by David Fisher
David Crockett, as he liked to be called, was a true child of the American frontier. His great-grandparents immigrated to America from Ireland in the early 1700s. His father, John Crockett, was born in 1753 in Virginia and was one of the Overmountain Men—patriots living west of the Appalachians—who fought in the Revolutionary War. Several members of the Crockett family were killed or captured and enslaved by Cherokees and Creek Indians in 1777. Davy Crockett was born in 1786, near the Nolichucky River in Tennessee. As did all children growing up on the frontier, Davy learned how to track, hunt, and shoot fast and straight, and was always comfortable in the backwoods. His father worked various jobs, from operating a gristmill to running a tavern, but struggled to support his family. When David Crockett was twelve years old, he was leased out as a bound boy to settle his father’s debt, tending cattle on a four-hundred-mile cattle drive. When he returned home, he was enrolled in Benjamin Kitchen’s school—and just four days later, after whupping the tar out of a bully, he took off from home to avoid his father’s wrath. His real knowledge came from practical lessons on how to survive on his own in the world.
After spending three years on the trail, finding work wherever it was offered as a hand, a drover, a teamster, and even a hatter, or simply hunting his food when it became necessary, he arrived back at the Crockett Tavern. It has been suggested that his adventures during these years, as he related them in his autobiography, served as a model for Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. And Twain did acknowledge reading Crockett’s tales.
He took several jobs to settle the rest of his father’s debts; he worked for six months at a neighbor’s tavern, where, he wrote, “a heap of bad company meet to drink and gamble.” And when that note was satisfied, he began working for another neighbor, a farmer named John Canady. Crockett spent four years on the Canady farm, staying on for pay long after the debt was settled. During that period, the plain-speaking personality that was to prove so politically appealing years later first began to emerge. Upon meeting a lovely young girl, for example, he wrote that his heart “would flutter like a duck in a puddle, and if I tried to outdo it and speak, it would get right smack up in my throat, and choke me like a cold potato.”
It was on the Canady farm that he got his first real taste of book learning, using the money he earned to pay Canady’s son for reading lessons, and after several months’ hard studying, “I learned to read a little in my primer, to write my own name, and to cypher some in the first three rules in figures.”
David Crockett also began growing himself a reputation, not only as a straight talker but also as a straight shooter. The practice in shooting matches at the time was to split a beef carcass into four quarters, with contestants competing separately for each one. Entry was twenty cents a shot. At one of those events, Crockett not only won the whole cow, he also won the “fifth quarter”—the hide, horns, and tallow.
Before his twentieth birthday in 1806, he married and settled on a rented farm with the former Miss Polly Finley, a lovely girl he’d met at a harvest festival. He hunted bear and fowl, trapped forest animals, cleared acreage and planted crops, and fathered two boys, but there was a pull inside him that he couldn’t ignore. When war was declared against Great Britain in 1812, most of the Indian tribes sided with the British, believing their victory would end American expansion into the West. Tribes that had lived peacefully with settlers for decades suddenly went on the warpath. In August 1813, a thousand Red Sticks, as Alabama Creek Indian warriors were known, attacked Fort Mims and massacred as many as five hundred people. Crockett answered the call for help, signing up as a scout for Colonel Andrew Jackson’s militia army, which was marching south to avenge that attack.
Although Davy Crockett might well have seen it as his duty to fight for his country, he had other reasons for wanting to go. It’s possible he recognized an opportunity to make his name—and perhaps avenge the earlier murders of his kin. His farm was struggling, the money he would earn was desperately needed, and his unique skills would be very valuable during a war and just might secure his future. Polly begged him not to go, but he told her, “If every man would wait till his wife got willing for him to go to war, there would be no fighting done till we all got killed in our own house.”
After the largest massacre of settlers in the South at Fort Mims, Davy Crockett volunteered to fight for Colonel Andrew Jackson.
He quickly established himself as a reliable scout—although even he admitted his sense of direction was woefully lacking. Once, while hunting, he realized he was lost, and “set out the way I thought [home] was, but it turned out with me, as it always does a lost man, I took the contrary direction from the right one.”
No one knows how a man will react to battle until lead is flying, and Davy Crockett turned out to be a courageous soldier. In early November, General John Coffee, under the command of Andrew Jackson, led about a thousand dragoons in an attack on the Alabama Creek village of Tallushatchee. An estimated two hundred warriors were killed in the brief battle. At the Battle of Talladega a week later, Coffee’s men killed an additional 299 Creeks.
But Crockett also learned that war was a lot more complicated than he had anticipated. He found that he admired the courage of his enemies, and whenever it was possible, he avoided confrontations with them. At the same time, he grew to despise Andrew Jackson for the way he treated his men. “Old Hickory” was a brutal leader, who seemed not to care about his troops’ welfare. Although Crockett and other scouts did their best to hunt wild game for the militia, because of lack of food and supplies, countless men just got on their horses and rode home. Davy Crockett’s enmity toward Jackson that began during this campaign would follow the two men throughout their political careers—and spark Crockett’s ride to the Alamo.
Although Crockett earned his reputation as a frontiersman, it was his engaging personality that attracted people to him. He was a great storyteller, with a lively wit and an appealing aw-shucks personality. For many other men, lack of an education might have proved a barrier to a political career, but he learned how to use it to his advantage. Later on, he often reminded voters that he wasn’t one of those fancy men from back east who were always changing their minds to please their supporters, but just a regular man trying to do the best he could for his people. His political philosophy wasn’t particularly sophisticated: He stood up for what he believed, he didn’t seem to care if his positions were popular, and he wasn’t afraid to confront the most powerful men in the nation. He articulated his credo this way: “Be always sure you’re right, then go ahead.”
Colonel David Crockett, painted by A. L. DeRose, engraved by Asher B. Durand
Davy Crockett’s political career began when his former commanding officer, Captain Matthews, was a candidate for the office of lieutenant colonel of the Fifty-Seventh Regiment of the Tennessee Militia and asked Crockett to run for major. Initially Crockett turned him down, explaining that he’d done his share of fighting, but the captain insisted. Finally, Crockett agreed. Only when it came time to make his campaign speech did he learn that his opponent would be Captain Matthews’s son. The meaning was clear to him: Matthews thought that running an unqualified hayseed against his son would guarantee victory. That insult got Crockett fired up, and he decided that if he was going to run, he should run against Matthews himself, for colonel. He stood on a tree stump and “told the people the cause of my opposing him, remarking that as I had the whole family to run against any way, I was determined to levy on the head of the mess.” His audience, presumably delighted by the honesty of this speech, elected him to run the militia. Ironically, he became Colonel Crockett on the campaign trail rather than on the battlefield.
Crockett found that politics fit him well. But he didn’t forget where he came from. Consciously or not, he always advertised his frontier background, from the buckskin clothes he wore to the way he spoke to the political positions he supported. His greatest political strength was that ordinary people believed he understood their needs—
the key requirement for a populist politician.
His wife Polly had died giving birth to their daughter, and he had remarried—to a woman with an eight-hundred-dollar dowry, so for the first time in his life he didn’t have to struggle to earn his keep. After moving to Lawrence County in 1817, he served as a town commissioner and helped draw the new county’s borders, then accepted an appointment as the local justice of the peace. In 1821, his friends and supporters urged him to run for the Tennessee legislature, representing the counties of Lawrence and Hickman. As he remembered, “It now became necessary that I should tell the people something about the government, and an eternal sight of other things that I knowed nothing more about than I did about Latin, and law.”
On the campaign stump, Crockett would sometimes finish his speech by inviting everyone to join him for a drink, leaving his opponent to address a reduced crowd.
His opponent, he recalled, “didn’t think he was in any danger from an ignorant backwoods bear hunter.” Crockett stood up on the stump and told people that he had come for their votes, and that if they didn’t watch mighty close, he’d get them. In one campaign appearance, he told his listeners the story of a traveler who saw somebody beating on an empty barrel. When asked what he was doing, the man explained that just a few days earlier there had been cider in there and he was trying to get it out. Then Crockett added, “there had been a little bit of a speech in me a while ago, but I believed I can’t get it out.” The crowd laughed, and as he finished, he told them it was time to wet their whistles and led them to the liquor stand—leaving only a sparse few people to listen to his frustrated opponent.
Crockett won his first election, receiving more than twice as many votes as his rival. Although other members of the legislature referred to him derisively as “the Gentleman from the Cane”—meaning from the uncivilized backwoods—he stood up to the wealthy and powerful. His staunch support for the struggling west Tennessee farmers and local folk made him so popular that a year after his election his constituents presented him with a .40-caliber flintlock with the motto go ahead inscribed in silver near the sight. He named this beautiful hunting rifle Old Betsy, in honor of his oldest sister.
When he was not doing the people’s work, he was building a new cabin for his family in the wilds of the Obion River, relying on Old Betsy to keep his family fed and warm. On one hunt, he brought down a six-hundred-pound bear, although he admitted that it took three shots. That he chose to live in the wilderness, where a man survived by his wits rather than his wallet, reinforced his growing reputation as a man of the people. Although he did not intend to stand for reelection in 1823, when a newspaper article appeared to lampoon him, he changed his mind. His opponent, Dr. William Butler, was Andrew Jackson’s nephew-in-law. It proved to be one of the most memorable populist campaigns ever run. On the stump, Crockett confessed that his campaign was financed by the raccoon pelts and wolf scalps his children and hunting dogs had gathered, and he reckoned after visiting Dr. Butler’s impressive home that he walked on fancier materials on his floor than most people’s wives wore on their backs. Crockett wore his buckskin shirt with extra-large pockets—for a twist of tobacky and a bottle of hooch—and won the election by 247 votes.
At this same time, Andrew Jackson’s political fortunes were skyrocketing. The military hero, who had defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans and led the nation to victory in both the War of 1812 and the First Seminole War, was a nominee for the presidency in 1824. Although Jackson won the popular vote, the close election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which chose John Quincy Adams. But Tennessee senator Jackson had established himself as a formidable politician and kept his sights firmly on the White House.
Crockett had aroused Jackson’s anger by supporting the candidate running against Old Hickory’s handpicked choice for governor in 1821, personally defeating his relation two years later, and backing Jackson’s opponent when he ran for the Senate. In fact, Crockett called his vote against Jackson “the best vote I ever gave.”
When his supporters urged him to run for Congress in 1825, Crockett accepted their nomination, then lost a woefully underfinanced campaign to the incumbent by 267 votes. But his reputation continued to grow, and it was known that in the winter of 1826, he and his hunting buddies accounted for 105 dead bears. Supposedly he had killed 47 of them himself.
Crockett lived a life of adventure—but one fraught with danger. He almost died twice from malaria, suffered near-fatal hypothermia, and was mauled by a bear. He had cheated death so often that his family refused to believe he had been killed at the Alamo and sent young John Crockett to verify it. Once, while he was earning his living cutting and selling barrel staves, his barge got caught in the rapids and he was trapped in its tiny cabin as it flooded. He struggled to escape through a small window and got stuck, urging rescuers to pull him out no matter what it required, “neck or nothing, come out or sink.” Indeed, they got him out, but he suffered serious injuries. Among the rescuers was a wealthy businessman and politician, Memphis mayor Marcus Brutus Winchester, who would take to Crockett and financially support his successful run for Congress in 1827.
Crockett’s homespun appeal attracted considerable attention in Washington, even before he arrived there. He was introduced by letter to Henry Clay, “the Great Compromiser,” who was preparing to run for the presidency, by Clay’s son-in-law, James Irwin, as an uncouth, loud talker, who was “independent and fearless and has a popularity at home that is unaccountable.”
Even nearly two centuries ago, a backwoodsman who often dressed in hand-sewn buckskin was considered out of place in the nation’s increasingly sophisticated and dignified capital. However, that worked in Crockett’s favor politically. Although he belonged to no political party, the Whigs saw great potential in him and helped build on the myths about him that were already spreading. More than a century later, Crockett would be celebrated on television by the Disney company as a man who wrestled alligators and “kilt him a bear when he was only three,” but the foundations of his legend were laid not in Hollywood but while he was in Congress.
In Congress, Crockett never wavered from his support for the rights of the poor. During his first term, he opposed a land bill because it might result in squatters being driven off their farms, pointing out, “The rich require but little legislation. We should at least occasionally legislate for the poor.” Although he had ended up supporting Andrew Jackson in Old Hickory’s victorious run for the White House in 1828, he didn’t hesitate to fight hard against him—as well as other members of the Tennessee delegation—when the land bill again was proposed in 1830. He answered to a higher power than Washington politicians, he explained: the people who put him in office; the kind of people whose children “never saw the inside of a college, and never are likely to do so.”
Crockett was becoming a problem for Jackson. He was an extraordinarily popular politician who too often opposed him. Their biggest fight came when Jackson introduced the Indian Removal Act in 1829, which proposed granting to the tribes the unsettled lands west of the Mississippi River, where they would be taught “the arts of civilization,” in exchange for their land within existing state borders. Jackson believed this separation of whites and Indians was the only way to ensure peace and was the most humane way of dealing with the Indian problem. Crockett opposed him; he had lived among Indians his whole life and believed they should be left in peace on their own lands. Describing it as “a wicked, unjust measure,” he voted against it and said bitterly, “I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed on the day of judgment.” The bill passed, but the Cherokee chief sent a letter to Crockett thanking him for his vote.
Crockett’s biggest political rival was Andrew Jackson, seen in this 1860 portrait by D. M. Carter, who was charged with extraordinary “bloody deeds” in this 1828 “coffin” handbill.
When Crockett stood for reelection in 1831, Jackson personally recruited a man named William Fitzgera
ld to run against him. It was going to be a difficult campaign for Crockett because the majority of people in his district had supported the Removal Act. Fitzgerald ran a dirty campaign, accusing Crockett of being a violent drunk and a gambling man who cheated on his wife. His men would post signs advertising a Crockett appearance that Crockett knew nothing about—but when he failed to show up, he was the one who was blamed. The tensest moment of the campaign came during a debate in Nashville. As the Nashville Banner reported,
Fitzgerald spoke first. Upon mounting the stand he was noticed to lay something on the pine table in front of him, wrapped in his handkerchief.
He commenced his speech…. When Fitzgerald reached the objectionable point, Crockett arose from his seat in the audience and advanced toward the stand. When he was within three or four feet of it, Fitzgerald suddenly removed a pistol from his handkerchief and, covering Colonel Crockett’s breast, warned him that a step further and he would fire.
Crockett hesitated a second, turned around and resumed his seat.
The episode caused a stir, but Jackson was well liked in Tennessee, and Crockett lost the election. To pay off all his campaign debts, he had to sell his land, and with the assistance of someone who knew how to spell, a man named Matthew St. Clair Clarke, he “wrote” The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, one of the first campaign biographies. It marked the beginning of his transformation from David Crockett to Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. It described his life-threatening adventures and his good character while vilifying Andrew Jackson—and was an immediate success. Two years later, after he defeated Fitzgerald to regain his seat in Congress, his official autobiography was published—partially to correct some of the taller tales told in that first book—and caused such a great stir that a segment of Whigs began suggesting he would be the perfect candidate to succeed Jackson in the White House.
