NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/soc/history/11040

Text File | 1993-01-28 | 4.0 KB | 88 lines

Newsgroups: soc.history
Path: sparky!uunet!hobbes!erics
From: [e-mail] (eric smith)
Subject: Re: Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1993 01:07:38 GMT
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References: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (News admin)
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This didn't seem to get out before so I'm trying it again.
Apologies if you've already seen it.

[e-mail] (Chris Brewster) writes:

>I know he was from Tennessee and served in
>Congress, but how much else in the legend is true?
[ ... ]
>I'd like to hear from anyone who knows where fact gives way
>to fiction in the Crockett story.

On the subject of David Crockett, here is an exerpt from _Lone Star:
A History of Texas and the Texans_ by T.R. Fehrenbach:

     Crockett, the other living legend in the Alamo, was also a
   frontiersman, born in the State of Franklin before it became
   Tennessee. Like Bowie's, his father had fought against the
   British, and had arrived from Ireland. And like Bowie, he was
   one of the two most famous characters in the Old Southwest.
   But Crockett was never a planter or a businessman; he remained
   a hunter and drifter all his days.

     When the planters and farmers filled Tennessee in the normal
   pattern in the early years of the century, Crockett failed to
   prosper. Instead of moving on, he entered politics, as a rep-
   resentative of the hunter-trapper-squatter population. Eventually,
   he served in Congress, and here came into opposition to the
   powerful President of the United States, Andrew Jackson. Jackson,
   for all his outward democratic biases and prejudices and the
   propaganda of his being the first President "from the people",
   concealed a deep conservative nature. The frontiersman in
   Jackson never liked the gentry-born, despite his enormous holdings
   at the Hermitage and his hundreds of black slaves, and his Kitchen
   Cabinet and other peculiar manifestations of vulgarity in the
   White House were symbolic of this. But if Jackson, like all
   classes of Westerners, disliked tight money and the United States
   Bank, he also removed the "civilized tribes" from the territory
   of the United States and paid off the public debt. Crockett
   opposed all these things, and came into violent opposition to
   the Administration. Crockett seems to have been an early Populist,
   who wanted federal funds used for domestic spending in the states,
   something Jackson's Roman sense of values opposed. The mass of the
   public was with Jackson on both the Bank and Indian questions; the
   Bank was closed and the Indians forcibly removed. Neither Davy
   Crockett nor the Supreme Court prevailed, whatever the constitu-
   tionality of their cause. Further, Jackson, who controlled the
   patronage of Tennessee, saw to it that Crockett was effectively
   purged at the polls.

     David Crockett's national fame rested on his ability with a
   rifle, and his ability to tell about it as a raconteur. He made a
   short concession speech, in which he told his constituents to go
   to Hell, while he went to Texas.

     Crockett had a wife and children along the line, who somehow
   had gotten lost. He had had woman trouble, like almost every one
   of the Texas immortals: Houston, Bowie, Travis, and a hundred
   others. Houston and Travis separated from wives in the United
   States under circumstances of scandal, though no evidence attached
   blame to either. Bowie's life was blasted by tragedy. Crockett,
   like Houston and Bowie a man in middle years, drifted into the
   Texas Revolution in search of a cathartic, a new life, and a new
   career. Destiny, manifest or otherwise, worked in mysterious ways.

Fehrenbach also states that twelve Tennesseeans marched west with
Crockett, and that, contrary to the story that he fought to the end
at the Alamo, there are reports that Crockett and some of his
Tennesseans attempted to surrender but were shot.

-----
Eric Smith
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