Davy Crockett

David Crockett was born on August 17, 1786, near the Nolichucky River in Greene County, in what was then the western territory of North Carolina and soon became part of Tennessee. His birthplace stood close to the mouth of Limestone Creek, a site now preserved as Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park ^[1]. He was the fifth of nine children born to John Crockett, a Revolutionary War veteran who tried his hand at farming, milling, and tavern keeping, and Rebecca Hawkins Crockett. The family was poor, and debt followed John Crockett from one venture to the next ^[2].

At twelve, David was hired out to a cattle drover heading to Virginia, the first of several stints of bound labor his father arranged to settle debts. A year later he enrolled briefly in a country school, got into a fight with a classmate, and ran away from home rather than face his father's anger. He spent roughly two and a half years working as a wagoner and farmhand across Virginia and Maryland before returning to Tennessee around 1802 ^[2].

Crockett's formal education amounted to about six months, most of it acquired in his late teens when he worked for a Quaker farmer and traded labor for lessons. He learned to read, write, and cipher well enough to keep accounts and, eventually, to draft legislation and an autobiography. In 1806 he married Polly Finley, a young woman from Jefferson County, and the couple started a family on rented land ^[3].

Farming never held Crockett's attention the way hunting did. He moved his family westward across Tennessee several times in search of better ground and better game, and his skill with a rifle became the foundation of his local reputation. By his own account he killed 105 bears in a single season in the canebrakes of West Tennessee, a figure he published himself and which biographers treat as his claim rather than a verified count ^[3].

When the Creek War broke out in 1813 after the attack on Fort Mims, Crockett enlisted in the Tennessee volunteer militia and served as a scout under Andrew Jackson's command. He took part in the campaign that included the destruction of the Creek town of Tallushatchee, an episode he later described bluntly and without glorification in his autobiography. He served two enlistments through 1815 but saw the war's brutality with a mix of duty and distaste ^[4].

Polly Crockett died in 1815, leaving David with three young children. The next year he married Elizabeth Patton, a widow with two children of her own and a modest inheritance that steadied the family's finances. The Crocketts settled in Lawrence County, where neighbors elected David a justice of the peace and then a lieutenant colonel of the county militia, the source of the title "Colonel Crockett" that followed him for the rest of his life ^[2].

Crockett's first campaign, for the Tennessee legislature in 1821, set the pattern for everything that followed. Short on money and shorter on polish, he won voters over with hunting stories, self-mocking humor, and a genuine feel for the grievances of squatters and poor settlers. He won that race and another in 1823, championing the rights of families who farmed land they did not formally own ^[3].

In 1827 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives from West Tennessee. Washington society treated him as a curiosity, the "gentleman from the cane," but Crockett proved a stubborn legislator. His central cause was the Tennessee Vacant Land Bill, which sought to let poor squatters buy the land they occupied at low prices instead of seeing it sold out from under them. The bill repeatedly failed, in part because Crockett refused to compromise with his own state's delegation ^[5].

His break with President Andrew Jackson defined his later career. Crockett opposed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, casting a vote against the forced relocation of the Cherokee and other southeastern nations even though the measure was popular with his constituents. He called the vote a matter of conscience. Jackson's allies made him pay for it: he lost his seat in 1831, won it back in 1833, and lost again in 1835 to Adam Huntsman, a Jackson man with a wooden leg ^[5]. Any honest Davy Crockett biography has to weigh that removal vote heavily, since it cost him his political life.

By the early 1830s Crockett was famous well beyond Tennessee, and not entirely on his own terms. James Kirke Paulding's 1831 play The Lion of the West featured a swaggering frontiersman named Nimrod Wildfire whom audiences immediately read as Crockett. Unauthorized books about his exploits followed, blending fact with tall tales ^[6].

To take control of his own story, and to raise his national profile, Crockett published A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee in 1834, written with the assistance of congressman Thomas Chilton. The book, plainspoken and often funny, sold well and remains the essential primary source on his life. Its motto, "Be always sure you're right, then go ahead," became permanently attached to his name ^[3].

The Whigs briefly promoted him as a possible answer to Jackson, sending him on a publicized tour of northeastern cities in 1834. But Crockett was a poor party man, and after his 1835 defeat the political establishment on both sides was done with him. Among the most repeated Davy Crockett facts is his reported farewell to his constituents: he told them they could go to hell, and he would go to Texas. The exact wording varies across sources, but his departure for Texas in November 1835 is well documented ^[6].

Crockett rode west with a small group of companions, exploring land along the Red River and considering a fresh political start in Texas, which was then in open revolt against the centralizing government of Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. In January 1836 he took an oath to the provisional government of Texas, which promised land to volunteers who served ^[7].

In early February 1836 Crockett arrived at San Antonio de Bexar and joined the garrison at the Alamo, a fortified former mission commanded by William Barret Travis and James Bowie. Santa Anna's army arrived on February 23 and placed the fort under siege. Accounts from within the garrison during the siege describe Crockett raising morale, playing the fiddle, and taking an active part in the defense ^[7].

Before dawn on March 6, 1836, Mexican troops stormed the walls and killed the defenders, roughly two hundred men. Crockett died that morning at age 49. How he died remains disputed: the memoir attributed to Mexican officer Jose Enrique de la Pena states that Crockett was among a handful of prisoners executed after the battle on Santa Anna's order, while other traditions hold that he fell fighting. Historians continue to argue over the de la Pena account's reliability, and no version diminishes the fact of his death in the Texas cause ^[8].

Crockett fathered three children with Polly Finley: John Wesley, William, and Margaret. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Patton in 1816, added her two children to the household and produced three more: Robert, Rebecca, and Matilda. Elizabeth managed the family's farms during David's long absences in Nashville, Washington, and finally Texas, and after his death she eventually moved to Texas herself to claim the land granted for his service ^[2].

The man behind the legend was more complicated than the almanac hero. He drank socially but campaigned on treating voters to drinks rather than on heavy drinking himself; he was chronically in debt, repeatedly wiped out by failed ventures including a gristmill and gunpowder factory destroyed by a flood in 1817; and he was by most accounts a warm, restless, impulsive man who preferred the woods to the drawing room ^[3]. His eldest son, John Wesley Crockett, followed him into Congress and in 1841 finally passed a version of the land bill his father had fought for ^[5].

Crockett's afterlife as a legend began almost immediately. From 1835 to 1856 a series of Crockett almanacs filled with wild invented adventures kept his name before the public, and the fall of the Alamo gave the stories a martyr's ending. "Remember the Alamo" became the rallying cry at the Battle of San Jacinto six weeks after his death, where Texas won its independence ^[7].

The twentieth century remade him again. Walt Disney's 1954 and 1955 television episodes starring Fess Parker set off a national craze: the coonskin cap became a children's fashion phenomenon, and "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" topped the American charts in 1955. John Wayne played him in the 1960 film The Alamo. The Disney version fixed the image of the buckskin hero "born on a mountaintop in Tennessee," a line that is catchy and geographically wrong, since he was born in a river valley ^[6].

Among Davy Crockett achievements, historians now give as much weight to his political record as to his marksmanship: his defense of squatters' rights anticipated the Homestead Act, and his vote against Indian removal was a rare act of conscience in the Jacksonian Congress. Counties in Tennessee and Texas, a national forest, schools, and state parks carry his name, and his autobiography is still read as an early classic of American vernacular writing ^[1][5].