viewed a respectable looking personage, dressed decently and wearing his locks much the fashion of our German farmers.¹²

Some might have been disappointed to realize that the legend they’d come to see was a man after all. But they had witnessed David Crockett in the flesh, had seen that he was certainly no ordinary man, and those who did manage a glimpse of the star would tell their children of it, and their grandchildren, relating the sighting of him to anyone and everyone they knew.

Crockett’s second son, William, met him on July 22 at Mill’s Point for the final thirty-five-mile horseback ride to Weakley County. The ride, the reunion with family, and the old familiar sights and smells of home would certainly have conjured mixed emotions in the national celebrity, and he had hardly dismounted and tied up his horse before the fallout from his eastern tour began to echo across the county, in the papers and through word-of-mouth gossip. Perhaps this lukewarm reception contributed to his short-lived stay at home, where he would linger less than three months. Already he was growing restless. His life had become routine, and routine never sat well with Crockett.

In September, John Crockett, David’s father, died. He had followed his son’s westward travels and must certainly have been proud to see what his industrious boy had achieved. David was made administrator of the estate, which did not amount to much, and was definitely not enough to solve the younger Crockett’s perpetual money problem. David Crockett had the uncanny ability to always spend more than he had, and despite strong book sales, the status of a U.S. Congressman, international celebrity, and friends in the highest echelons of the U.S. government, industries, and financial circles, debt haunted him to the grave. He simply did not possess the ability to properly manage his own accounts.

The bittersweet homecoming included dealing with some old debts, the marks for which had been called in, including one seven years old. A local judge threatened to sell Crockett’s property if he did not pay up. In early October he was so strapped that he was forced to sign a promissory note to one of his creditors, William Tucker, for $312.49, and he had outstanding notes at the bank under Nicholas Biddle. Though he hated to do it, Crockett was forced to write Biddle for an extension, saying “I know of no other way that I can do but that to pay you when I get to Washington I am more distressed . . . then anything in the world.” Always up-front about his money matters, Crockett added that he’d be leaving for Washington the first week of November, and “I expect to come through Philadelphia at which time I will see you and I will try and have matters arranged.”¹³ Crockett must have been confused and frustrated that all his efforts at making a name for himself, and the expense and time of his eastern tour, had yet to alleviate his financial woes.

Arriving in Philadelphia, Crockett sought a draw against royalties from Carey & Hart, hoping that book sales had been brisk enough to warrant the advance. They were unable to honor his request for $500. His pride bruised considerably, Crockett turned to Nicholas Biddle again. Biddle frequently loaned or backed the nation’s top politicians and businessmen with amounts much greater than the $500 Crockett needed, so he immediately agreed to the loan, helping Crockett settle his bill at the Nashville branch and offering to remove his name from the Protest Book, a generous gesture, since having one’s name registered under protest was the modern equivalent of a bad credit report, and such a personal blemish could be political fodder for enemies and opponents in the coming election.¹⁴

Crockett was in dire need of cash. Having been denied an advance by his publishers, he knew he could not merely rely on the sales from the Narrative. He would need another source to supplement that and the eight dollars a day he received during the congressional session. Late in the autumn, Crockett had met with fellow boarder William Clark, a Pennsylvanian congressman, to discuss the possibility of writing up an account of his eastern tour and selling that as a stand-alone book. It made a lot of sense, would be relatively easy to collaborate on, and would serve the dual purpose of generating income on its own, plus rekindling sales of the Narrative. By the time Crockett reached Washington, his publishers Carey & Hart had agreed to publish the book about the tour, and Crockett finalized his agreement with Clark. Crockett’s job would be to provide notes, a few sketches and anecdotes, plus originals and newspaper accounts of his many speeches and the printed details of his tour to Clark, who in turn would edit and organize it all into book form.¹⁵ If they worked quickly and the book sold well, his financial woes might be alleviated. He was painfully aware of his predicament, having written Biddle a letter in mid-December thanking him for the assistance, and adding that the loan would “give me much relief and I hope will not be any disadvantage to the Bank I hope never again to be so hard pressed as I have said poverty is no crime but it is attended with many inconveniences.”¹⁶

Spurred by the prospect of another money-making venture, Crockett tore into his responsibilities on the new book with much more enthusiasm and attention than he gave his congressional duties, churning out more than forty pages of the manuscript in the first three weeks of the session. He delivered the bulk of these to Clark for editing, and Clark was initially optimistic about Crockett’s work, expressing confidence that he could turn the pages into a “most interesting book.”¹⁷ Encouraged and badly needing more money, Crockett wrote and compiled like a man possessed, contacting everyone he knew and asking them to provide him with newspaper articles of his speeches and notes on his travels, and he wrote with such vigor that he feared Clark would be unable to keep up with him.¹⁸ Clark busied himself with the revisions and with writing the preface, and Crockett expected that at this pace, they would complete the book by late January 1835. Clearly hoping his publishers would be confident in the quick delivery of the book, Crockett then asked them for an advance of $300, to take care of yet another debt, this one due in a matter of weeks. He was forever robbing Peter to pay Paul.

While Crockett hurried to compile the central text for the book and continued dumping it on Clark for editing, only one political certainty remained clear to him: any reelection chances he might have for the coming August hinged entirely on his ability to bring forward, and then pass, the notorious land bill. On December 27, he announced with empty optimism that

I expect in a few days to be able to Convey the good news to my District of the passage of my occupant land Bill it is the first Bill that will Come up and I have no fears of its passage every member from Tennessee that I have talked to Says that it will pass if So it will Bless many a poor man with a home.¹⁹

This hollow claim proved insincere, for though on December 9 Crockett had in fact put forth a motion to make his land bill the first order of business for the following day, long speeches on prior matters kept discussion of his bill from reaching the floor. On January 7, Crockett pleaded urgently in a last-ditch effort to get his land bill on the docket, knowing that the end of the term loomed just a few short months away, and nothing in the slow-turning wheels of Congress should have given him confidence.

Frustrated and disgusted, he turned his complete attentions to finishing his portion of the tour book, and this he delivered by January 21, remarkably quickly. Although Clark worked fairly quickly as well, Crockett had been right in his prediction that his editor would not be able to keep up. To further slow the process, just after receiving Crockett’s materials Clark fell dreadfully ill, but even in his sickly state he assured Crockett that he would finish his work as soon as he was physically able to sit up. In the meantime, Crockett wrote to Carey & Hart suggesting the title An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty Four. At the same time, Crockett hedged a bit on claiming personal authorship of the book, and instead wondered if a disclaimer of sorts might be appropriate, suggesting that the title page state “written from notes furnished by my self ” rather than their original suggestion “written by my self.”²⁰ Crockett showed a good bit of conscience here, as he realized that many careful readers would know that the book was ghostwritten and heavily supplemented by reproductions of previously published materials. In the end, Carey & Hart ignored his request, no doubt driven by the potential of better book sales if it included, as did his Narrative, “Written by Himself.”

While he waited nervously for Clark to deliver and for Carey & Hart to hurry the book to press, Crockett schemed up yet another book idea. He certainly preferred his role as author, traveling celebrity, and notorious backwoodsman to the terminal tedium of the legislature, with which he was now beyond disenchanted. He wrote a quick letter to his publishers proposing a book on the sly fox himself, Martin Van Buren. Carey & Hart were rightly skeptical, fearing Crockett’s known wrath toward the man might lead him to write something overly scandalous. The last thing they needed was a lawsuit brought against them by someone as powerful as Van Buren—that would be very bad for business. But Crockett assured them he would stick to the truth. He determined to spend the winter writing “little vans life” and promised “what I write will be true.” But he also added with foreshadowing that the work would be venomous: “I’ll do it; and if when you read it, you don’t say I’ve used him up, I’m mistaken, that’s all.”²¹

The project was ambitious if foolhardy, but by now Crockett believed he could profit from writing, which would now give him an opportunity to rail against the very man he might conceivably face in a presidential election in 1836. Why not start the sparring now? There was at least some residual anti-Van Buren sentiment, for as a party they viewed him as dangerous and potentially harmful to the country. He represented sprawling government, but worse, “lawlessness and violence that bred fear and anger around the country.”²² Crockett echoed their sentiments even louder, exclaiming “I have sworn for the last four years that if Vanburen is our next President I will leave the United States I will not live under his kingdom.”²³ Then he added, alluding to a move he’d been thinking about since his conversation with Sam Houston back in April, that rather than submit to a government run by Little Van, the sly fox, Crockett would escape “to the wildes of Texes,” where living under foreign Mexican dictates would offer “a Paradice to what this will be.”²⁴

But politically, Crockett was grasping at straws. He tried numerous times to get his land bill on the floor, failing miserably. He was reduced, as he had been during the previous session, to wild rants and digressions, violent outbursts concerning the despotic administration. His efforts to bring his pet bill to the floor bordered on desperation. He had forwarded a bill to improve navigation on his district’s rivers, and that too summarily disintegrated. Even his Whig supporters who had courted him during the tour and contemplated running him for president, cooled toward Crockett. No doubt Crockett’s instability, his failure to prove malleable, and his constant debts concerned them. Still, they had yet to settle on a nominee, and Crockett hadn’t been entirely ruled out. His anti-Jackson rants would continue to serve them, and it pleased them when he swamped his district with anti-Jackson writings. Crockett kept the heat on, smearing both Jackson and Van Buren as he could, futilely struggling to have his land bill heard, and contacting Augustin Clayton about collaborating on the Van Buren book. It was a busy, desperate winter.

In March, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour . . . hit the bookshelves. The book had none of the wit, charm, or authentic voice Crockett had achieved in his Narrative, and though the Whig press lauded the work, the general public, and more particularly, Crockett’s growing readership, saw the book for what it was: political propaganda.²⁵ Sometimes satirical and reading like a travelogue, the work failed to strike the necessary chord in its audience precisely because it lacked Crockett’s true voice. Though in their original agreement William Clark was to have assumed the role that Chilton took in writing the Narrative,²⁶ in the end Crockett’s narrative voice became subsumed by Clark’s and by the replication of news articles and speeches, resulting in an unimpressive political tract that Carey & Hart would have difficulty unloading.²⁷ Clark proved to be but a shadow of the ghostwriter that Chilton was; Chilton saw the virtue and nuance in letting Crockett do the talking. The sales Crockett had dreamed would alleviate his financial woes would remain just that, a dream.

But he had suffered worse setbacks, and there was still the scathing Van Buren book to come, so Crockett held out a glimmer of hope. Even in the face of disintegrating support from the inside (certain Whigs who had sided with Crockett previously began to jump ship, leaving him marooned in this session), Crockett retained a degree of bravado as to his own prospects. Although by now he privately doubted that anyone would have the strength to defeat Van Buren in 1836,²⁸ that did not mean he couldn’t be defeated four years later. In a tongue-in-cheek letter conceding that the next president would likely be Van Buren, Crockett wrote: “Let the next president come from the North; and then I go with all my heart for a Southwest president, the time after; and that president shall be myself.”²⁹ He wasn’t ready to give up just yet, and both recent books, financially and politically motivated, indicated his intention to remain in the game. With an eye on the future, Crockett signed a letter with much of the rest of the Tennessee delegation, asking Senator Hugh Lawson White to run for the Democratic nomination against Van Buren. It made sense, since White was a popular and powerful Whig, and as a fellow Tennessean, his candidacy stood to embarrass Jackson.³⁰ Believing Van Buren unbeatable, Crockett must have figured White was an ideal scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb.

The first order of business would be to retain his congressional seat, and that was no guarantee. Though his fame would secure him a decent number of votes in the coming August elections, his activities in the session had yielded him nothing to hang a campaign on. He continued to pen open letters to constituents in his district, using the forum to proffer anti-Jackson slurs which, though by now redundant, still had an impact on voters.

By now Crockett knew that his opponent would once again be Adam Huntsman, the shrewd fellow Creek War veteran. Huntsman was a formidable foe, a bright and clever man with a decent sense of humor and sharp political savvy. Crockett figured the race would be tough, but he remained confident, as he always did, in his chances at victory, and he certainly liked politicking a lot more than politics. “I see they have got out A. Huntsman,” he wrote, leveling his competitive gaze on his opponent, “I [am] of the opinion I will beat him.”³¹ The fiery yet sensible Huntsman had his own feelings on the subject, which he shared in a letter to his friend and confidant James Polk, mockingly referring to Crockett, as he had in his Chronicles, as “Davy of the River Country”:

I begin to believe I can beat Davy . . . I have been in all the counties but one in this District and Crockett is evidently losing ground or otherwise he never was as strong as I supposed him to be. Perhaps it is both. If my friends take anything of a lively interest in it I think my prospects are as good as usual. He is eternally sending Anti Jackson documents here and it has its effect. If he carries his land Bill it will give him strength. Otherwise, the conflict will not be a difficult one.³²

Almost as though he could hear those words, Crockett made one last-ditch effort to secure his coveted bill. Four times during the session he attempted to have it heard, and each time he was denied. He endured the same old rhetoric, the same politicking, the same excruciatingly protracted speeches that he had submitted to time and time again, and it ultimately became more than he could bear. On February 4 he tried vainly to terminate a long discussion regarding the Alexandria Canal in order to bring up his land bill, concluding from the painful length of the speeches that Washington was “a better place to manufacture orators than to dispatch business.”³³ For the next two weeks he rose again and again, disgusted and almost pleading, but always some other business took precedence. On February 20, Crockett delivered his last recorded speech in the halls of Congress, and fittingly, it was a final stab at passing his doomed bill. It failed to even rise to discussion.³⁴ Disillusioned, even disgusted, Crockett would have been quite happy to see the session come to a close so that he could leave Washington and its pontificators and head back to Tennessee, then out onto the campaign circuit for one more go-round. Though even electioneering was becoming rote and redundant, he still preferred it to the charade that he considered Washington to be.

But heading home in June, Crockett must have been restless and uneasy. His political independence, his proclamations that “I am no man’s man” and that “I bark at no man’s bid. I will never come and go, and fetch and carry, at the whistle of the great man in the white house no matter who he is,”³⁵ had succeeded in ostracizing him in Washington, and even if such protestations were true (for indeed, to the very end he did vote his conscience), they had begun to ring a bit hollow in the expectant ears of his Tennessee brethren. He had less than three months to win over a dubious voting public, one that would seek explanations for his blank congressional record. The one trump card Crockett hoped might gain purchase was an allegiance he had formed with Seba Smith, perhaps cemented at their meal together during Crockett’s book and speaking tour. Smith started a new magazine called the Downing Gazette, a single-sheet news weekly featuring the missives of Major Jack Downing discussing political issues of the day.³⁶

Throughout the summer, the Downing Gazette published a series of letters offering political banter between Major Jack and Crockett, with the hope of giving Crockett a campaign bounce from their content, which echoed sentiments, themes, and commentary found elsewhere in Crockett’s writings.³⁷ But the Downing Gazette was published in Portland, Maine, and its distribution was limited to the Northeast, plus any copies managing to trickle west. The exchanges probably failed to find readership as far southwest as Crockett’s district.³⁸

At about the same time The Life of Martin Van Buren, Hair-Apparent to the “Government” and the Appointed Successor of General Jackson hit the shelves. Augustin Clayton, initially a vehement opponent of the Second Bank (he later flip-flopped when he managed to procure a $3,000 loan from the bank)³⁹ wrote the bulk of the book, with Crockett lending very little, mainly his name to the text and a shared scorn for the subject. The book lacked even the humor of the Tour, and Carey & Hart found its content questionable enough to publish it under a spurious imprint called Robert Wright, keeping their own names well out of it. The extended, venomous rant abused Little Van viciously, accusing him, among many other things, of being a dandy and a fop: “He is laced up in corsets such as women in town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the best of them. It would be difficult to say, from his personal appearance, whether he was a man or a woman, but for his large red and grey whiskers.”⁴⁰

The book possessed none of Crockett’s mischievousness or fun, its tone instead violent and mean-spirited, and though the Whigs found it devilishly droll, it failed to have much of an impact on the Crockett campaign. In the end he was left to do what he did best, go out amongst his people and tell them what he thought they wanted to hear. But by now he was becoming slightly unsure of just who they expected to see, and perhaps more troubling, he may have begun to experience a crisis of identity. The brash and outspoken champion-of-the-downtrodden approach had been played out, and with his own dalliances among the country’s elite well known, his “I’m one of ya’ll” claim would be a hard sell. He had said in the opening lines of his Narrative, “Most of authors seek fame, but I seek for justice.” Perhaps now he had cause to wonder. Having achieved no justice through legislature, what was it that he still sought? What drove him to continue electioneering, keeping himself in the limelight? Could it be the delicious, addictive drive toward fame, which he called “that fickle, flirting goddess”?

Crockett understood that Adam Huntsman was no slouch as a campaigner, and that it would require a strong effort to defeat him. Huntsman also came into the race with the public backing of both Polk and Jackson. The Jacksonians kept Huntsman’s campaigning coffers flush, while Crockett stumped on a minuscule budget. The Jackson camp plied the press with negative stories about Crockett, including charges, not all false, that he had exaggerated his mileage expenses in his trips to and from Washington, had used franking for personal gain, and most damning of all, that he had failed to achieve any significant legislation in three terms in Congress.⁴¹

Crockett had stumped and politicked enough not to go down without a scrap, and one trickster ploy, clever and pure Crockett, nearly ruined Huntsman and showed that Crockett never lost his sense of humor. During the Creek War, Huntsman had been badly wounded, one of his lower legs requiring amputation, and from then on he had worn a wooden leg, which served as a reminder of his devotion to his country and allowed him to run on his war record. As often happened, rival candidates billeted together while campaigning, and Crockett and Huntsman spent a night together at the home of a devout Jackson man who just happened to have a beautiful daughter. Late in the evening, with everyone sound asleep, Crockett grabbed a wooden chair and clomped noisily to the daughter’s door, which he rattled and knocked on. When she awoke screaming, Crockett placed one foot on the lower rung of the chair, and, holding its backrest, hopped loudly across the wooden floorboards, clomping loudly back to the room he shared with Huntsman, a known rake. Crockett dove into bed, pulled the covers to his chin, and fell into a deep, feigned snore. Having heard the commotion, the farmer rushed in, immediately assuming that Huntsman’s peg leg had made the stamping noise across the breeze-way. The farmer threatened to kill Huntsman, until Crockett finally managed to calm the enraged father. The ploy won Crockett the man’s vote and some of his friends’, and completely embarrassed Huntsman.⁴²

The ploy allowed Crockett to remain optimistic, even overconfident. With little more than a month to go in the election, Crockett exclaimed of his opponent: “I have him bad plagued for he don’t know as much as me about the Government,”⁴³ adding that he felt confident he would glean twice as many votes as his competitor. Crockett politicked in a frenzied fashion, accepting offers to every stomp-down, dinner, or reaping in the region, maintaining his infectious grin and patented jargon everywhere he went. Near election day he harkened back to an early threat, stating unequivocally “If I don’t beat my competitor I will go to Texes.”⁴⁴

Crockett promised to write his publishers and his Whig supporters as soon as the results of the August 6 elections were known, and he honored his claim with a long and telling letter on August 11, by which time the final tally was in. The race was tight, with Crockett picking up 4,400 votes to Huntsman’s 4,652. Sour, even bitter, and suspicious that the voting had been rigged, Crockett accused bank managers of offering a healthy $25 per Huntsman vote (a rumor Crockett had heard going round). “I have no doubt that I was Completely Raskeled out of my Election,” he wrote, adding, as was his style, a high-minded commentary on justice and righteousness, which he may well have believed: “I will be rewarded for letting my tongue Speake what my hart thinks . . . I have Suffered my Self to be politically Sacrafised to Save my Country from ruin and disgrace and if I am never again elected I will have the gratification to know that I have done my duty.”⁴⁵

The loss burned into Crockett like a brand searing a cow’s flank, and, a sore loser in the best of times and now smarting from an election he considered fixed, he was nearly out of options. Washington no longer wanted him, and now it seemed, shifty vote or no, neither did West Tennessee. His familial relations were civil, but he no longer shared a bed with Elizabeth, and to add biting insult to the painful injury of election loss, her relatives accused him of misconduct in the administration of her father’s will, which hurt his feelings deeply and festered into a familial falling-out, though nothing came of legal consequences. Still, he likely felt doubly rejected by both friends and family.⁴⁶

Then the arrogant and boasting press began to flow in from the side of the victors, proving more than Crockett could stomach. A wealthy businessman and ardent Jackson man wrote giddily to Polk, exclaiming, “We have killd blacguard Crockett at last.”⁴⁷ A local building contractor exclaimed joyously, “It gives me great pleasure to say . . . that the great Hunter one Davy has been beaten by a Hunstman.”⁴⁸ The Charleston Courier appeared giddy with elation, printing on August 31:

Col. Davy Crockett, hitherto regarded as the Nimerod of the West, has been beaten for Congress by a Mr. Huntsman. The Colonel has lately suffered himself to be made a lion, or some other wild beast, tamed, if not caged, for public shew—and it is no wonder that he should have yielded to the prowess of a Huntsman, when again let loose in his native wilds. We fear that ‘Go ahead’ will no longer be either the Colonel’s motto or destiny.⁴⁹

It was time to cut and run. At forty-nine years of age, Crockett still had some living to do. Perhaps he recalled the conversation with Sam Houston and felt the pull of Texas. But for now, Tennessee was spent, and there wasn’t much to keep him there. He remained a celebrity in the East, but playing the role of the backwoodsman had worn thin. Perhaps it was time to actually be a backwoodsman again, to mount a horse, cradle a long rifle in his arms, and trot into a stiffening breeze. He knew that bison still roamed the plains of Texas, and fellows with enough grit and determination could make a go of it on the new frontier. He’d heard stories of how it was bigger than anything you’d ever imagined, plains rolling on and on into the sunset and beyond, the dirt blood-red as the sky. Maybe now might be the right time to see for himself.