David Crockett: The Lion of the West
Michael Wallis
W.W. Norton, 320 pages, $26.95
Reviewed by Allen Barra
He wasn't born on a mountaintop in Tennessee — it was actually a part of North Carolina that later became Tennessee. His legend was big enough for several states to claim a part of. And he didn't kill himself a b'ar when he was only 3 — though, armed with only a knife, he did at age 39.
In Michael Wallis’ splendid biography, “David Crockett: The Lion of the West,” nearly every legend about America’s most famous frontiersman is proved to be exaggeration — but, happily, with hard kernels of truth.
David Crockett — he preferred his formal Christian name — “believed in the wind and in stars. This son of Tennessee could read the sun, the shadows and the wild clouds full of thunder ...”
Born in 1786 to a hardscrabble family of Scotch-Irish stock from Ulster, he was hounded by debt all his life. Achieving a reputation as a marksman, Crockett supported his family as a hunter and distinguished himself by fighting with Andrew Jackson in the Creek War.
Despite only a few months formal education, he was elected to Congress in 1826. The Crockett record for integrity survives historical scrutiny, though he was not above sly political tricks. Crockett perfected the tactic of "branding opponents as being too elite."
Crockett, though, was a genuine populist. "He always took up for the settlers" who "suffered at the hands of land speculators." He was on the right side of one of the most important American issues, voting against Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Bill. A vote that "will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment."
Burning his political bridges after a defeat in the 1836 congressional race, he told his constituents, “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.” Texas “promised Crockett a fresh start and new opportunities for homesteading, as well as politicking.”
Unlike Fess Parker and John Wayne, the real Crockett did not go to Texas to fight for liberty. He “had never heard of the Alamo,” but chose to stay and fight with Jim Bowie and Colonel William Travis in the old Mexican mission/fort. In doing so, he became America’s first real folk hero.
In the end, Crockett deserved that status. He actually lived to see himself portrayed on stage as Col. Nimrod Wildfire.
"The curtain calls ... have never ceased," writes Wallis, "for the Davey Crockett of imagination."
Allen Barra is an author and reviewer from South Orange.