The man in the coonskin cap: your guide to Davy Crockett
Growing up on the American frontier taught Davy Crockett how to survive, but it was his gifts as a raconteur that saw him thrive. Malcolm Smith explores the life and legacy of the folk hero who fought at the Alamo
Who was Davy Crockett?
A skilled and courageous frontiersman who became a politician; an outspoken and popular politician who was transformed into an American folk hero; a homespun storytelling folk hero who was later known as the legendary ‘king of the wild frontier’. Davy Crockett is a larger-than-life figure in the history of the United States.
With a natural talent for spinning a yarn, Crockett could keep audiences spellbound with tales of hunting bears and living in the wild. He was such a good shot that it was said he could split a bullet on the head of an axe from 40 yards away. Americans lapped up his stories and his legend bloomed in his own lifetime, added to by an autobiography, a play based on his exploits, and a surfeit of press attention.
Then, in 1836, Crockett’s heroic death at the Alamo – the site of a last stand against Mexican troops, which took on near-mythical status in the US – cemented his cult status.
Today, the image most associated with the name Davy Crockett will be a coonskin cap (a hat fashioned from the skin and fur of a raccoon) and fringed leather frontiersman jacket. This came not from real life, but a Disney television series and film in the 1950s. Wildly popular, seemingly watched by every child in both the US and Britain, it breathed new life into his legend.
Whether in life or death, nothing can get in the way of a good story when Davy Crockett is concerned.
What was Davy Crockett’s early life like?
David Crockett (he was never called Davy during his lifetime, though some called him Davy, especially in the Davy Crockett Almanacs) was born on 17 August 1786. It was a Thursday, and as the old rhyme says: “Thursday’s child has far to go.” So it would prove.
His start in life on the American frontier was extremely hard. Rather than education, the priority would have been basic survival. Nine years earlier, his paternal grandfather (after whom he was named) and grandmother had been killed by Muscogee or Chickamauga Cherokees.
Crockett was one of nine children raised in a tiny log cabin by the Nolichucky River, in what would become Tennessee. As his father John struggled to make ends meet, the family moved around a lot and Crockett had no choice but to grow up fast.
This was frontier land with a scatter of homesteads. Much of it was forest and canebrake (thickets of tough grasses that can grow more than seven metres high), and although small areas were cleared for crop growing, meals relied heavily on foraging wild foods and hunting deer, bears and turkeys. Like every young boy, Crockett learnt how to handle a gun, hunt game and be sparing with expensive ammunition.
Forever in debt, John hired out his young son to work. Aged 12, Crockett joined a cattle drive that took him over 400 miles of rough terrain to Virginia. Some of the journey, Crockett later wrote in his 1834 autobiography, had been made “through snow about as deep as my knees”. He was treated well but, months later, decided to head home.
It would be the first of many such journeys in his youth. There were short spells of school in between, but he learned everything he needed to know in the wild.
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Davy Crockett’s military service in the War of 1812
By the time he was in his 20s, Crockett had become a master hunter and a knowledgeable scout. He had also married and had three children (after his first wife Polly died, another marriage and three more children would follow).
In 1813, Crockett enlisted in the Tennessee militia that had been mustered to fight in the Creek War in Alabama. The Muscogee (Creek) nation had allied itself with the British, who themselves were fighting US forces in the so-called War of 1812.
Initially, he served as a scout for four months in the militia commanded by Andrew Jackson, before joining up for another six months in the US Army. Here, he saw no frontline action, although Jackson would become a national hero for his victory against the British at the battle of New Orleans in 1815.
Crockett proved to be a popular figure among soldiers: kind, helpful and regarded as a brother. He equally kept the morale thriving with his adventure-laden narratives of his life on the frontier or bear-hunting exploits. At a time when food supply was often the troops’ biggest problem, Crockett would disappear into the wilderness and return with a deer or boar for the camp.
He quickly realised, though, that he was no soldier. Having to take part in the burning of Creek villages, he was horrified by the slaughters he witnessed. He secured an honourable discharge, which he later wrote about in his autobiography: “This closed my career as a warrior, and I am glad of it.”
Davy Crockett’s political career
In 1817, Crockett moved with his second wife Elizabeth and their children to Lawrence County, where he took his first political role as a commissioner. Soon, he had been elected a county justice of the peace, and was running several businesses.
Four years later, he ran for the Tennessee General Assembly and won a seat representing Lawrence and Hickman counties. One of the chief reasons for his rising popularity were his speeches: an ideal platform for his folksy anecdotal storytelling, peppered with what was described by one biographer as “an ample load of horse sense”.
He fought for the land and tax rights of the poorest settlers – although, like the majority of settlers, he did own a number of enslaved people – and frequently branded his opponents as too elitist to represent ordinary voters. This won him support, but, not one for compromise, he failed to get any legislation passed.
After his second term in the state legislature, Crockett turned his attentions to being elected to the US Congress. He lost in 1825, but was elected in 1827.
With no pretensions and a frontier attitude, he was one of the more unusual Congressman. An opponent once called him the “gentleman from the cane”, referring to his rural background. Nevertheless, Crockett was always properly attired in a high collared coat, dress shirt and cravat, rather than the buckskin as some later claimed.
For a lot of Crockett’s time in Washington DC, however, he was at loggerheads with his former commanding officer, Andrew Jackson, who was elected as president in 1828.
Most notably, he opposed the Indian Removal Act, which essentially allowed for indigenous land in the east to be seized. As the only member of the Tennessee delegation to vote against it, the move resulted in Crockett losing support, and he was voted out of Congress for good in 1835.
“I told the people… that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas” he declared. He did just that, and it proved to be a fatal move.
How Davy Crockett became a folk hero
During his time in Congress, Crockett garnered a lot of press coverage. Newspapers published story after story of this frontiersman-turned-congressman fighting for the little guy and with a host of wild adventures in his past.
Accepting that many claims attributed to Crockett were exaggerated, people were fascinated that he had killed bears with nothing but a knife, shot a “covey of wild turkeys with one gunshot”, survived falling through ice into dangerous rivers, or crawled through marshes for days.
He formed the inspiration for a popular play, The Lion of the West, written by James Kirke Paulding and first performed in 1831, and wrote his autobiography in 1834. No matter that fact and fiction had become inseparable; his story loomed over the country’s settling of the frontier.
“He was well on the way to folk hero status in a nation that had no genuine folk heroes,” comments Michael Wallis in his 2011 biography of Crockett. This status would be secured for good with his time in Texas – at a place called the Alamo.
Davy Crockett and the battle of the Alamo
Just as Crockett left for Texas in November 1835, heading a unit of 30 armed men and being feted at the towns he stopped at along the way, the territory was erupting in revolution.
Texas was a part of Mexico at the time, but tensions had spilled over between the government and the Anglo-American immigrants living there, called Texians. The conscripts were promised land in return for their service, and Crockett, having been promised 4,600 acres, swore allegiance to the Provisional Government of Texas and travelled to the Alamo, a Catholic mission transformed into a stronghold in San Antonio.
Shortly afterwards, around 2,000 Mexican troops under the command of General Santa Anna surrounded the Alamo and laid siege. For 13 days, the defending garrison, around a tenth of the size of the attackers, withstood bombardments and assaults. Accounts say that Crockett’s stories were in full flow to boost morale.
Though they made a call for resupply of the dwindling ammunition and reinforcements, nothing arrived, and on the morning of 6 March the Mexican forces eventually broke through and overwhelmed the Texans.
Only a handful survived. The most-repeated account claims that Crockett made a heroic last stand: out of ammunition but still swinging his rifle as a club before being brought down by the enemy. When he finally died, these accounts have it, he was surrounded by “no less than 16 Mexican corpses”.
But, in true Crockett fashion, his final tale may have been exaggerated. Another account, based on the translated memoirs of José Enrique de la Peña, a Mexican officer present at the Alamo and agreed by many experts to be closest to the truth, suggests that he was captured and executed. The diary of Peña came to light in 1955, and when translated into English in 1975, it was widely denounced; by then, Crockett’s place in US history was too deeply rooted.
Why is Davy Crockett still important today?
In the 1950s, Walt Disney developed a television miniseries titled Davy Crockett, starring Fess Parker as the folk hero and sporting the iconic coonskin cap.
This launched a so-called ‘Crockett craze’: children would wear coonskin caps of their own, a song called The Ballad of Davy Crockett became a hit, and a movie, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier was released in 1955. The craze was not confined to the US, either, spreading to postwar UK where Westerns were hugely popular.
The name Davy Crockett is interwoven into the westward expansion of the US. In testing times, he was an adventurer and pioneer, and also a humble and folksy raconteur. By staking his claim on the frontier, he reflected the rugged consciousness of a restless nation determined to move west and take everything in its path.
Malcolm Smith is a biologist, a former chief scientist and former deputy chief executive at the Countryside Council for Wales. His books include Hats: A Very Unnatural History (Michigan State University Press, 2020)
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