David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [118]
The writing went relatively fast, taking just about two months, with Crockett dictating his thoughts and memories to Chilton in the comfort of their room. In developing the text, the two turned to a variety of sources for inspiration and as models to follow. One of these was The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the traditional title given for the unfinished record of Franklin’s life, which he wrote with considerable humor and wit in the final decades of his life, between 1771 and 1790.
First published in France in 1791, Franklin’s work appeared two years later in an English edition. It was said to have been the first secular biography printed in the United States and served as the model for many more authors to follow. According to popular legend, a well-thumbed copy was among Crockett’s possessions when he made his trek from Tennessee to the Mexican state of Texas in late 1835.7
Like Franklin, Crockett avoided discussing any of his serious failings. Other similarities linked the two men, superficial and substantive, including the fact that both were known to wear fur caps—Franklin to delight and charm his many admirers in France, Crockett to prop up his colorful frontiersman image. Franklin portrayed himself as homespun but shrewd, with plenty of horse sense. He also was one of the first American writers to make a case for the notion that a lack of formal education was actually beneficial. This was a game plan from which Crockett planned not to stray.
“Both were self-made men,” Joe Reilly, of Drexel University, explained during a presentation about the two men in 2007.
They volunteered for glory and fame. They had political and economic goals they chose to pursue. To establish and maintain their public image they manipulated the contemporary media by publishing an Autobiography. Ben Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanac for 25 years. He became wealthy from it. Davy Crockett was the supposed author of an almanac series for 20 years. He had no financial interest in them and never profited from it except for notoriety. He was an early example of others profiting from a celebrity.8
Another literary work that influenced Crockett was an English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which had been published in 1774 in Ireland. The University of Tennessee’s 2003 acquisition of this copy of the Metamorphoses—bearing an authenticated Crockett signature and with a complete provenance—provided some additional insight into both the historic and the mythical Crockett.9
One of the most influential works in the Western literary canon, this epic narrative poem in which Ovid tells of the creation and history of the world through the legends of the gods, and their transformation of humans into nonhuman forms, has inspired great writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Joyce. This particular copy of the Ovid classic came to the attention of the University of Tennessee in late March 2003, when Aaron Purcell, a special collections archivist, randomly scanned eBay. com. The online listing that drew Purcell’s attention provided a detailed provenance of the book—published by John Exshaw, the edition had been issued by a family of prominent printers and booksellers on Dame Street, in Dublin.10 Along with other information about the book, the seller included a digital image from the endpages. When he examined it, Purcell was stunned. He could not believe what he saw on the computer screen—David Crockett’s distinctive autograph, scrawled in ink.
“The online description had a very strong scan of Crockett’s signature,” according to Purcell, who quickly compared the computer version to archival documents signed by Crockett.11 If, as Purcell thought, the autograph was genuine, he had “unearthed an almost too-good-to-be-true find: a book that had once belonged to Tennessee’s backwoods hero, Davy Crockett.”
After several weeks, the book finally arrived. Following careful examination, it was determined that the Crockett signature inside was authentic, making the book an invaluable