Frontier Hero Davy Crockett

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Crockett had a reserved box seat when The Lion of the West returned from a triumphal London engagement to play Washington in 1833. When the buckskin-clad Hackett, wearing a wildcat-skin fur cap, strode onto the stage, he promptly bowed to Crockett. The colonel rose and bowed right back, the audience went wild, and reality and legend melded for a cosmic moment into one.

By this time Crockett had broken with Jackson, first over squatter pre-emption rights in the western country and then over Indian removal. The refusal of Crockett, the national symbol of the frontier, to go along with the cruel dispossession of the Eastern tribes and their forced removal westward highly embarrassed the Jacksonians. ‘I have no other feelings towards Colonel Crockett than those of pity for his folly,’ scoffed James K. Polk.

The Jacksonians worked diligently and successfully to defeat Crockett in 1831, but he came back strong to regain his seat in 1833. Now he was firmly in the camp of Jackson’s enemies and more famous than ever. A laudatory biography had appeared in 1833, while Crockett published his autobiography in March 1834.

The Whigs now sent Crockett on a grand Eastern junket, and a ghost-written account of this tour was published in 1835. That same year, the first of some 50 Davy Crockett almanacs appeared under a Nashville imprint. They interlaced backwoods tall tales with the usual astronomical calculations and weather predictions and quickly became enormously popular.

There was talk in Whig circles of running Crockett for vice president or even president, and the colonel’s head was turned by these blandishments. The folks back home in western Tennessee, however, had not elected the colonel to Congress so that he could tour Eastern cities, dine with famous politicians or write books, and they proceeded to make their disappointment in him clear in the August 1835 election. His Whig friends promptly deserted him, and Crockett turned westward for redemption.

The motto ‘Be always sure you’re right–Then go ahead,’ had become identified with Crockett, and he reflected that self-assurance as he traveled westward. He had added three more to his party by the time he reached Little Rock on November 12. The city fathers heard of his arrival and sought him out, finding him busily skinning a deer he had just shot. He was invited to a dinner in his honor at Jeffries Hotel, where he regaled those gathered with a talk described by a local newspaper as’simply rough, natural, and pleasant.’ The war news from Texas was now ominous, and while Crockett could not help but direct a few barbs at President Jackson, he aimed his real enmity at the president of Mexico, quipping that he intended to ‘have Santa Anna’s head, and wear it for a watch seal!’

The next morning Crockett’s company departed Little Rock, joined by several young men anxious for adventure in Texas. They crossed the Red River at Lost Prairie and entered Texas, where Crockett, strapped for funds, traded a gold watch to Isaac Jones for his watch and $30. Crockett’s watch had been a gift from the Philadelphia Whigs during his Eastern tour. Such mementos of his failed political fortunes held no sentiment for him now.

He led his men on to the tiny hamlet of Clarksville, some 25 miles south of the Red River, where his old friend Captain William Becknell lived. Becknell, the famed father of the Santa Fe Trail, lived on Sulphur Fork Prairie, and Crockett stayed there for several days while a large buffalo-hunting party was organized. Ignoring warnings of Indian war parties, Crockett and his companions pushed farther westward, exploring the country and searching for buffalo. Crockett loved this wide-open prairie country, so different from Tennessee. ‘Good land and plenty of timber and the best springs and wild mill streams, good range, clear water and every appearance of good health and game aplenty,’ he wrote his daughter.

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