David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [149]
NOTES
ONE • “KILT HIM A B’AR”
1 Lyrics by Tom Blackburn, music by George Bruns, copyright 1954, Wonderland Music Co.
2 David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1834), 190.
3 Ibid., 190–91. Some sources contend that Crockett’s story about climbing a tree and sliding down to stay warm was pure invention—one of his exaggerated yarns later picked up and reprinted in almanacs and newspapers. Others disagree and believe the story has the ring of truth.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 194.
6 J. H. Grime, Recollections of a Long Life (Lebanon, TN: 1930), 8. Rev. John Harvey Grime, a prominent Baptist preacher and religious leader throughout the South, recalled that as a boy in Tennessee he had a hunting dog named after Davy Crockett and another he named Jolar after Crockett’s favorite dog.
TWO • BORN ON A RIVERBANK IN FRANKLIN
1 No records of David Crockett’s birth exist. In all probability, August 17, 1786, is correct. It has always been the accepted date of birth.
2 Kathryn E. Jones, Crockett Cousins (Graham, TX: K. E. Jones, 1984; 2nd printing, rev. ed., 1986), 21–24.
3 From Joy Bland e-mail to the author, April 8, 2009.
4 Joy Bland, “Genealogical Discovery,” Go Ahead: Newsletter of the Direct Descendants and Kin of David Crockett 25, no. 1, August 2008, 3.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Robert L. Geiser, The Illusion of Caring (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 148.
8 This quote is attributed to Mary Boykin Chestnut, the daughter of a South Carolina governor and the wife of James Chestnut Jr., the son of one of antebellum South Carolina’s largest landowners.
9 Crockett, Narrative, 16.
10 James Atkins Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, edited by John B. Shackford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 7.
11 Curtis Carroll Davis, “A Legend at Full-Length: Mr. Chapman Paints Colonel Crockett—and Tells About It,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, April 1960), 170. Crockett made this statement to artist John Gadsby Chapman in 1834 while sitting for his portrait in Chapman’s studio in Washington, D.C.
12 David Dobson, Directory of Scots in the Carolinas, 1680–1830 (Baltimore: Genealogical Printing Company, 2002), 52. The name Crockett may have come from the ancient Norse word krok-r, meaning crook, hook, or bend and probably the root of the old English word crock.
13 Joseph A. Swann, “The Early Life & Times of David Crockett, 1786–1812,” unpublished manuscript.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid. Lowland Scots were an interesting mixture of Celts, Romans, Scandinavians, Germans, English, Irish, and Scots. The region of southern Scotland and northern England was an age-old border battleground where lawlessness had become a way of life. Residents of this contested landscape raided back and forth across the border from before the time of the Romans in the first century AD. This lawlessness and fighting escalated by the seventeenth century, creating an environment of strife and disorder, which effectively undermined any kind of sustained economic opportunity. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the British government confiscated a great deal of Catholic-owned property and enacted penal laws restricting land ownership exclusively to Protestants.
17 Ibid. Over three or four generations, the Scots succeeded in developing the Ulster-Londonderry area that had been torn apart by war and poverty into