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Davy Crockett • Vol. 20: #4 • (1-21-2024) Tidbits of Coachella Valley
• In March of 1836 a legendary man died at a soon-to-be-legendary place. That man was Davy Crockett, and the place was the Alamo.
• Known as “king of the wild frontier,” Crockett was born in Tennessee in 1786. He was a braggart, and once his escapades sparked the imagination of his countrymen, he did nothing to lessen their enthusiasm. Reserved Easterners were just beginning to recognize and appreciate the unrefined ways of the wilderness. Meanwhile, rowdies were swapping wild yarns of any hero who had a story to tell.
• During his own lifetime, someone published a wildly embellished account of his exploits in the “Crockett Almanac,” which served as a sort of folk tale comic book. Fortunately, Crockett himself penned a much more factual recounting of his deeds. In his own homey book, Davy’s broad humor and country-bumpkin language entertained his generation in much the same way that Mark Twain’s humor amused a later one.
• However fanciful his later life turned out, Davy’s youth had been somewhat more prosaic. A hunter and a tracker, he had been eager to help fight America’s second war against England. During that conflict in 1813, Creek Indians had massacred whites in the territory later to become Alabama. Under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson, Crockett soldiered for more than a year. Soon after he returned home, his wife died, leaving him with three offspring to raise. Since every good man in those days needed a good woman, Crockett began courting a widow. Together they raised a brood of kids: his, hers, and theirs.
• In 1821 Crockett was enticed into local politics by fellow-Tennesseean, James Knox Polk. Crockett admitted he knew little of law, less of Latin, and had not the least notion of what a legislature did. He was so nervous about making public speeches that his legs trembled, so he soon learned to mellow his stump-speeches with hard cider beforehand.
• His first political job as justice of the peace led to a term in Congress, a move that exposed his bodacious ways to the national spotlight. By then Andrew Jackson was president and was planning to remove all eastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi. At that point Crockett parted company with Jackson, voting in vain against the Indian removals. Since Crockett’s defection was an unpardonable sin, Jackson immediately threw roadblocks in the way of Davy’s re-election. But despite Jackson's efforts, he won re-election in a landslide victory.
• Davy Crockett was always his own man. He marched out of step during Jackson’s second presidential term as well, bucking “Old Hickory” on national banking issues and land policies.
• In 1834 Crockett took a trip to America’s Northeast, where he amused the Yankees and became google-eyed by what he saw there: Organized community fire-fighting teams, rubberized rain garments, braille print, and textile mills where women did men’s work. He even took his first ride on a train.
• After a third term in Washington, Crockett turned his face and future toward the West. One year after casting his final congressional vote, he was in San Antonio, Texas.
• The chronicles of Davy’s last few months in Texas are largely fictitious since no one knows exactly how he lived there, or how he died at the Alamo. But however it happened, his sacrifice did nothing to diminish the legends already surrounding his life.
• Davy Crockett represented the restlessness of the pioneers and their relentless movement westward. He fought for the impoverished, the threatened and the dispossessed. In a fitting epitaph to his passing that he had earlier phrased himself, he said, “I hope to die like a brave man, for most men are remembered as they died, not as they lived. We admire the glories of the sunset, yet scarcely glance upon the splendid noonday sun.”
