Wednesday, October 4, 2017

What a 'Crock'!

"Be always sure you're right—then go ahead!"


            French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S. in the 1830s. To this day, he is renowned for his shrewd insights into the American character. But he got at least one thing wrong. For example, he was horrified to learn that western Tennessee voters had sent to Congress "an individual named David Crockett, who has no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods."
            Even today, that sort of fellow might have more appeal to some Americans than most current Congressmen. Americans have long had a fondness for rough-hewn tough guys with true grit--and golden souls. There's no better example of such a man than the legendary Davy Crockett, immortalized forever by Walt Disney's TV miniseries (which later became a hit movie). Its title song crowned Davy "the King of the Wild Frontier."
            Crockett was a true American jack-of-all-trades and master of all of them. He was a formidable hunter possessing a deadly aim, a never-say-die pioneer farmer, a husband and father, an entrepreneur, a soldier, but, most of all, a politician. It's surprising to learn that he spent most of his adult life in the Tennessee legislature and in Congress. He was even a potential presidential candidate. He was a soldier less than six months.
            Born almost exactly a decade after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Crockett grew up in near poverty on the frontier in and around present-day Greenville, Tennessee, in the eastern part of the state. He was his parents' fifth son in six years.
            The Disney song says he was "born on a mountaintop in Tennessee,/Greenest state in the Land of the Free." Sadly, there are no mountains in Greenville, though the Volunteer State is acclaimed for its natural beauty.
            "Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree,/Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three." While Crockett was a master scout, nothing in the historical record indicates the age at which he first took down a bear.

Hickory switch

            He did grow up fast. At the age of 12, he became a cowboy. His father hired him out to accompany a rancher herding cattle on a 400-mile odyssey. He had only a few months of schooling, and he didn't enjoy it. On one occasion when he dawdled on the way to classes, his father chased him there, wielding a hickory switch. At age 14, he made another 400-mile trip, this time to Baltimore, also accompanying cattle.
            While still in his teens, he moved away from home, renting himself out as a hired farm hand. He swiftly married. By the time he had two children, he concluded he was "better at increasing my family than my fortune."
            Crockett was always on the move—and always in a westerly direction. By 1812, he located his family in southeastern Tennessee near Lynchburg. Indian tribes there and throughout the southeast rose up against settlers. They massacred nearly 500 settlers who had taken refuge in a fort. (A hundred of the victims were children.)
            Along with other farmers, Crockett volunteered to fight. He served under an officer who reported to Gen. Andrew Jackson. Serving as a scout, Crockett located the Indian war party's whereabouts, but his account was ignored. Why? He wasn't an officer. "I was no great man, but just a poor soldier," he recalled.
            When the battle finally came, Crockett and other soldiers massacred nearly 50 Indians who refused to surrender and had taken refuge in a house. (There was no love lost between settlers and Indians; in fact, Indians butchered Crockett's grandparents in 1777.) When new volunteers arrived, Crockett went back to his wife and family. He missed the decisive battle in which Jackson put down the uprising.
            "This closed my career as a warrior," he wrote. "And I am glad of it, for I like life now a heap better than I did then, and I am glad all over that I lived to see these times, which I should not have done if I had keep fooling along in war and got used up at it."
            His first wife died of a sudden illness leaving him with five children. As was the custom, Crockett promptly remarried and moved further west to the Lawrenceburg, Tenn., area. There was appointed a magistrate to help bring law and order to the frontier.
            "I gave my decisions," he said, "on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law [and] learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in my life."
            Soon enough his good-humored personality inspired his neighbors to ask him to run for the state legislature. He did so saying he had "never read even a newspaper in my life, or any thing else on the subject."
            Strongly built, Crockett had a robust head of black hair, an easy smile, a gift of storytelling, and an earnest friendly character. One newspaper reported that he was "just such a one as you would desire to meet with, if any accident or misfortune had happened to you on the highway."
            As was the custom in the day, the candidates traveled together from one village to another, giving speeches back to back. On one occasion, when Crockett's opponent went to speak, he found that Crockett had already invited voters to get drunk (another custom of the day), thus robbing him of his audience. Crockett won the election.
            Later, when running for Congress, he heard his opponent's speech so many times that he memorized it. When the candidates came to the next town, Crockett spoke first, delivered the man's oration for him, leaving him dumbfounded and speechless when his turn to speak came.

Neck or nothing

            During those days, Crockett still lived the life of a frontier farmer and businessman. He had a scheme to make barrel staves and float them down the Mississippi to sell. When his homemade riverboat sank, he became trapped and had to be yanked to safety through the porthole. "Neck or nothing, come out or sink!" he said.
            In a day when a man's ability to hunt meant the difference between life and starvation for his family, Crockett was fearless.
            One time in west Tennessee, his dogs treed a bear. After shooting it, the bear fell, landing amid the howling hounds. Then the lot of them then dropped into a crevasse created by the three colossal New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812. (The shocks ranged from 7.4 to 7.9 on the Richter scale. They were so titanic the Mississippi ran backwards, and the ground sank creating the 13,000-acre Reelfoot Lake.) Crockett leapt into the claw and fang tussle. While the bear was battling the dogs, he plunged his blade into its heart, killing it.


            That's the way he approached politics, too. "Independent and fearless" is how one Tennessee political opponent described him. Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson's prime rival, said Crockett was "the only man that I know now in Tennessee that could openly oppose Genl. Jackson in his own district and get elected to congress."
            In Washington, Crockett became known for three things. First, he steadfastly supported his frontier constituents. He once said both cynically and in jest, "We should occasionally legislate for the poor." On another occasion, he remarked, "The children of my people never saw the inside of a college in their lives, and never are likely to do so."
            Second, he stood up for what was right, even though it sometimes ran contrary to what most of his constitutents would have preferred. He opposed Pres. Jackson's forced removal of peaceful Indian tribes from southeastern states, thinking it inhumane. This from a man who years earlier had given no quarter to hostile Indians.
            Most of all, Crockett became famed in Congress for his opposition to Pres. Jackson, a Democrat, who he saw as favoring moneyed Eastern interests over those of struggling western settlers. Thus, he became a favorite of the opposition Whig party. He said he'd rather be "politically dead than hypocritically immortalized" by acting as a lap dog to his fellow Tennessean.
            After being defeated for re-election, Crockett found himself in the enviable position of being idolized in the theatre. He was America's first media superstar. In 1831, a popular play about the fictional "Nimrod Wildfire" told tales of a backwoods military hero running for office. Lightning struck again in 1833 when he became the centerpiece of a book of mostly tall tales "Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee."
            Offended that both the book and the play made him look like a bumpkin (and that he profited from neither) he went on a speaking tour to cash in on his fame. No less an authority than The New York Sun said he was "a gentleman, his speech flashing with wit, but never vulgar or buffoonish." He didn't go about in society wearing a coon skin cap but instead toured the northeast "waring fashionably cut pantaloons and a loose calico hunting shirt, ruffled around the collar."
            Crockett got his own word out in 1834 with his book "A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee." A best seller, it vanished from store shelves. He then went on a 19-city book tour organized and paid for by the Whig Party. After all, it wanted him to run for president and wanted to test his appeal.
            In Jersey City, N.J., he proved his aim was true with voters. At a shooting contest, firing a rifle he'd never held before, at a range of 100 yards, he hit a target only two inches off center. Then at 40 yards, he put a bullet through a quarter.
            Ultimately, the Whigs lost interest in Crockett. During his time in Congress, he was unable to pass a single bill. All he was really known for was his adamant opposition to all things Jacksonian.
            Tired of politics, Crockett headed to Texas. It wasn't necessarily to fight. It was to scout the region with an eye on relocating his family. "I…have enrolled my name as a volunteer," he said. "I am in hopes of making a fortune yet for myself and family bad as my prospect has been."
            At the same time, the Mexican army attacked American settlers. Even though Mexico had opened its northern territory to American pioneers in 1821, tensions had grown between the newcomers and the government.
            Crockett heard that 150 of his armed countrymen were trapped in a 90-year-old Catholic mission in San Antonio, the Alamo. He naturally went to help. His feud with Jackson had something to do with it. The Texas settlers were divided between Whigs and Democrats. Those following Jackson had been ordered to withdraw by their leader Sam Houston. Others following Col. William Travis chose to stay and fight.
            Surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, the defenders were massacred on March 5, 1836. The Mexican commander Santa Anna had told his troops in writing, "In this war you know there are no prisoners."
            How did Crockett die? The most highly regarded account says that true to his nature, Crockett went down fighting. Eualia Yorba, a woman who had previously met him, entered the Alamo with a priest after the battle. "He lay dead by the side of a dying man, whose bloody-and powder-stained face I was washing," she said. "His coat and rough woolen shirt were soaked with blood so that the original color was hidden, for the eccentric hero must have died of some ball in the chest or a bayonet thrust."
            Davy Crockett went to his reward at age 49. "His land is biggest and his land is best,/From grassy plains to the mountain crest," goes the Disney song. "He's ahead of us all meeting the test,/Following the legend into the West."


MORAL: Die fighting.

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