David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  Helen Chapman, a seventeen-year-old girl, also at the museum that afternoon, described her impression of Crockett in a letter to her mother:

  I have seen a great man. No less of one than Col. Crockett. I . . . sat close by him so I had a good opportunity of observing his physiognomy…. he is wholly different from what I thought him. Tall in stature and large in frame, but quite thin, with black hair combed straight over his forehead, parted from the middle and his shirt collar turned negligently back over his coat. He has rather an indolent and careless appearance and looks not like a “go ahead” man.28

  The rest of the tour became a blur for Crockett. He was ferried across the Hudson River to show off his marksmanship in a shooting match in Jersey City, and then took a steamship to Boston, by way of Newport and Providence, where large crowds waved and cheered. At one of the dinners in Boston, attended by 100 young Whigs, he tasted champagne for the first time and commented that it was like “supping [sic] fog out of speaking trumpets,” and a far cry from Tennessee sipping whiskey.29 Crockett declined an invitation to visit nearby Cambridge, fearful that the folks at Harvard University might try to give him an honorary degree. At Lowell, Massachusetts, a burgeoning New England labor city where the Industrial Revolution had already begun, a textile tycoon showed Crockett through his busy mill and presented him with a handsome woolen suit.

  At tour’s end, he retraced his journey through Boston to New York and Philadelphia. The only hitch occurred during a brief speech stop in Camden, New Jersey, where a clever pickpocket victimized Crockett and some of his escorts. As usual, he was able to turn the incident into a political joke by speculating that the thief had to have been a Jackson man.30

  On May 13, Crockett returned to Washington City and collapsed in his feather bed at the boardinghouse. The euphoria of his book tour was soon to wear off. All the adoring crowds and the compliments of self-serving Whigs had no currency in Congress. If anything, the attention was deemed inappropriate, with jealousy and political apprehension the underlying factors.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  GONE TO TEXAS

  WHILE ON THE BOOK TOUR, as well as during his tenure in Congress, Crockett commissioned portrait artists to capture his likeness. Not a particularly vain man, Crockett certainly did not wish to be remembered as yet another dandified politician clad in a suit and high-collar shirt with a cravat around his neck. That was the Crockett portrayed in Chester Harding’s oil painting executed in Boston during the Whig book tour.1 Crockett’s family liked that depiction as well as a half-length full-size portrait by Rembrandt Peale, brother of Rubens Peale, who started the museum of oddities that Crockett had visited in New York.2 Between 1833 and 1834, he sat for at least six portraits by five different artists. While Crockett was satisfied with the portraits, including the one he lost when he accidentally left it behind on a steamboat, he still hoped for a look that better suited how he actually saw himself in his role as the classic hunter hero.

  As soon as he returned to Washington in mid-May 1834, and before the extended session of Congress officially closed six weeks later, Crockett sat for a portrait by artist John Gadsby Chapman.3 It was while Chapman worked on an artistic study of Crockett’s head to be used for the next election campaign that the artist and his subject came up with the idea of a full-length portrait of Crockett getting ready to do what he did best—go bear hunting.

  Other artists who had painted Crockett portrayed him, in his own words, as “a sort of cross between a clean-shirted Member of Congress and a Methodist Preacher.”4 Crockett had another idea. “If you could catch me on bear-hunt in a ‘harricane’ with hunting tools and gear, and a team of dogs, you might have a picture better worth looking at,” Crockett told Chapman. The artist wisely heeded the advice and decided to render a likeness of his subject in hunting garb, rejecting the standard Washington politician dress. The result was a full-length, life-size portrait of Crockett clad in a well-worn linsey-woolsey hunting shirt, buckskin leggings, and moccasins.

  “I admitted, that I would be delighted to try it, but it would have to be a large picture and, as I never saw a harricane, or bear hunt, I should be obliged to give him a great deal more bother to explain all about them, and to show me what to do,”5 Chapman later wrote.

  Besides scouring the city of Washington for the appropriate costume, Chapman had to secure several props, including a butcher knife and a hatchet to make the Crockett painting as authentic-looking as possible. Finding a rifle “to conform to his [Crockett’s] fastidious ideas of perfection proved difficult,” according to Chapman. Finally, “an old sportsman on the Potomac” provided a rifle, and although the barrel was a few inches shorter than Crockett preferred for bear hunts, he was generally pleased.6 Crockett and Chapman even paid a Sunday afternoon courtesy call on the owner at his home in nearby Alexandria, Virginia. The visit was so cordial that Crockett invited the gentleman to “come out to Tennessee for a riproarious bar-hunt.” In return, Crockett left with gifts from his host, including a powder horn, a bullet pouch, and a bit of old leather, which he used to fashion a hatchet sheath.

  “A grand old fellow,” Crockett exclaimed to Chapman as they walked back to their hotels. “A grand old fellow that! When I’m President, I’ll be shot if I don’t put him into the War Department, he uttered prematurely.”7

  With all the accoutrements of the hunt in place, Chapman then looked for some hounds to add to the painting in order to lend even greater authenticity to the scene. Chapman suggested using his own dog, which he described as “a general sporting animal, of a highly valued breed. With remarkable record for scent, intelligence, courage and endurance—besides being thoroughly trained for service as a model.”8

  Crockett would have none of it. He believed thoroughbred dogs lacked the traits needed for best coping with a bear. “There’s plenty of first-rate fellows to be found about the country carts any market day,” said Crockett. “Come with me tomorrow and I’ll show you. It does my eyes good to look at some of them, and think what a team of beauties they would be—with their tails chopped off—in a roll-and-tumble tussle with a big bear.”9

  Some stray hounds were found and the portrait completed. Chapman selected a lively pose struck by Crockett one afternoon when he walked into the studio and “gave a shout that raised the whole neighborhood.”10 The striking oil on canvas depicted Crockett standing among three mongrel hounds, his left arm crooked to hold his rifle, his right arm raised and grasping his broad-brimmed felt hunting hat as he waves the dogs on to the hunt. The portrait was one of Crockett’s favorites.11

  Over the course of six weeks, while working on the large likeness of Crockett on the hunt, Chapman developed a warm friendship with the colorful congressman and later put his thoughts and impressions to paper. Although it is brief, the nine-page reminiscence offers great insight into the true character of Crockett at that stage in his life.

  “During the progressive intimacy that grew out of familiar intercourse with Col. Crockett, while engaged upon his portrait, he rarely, if ever, exhibited either in conversation or manner, attributes of coarseness of character that prevailing popular opinion very unjustly assigned to him,” Chapman wrote.

  I cannot recall to mind an instance of his indulgence in gasconade or profanity. There was an earnestness of truth in his narrations of events, and circumstances of his adventuresome life, that made it obvious: while the heroic type of his grand physical development, equal to any emergency of achievement—his clear unfaltering eye, and with all gentle and sympathetic play of features, telegraphing, as it were, directly from a true heart, overflowing with kind feeling and impulse, irresistibly dispelled suspicion of insincerity and braggartism…. The ease and readiness with which Crockett adapted himself to circumstances of personal position and intercourse were remarkable, at times even masterly. He would seem to catch, in the first moment of introduction, the tone and characteristics of a new acquaintance and as well to comprehend, and rarely failed in agreeably confirming preentertain
ed opinions in reference to himself.12

  Chapman liked recounting an incident that occurred when he was exhibiting his copies of old masters and original sketches at Mrs. Ball’s Boarding House on Pennsylvania Avenue. While taking a break, the artist was fully engrossed with one of Crockett’s many high adventure stories when there was a rap on his door. It was a sightseeing guide escorting two gentlemen on a tour of Washington City. They were hopeful that they could gaze upon the famed frontiersmen-turned-politician and steal a few moments of his time. Much to Chapman’s surprise, Crockett welcomed them with a “comical air of resignation, at the same time putting on his hat, and throwing one leg over the arm of his chair, and greeting them with cordial extension of hand, but not rising.”13 He urged his guests to take seats and make themselves at home while the guide nervously made formal introductions of his “distinguished friends,” stressing that they had come to the capital expressly to pay their respects to Crockett.

  “A lively conversation was very soon improvised,” Chapman wrote.

  The colonel told several of his best stories—“hoped the gentlemen would have a safe and pleasant journey home, and find all right when they got there” adding “his best regards to the ladies of their families.” Evidentially highly gratified with their visit, with a cordial hand shaking all around, they took their leave. As the door closed the Colonel shook himself out of dramatic pose, replaced his hat upon the table, and, as it were, thinking aloud, murmured, “Well—they came to see a bar, and they’ve seen one—hope they like the performance—it did not cost them any thing any how. Let’s go take a horn!”14

  Chapman’s studio became a place of refuge for Crockett. During the six weeks that he went back and forth for sittings, he used Chapman as a sounding board and father confessor who had no political axe to grind, no favors to ask, and was always ready to listen. One morning when Crockett appeared for a scheduled sitting before going to the Capitol, Chapman immediately noticed “a marked change in his manner and general bearing, his step less firm and his carriage less erect and defiant.”15 He saw a crumpled letter in Crockett’s hand and what he later described as a subdued expression on his face that had never been there before. Chapman asked if he had received some bad news, and Crockett told him that the letter was from his eldest son, John Wesley,16 in Tennessee, who spoke of his own religious conversion, and chastised his father for his public behavior, and his rank failure to tend to the family needs. “Thinks he’s off to Paradise on a streak of lightning,” Crockett told Chapman, adding that the scolding “Pitches into me, pretty considerable.”

  It was clear to Chapman that Crockett’s “thoughts and sympathies had been abruptly and touchingly recalled from present surroundings to home and heart memories…. The awkwardness of his efforts to resume his usual dash of manner was painful to witness.”17 No amount of public reverie or public adulation, it was clear, could fully detach Crockett from the family he had abandoned, both financially and emotionally.

  When he was with Chapman, however, Crockett could be himself. There he had no need to “shake out” of the dramatic pose he often struck when dealing with his doting fans or his foes. Chapman recalled the afternoon he happened upon Crockett at the foot of the great descent to Pennsylvania Avenue looking “very much fagged” and not at all his usual jovial self. He told Crockett how tired he looked, as if he had just delivered a long speech to the House of Representatives. Crockett exclaimed, “Long speech to thunder, there’s plenty of ’em up there for that sort of nonsense, without my making a fool of myself, at public expense. I can stand good nonsense—rather like it—but such nonsense as they are digging at up yonder, it’s no use trying to—I’m going home.”18

  By “going home,” Crockett meant that he was going back to his quarters at the nearby boardinghouse, not back to his estranged family in Tennessee. Yet even as he trudged down the avenue, forces were hard at work to ensure he would indeed go home to those canebrakes where his detractors thought he belonged and should forever remain.

  Everyone in Congress, including Crockett’s Whig friends, noticed a change in him after the book tour. Many historians and biographers agree that going on the tour with Congress still in session was possibly the greatest political blunder Crockett ever committed. They maintain it gave his enemies in the Jackson camp plenty of fodder to use against him. All that had to be done was to point out that, as a duly elected representative of the people, Crockett missed important votes, floor debates, and other congressional business while he traipsed around the country having a high time with his Whig pals. Although he would not be the last American politician to evade his legislative duties, his constituents in Tennessee felt they had been taken advantage of. The man supposed to be looking out for their interests was busy peddling books and speaking out against America’s laudable commander-in-chief, a Tennessee man himself. It was a point well made, and when Crockett offered feeble excuses for his absence by blaming it on illness, it only compounded the severity of the situation.19 Everyone in the country, let alone Washington City, had been reading about Crockett’s junket for weeks.

  Crockett’s frustration was evident in his verbal assaults on Jackson, Van Buren, and their followers, as they became more caustic and breached all sense of decorum, even for the already raucous House of Representatives. There were several instances in the chamber when the sound of the gavel rang out like a rifle shot as the Speaker of the House tried to bring the out-of-control Crockett to order. The sergeant-at-arms and his underlings stood at the ready and legislators pushed their brass spittoons beneath their desks in case a scuffle erupted in the aisles between feuding members, especially the demonstrative gentleman from the cane.

  The book tour had clearly diminished his political effectiveness. Crockett was fully aware that his entire political future hinged on the passage of his land legislation, and he knew the chances of that ever happening receded with each passing day. To say that Crockett was distraught would have been an understatement. His hatred of Jackson grew to uncontrollable excess, and he eagerly let those feelings be known to his colleagues in Washington and to his constituents.20 The spectacle suggested a man out of control, as events moved increasingly into public view.

  In Tennessee, concerned voters began to make inquiries about the land bill. Crockett had no real answers. Any pleasant memories of the recent tour had evaporated. He felt trapped and more and more alone. “I now look forward toward our adjournment with as much interest as ever did a poor convict in the penitentiary to see his last day come,”21 he wrote. “We have done but one act, and that is that the will of Andrew, the first king, is to be the law of the land. He has tools and slaves enough in Congress to sustain him in anything he may wish to effect…. I thank God I am not one of them. I do consider him a greater tyrant than Cromwell, Caesar or Bonaparte…”

  In the end, Crockett did not even stay for the rest of the session but bolted the day before the official close. He did not head out west to Tennessee but instead boarded a stagecoach bound for Baltimore and then on to Philadelphia. There he was to meet with his publishers, accept some promised gifts, and deliver a July Fourth speech at Independence Hall along with Senator Daniel Webster and some other resolute Whigs. The anti-Jacksonians, while politically smart enough to figure that Crockett had no real chance of ever becoming president, still considered him a useful weapon to unleash at staged events and political rallies.

  Reaching Philadelphia on June 30, Crockett was again escorted to the United States Hotel on Chestnut Street and given the sort of pampered treatment a prized gladiator received before entering the arena. On the evening of July 1 at a special ceremony near the old state house, he was given a special custom-made rifle that had been promised to him during his earlier book tour by the young Whigs of Philadelphia. J. M. Sanderson, the renowned local gunsmith the Whigs had commissioned to create the weapon, presented it to Crockett, along with a silver tomahawk inscribed with the words “Go Ahead Crockett,” a butcher knife, a shot pouch, and a
n ornate gilded liquor canteen shaped like a bound book and filled with first-rate sipping whiskey. There also was a powder horn with silver mounts inscribed “Tho. H. Benton to David Crockett 1832.”22 The inscription was curious, since by 1832 Crockett was a known Jackson enemy and Tom Benton, despite earlier differences, was one of Jackson’s staunchest supporters. Soon the room broke out in laughter when it became known that it was a bogus inscription etched by some of Crockett’s Whig friends as a political prank.

  The richly ornamented rifle was a treasure to behold. The inscription in gold read: “Presented by the Young Men of Philadelphia to Hon. David Crockett of Tennessee.” On the stock, a silver plate depicted an alligator with its open jaws, a deer, and a possum. Sanderson also inlaid a gilded arrow into the barrel near the muzzle, and the words “Go Ahead” were etched near the front sight. Crockett was visibly moved with the gifts, especially the rifle. He vowed to use it in defense of his country and to hand it down to his sons for the same purpose. As was the common custom of most hunters of the time, Crockett gave all his rifles names. The well-used rifle he had been using for many years was called “Betsey,” his favorite moniker for guns, and so he told the crowd that this newest weapon in his arsenal would be called “Pretty Betsey.”23