David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [112]
Throughout the drama Wildfire spouted a stream of backwoods witticisms, such as “You might as well try to scull a potash kettle up the falls of Niagara with a crowbar for an oar,” or the insensitive boast that he was “primed for anything from a possum hunt to a nigger funeral,” reflecting the racist language of the day. Newspaper articles about Crockett may have inspired much of the play’s language, but many of the frontier epithets were straight from the pen of Paulding and not from the tongue of Crockett. Some of the news stories were of dubious origin, such as one published in late 1828 that called Crockett “one of the most eccentric and amusing members of Congress,” and said that his family coat of arms included a rifle, a butcher’s knife, and a tomahawk.22 The article went on to tell of Crockett’s boast that he could whip any man in the House of Representatives and also “could wade the Mississippi, carry a steamboat on his back and whip his weight in wild cats.”
What is certain is that the national mythologizing of Crockett had already begun, even in his lifetime, making it difficult to separate what Crockett actually said from what others made up about him. The Paulding play was replete with backwoods lingo and bastardized words that, over time, several sources erroneously attributed to Crockett. He did, in fact, use much of the slang, idioms, and sayings of the time in his daily lexicon and various writings, but he did not coin the more colorful words uttered by Nimrod Wildfire, such as catawampus, jubus, tetotaciously exflunctified, gullywhumping, flutterbation, and the popular ripsnorter, which probably originated in 1840, four years after Crockett’s death.23 But it was sockdolager, a word that meant the ultimate or decisive, as in a knockout punch, that became most associated with Crockett as a result of its usage in the Paulding play. While preparing for a duel, Wildfire in speaking of his opponent brags, “He’ll come off as badly as a feller I once hit with a sledge hammer lick over the head—a real sogdolloger [sic]. He disappeared altogether; all they could ever find of him was a little grease spot in one corner.”
Interestingly, the term sockdolager was widely used for many years, including by Mark Twain, who, as a young Samuel Clemens, was taken with frontier stories. Twain was influenced by reading Crockett’s 1834 autobiography as well as the fictionalized accounts of the buckskin hero in the many Crockett almanacs that appeared for more than twenty years after his death. In fact, sockdolager actually appears in Twain’s classic work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Like Twain, Abraham Lincoln was yet another historical figure who fell under the spell of the mythical Crockett, incorporating his style of self-effacing humor into the fabric of his political life. Lincoln admired Crockett, a man, like himself, who grew up in poverty and became a national icon. Both Crockett and Lincoln also had gregarious personalities and a penchant for telling humorous stories, though Lincoln had a brooding, introspective side that Crockett, a more unselfconscious sort, could not have appreciated. Ironically, the humorous word sockdolager figured in one of the most tragic moments in American history. On April 14, 1865, during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth was poised outside the box where Lincoln, his wife, and their guests sat watching the action below. A veteran thespian who knew the play well, Booth waited for the line to be spoken that always got the most laughs: “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap.”24 As the audience roared in delight, Booth stepped inside the box and fired his small pistol.
Thirty-two years before the first presidential