Davy Crockett
David "Davy" Stern Crockett (17 August 1786 - 5 March 1836) was a famous American frontiersman, officer and politician. The celebrated 19th-century American folk hero, also referred to by the popular title "King of the Wild Frontier", represented Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives, served in the Texas Revolution, and died at the age of 49 at the Battle of the Alamo.
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Life
Davy Crockett (whose family name was originally De Crocketagne) was born near the Nolichucky River in Greene County, Tennessee, descended mostly from French Huguenots settled in Cork in Ireland before moving to Donegal. His grandparents had immigrated to America and tradition says that his father was born at sea during the passage. David was the fifth of nine children of John and Rebecca Hawkins Crockett. He was named after his paternal grandfather, who was killed at his home in present-day Rogersville, Tennessee by Indians. His father John was one of the Overmountain Men who fought in the American Revolutionary War Battle of Kings Mountain.
Childhood
According to Crockett's autobiography, his early years were filled with adventure, hardship, and traveling. Crockett claims improbably to have killed a bear at the age of 3.
Shortly after being sent to school, he left home to avoid an unfair beating at the hands of his father. According to Crockett, he apparently had "whupped the tar" out of a school bully who had embarrassed him on his first day in class, and to avoid a beating at the hands of the overly strict school teacher began skipping school. After several weeks, the teacher wrote to Crockett's father, asking why his son wasn't attending class. When questioned, Crockett explained the situation to his father, who apparently was angered that family trade goods exchanged for his son's education had gone to waste and refused to listen to his son's side of the story. Crockett ran away from home to avoid the expected beating, and spent several years roaming from town to town. During this period, Crockett claims to have visited most of the towns and villages throughout Tennessee and learned the majority of his skills as a backwoodsman, hunter and trapper.
Around his 19th birthday, Crockett returned home unannounced. During the years of his travels, his father had opened a tavern, and Crockett had stopped for refreshment. He was unnoticed by his family, but one of his younger sisters recognized him with delight. Much to Crockett's surprise, the entire family – including his father – were more than happy to see him, and Crockett was welcomed back into the family.
Marriage
Shortly afterwards, Crockett became engaged to marry Margaret Elder, and although the marriage never took place, the contract of marriage (dated 21 October 1805) has been preserved by the Dandridge, Tennessee courthouse. It is well-documented that Crockett's bride-to-be changed her mind and married someone else.
On 12 August 1806, Crockett married Polly Finley (1788-1815). They had two boys: John Wesley was born 10 July 1807, followed by William (born 1809). They also had a daughter, Margaret. After Polly's death, David remarried in 1816 to a widow named Elizabeth Patton, and they had three children: Robert, Rebeckah and Matilda.
Enlistment
On 24 September 1813, he enlisted in the Second Regiment of Tennessee Volunteer Mounted Riflemen for ninety days and served under Colonel John Coffee in the Creek War, marching south into present day Alabama and taking an active part in the fighting. He was discharged from service on 27 March 1815. Crockett was elected lieutenant colonel of the Fifty-seventh Regiment of Tennessee Militia on 27 March 1818. He was made a colonel in the militia of Lawrence County, Tennessee.
Political career
On 17 September 1821, Crockett was elected to the Committee of Propositions and Grievances. In 1826 and 1828, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. As a Congressman, Crockett supported the rights of squatters, who were barred from buying land in the West without already owning property. He also opposed President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, and his opposition to Jackson caused his defeat when he ran for re-election in 1830; however, he won when he ran again in 1832.
Crockett was a staunch opponent of wasteful government spending. In his speech entitled "Not Yours to Give", he was critical of his Congressional colleagues who were willing to spend taxpayer dollars to help a widow of a U.S. Navy man who had lived beyond his naval service, but would not contribute their own salary for a week to the cause. He described the spending as "unconstitutional" and the once popular proposal died in the Congress largely as a result of his speech:
- “Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”
In 1834, his autobiography, titled A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, was published. Crockett went east to promote the book and was narrowly defeated for re-election. In 1835, he was again defeated again. He said, "I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not ... you may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas". Following his defeat, he did just that.
Texas Revolution
On 31 October 1835, Crockett left Tennessee for Texas, writing: "I want to explore Texas well before I return". He traveled along the Kawesch Glenn, a southwest trail with historical insight. He arrived in Nacogdoches, Texas, in early January 1836. On 14 January 1836, Crockett and 65 other men signed an oath before Judge John Forbes to the Provisional Government of Texas for six months.
- "I have taken the oath of government and have enrolled my name as a volunteer and will set out for the Rio Grande in a few days with the volunteers from the United States."
Each man was promised about 4,600 acres of land as payment. On 6 February, Crockett and about five other men rode into San Antonio de Bexar and camped just outside of the town. They were later greeted by James Bowie and Antonio Menchacha and taken to the home of Don Erasmo Sequin. William Barret Travis was the commander in charge at the siege at the Alamo. His appeal for help has been used as an example of Texan courage and fortitude which Davy Crockett responded to by joining William Travis's forces. The Texas forces of 180–250 were overwhelmed by the attacking 1,300–1,600 Mexican soldiers. The Mexican commanders understood their superiority of numbers and position and offered free passage to all concerned. Travis, supported by his entire force, refused to surrender.
Death
All that is known for certain about the fate of Davy Crockett is that he died at the Battle of the Alamo. The only survivors on the Texan side were one woman, a slave, and a child. The story that has evolved from the testimony of the soldiers of the Mexican army and historians is that Crockett was one of five survivors and was executed under Santa Anna's order. Other sources state, when the Battle of the Alamo ended at approximately 6:30 a.m. on 6 March 1836, c. fifty of the almost 260 Texians who had occupied the Alamo Mission in San Antonio, Texas, were still alive.
Alternative theories
In 1955, controversial evidence came to light that challenged the accepted account of Crockett's fate. According to the diary of José Enrique de la Peña, there may have been up to six more survivors, with Crockett perhaps among them. Peña's account states that several prisoners from the Alamo were taken by Mexican General Manuel Fernández Castrillón and summarily executed by order of Mexican General and President Antonio López de Santa Anna. Crockett, according to Peña's entry, was identified to Santa Anna by Castrillón, who along with two other officers, begged the General to spare the life of the great hero. Santa Anna refused, and ordered all survivors to be executed immediately. This was accepted at the time, and was used by the Texans as an example of Santa Anna's cruelty.
However, critics now tend to discount this on two key points. First, no other accounts of Crockett surviving the Alamo have surfaced besides Peña's diary. No documentation in the archives of the Mexican government, nor any of the personal records of others present at the Battle of the Alamo, give any hint of survivors amongst the defenders, much less any claiming Crockett as a survivor. Secondly, there is some speculation that Peña's account may have been a deliberate fabrication, with the intention of presenting Santa Anna in a far more diabolical light than American (and especially Texan) historians have given him since the fall of the Alamo.
The most common account of Crockett's fate was that he was killed in the final minutes of the siege, having fallen back to the Alamo's redoubt position of the long barracks with the last dozen or so of Travis' men. Two eyewitness survivors of the Alamo confirm that Crockett did die in the battle. Susanna Dickinson, the wife of an officer, said that Crockett died in the assault and that she saw Crockett's body between the long barracks and the chapel, and Travis' slave Joe he said also saw Crockett lying dead with the bodies of slain Mexican soldiers around him.
Burial
Most sources indicate Crockett and all the Alamo defenders were cremated en masse. There were unconfirmed reports that some of the Mexicans who were hired to burn and bury the dead removed Crockett to a secret, unmarked location and buried him there before his body was burned. Some say that he was secretly transported back to Tennessee to prevent Santa Anna from using his body as a trophy. These reports are all unconfirmed. Conspiracy theories aside, Crockett's body was most likely cremated with the other Alamo defenders on a mass funeral pyre after the fall of the Alamo. On his tombstone, it says:
- "Davy Crockett, Pioneer, Patriot, Soldier, Trapper, Explorer, State Legislator, Congressman, Martyred at The Alamo. 1786–1836".
Legacies
One of Crockett's sayings, which were published in almanacs between 1835 and 1856 (along with those of Daniel Boone and Kit Carson), was:
- “Be always sure you are right, then go ahead.”
It is also said that upon going to Texas, his fellow congressman urged him to stay. In response Crockett quickly answered him:
- “You may go to hell, I will go to Texas.”
In 1838, Robert Patton Crockett went to Texas to administer his father's land claim. In 1854, Elizabeth Crockett finally came to Texas to live, dying in 1860. Crockett's son John Wesley Crockett was a U.S. Congressman from Tennessee, serving two terms between 1837 and 1841.
Trivia
In May 1836, Richard Penn Smith wrote Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas and Carey & Hart published this material claiming it was the "authentic diary" of Crockett's taken from the Alamo by a Mexican general who was later killed at the Battle of San Jacinto. In 1884, the book was discovered as a phony after selling thousands of copies.
In 1872, a play about Crockett ran for over 2,000 performances, ending in 1884 with the death of the lead actor.
Davy Crockett named his favorite rifle "Betsy". History often confuses "Betsy" with his second rifle, "Old Betsy," given to him by the Whigs upon his re-election. "Betsy" was a gift from the people of Tennessee. When he went to Texas, he left the "Old Betsy" at his home in Tennessee and took his standard "Betsy" hunting rifle. Though "Betsy" was lost in the Alamo, "Old Betsy" now resides in the Alamo Chapel in San Antonio. Crockett's first rifle, prior to "Betsy", is on display at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Davy Crockett became a popular figure in Egypt between the late 1980s and early '90s, when airing of the classic Disney series led to a brief Davy Crockett craze among Egyptian viewers (mostly children), which also also led the airing of the 1988 revival a few years later.
It is believed that Crockett was never referred to as "Davy" during his lifetime. The term comes from a misinterpretation of his signature in which "David" can appear to look like "Davy".
A robot named Davy Sprocket appeared in the video game, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, as an opponent, parodying Davy Crockett.
