David Crockett (1786–1836)

“Davy Crockett’s Own Story”, told with folksy good humor, for all the world as if it was four or five decades ago and I was eavesdropping on Grandpa and the other menfolk talking hunting and politics, and how this country would be better off ‘if’. Except Davy Crockett is ever so much more famous than Grandpa Roy, and had actual political experience. But they both said this (one way or another): “The President, both cabinets and Congress to boot, can’t enact poor men into rich. show more Hard knocks, and plenty of them, can only build up a fellow’s self.”

This book is a compilation of three autobiographical writings by Davy Crockett: A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett . . . Written by Himself; An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East, both published in 1834; and Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas, published posthumously in 1836.

The jacket says: “Davy Crockett’s Own Story is a book filled to the brim with vigorous good humor, anecdotes, tall tales, legends, traditions, and sheer uproarious fun. At the same time it is a rich social and cultural history of the United States in its youthful years.” It delivers on all those counts. There are a few distasteful portions in the book, which my mind relegated to the context of their time. But most of the book was educational, if not entertaining.

I enjoyed the portion covered under the ‘Tour’, where he documents his travels as a congressman from Tennessee. Showing life in the various places he visited, how he was treated, giving glimpses of city society in those years and patriotism as it was evidenced then. In all three sections, he is not spare with his political opinions, and is most vocal about (as he sees it) wrongs done to the nation by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Under the ‘Narrative’ of his life, I found most of his story interesting, but my eyes glass over when it runs into the territory of ‘tall tales’ (bear hunts particularly come to mind; surely those were not meant to be believed). To my mind, ‘Adventures in Texas’ was the most interesting part of the book. His travels on horseback from Tennessee to Texas, the people he meets along the way (especially those that end up going all the way to the Alamo with him), then the events leading up to and the battle for the Alamo itself. As if Davy Crockett’s story wasn’t poignant enough, the last few pages of the book tell the rest of his story, related by eyewitnesses, from the time when he could no longer take up his pen to keep up with his ‘memorandums’, to the moment when his life was taken from him.

It reads as if you were listening to a common country man speaking; some people may not like that past-generation ‘folksiness’, though, to me, it felt like home. So, don’t pick up this book if you are bothered by that, or don’t like reading about history, or aren’t a patriotic American. Yep. Wouldn’t be a bad idea for every citizen of the United States to read it! show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1869728.html

It's a book which is quite obviously a first step in a presidential election campaign that never happened, full of references to the incumbent Andrew Jackson, most of which are rather obscure to anyone not familiar with the micro-politics of the year 1834. There is a lot of interesting detail about life on the frontier, including gruesome details of combat with various tribes and indeed with other white men; there's a surprisingly lengthy section show more about the intricacies of bear hunting; there's a sense that Crockett (and/or his ghost-writer) intended for large sections of it to be read aloud to his adoring public. There is surprisingly little detail on the politics - this is the most substantial passage about his falling out with Andrew Jackson:

"I can say, on my conscience, that I was, without disguise, the friend and supporter of General Jackson, upon his principles as he laid them down, and as "I understood them," before his election as president. During my two first sessions in Congress, Mr. Adams was president, and I worked along with what was called the Jackson party pretty well. I was re-elected to Congress, in 1829, by an overwhelming majority; and soon after the commencement of this second term, I saw, or thought I did, that it was expected of me that I was to bow to the name of Andrew Jackson, and follow him in all his motions, and mindings, and turnings, even at the expense of my conscience and judgment. Such a thing was new to me, and a total stranger to my principles. I know'd well enough, though, that if I didn't "hurra" for his name, the hue and cry was to be raised against me, and I was to be sacrificed, if possible. His famous, or rather I should say his in-famous, Indian bill was brought forward, and I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself. They said this was a favourite measure of the president, and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might; that I was willing to go with General Jackson in every thing that I believed was honest and right; but, further than this, I wouldn't go for him, or any other man in the whole creation; that I would sooner be honestly and politically d—nd, than hypocritically immortalized. I had been elected by a majority of three thousand five hundred and eighty-five votes, and I believed they were honest men, and wouldn't want me to vote for any unjust notion, to please Jackson or any one else; at any rate, I was of age, and was determined to trust them. I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment. I served out my term, and though many amusing things happened, I am not disposed to swell my narrative by inserting them.
I wish he had swelled his narrative by inserting them. There's almost no indication in the book as to what Jackson's "Indian bill" (actually the Indian Removal Act) was about, and none at all as to Crockett's objections to it (other than that he thought it wicked and unjust)."

Part of the charm of the book is the obscure vocabulary. What are we to make of the word "toated" in this passage, where he has an unexpected encounter with his future first wife?

"I was sent for to engage in a wolf hunt, where a great number of men were to meet, with their dogs and guns, and where the best sort of sport was expected. I went as large as life, but I had to hunt in strange woods, and in a part of the country which was very thinly inhabited. While I was out it clouded up, and I began to get scared; and in a little while I was so much so, that I didn't know which way home was, nor any thing about it. I set out the way I thought it was, but it turned out with me, as it always does with a lost man, I was wrong, and took exactly the contrary direction from the right one. And for the information of young hunters, I will just say, in this place, that whenever a fellow gets bad lost, the way home is just the way he don't think it is. This rule will hit nine times out of ten. I went ahead, though, about six or seven miles, when I found night was coming on fast; but at this distressing time I saw a little woman streaking it along through the woods like all wrath, and so I cut on too, for I was determined I wouldn't lose sight of her that night any more. I run on till she saw me, and she stopped; for she was as glad to see me as I was to see her, as she was lost as well as me. When I came up to her, who should she be but my little girl, that I had been paying my respects to. She had been out hunting her father's horses, and had missed her way, and had no knowledge where she was, or how far it was to any house, or what way would take us there. She had been travelling all day, and was mighty tired; and I would have taken her up, and toated her, if it hadn't been that I wanted her just where I could see her all the time, for I thought she looked sweeter than sugar; and by this time I loved her almost well enough to eat her.

"At last I came to a path, that I know'd must go somewhere, and so we followed it, till we came to a house, at about dark. Here we staid all night. I set up all night courting; and in the morning we parted. She went to her home, from which we were distant about seven miles, and I to mine, which was ten miles off."

I'm mystified. I find definitions for 'toat' including "The handle of a joiner's plane" and "A tenth of a ton, or a woman weighing 200 pounds", but those are nouns; I need a verb which suits the situation, and can't really think of one. But it certainly has the effect of adding to Crockett's homespun mystique. He concludes that

"I do reckon we love as hard in the backwood country, as any people in the whole creation."

Of course, the book failed to get Crockett re-elected to congress in late 1834, and consequentially he went south to Texas and his story ended at the Alamo on 6 March 1836. But it's interesting to see an early example of a potential presidential candidate writing his autobiography, a path later pursued more successfully (from the perspectives of both political success and literary quality) by the current chap. show less

The King of the Wild Frontier was no great writer, but he certainly lived through some interesting times. The prose style is conversational, with often fascinating outbreaks of nineteenth-century backwoods slang (Davy gets "plaguy thirty" and knocks back "a leetle of the creater"), although the constant military campaigning of the first half can get a little repetetive.

The matter-of-fact way in which he writes about slaughtering Indians can be quite shocking, the more so for being described show more in this down-home laid-back style. At one point during the Creek War, his unit burns 46 Indians alive in a house; the next day, running short of food, they discover a stash of potatoes in the cellar of the house. Crockett remarks that

hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had a little rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.

Jesus, what a detail. There are a few times in the text where such things reach across the years and give you quite a shock. (Later he goes some way to redeeming himself by speaking out against the Indian Removal Act.)

When he wrote this, he was a Congressman with a not-unrealistic chance at the presidency. There are several passages of political grandstanding which haven't dated all that well, unless political history is your forte. But really the overriding feeling when you read these expressions of political ambition is one of pathos, knowing that soon after the autobiography was published, this man with all his big dreams lost his seat in Congress, and headed ultimately towards Texas – and the Alamo... show less

Davy Crockett was famous for hunting bears, killing Indians, drinking whiskey, riding rapids and was 'King of the Wild Frontier' in a buckskin jersey and coonskin cap. I only vaguely knew about him from the Disney film, and so after reading this excellent review by Pulitzer winning critic Henry Allen about a recent biography (David Crockett: The Lion of the West (2011)), I decided to go straight to the primary source, his autobiography, to hear Crockett in his own voice. As Allen says, show more Crockett "spoke the American language, funny and sly in the frontier style that would later make Mark Twain famous." He writes with a sort of genius for telling tales in the vernacular, and was supposedly irresistible in person. "He invented a kind of American manhood, too, one that depends on believing it can always survive walking alone down whatever mean streets—can pack up and head West as a last resort, like Huck Finn lighting out "for the Territory" or Jack Kerouac fleeing nothing and everything by heading west in "On the Road."

Read via Internet Archive, first edition, 1834. show less