Davy Crockett Died at the Alamo, But the Story of How He Lived Remains

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. For more than one hundred and fifty years, the story of Davy Crockett has captured our imaginations and inspired us to celebrate his image in song, story, and cinema. For you to tell the story of Davy Crockett is Roger McGrath, author of Gunfighters, Ie Women and Vigilantes. He’s also a frequent contributor on History Channel documentaries and a regular contributor here.

On Our American Stories. Take it away, McGrath.

One of those truly iconic figures of the American frontier is David Crockett. He was a legend in his own lifetime. Now he’s sued me had tale spun about him that were hyperbolic or entirely fictional, but that was only because his real life rise from backwoodsman to congressman and his extraordinary adventures were heroic and quintessentially American. He stood as a symbol of the new American, the man of the West, and the future of the new Republic. He lived at the dawn of the age called Manifest Destiny, the time of an expanding America that is moving west. Crockett was born just ten years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in log cabin in Greene County, Tennessee, on August seventeenth, seventeen eighty-six. Davy Crockett is a third-generation frontiersman and becomes a fifth of John and Rebecca Crockett’s nine children. Davy’s father, John, is one of the famous Overmountain Men who fights in the pivotal American victory at the Battle of King’s Mountain in seventeen eighty.

While he is…
…away fighting during the American Revolution, John’s parents are slaughtered by Cherokee, who ally themselves with the British to take advantage of the war to raid and pillage. One of John’s brothers is badly wounded in the attack and left for dead, and another is taken captive by the Cherokee and made a slave for seventeen years. Born into this war good patriotic environment, a pioneering mountain folk, Davy learns marksmanship at a young age, both for hunting and for protection against marauding Indians. Here’s Crockett biographer Buddy Levy.

Crockett came from a tradition of woodsmen, and he would have learned from his father and his uncles how to hunt. He learned how to track. He learned how to identify sign, scat, broken twigs.

He also learned rough and tumblefere fighting from his older brothers. Here’s historians Steven Harden and David Eisenbach.

Crockett’s a jokester. He’s remarkably funny, and he’s affable. People like him well.

Tennessee at the time was still the American frontier.

You got wild animals, you got fights; and it was in this world where there’s no kind of solid established law that David Crockett began the process of becoming the myth.

By the time Davy is twelve, his father bound him out to a perfect stranger to travel four hundred miles on foot in a cattle drive to the Eastern Seaboard, with no arrangements for his eventual return home. Three months of intensive labor passed before Davy traveled alone in snow and on foot back to his mountain home, where his family runs a tavern. But Davy is in for his parents’ society will benefit from formal schooling. He isn’t thrilled with confinement in a classroom, but his father is paying for it, so Davy accepts the inevitable.

“I went four days and had just begun to learn my letters a little when I had an unfortunate falling out with a boy much larger and older than myself.” Davy Crockett.

Davy begins playing hooky from school, but after a week the schoolmaster contacts John Crockett. Davy now thinks he’ll be whipped by both the schoolmaster and his own father.

“My father told me he would whip me if I didn’t start immediately to the school. Finding me rather too slow about starting, he gathered about a two-year-old hickory stick and broke after me.”

I put out with…
…all my might, and soon we were both up to our top speed. But mind me not on the schoolhouse road, for I was trying to get as far to other way as possible.”

Davy Crockett, eighteen thirty-four.

Davy doesn’t stop running, and as soon on another cattle drive to the Eastern Seaboard. For the next two years, he has more adventures than most people having lifetime. Davy returns home just shy of his fifteenth birthday. Here are Crockett historians Gary Foreman and Paul Hadn’t.

David has well reached the age of puberty, and his growth is enormous. He has grown several inches, he’s changed his features, and he is now a young man. He’s no longer the little…
…boy that ran away from home.

When Davy got back to the tavern, it was nighttime and the evening meal was…
…being served to the herders and teamsters.

He moved unannounced into the tavern and sat down amidst the other men.

So he got inside the tavern, sat amongst the other travelers at the same table the family. Finally, one of his sisters looked at him, recognized his features, and discovered she has just found her long-lost brother, David.

For dear, life is constant struggle, and the family farm bankrupts the Crocketts in order to pay his debts. Davy’s father is forced to make a difficult decision. Here are criminology professor Arnette Guest and Stephen Harden.

Davy Crockett becomes what is known as a bound boy. It’s really a firm of indentured service to pay off a debt. It was slightly above being a Slady. This had a significant impact on Crockett.

We shouldn’t, as modern people, judge John Crockett too harshly. The role of children in the early nineteenth century was vastly different than it is now.

And you’ve been listening to the story of Davy Crockett, and what a story indeed! Born in seventeen eighty-six is Tennessee frontiersman, father one of nine kids, and his father fought in the Revolutionary War. And as was so well said there, we can’t judge people out of their times. Don’t judge the father too harshly. The role of children was different in the eighteenth century than it is today. When we come back, more of the story of Davy Crockett here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. We can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love our stories in America like we do, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American Stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com, and we continue with Our American Stories. We last left off with Davy Crockett paying off his father’s debts by becoming an indentured servant.

Let’s pick up from there. Here again is Roger McGrath.

The War of eighteen-twelve is over in March of eighteen-fifteen. After a treaty is signed, recognizing a military stalemate, Crockett returns to his family and home in the backwoods of Tennessee, but his bliss is short-lived.

No sooner had he returned home than Polly died. She had been fine after the birth of their third child, Margaret, but she soon took ill on rapidly.

Davy was devastated.

Crockett forges on as a widower, and a year later marries Elizabeth Patton, a widow with two small children of her own. She lost her husband in the Creek War. Crockett will father three children with her. He moves west again in eighteen-seventeen through Lawrence County, Tennessee, and…

At the same time, he began his political career: first as magistrate; later as colonel of the local militia regiment, thus the title Colonel Crockett; and soon he began to think about running for the state legislature.

Crockett’s reputation as a frontiersman and soldier makes him a standout candidate. He becomes a voice of laborers, tradesmen, pioneers, and farmers, those building America into the powerhouse it’s becoming. It’s becoming style is simple, one that involves whiskey drinking and laughable storytelling.

I bet you’re all at thirsty.

You need to what all was?

Here’s his historian, David Eisenbach.

I hope I get your vote. You got my vote, yes, sir. Good.

David Crockett was a politician.

The frontiersman was part of his image-making campaign in order to get elected to a population that did not want to hear from the old-time politicians.

When Crockett is elected to the United States Congress, he arrives in Washington and still takes the floor of the House pretty much dressed in his buckskins.

In eighteen twenty-one, he’s elected to the Tennessee General Assembly and reelected in eighteen twenty-three. He is elected in a landslide to the U.S. House of Representatives twenty-six and reelected in eighteen twenty-eight.

David Crockett looms huge in the notion of what the American frontier was. He became a symbol of possibility, of hope that the common man could actually rise to great heights. A man with six months’ education ends up in the halls of Congress. It’s a uniquely American story.