David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [5]
The highlight of that summer vacation came when we neared the Davy Crockett birthplace, in eastern Tennessee, and the days that followed, in the nearby Smoky Mountains. We checked into a mom-and-pop motel in Gatlinburg, the resort town that billed itself as the “gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains.” We hit the pottery and souvenir shops in the nearby town of Pigeon Forge, and I ate my share of taffy and fudge from the sweetshops along Gatlinburg’s main drag. In a few years these mountain towns would mushroom in size, thanks to a commercial boom, as Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park became important tourist destinations. But back then there was no Dollywood, nor were there discount shopping malls, theme parks, and hordes of tourists.
I dipped my bare feet in icy cold Little Pigeon River, rode with my dad on the new ski lift to the top of Crockett Mountain, and saw the first black bears I had ever glimpsed in the wild. I slept in my coonskin hat.
The woman who ran the motel where we stayed told my dad about a good place to gather blackberries, and one morning we walked up the road and found the patch just as she described. In no time we filled a big coffee can to the top and my coonskin hat overflowed with fat juicy berries. Back at the motel the woman generously made a batch of blackberry cobbler that was the best I ever put to my lips. I called it “Crockett Cobbler” and imagined it was just like the kind that my hero ate when he was nine years old. We went to the berry patch again, and when we left to drive back to Missouri, my dad put a couple of empty milk cartons of berries in the ice chest.
All the way home, I gazed out the windows of the Green Dragon and thought about what it must have been like to be Davy Crockett. Now, all these many years later, I still cherish the memories of that trip. I think of it whenever I take out a photograph of my father and me sitting on the living room sofa. He is clowning around and has me hold a napkin to my chin while spoon-feeding me Crockett Cobbler. On my head is my coonskin hat. For the life of me, I cannot remember whatever happened to it.
MICHAEL WALLIS Tulsa, Oklahoma May 6, 2010
Author Michael Wallis (in coonskin cap) eating “Crockett Cobbler” with his father, Herbert Wallis, St. Louis, Missouri, 1956. (Wallis Collection)
PREFACE
THIS IS NOT ANOTHER straightforward chronological biography of Davy Crockett, nor is it a regurgitation of the many myths and lies perpetuated about Crockett over the years. Instead this book is for those people interested in learning the truth—or at least as much as can be uncovered—about the historical and fictional Crockett, and how the two often became one. I hope that readers will gain some new historical insight into the man and how he captured the imagination of his generation and later ones as well.
In the course of researching and writing this book, I came to know David Crockett. I scoured all the places he lived and journeyed—from throughout the breadth of his native Tennessee to Washington, D.C., and cities of the northeast and, finally, to Texas, where he spent but a few months before his much mythologized death at the Alamo. I learned about the man’s accomplishments and shortcomings, discovering that the Davy Crockett created by Walt Disney in 1954 was definitely not the David Crockett who actually lived, and that much of the distortion of truth about Crockett began in his own lifetime and only increased after his death.
The authentic David Crockett was first and foremost a three-dimensional human being—a person with somewhat exaggerated hopes and well-checked fears, a man who had, as we all do, both