“King of the Wild Frontier”

On this date in 1786 David "Davy" Crockett—hunter, frontiersman, politician, and soldier—was born in a rough-hewn cabin in Tennessee. It can be difficult to separate the myth from the man, including the famous story that he "killed him a bear when he was only three." His extraordinary life, however, hardly needs embellishment. He was a famous and successful trapper, served three terms in Congress, and died defending the Alamo from Santana’s army.

His tombstone carried this epitaph: "Davy Crockett, Pioneer, Patriot, Soldier, Trapper, Explorer, State Legislator, Congressman, Martyred at The Alamo. 1786 – 1836"

Here is the entry on Davy Crockett from The American National Biography:

(Engraving after a portrait by John Gadsby Chapman courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Crockett, Davy (17 Aug. 1786-6 Mar. 1836), frontiersman, Tennessee and U.S. congressman, and folk hero, was born David Crockett in Greene County, East Tennessee, the son of John Crockett, a magistrate, unsuccessful land speculator, and tavern owner, and Rebecca Hawkins. John Crockett hired his son out to Jacob Siler in 1798 to help on a cattle drive to Rockbridge County, Virginia, and Siler tried forcibly to detain young Crockett after the completion of the job. The boy ran away at night, however, and arrived home in late 1798 or early 1799. Preferring to play hooky rather than attend school, he ran away from home to escape his father’s wrath. His "strategic withdrawal," as he called it, lasted about thirty months while he worked at odd jobs and as a laborer and a wagon driver. When he returned home in 1802, he had grown so much that his family at first did not recognize him. He soon found that all was forgiven and reciprocated their generosity by working for a year to settle the debts that his father had incurred.

Crockett married Mary "Polly" Finley in August 1806 in Jefferson County, Tennessee, and they remained in the mountains of East Tennessee for just over five years while he supported their growing family as a farmer and a hunter. In the fall of 1811 the Crocketts and their two sons, John Wesley and William, settled in Lincoln County, Tennessee, but in 1813 they moved again, this time to near the present Alabama border in Franklin County, Tennessee. Crockett enlisted twice as a volunteer in the Indian wars in the southeastern United States from 1813 to 1815, seeing action mainly in Alabama and Florida. Soon after his discharge, Polly gave birth to Margaret, their third child, and David was elected a lieutenant in the Thirty-second Militia Regiment of Franklin County in 1815. Polly died that summer, and a year later he married Elizabeth Patton, a widow with two children, and they moved to Lawrence County, Tennessee, in the fall of 1817.

Although Crockett served as a justice of the peace and town commissioner of Lawrenceburg and was eventually elected colonel of the Fifty-seventh Militia Regiment of Lawrence County by 1818, he was still a relatively unknown backwoods hunter with a talent for storytelling until his election to the Tennessee legislature in 1821 as the representative of Lawrence and Hickman counties. From the start, he took an active interest in public land policy regarding the West. Reelected in 1823 but defeated in 1825, he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1827. He had promoted himself as a simple, honest country boy who was an extraordinary hunter and marksman, someone who was in every sense a "straight shooter." Reelected to a second term in 1829, he split with President Andrew Jackson and the Tennessee delegation headed by James K. Polk on several important issues including land reform and the Indian removal bill. Crockett was defeated for a bid for a third term when he openly and vehemently opposed Jackson’s policies, but he was reelected in 1833.

Political notoriety had given his image a life of its own, and by 1831 Crockett had become the model for Nimrod Wildfire, the hero of James Kirke Paulding’s play The Lion of the West, as well as the subject of articles and books. Crockett said he was compelled to publish his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, which was written in 1834 with the help of Thomas Chilton, to counteract the outlandish stories printed under Crockett’s name as the Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee a year earlier. A good deal of the information in Sketches and Eccentricities, however, was likely supplied by Crockett. He clearly recognized the power of his popular image and sought to manipulate it for political gain. The more outrageous stories were taken up and expanded by the anonymous eastern hack writers who spun tall tales for the Crockett Almanacs (1835-1856). In their hands the fictional Davy Crockett became the apotheosis of the backwoods screamer, and with the death of the historical Crockett at the Alamo in 1836, the floodgates were loosed for the full-blown expansion of legend. He could not only "run faster, -jump higher, -squat lower, -dive deeper, -stay under longer, -and come out drier, than any man in the whole country" (Crockett Almanac [1835], p. 2) but could save the world by unfreezing the sun and the earth from their axes and ride his pet alligator up Niagara Falls.

Crockett’s "corrective" Narrative can also be viewed as the first presidential campaign autobiography, since he was being touted by the Whigs as the candidate who would oppose Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, in the election of 1836. Jackson and Governor William Carroll of Tennessee helped to engineer Crockett’s defeat in his bid to be returned to Congress in 1835. The election of Adam Huntsman, a peg-legged lawyer, in his stead ended Crockett’s presidential ambitions and, temporarily disenchanted with politics and his constituents, he made the now famous remark, "Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas." His last surviving letters spoke of his confidence that Texas would allow him to rejuvenate his political career and finally make his fortune. He intended to become land agent for the territory that was in revolt against its Mexican rulers and saw the future of an independent Texas as intertwined with his own.

Crockett and his men joined Colonel William B. Travis at San Antonio De Bexar in early February 1836. Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna arrived on 20 February and laid siege to the Alamo garrison. In the defense of the Alamo Travis wrote that during the first bombardment that Crockett was everywhere in the Alamo, "animating the men to do their duty." The siege of thirteen days ended on 6 March 1836 when the Alamo was overrun at about six o’clock that morning. According to the eyewitness account in the diary of Lieutenant Jose Enrique de la Pena, Crockett and five or six other survivors were captured. Several Mexican officers asked that they be spared, but Santa Anna had the prisoners bayoneted and then shot.

Many thought that Crockett deserved a better end and provided it, from thrilling fictions of his clubbing Mexicans with his empty rifle until cut down by a flurry of bullets or bayonets or both–stories that undergirded the movie portrayals by Fess Parker and John Wayne–to his survival as a slave in a salt mine in Mexico. No matter what the past or future directions of the legendary Crockett, however, it is quite clear that the historical Crockett proved a formidable cultural hero in his own right and attained a continuing preeminence in the American mind as the representative of frontier independence and virtue.