Crockett, Davy

Crockett, Davy (1786–1836), frontiersman, congressman, folk hero.David Crockett was born in Tennessee where, in 1806, he married Mary (Polly) Finley. She died in 1815, and a year later he married Elizabeth Patton. Although he served as a militia officer, justice of the peace, town commissioner of Lawrenceburg, and a volunteer in the Creek War (1813–1814), Crockett was a relatively unknown backwoods hunter and storyteller when he was elected to the Tennessee legislature in 1821. There he took an active interest in land policies relating to western settlement. In 1827, he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Serving two terms (1827–1831), he split with his fellow Tennessean, President Andrew Jackson, on land issues and Indian removal. Crockett was defeated for a third term in 1831, when he openly opposed Jackson's policies, but was reelected in 1832 as a Whig party candidate. As the 1836 election approached, some Whig leaders touted Crockett as their alternative to Jackson's handpicked successor, the Democrat Martin Van Buren. However, President Jackson and Tennessee governor William Carroll helped engineer Crockett's 1835 congressional defeat. “You may all go to hell,” he proclaimed, “and I will go to Texas.” His last letters reveal that he hoped to rejuvenate his political career in Texas and make his fortune as a land agent.

Arriving in Texas in February 1836 amid the movement for Texan independence from Mexico, Crockett joined Colonel William B. Travis at San Antonio de Bexar. On 20 February, Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna laid siege to the Alamo, a San Antonio mission occupied by Travis and his forces. During Santa Anna's first shelling of the Alamo, Travis wrote, Crockett was everywhere “animating the men to do their duty.” On 6 March, the Alamo was overrun. According to Lieutenant José Enrique de la Peña, Crockett and five or six other survivors were captured and executed on Santa Anna's orders.

Crockett was celebrated in humorous stories based on his adventures, and by the early 1830s he had already become the subject of fanciful exploits and tall tales. The mythmaking was enhanced by his heavily publicized tour of eastern cities in 1834, by his autobiography, and by other “autobiographical” books and almanacs actually written by others. For many Americans his stand at the Alamo completed the union of history and legend that made Davy Crockett a premier representative of frontier individualism. When the Disney company released a big‐budget film about the Battle of the Alamo in 2004, patriotic organizations protested the portrayal of Davy Crockett in less than heroic terms. Clearly the Crockett legend remained potent nearly 170 years after his death.
See also Alamo, Battle of the; Folklore; Indian Removal Act; Indian Wars; Texas Republic and Annexation.

Bibliography

James Adkins Shackford , David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 1956; rev. ed., 1986.
Michael A. Lofaro and Joe Cummings, eds., Crockett at Two Hundred: New Perspectives on the Man and the Myth, 1989.

Michael A. Lofaro

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Paul S. Boyer