David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [119]
“The news that Special Collections had acquired a book owned by Davy Crockett that carried his signature was truly a signal event,” declared Crockett scholar Michael A. Lofaro in a university library publication. “Like many a frontiersman, Crockett was never renowned as a reader, and a book that he owned and signed at the rear as testimony to the fact that he had read it could lend true insight into the man and perhaps into the works that he himself authored or encouraged.”12 Lofaro added:
We are left with the tantalizing proposition that Crockett’s reading of this compendium of myths may have had a significant impact on the evolution of the narratives that essentially define his legendary status through tall tales. While only further study can prove or disprove this hypothesis, it is also well to note that Metamorphoses does translate from the Latin as transformations and that the first line of Ovid’s text reads “my intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms.”13
The book’s importance to Crockett is significant, and it is important to realize that the work had been available since the mid-1700s, when lexicographer Nathan Bailey translated the original Latin text into English, primarily for use in school classrooms. This meant that Crockett—who certainly did not master Latin but, contrary to some accounts was not an illiterate backwoods bumpkin—could have read much of the book, including the main introduction, the story summaries, the various notes, and a final explanation of the history and mythology of each of the fables. Moreover, besides Crockett’s signature on page 392, Thomas Owen, the man to whom the book was given, signed the same page, with the date 1832.
Another critical detail contained in the book’s affidavit of provenance is the mention of Thomas Chilton, friend of both Crockett and Owen, the man who received the book from Crockett as a gift. Certainly much credit for the Crockett autobiography was due Tom Chilton, who had an ear for his friend’s vast repertoire of stories laced with idioms and phrases. Chilton also proved quite helpful in negotiating a contract for the 211-page book, which was officially completed on January 28, 1834.14
On February 3, the manuscript was shipped to the publisher selected by Chilton and Crockett—E. L. Carey and A. Hart in Philadelphia, a then venerable house with a solid reputation for publishing such well-known authors as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.15 In the cover letter to the publisher, which was, like the manuscript, in Chilton’s handwriting and dictated by Crockett, the coauthors cavalierly mentioned that they had no time to have the manuscript copied, so they shipped the only copy. “It has been hastily passed over for correction, and some small words may have been omitted,” Crockett wrote. “If so you will supply them. It needs no corrections of spelling or grammar, as I make no literary pretensions.”16 The lone copy of the manuscript arrived safely in Philadelphia, and the publishers immediately distributed a broadside with the announcement:
It may interest the friend of this genuine Son of the West to learn, that he has lately completed, with his own hand, a narrative of his life and adventures, and that the work will be shortly published by Messrs. Carey & Hart, of Philadelphia. The work bears this excellent and characteristic motto by the author:
I leave this rule for others, when I’m dead:
Be always sure you’re right—THEN GO AHEAD!
Three weeks later, Crockett again wrote Carey and Hart, expressing