• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 209 0

good points and bad points. He was somewhat idiosyncratic, possessed of often unusual views, prejudices, and opinions that governed how he chose to live his life. Crockett could be calculating and self-aggrandizing, but also as valiant and, indeed, as resourceful as anyone who roamed the American frontier. As a man, he was both authentic and contrived. He was wise in the ways of the wilderness and most comfortable when deep in the woods on a hunt, yet he also could hold his own in the halls of Congress, a fact that distinguished him from so many other frontiersmen. Remarkably, he enjoyed fraternizing with men of power and prestige in the fancy parlors of Philadelphia and New York. Crockett was, like none other, a nineteenth-century enigma. He fought under Andrew Jackson in the ruinous Indian Wars, only later to become Jackson’s bitter foe on the issue of removal of Indian tribes from their homelands. Crockett’s contradictions extended beyond politics. He had only a few months of formal education, yet he read Ovid and the Bard. He was neither a buffoon nor a great intellect but a man who was always evolving on the stage of a nation in its adolescence, a pioneer whose inchoate dreams aptly reflected a restless nation with a gaze firmly pointed toward the West.

Perhaps more than anyone of his time, David Crockett was arguably our first celebrity hero, inspiring people of his own time as well as a twentieth-century generation. The man David Crockett may have perished on March 6, 1836, in the final assault on the Alamo, but the mythical Davy Crockett, now an integral part of the American psyche, perhaps more so than any other frontiersman, lives powerfully on. In this way his story then becomes far more than a one-note Walt Disney legend, while his life continues to shed light on the meaning of America’s national character.

DAVID CROCKETT

Almanac cover, 1848. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

PART I

“KILT HIM A B’AR”

DAVID CROCKETT BELIEVED in the wind and in the stars. This son of Tennessee could read the sun, the shadows, and the wild clouds full of thunder. He was comfortable amid the thickets and canebrakes, the quagmires, and the mountain balds. He hunted the oak, hickory, maple, and sweet gum forests that had never felt an axe blade. He was familiar with all the smells—the odor of decaying animal flesh, the aroma of the air after a rain, and the pungent smell of the forest. He knew the rivers lined with sycamore, poplar, and willow that breached the mountains through steep-sided gorges with strange-sounding names, many with Indian influences like the Nolichucky, the French Broad, the Pigeon, the Tellico, the Hiwassee, the South Holston, the Watauga, the Coosa, the Obey’s, the Wolf, the Elk, and the Obion. He stalked the dimensions of lakes and streams studded with ancient cypress. He learned that dog days arrive not with the heat of August but in early July, when the Dog Star rises and sets with the sun. He carried his compass and maps in his head. He traversed the land when it was lush in the warm times and when it was covered with the frost that Cherokees described as “clouds frozen on the trees.”

The wilderness was, indeed, Crockett’s cathedral, and as the stress of his political and home life began to wear him down, it was the forest where he took refuge. Even with the debates that continue to rage today about who the real David Crockett was, no one disputes that this was a man who approached nature as a science and hunting as an art and who found excitement in combining the two. Crockett had a calling and was a hunter by trade, relying on black bears just as much to clothe and feed his family as for the rich fodder they provided for stories told around the campfires and when campaigning for political office.

Yet, contrary to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the popular tune from the mid-1950s, Crockett did not “kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.”1 For that matter, Crockett was not even “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee.” Indeed, he most likely never signed his name