Land, and the quest for it, had dominated much of Crockett’s life. His early efforts at pioneer farming had all failed miserably, and he was quick to confess that by 1813 he had proved ‘better at increasing my family than my fortune.’ He had, however, proved adept as a hunter, especially of bears, killing 105 in one season alone. In 1813 he had followed Andrew Jackson’s call for volunteers to fight the Creek Indians and seen some hard campaigning in Alabama and Florida. Although he proved an able soldier, rising to the rank of militia sergeant, he cared little for the increasingly one-sided conflict with the Indians or for the rules of martial life. ‘I like life now a heap better than I did then,’ he later remarked of his military career, ‘and I am glad all over that I lived to see these times, which I should not have done if I had kept fooling around in war, and got used up.’

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Soon after the war ended, Crockett’s first wife, Polly, died, leaving him with three small children to care for. In 1816 he married Elizabeth Patton, a young widow with two children of her own, whose husband had been killed in the war with the Creeks. They soon moved their family westward to Shoal Creek in Lawrence County, Tenn. Crockett took an active role in the formation of a new government in this wilderness country, first serving as magistrate, then as justice of the peace, and finally as town commissioner. In 1818 his neighbors elected him colonel of the 57th Militia Regiment and three years later sent him as their representative to the state Legislature.

There, he won good marks for his strong defense of squatters’ rights to the lands they had pioneered in the western country, and he soon came to be friends with leading Tennessee politicians such as Sam Houston and James K. Polk. Intelligent and affable, he was endowed with a considerable measure of common sense and an uncommon streak of pure honesty that made him a natural for the rough-and-tumble world of backwoods electioneering.

In 1827, having moved his family to the Obion River country of northwestern Tennessee, he was urged to run for the U.S. Congress by the mayor of Memphis, Marcus Winchester. Crockett, like Winchester, Polk and Houston, was strongly identified with Andrew Jackson–who would be elected president in 1828–and with the so-called Age of the Common Man. Crockett’s election to Congress represented to many the rise of frontier democracy and a complete rejection of Eastern notions of social class. He was an instant celebrity in Washington, hailed by many as the ‘canebrake congressman’ and condemned by the anti-Jackson press as an ignorant country bumpkin devoid of any semblance of refinement. The more he was pilloried by the Eastern establishment, the more beloved he became everywhere else in the country.

By 1831, after he had won re-election to a second term, even his critics were coming around, especially after he made it clear that he was not to be bound by any party solidarity and would instead vote his conscience at all costs. Noted the Norristown Free Press in June 1831: ‘He was elected to the house of Assembly where he attracted the general gaze by his grotesque appearance, his rough manners, and jovial habits, at the same time that he exhibited uncommon indications of a strong though undisciplined mind. He became, indeed, the object of universal notoriety–and to return from the capital without having seen Colonel Crockett, betrayed a total destitution of curiosity, and a perfect insensibility to the ‘lions’ of the West.’

The Lion of the West, a play written by future Secretary of the Navy James Kirke Paulding, premiered in New York in April 1831 to wide acclaim, further boosting Crockett’s fame. Noted Shakespearean actor James Hackett’s portrayal of the blustering, uncouth, but razor-sharp Colonel Nimrod Wildfire was recognized everywhere as a caricature of the Tennessee congressman.

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