He went by David. His life story has been told many times thru the years. David Crockett was born August 17, , in East Tennessee. His family was not rich. This was a common thing in the and s. They also moved around a lot looking for ways to make a living. He did not get the chance to go to school like you do today. He was tutored by a neighbor sometimes. He spent most of his time working different jobs, exploring, and hunting. Even though he did not go to school, David was able to do great things.
What he learned from living on the frontier prepared him for his future. His knowledge of the land led him to join the local militia as a scout in He served in the Creek War until He was popular with other soldiers for his hunting skills. He also became popular for being able to tell a good story. After the war, he moved to Lawrence County. That is where he became interested in government as a way to help people. In , David was elected to the Tennessee General Assembly.
During his campaign , he told crowds of people stories of his frontier adventures. He soon became a spokesman for the frontier people. He was elected to the U. Congress in He fought for the rights of regular people, not the wealthy. When he showed up in the settlements, cannons were shot off in celebration, banquets were held in his honor and the delighted local citizens tried to enlist him for office. But Crockett knew he had to earn his welcome, and so he took the oath of allegiance to the provisional government of Texas and joined the army as a mounted volunteer.
He rode off to Washington-on-the-Brazos, the seat of the rebel government, to receive orders from General Sam Houston on where to report next. Though he held no rank, a small contingent of men went with him, apparently regarding him as their leader. Crockett rode into Bexar in the company of about a dozen men.
Entering town on the La Bahia road, he might not even have noticed the broken-down old Franciscan mission that sat in relative isolation on the far side of the river, a forlorn outpost that would seal both his fate and his legend. But it would be another two weeks before the rebels found themselves trapped behind the walls of the Alamo.
For now, they were in control of the whole town, though the men of the Bexar garrison were undersupplied and felt as though the Texas government had forgotten about them. A few days later his presence served as the excuse for a fandango that went on well past midnight, and was only briefly interrupted by the news that General Santa Anna and his army were already on the banks of the Rio Grande and headed for Bexar.
It would not be unreasonable to assume that the pacific Crockett played some role in smoothing over these tensions, but he refused offers by the volunteers to take on a formal leadership role. He was still Private Crockett when the Mexican forces swept into Bexar on February 23, , and forced the rebels to barricade themselves inside the Alamo.
William Travis, We know, of course, that Crockett endured the siege of the Alamo and died in the final assault, but hard information about his activities during those 13 days is maddeningly scant. John Sutherland states that on the first day of the siege Travis assigned Crockett and his men to defend the low palisade spanning the gap between the church and the gatehouse on the south side of the mission.
But the notion that Crockett confined himself to one defensive position during the siege is subtly contradicted by a high-spirited letter Travis wrote to Sam Houston on February 25, after the defenders repulsed a probing assault by the Mexicans on the south side of the mission.
This terse observation is, in my opinion, the last really authoritative glimpse we have of the life of David Crockett. It was written instead immediately after the events it describes, by a commanding officer indisputably in a position to witness them. This scrap of information is crucially revealing.
In the last few years the bottom had fallen out of his life, but he was still a man of spectacular achievement who had risen from an impoverished frontier childhood to become a not-implausible contender for the presidency of his country. He was still in possession of his droll fame and easy humor, and as one of the oldest men in the Alamo he had a seasoned perspective that no doubt the year-old Travis found useful.
Susanna Dickinson, who survived the Battle of the Alamo along with a number of other women and children, gave several accounts of the siege in the latter part of her life. In one of these, published in , she recalled Crockett entertaining the garrison defenders on his violin, though he also had his fatalistic moments. Dickinson reported Crockett as saying. The impression they convey that Crockett played some sort of key leadership role in the defense of the Alamo does not seem to me to be off the mark.
A decade or so ago, the late Alamo scholar Thomas Ricks Lindley hypothesized that there was a significant and previously unknown reinforcement to the Alamo in the last few days of the siege, and that Crockett himself slipped through the Mexican lines to meet this new force and guide it back into the Alamo. He was too great an asset, too big a personality, to have mutely settled into the ranks of the rest of those trapped men.
The death of David Crockett has always excited a weird primal fascination. I remember my flabbergasted realization, at age 7, that Davy Crockett was not going to survive this. The death scene itself—or near-death scene, since the movie faded out before he actually met his demise—was shot on a soundstage, a bit of Disney cost-cutting that created a mood of claustrophobic doom.
Among them was one of great stature, well proportioned, with regular features, in whose face there was the imprint of adversity, but in whom one also noted a degree of resignation and nobility that did him honor.
He was the naturalist David Crockett. There were six others as well, though of wildly varying degrees of believability.
The execution scenario had the stamp of orthodoxy. The controversy has since been the never-ending subject of even more books, dozens of learned articles, radio programs and documentaries. Mostly this is because it just sounds wrong. This is what I think is also going on in the other execution accounts.
So what do we know for sure? We know that David Crockett died at the Alamo. Crockett lying dead and mutilated between the church and the two story barrack building, and even remember seeing his peculiar cap lying by his side. It comes to us secondhand, having passed through the pen of an author named James M.
As late as , four years after the battle, there was a purported sighting of David Crockett near Guadalajara, where he had been taken after being captured at the Alamo and condemned to slave labor in the silver mines. But he was dead. That is the one fact visible in the fog of his final days. The former congressman from Tennessee was disposed of with gruesome anonymity. His body was dragged onto a funeral pyre with those of the other Alamo defenders, and for three days the stench of burning flesh horrified the citizens of Bexar and brought in circling clouds of buzzards.
It was a graceless end, but the beginning of an uncontainable legend. David Crockett, who had come to Texas in search of a new start, had found immortality instead. Colonel Davy Crockett, recently defeated in his bid for a fourth term in the Congress of the United States, returned to one of his favorite hunting grounds—the taverns of Memphis—on November 1, I told the voters that if they would elect me I would serve them to the best of my ability; but if they did not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.
I am on my way now! The crowd shouted in delight—that is, all save the fastidious barkeeper, Neil McCool. The sight of Crockett in muddy boots atop his freshly oil-clothed counter was too much.
In a rage, he lashed out with a club. Crockett had jumped down by then, and McCool managed only to fall over the counter into the arms of a dozen half-drunken revelers.
Amid many oaths he ordered everyone out. Early the next morning Crockett and his three companions walked their horses down to the ferry landing at the mouth of the Wolf River. His Memphis friends were still with him, and the group attracted the curious. Young James Davis watched the warm farewells, somewhat in awe of the noted hunter turned politician. Limus worked his snatch oars as the little flatboat floated lazily down the Wolf, into the Mississippi and toward the distant shore.
Despite the frivolity of his Memphis farewell, Crockett was a deeply troubled man. He had turned 49 in August, the same month of his electoral defeat. He might well have been one of the most celebrated men in America, but he was barely better off financially than when he had won his first electoral bid as militia colonel in He had always been restless, but now a new and uncharacteristic bitterness marked his temper as he cast about for new opportunities by which to rebuild his shattered fortunes.
Texas was on every American tongue by as a land of grand opportunity. American settlers there were growing increasingly restless under Mexican rule that was at best incompetent and at worst despotic. Once the Mexican shackles were discarded, there would be plenty of free land for those bold enough to take it.
Although he proved an able soldier, rising to the rank of militia sergeant, he cared little for the increasingly one-sided conflict with the Indians or for the rules of martial life. In he married Elizabeth Patton, a young widow with two children of her own, whose husband had been killed in the war with the Creeks.
Crockett took an active role in the formation of a new government in this wilderness country, first serving as magistrate, then as justice of the peace, and finally as town commissioner. In his neighbors elected him colonel of the 57th Militia Regiment and three years later sent him as their representative to the state Legislature.
Intelligent and affable, he was endowed with a considerable measure of common sense and an uncommon streak of pure honesty that made him a natural for the rough-and-tumble world of backwoods electioneering.
In , having moved his family to the Obion River country of northwestern Tennessee, he was urged to run for the U. Congress by the mayor of Memphis, Marcus Winchester. Crockett, like Winchester, Polk and Houston, was strongly identified with Andrew Jackson—who would be elected president in —and with the so-called Age of the Common Man.
The more he was pilloried by the Eastern establishment, the more beloved he became everywhere else in the country. By , after he had won re-election to a second term, even his critics were coming around, especially after he made it clear that he was not to be bound by any party solidarity and would instead vote his conscience at all costs. Crockett had a reserved box seat when The Lion of the West returned from a triumphal London engagement to play Washington in When the buckskin-clad Hackett, wearing a wildcat-skin fur cap, strode onto the stage, he promptly bowed to Crockett.
The colonel rose and bowed right back, the audience went wild, and reality and legend melded for a cosmic moment into one. By this time Crockett had broken with Jackson, first over squatter pre-emption rights in the western country and then over Indian removal.
After being discharged in , he returned home, where his wife Polly soon died. He remarried, moved his family to Lawrence County , Tennessee, started several businesses and began his political career. In , Crockett became public commissioner of Lawrence County. Later that year, he was elected justice of the peace and then became a lieutenant colonel in the Tennessee militia.
After resigning those posts, he won a seat in the Tennessee General Assembly representing Lawrence and Hickman counties, where he fought for the tax and land rights of poor settlers and refined his speaking skills. After losing his businesses to flooding, Davy moved to Carroll County and was again elected to the General Assembly in He lost a bid for Congress in and returned to the private sector.
He ran for Congress again in and and won a seat in the U. House of Representatives , lost in , won again in and lost his final bid in He also became the subject of a play and a series of books and almanacs which included tall tales about his exploits as a bear-hunting frontiersman. Hoping to set the record straight about the reality of his life and change his folk hero reputation, Crockett wrote an autobiography and went on tour promoting it.
Crockett and a man armed brigade arrived in Nacogdoches , Texas, in January during the Texas War for Independence. On February 23, President General Santa Anna and thousands of his troops laid siege to the Alamo against no more than Texas volunteer soldiers, including Crockett and his men, whose sharpshooting skills and long rifles proved invaluable in the fight.
Blackburn, and gave the world the still-popular image of a patriotic Crockett holding a long rifle while wearing frontier clothes and a coonskin cap. Army during the Cold War. Crockett, David. History, Art and Archives; U. House of Representatives. David Crockett. The Handbook of Texas Online.
Eric Foner and John A.
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