• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 303 0

assassination, when Lincoln was a young Whig politician, Crockett had his own memorable moment in another Washington, D.C., theater. On the evening of December 21, 1833, at a benefit performance of The Lion of the West staged at the Washington Theater, Crockett, who had returned to the capital, was escorted to a special reserved seat in the front row, stage center.25 The capacity audience cheered and hollered in recognition. Then the curtain slowly rose and James Hackett sprang onto the stage, dressed in the leather leggings and wildcat-skin hat of Colonel Nimrod Wildfire. He walked to the edge of the stage and ceremoniously bowed to the smiling Crockett, who, in turn, rose from his seat and returned the bow to Hackett. The crowd responded with a volley of thunderous applause. All the while, the actor portraying the legend and the real man continued to bow and smile.

THIRTY-ONE

BEAR-BIT LION

THE LION OF THE WEST became the inspiration for and the cornerstone of future writings about Crockett. This satirical spoof sparked a seemingly endless series of unauthorized biographies and ghostwritten books attributed to him.

In his role as Nimrod Wildfire, James Hackett enjoyed great success and garnered brilliant reviews and the praise of adoring audiences. Noted a New York critic in late 1831, “At the fall of the curtain there was one universal and continuous call kept up for Mr. Hackett, who promptly answered it [and] returned thanks for ‘the indulgence the public had uniformly extended, not only to himself in the [im]personation, but to the inexperienced attempts of our native dramatists in drawing characters indigenous to this country.’”1 Hackett thus came to absorb much of the heartfelt attention that the defeated Crockett now enjoyed.

In 1833 Hackett took the revised show—retitled A Kentuckian’s Trip to New York in 1815—to London’s fashionable West End, introducing the indomitable Nimrod Wildfire to audiences at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Crockett’s reputation had reached across “the big pond,” as Wildfire called the Atlantic Ocean, creating an image of the American West that would spread throughout the continent.2 Even when British critics unfamiliar with American frontier culture failed to understand the simple storyline and audiences were puzzled by the American dialect, Hackett consistently won praise for his portrayal of the lead character’s tough sensibility that the refined British specifically associated with their former colony. Hackett also was the party most responsible for establishing the coonskin cap as Crockett’s headgear. As Crockett scholar Paul Hutton pointed out: “No authentic contemporary portrait or written account identifies such a crown upon the ‘King of the Wild Frontier’s’ regal head before 1835. The first drawing of Crockett in a fur cap (it is a wildcat skin) graces the cover of Davy Crockett’s 1837 Almanack, and it is a copy of a drawing of Hackett as Nimrod Wildfire that was used to publicize the play.”3

Paulding continued to churn out more literary works, reaching the zenith of his fame as a popular American writer in the 1830s. Besides his writing, Paulding also held various governmental positions and went on to serve as the secretary of the navy under President Martin Van Buren from 1838 to 1841.4 With a change in administration, Paulding, though effectively forgotten today, returned to his literary pursuits at his farm near Hyde Park, New York, where he died in 1860, leaving behind a bounty of writing including The Lion of the West, the most-often performed play on the American stage before a dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin premiered in 1852.

By the time Crockett finally saw the play and had his memorable face-to-face session with Wildfire in December 1833, his life had rebounded somewhat. He remained estranged from Elizabeth and constantly scrambled for money, but the notoriety generated about him from the play continued to sweep the country. As one writer, mindful of Crockett’s favorite activity, put it, “he surfaced refreshed but famished, like a bear rousing