If I say the name Davy Crockett, I know exactly
what image just popped into your head. Oh, absolutely.
You're seeing the coonskin cap. You're seeing
the fringed buckskin jacket. You're probably
hearing the faint humming of a song about the
King of the Wild Frontier. Maybe Fess Parker.
Maybe John Wayne. Right. Maybe you're picturing
John Wayne on the big screen swinging a rifle
in a last stand. It's an image so... you know,
baked into the American consciousness, that it
feels less like history and more like a folk
tale. It does. It's right up there with Paul
Bunyan and his blue ox. It's one of the most
durable brands in American history, really. It
is a brand. That's a great way to put it. But
that's the problem with brands, isn't it? Especially
ones that get the full Hollywood treatment. They
tend to... flatten out the actual human being.
They turn a messy, complex life into a two -dimensional
sticker that fits on a lunchbox. Exactly. And
that's why we're here today. Our mission really
is to peel back that legend. We're going to put
the coonskin cap on the shelf for a moment and
look at the man underneath it. And there's a
lot to look at. Oh, yeah. We have a massive stack
of sources here. Biographical records, legislative
history from the Tennessee Statehouse, congressional
transcripts from Washington. And some very controversial
eyewitness accounts from the Alamo. Very controversial.
And when you dig into these records, you don't
find a cartoon character. No, you certainly don't.
You find a man who was, well, deeply flawed,
incredibly principled, and just consistently
struggling. You find a failed businessman who
couldn't keep his finances straight. Right. a
politician who committed what was essentially
career suicide for a moral cause, and of course,
a man whose death is arguably the subject of
a century -long heated controversy. And just
to give you a taste of how complicated this gets
before we dive into the chronology, we're talking
about a guy who is famous for fighting Indians
in the movies, right? That's the whole persona.
That's the Indian fighter persona that got sold
to kids in the 1950s. That's the label. But looking
at the congressional record, he was the only
member of the entire Tennessee delegation to
vote against Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal
Act. That vote is, in my opinion, the most defining
moment of his life. Really? Even more so than
the Alamo. Really? I think so. It's the central
tension of his story. You have to ask, how does
a man who fought in the militia, who lived on
the frontier, and who we should note owned slaves,
end up risking everything to defend Native American
land rights? against the head of his own party.
That is the hook. That is the contradiction we
need to solve. So let's separate the man from
the myth. Let's unpack the real David Crockett.
Let's do it. And honestly, we have to start with
the name itself. You think Crockett. You think
rugged Scots -Irish Appalachian pioneer. It sounds
hard. Sure. It sounds like rock or cricket. It
sounds earthy. It sounds American. It does. But
if we go back a few generations, the family name
wasn't Crockett. It was de Croquetin. De Croquetin.
That sounds surprisingly aristocratic and French.
It is French. His ancestors were French Huguenots.
These were Protestants who were essentially persecuted
out of France during the religious wars. Okay,
see. They fled to Ireland and then eventually,
like so many displaced groups, they made their
way to America. The name got anglicized to Crockett
over time, likely just to make it easier to spell
and say. That's fascinating. But I think that's
a great reminder right off the bat that the American
frontier was this melting pot of displaced people
trying to reinvent themselves. It wasn't just
people born into the woods. It was refugees.
And speaking of reinventing, Davey, or David
as he preferred to be called, he didn't exactly
start with a silver spoon. We have this romantic
idea of the frontier life, but looking at his
father, John Crockett, the reality was much,
much harsher. Oh, John Crockett was what they
called an over -mountain man. He fought in the
Revolutionary War at the Battle of Kings Mountain,
which sounds impressive on a resume. It does.
But financially, the man could not catch a break.
It was just one disaster after another. I was
reading about the gristmill. That seemed like
the breaking point for the family. It was. John
Crockett tried to pivot from farming to industry.
He built a gristmill, which is a huge capital
investment for a family that didn't have any
capital. He partnered with another man. They
put everything into it. Labor, borrowed money,
time. And right before they could even start
grinding corn. Let me guess. A massive flood
came through the river valley and wiped the entire
thing away. Just erased it. Wow. So the family
is constantly on the edge of ruin. This is where
the story gets a little heartbreaking, honestly.
We have this image of Davy Crockett as this free
spirit roaming the woods, living off the land
because he loved nature. Right, the noble hunter.
But his childhood was defined by debt, serious
crushing debt. It was. And we have to contextualize
debt in the late 1700s. It wasn't just a hit
to your credit score. You could go to debtor's
prison. It was a shackle. When David was just
12 years old, his father essentially rented him
out. Rented him out. He indentured him to a man
named Jacob Seeler to pay off the family's debt.
12 years old. I mean, imagine that. You're barely
out of childhood and you're being traded as labor
currency. And it wasn't light work. He was working
as a cattle driver. He had to walk, not ride,
walk 400 miles on a trip to Virginia. 400 miles
at 12. In bad shoes, presumably. If any shoes.
And he did it. He was dutiful. But here's the
interesting part that gives us a glimpse into
his personality. After doing that service, he
comes back home, he's done his duty, and a year
later, his father tries to whip him. Why? I mean,
what could he have done to deserve that after
saving the family? He played hooky from school.
Oh, come on. Which, to be fair, after walking
400 miles driving cattle to save the family farm,
sitting in a schoolhouse probably felt a little
confining. Exactly. But David had a line. He
wouldn't accept the whipping. So he ran away.
He was 13. So kind of gone. And he didn't just
run to the neighbor's barn. He spent years roaming.
He worked for Teamsters. He worked for Hatters.
He was walking hundreds of miles completely on
his own, fending for himself from age 13 to 15.
This is the wild frontier part, but it's not
romantic at all. It's survival. It's homelessness,
essentially. It is. But there's this moment of
reconciliation that I found really touching in
the source material. He eventually comes back
home, right? Oh, he does. And this tells you
everything you need to know about his character.
He returns to his father's tavern. He's been
gone for years. He's grown taller, stronger.
The family barely recognizes him at first. It's
this emotional reunion. But then he finds out
his father is in debt again. Oh, of course. The
cycle continues. Specifically, John Crockett
owed $36 to a man named Abraham Wilson and $40
to a man named John Kennedy. Which is real money
back then. That's not pocket change. That's a
fortune for a frontier family. It's a significant
sum. And David... Having just regained his freedom,
having established his independence, he voluntarily
goes back into indentured servitude. No way.
He works for six months for Wilson and six months
for Kennedy just to clear his father's ledger.
That is a level of maturity and loyalty that
is. Yeah. It's hard to wrap your head around.
He basically gave a year of his life to fix his
father's mistakes. And that experience, the weight
of debt, the precariousness of land ownership,
the feeling of being owned by a creditor. It
shaped his entire political philosophy later
on. It had to. He knew what it felt like to be
the little guy who owed money to the big guy.
Yeah. That wasn't an abstract concept to him.
It was his daily reality. So let's jump forward
a bit. He grows up, he pays his dues, he marries,
starts a family, and eventually history catches
up to him in the form of the Creek War in 1813.
This is where the Indian fighter reputation really
starts. He enlifts as a scout. He does. This
was right after the Fort Mims massacre, which
is a brutal event where Red Stick Creeks attacked
a fort and killed hundreds of settlers. It really
rallied the militia across Tennessee. Right.
But if you look at Crockett's own accounts, and
he wrote about this in his autobiography, he
wasn't a bloodthirsty warrior. That is a nuance
you don't see in the movies. The movies show
him eager for the fight, you know, charging in.
In reality, he actually admitted that he preferred
hunting game to feed the troops rather than killing
Creek warriors. He saw the necessity of the war
from the settlers' perspective, defending their
homes, but he didn't revel in the violence. I
see. He was there to support the unit using the
skills he had, which were tracking and hunting.
Right. He was a provider more than a frontline
soldier in some respects. But this service is
crucial because it connects him with a very specific
man. Drew Jackson. Old hickory. Yes. Jackson
was the major general of the Tennessee militia
at the time. He was the rising star. That relationship,
Crockett and Jackson, is going to drive the rest
of the story. But at this point, they're on the
same side. They're both Tennessee men fighting
for the safety of the frontier. They are, for
now, allies. So how does he make the leap from
scout and bear hunter to politics? Because the
gentleman from the cane doesn't sound like your
typical congressman. Today, you need a law degree
and a super PAC. What did he have? He had a voice.
And he has stories. He started small local commissioner,
then a justice of the peace, and he realized
he had a gift. He wasn't educated in the traditional
sense. He barely had any schooling, as we mentioned.
But he could talk to people, not above them.
The sources call it anecdotal oratory. Exactly.
I mean, imagine a political debate in the 1820s.
His opponents are these well -educated men giving
dry, polished Latin quoting speeches about tariffs
and judicial reform. The crowd is falling asleep.
Totally asleep. Then Crockett gets up. He doesn't
talk about tariffs. He tells a funny story about
a raccoon hunt he went on last week. And somehow
connects the raccoon to the economy. Precisely.
He would use the story as a metaphor. He'd make
the crowd laugh, he'd make them feel understood,
and he'd make his opponent look stiff and out
of touch. He was the original guy you want to
have a beer with. Politician. Or in his case,
a whiskey. He was a populist before the term
really existed. He was. But I want to be clear,
he wasn't just a clown. It's easy to dismiss
him as just a storyteller. But when he got to
the Tennessee General Assembly, and later the
U .S. House of Representatives, he had a very
specific, very serious agenda. Which was? He
was the champion of the impoverished settler.
This goes back to his dad. It is all about his
dad. He spent his career fighting for fair land
titles. The state of Tennessee had a system that
was incredibly complicated, and it favored land
speculators, rich guys from out of town who would
buy up huge tracts of land. And the poor settlers
who were actually doing the work. The ones actually
clearing the forest and building the cabins,
they often found themselves being evicted because
they didn't have the cash to buy the title. So
Crockett wanted a system where labor equaled
ownership. Basically, yes. He wanted to make
sure that if you worked the land, you could own
the land. He felt the system was rigged against
the poor, and he was loud about it. He called
the speculators land sharks. He rides this populist
wave all the way to Washington, D .C. He's elected
to Congress in 1827. Andrew Jackson becomes president
in 1828. You would think this would be Crockett's
golden age. You would think. His old commander
is the president. They're both Tennessee men.
They both hate the Eastern elites. It should
be a slam dunk alliance. It should have been.
But Crockett had a stubborn streak of independence
that is almost pathologically strong. He started
drifting away from Jackson almost immediately.
He opposed Jackson on land policies because he
felt Jackson's plans still favored the government
over the individual settler. He even introduced
a resolution to abolish West Point. West Point,
the military academy, why? He thought it was
using public money to educate the sons of the
wealthy aristocracy. He thought it was elitist,
which is very on brand for him. It is. But those
are minor skirmishes compared to what happens
next. The break, the absolute shattering of their
relationship came with the Indian Removal Act
of 1830. This is the moment. This is where the
story pivots from local politician to man of
principle. Let's unpack this because this is
the moment that makes him a true individual in
my eyes. Andrew Jackson wants to forcibly remove
the Native American tribes, the Cherokee, Creek,
Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole from the southeast
and push them west of the Mississippi to what
is now Oklahoma. The Trail of Tears. This is
the prelude to that. Exactly. And we have to
understand the political pressure here. This
policy was incredibly popular in Tennessee. The
settlers wanted that land. They wanted the tribes
gone so they could expand cotton production.
For a Tennessee politician to oppose Jackson
on this was unthinkable. It wasn't just a disagreement.
It was political suicide. It was absolute career
suicide. And yet. And yet Davy Crockett voted
no. He was the only member of the Tennessee delegation
to vote against it. He stood completely alone.
He did. Why? I mean, we just established he was
a scout in the Creek War. He was. Because he
had a code. He believed that the treaties the
government had signed with these tribes were
binding legal documents. He believed that the
government had given its word and that breaking
that word was dishonorable. It was a matter of
integrity for him. I think so. And he also had
a certain empathy for the underdog. He saw the
government using his massive power to crush a
group of people and he just... He didn't like
it. There's a quote from his autobiography about
this vote that I have highlighted here. I know
the one. It's powerful. He wrote, Not ashamed
in the day of judgment. That gives me chills
every time I hear it. He wasn't thinking about
the next election. He was thinking about his
soul. He knew he was nuking his career. And he
was right. He paid the price immediately. He
did. He lost the next election in 1831. His constituents
voted him out. They saw him as a traitor to the
Tennessee interest. That is the definition of
integrity. I mean, doing the right thing when
you know it's going to cost you your job. It
is. He did manage to win his seat back in 1833
for one more term, mostly because the districts
were redrawn and he campaigned hard, but the
writing was on the wall. The Jackson political
machine was just too strong. By 1835, he lost
again. To a man named Adam Huntsman? A man who
was a pro -Jackson candidate with a wooden leg.
Losing to a man with a wooden leg, that had a
sting. It did. And that loss leads us to one
of the most famous quotes in American history.
I feel like we have to say it. Go ahead. He apparently
stood up and said, I told the people of my district
that I would serve them as faithfully as I had
done, but if not, they might go to hell and I
would go to Texas. It is such a mic drop moment.
It's the ultimate, I quit. It is. But we have
to look past the bravado. Why Texas? Was he just
running away again like when he was 13? Was it
just sour grapes? Sources suggest it was financial
again, right? Always land. Always. Texas represented
opportunity. You have to remember, Texas was
part of Mexico then, but there was unrest. A
revolution was brewing. And where there's revolution.
There are land grants for volunteers. Exactly.
So he wasn't going there to die. He was going
there to get rich. Or at least to get a fresh
start. Right. Crockett was expecting to help
settle things, maybe fight a little, and then
claim his reward. Volunteers were being promised
huge tracts, something like 4 ,600 acres. That's
a kingdom. It is. He thought he could go down
there, help out, get his land, and then bring
his wife and children down to start a new empire.
He was pushing 50, and he still didn't have that
financial security his father had chased. That
is a key detail. He didn't abandon his family.
He intended to send for them. His daughter, Matilda,
later wrote about watching him leave. I remember
that account. She said he was dressed in his
hunting suit, wearing that famous coon skin cap,
and he was confident. He didn't think he was
going to die. He thought this was his third act.
He viewed Texas as a fresh start. He traveled
with about 30 men, arriving in Arkansas first.
And it's worth noting, he was a celebrity by
now. A real folk hero in his own lifetime. Oh,
yeah. Plays were being written about him in New
York. So as he traveled toward Texas, he's giving
speeches. People are cheering him. He feels like
he's on a victory tour, not a death march. So
he crosses into Texas, signs an oath to the provisional
government in January 1836. But the timing, I
mean, looking at the calendar, it's just tragic.
It's incredibly tight. He arrives in San Antonio
on February 8th. Santa Ana's massive Mexican
army shows up on February 23rd. Just over two
weeks later. If he had lingered a few weeks longer
in Arkansas, or if he had stopped to hunt for
a week, history would be very different. He walked
right into the trap just as it was snapping shut.
So he's trapped in the Alamo. The siege begins.
And this is where we need to look at what he
actually did during those 13 days. Because the
movies show him swinging a rifle. But what do
the military sources say? Was he effective? He
was a critical asset. And here's where the myth
actually matches the reality pretty well. First,
there's the marksmanship. Crockett and his Tennessee
Mounted Volunteers were armed with long rifles.
Most of the soldiers on both sides had smoothbore
muskets. What's the practical difference there
for the listener who might not be a gun enthusiast?
Well, a smoothbore musket is accurate to maybe
50 or 75 yards. It's kind of point and pray.
A rifled barrel spins the bullet, making it accurate
at 200 yards or more. Crockett and his men were
snipers before the turn existed. So they could
do real damage from the walls. They could reach
out and touch the enemy from a distance where
the enemy couldn't touch them back. There's a
specific detail about a skirmish on February
25th that highlights this. Yes. The Mexican army
was trying to set up artillery positions closer
to the walls. They were digging trenches. Crockett
and his men provided cover fire for a group of
Texans who went out to burn some wooden huts
that were providing cover for the enemy. And
it worked. The fire from Crockett's men was so
accurate and deadly that it actually forced the
Mexican troops to retreat and abandon that position.
They got the defender's time. And beyond the
shooting, there's the morale factor. We have
accounts that he played the fiddle. He did. You
have to imagine the atmosphere. It's cold. It's
damp. They're surrounded by thousands of troops
they know no help is coming. Terrifying. Commander
Travis was stressed, rigid, sending out desperate
letters. Colonel Bowie was sick in bed, likely
with typhoid or pneumonia, barely conscious.
Crockett was the one walking the perimeter, telling
those funny stories, playing music, challenging
the Mexicans to shooting contests. He was the
glue holding those terrified men together. But
then comes the morning of March 6th. The final
assault. It happened before dawn. Santa Ana had
been bombarding the fort constantly for days
to keep the Texans awake. Then suddenly, he stopped
the cannons. The silence probably let the defenders
fall into a deep, exhausted sleep. And then the
attack. Then thousands of Mexican soldiers attacked
from all sides. The battle only lasted about
90 minutes. That's staggering when you think
about the casualty count and the fame of the
battle. It was intense, chaotic, and short. Crockett
and his men were defending the low wall in front
of the church, the palisade. The fighting became
hand -to -hand almost immediately. It was too
fast to reload those long rifles. So they were
basically clubs at that point. They were using
them as clubs. They were using knives. And this
brings us to the most controversial part of this
deep dive, the death of Davy Crockett. This is
the deep dive into death, if you will. We have
two very different versions of how this ends,
and people get very emotional about which one
they believe. Version A is the John Wayne version.
The glorious last stand. He's the last man standing,
swinging old Betsy, surrounded by a pile of enemy
corpses fighting until the very last breath.
That version comes largely from a former slave
named Ben, who was a cook for one of Santa Ana's
officers. After the battle, he claimed he saw
Crockett's body surrounded by no less than 16
Mexican corpses, with Crockett's knife buried
in one of them. It's the heroic, defiant end
we want to believe. It fits the brand. It's the
end we want for our heroes. But then there's
version B, and version B makes a lot of people
very angry. Version B comes primarily from the
diary of a Mexican officer named Jose Enrique
de la Peña. Tell us about this diary. Where did
it come from? So this surfaced in the mid -20th
century. De la Peña wrote a memoir of the campaign.
In it, he claims that Crockett did not die in
the fighting. He claims that Crockett and a handful
of others, maybe five or six men, were overwhelmed
and surrendered or were captured at the very
end of the battle. They were brought before Santa
Ana alive. Alive. De La Pena writes that General
Castrillon, a Mexican officer, tried to save
them, presenting them to Santa Ana as brave soldiers
who should be spared. But Santa Ana was furious.
He ordered them executed on the spot. So captured
and then executed by sword or firing squad minutes
later. Yes. Della Pena writes that the soldiers
hacked them down with swords. He describes Crockett
specifically as enduring this torture without
complaining and dying with a moan. When this
diary was published in English in 1975, people
lost their minds. It was a massive scandal. Yeah.
The translator, Carmen Perry, received hate mail.
People accused her of blasphemy. To suggest that
Davy Crockett surrendered, it was seen as an
unpatriotic attack on the American character.
People wanted the diary burned. They did. There
were editorials written against it. But is the
diary real? Because for a long time, people claimed
it was a forgery planted to embarrass Texas.
That is the big question. And for a long time,
it was debated. But in 2001, a very serious forensic
analysis was done on the paper and the ink. They
looked at the chemical composition, the oxidation,
everything, and the results showed that the materials
were authentic to the period. Wow. The handwriting
matched other military documents written by de
la Peña in the Mexican archives. So most professional
historians now accept that the document itself
is genuine. So does that mean he definitely surrendered?
Not necessarily. It means de la Peña wrote that
he surrendered. But we have to remember. Eyewitness
testimony in war is notoriously tricky. Other
Mexican officers didn't mention it. Santa Ana's
own memoir just says Crockett was found among
the corpses, implying he died fighting. And what
about the survivors from inside the Alamo? Right,
like Susana Dickinson, the wife of one of the
defenders. She said Crockett paused to pray and
then ran to his post to fight to the death. So
we have conflicting eyewitnesses. We do. And
we have to ask, does de la Pena have a reason
to lie? Well, he hated Santa Ana. Maybe he invented
the execution story to make Santa Ana look like
a butcher, a man who kills prisoners of war.
Or maybe Ben the Cook wanted to tell a story
that honored the brave defenders to please his
Texas audience. Exactly. So, synthesis time?
If you're the listener, what should you believe?
Yeah, what's the takeaway? Here's how I see it.
Whether he died swinging his rifle in the heat
of combat at 6 a .m. or whether he was overwhelmed,
surrounded, and executed at 6 .15 a .m., he died
a defender of the Alamo. That's a great point.
An execution doesn't make him a coward. Not at
all. He stayed. He fought. He refused to leave
when he probably could have slipped out in the
early days of the siege. He stood his ground
against impossible odds. The execution theory,
if true, simply adds a tragic war crime to the
story. It doesn't subtract from his bravery.
I think that's the healthy way to look at it.
We don't need the John Wayne ending for him to
be a hero. Exactly. The bravery wasn't being
there in the first place. So let's zoom out to
his legacy. Because after he died, he didn't
just stay a politician. He became a myth. It
started almost immediately, didn't it? Immediately.
The Crockett Almanac started coming out in the
1830s and 40s. These were like comic books. They
turned him into a Superman. They had stories
where he could grin a raccoon out of a tree,
ride lightning bolts, and wring the tail off
a comet. And then the 1950s Disney series just
exploded that into the stratosphere. It did.
Fess Parker became the face of Crockett. But
that series also cemented the contradictions.
We have this king of the wild frontier who fights
for freedom. But we have to address the elephant
in the room that we touched on in the outline.
Slavery. Yes. David Crockett is often held up
as a champion of the poor and the oppressed.
And he was when it came to white settlers and
surprisingly Native Americans during the Removal
Act. Right. But the historical record shows that
despite opposing slavery as an institution in
some of his rhetoric, saying it was a bad system,
he did enslave people. He owned slaves. He did.
At various points in his life, he purchased and
held enslaved people to work his land. And that
is the complexity of historical figures. He could
have this incredible moral clarity regarding
the treatment of Native Americans, which was
way ahead of his time for a Tennessee politician
while still participating in the system of slavery.
It prevents us from making him a saint. He was
a man of his time who transcended his time in
some ways and was completely bound by it in others.
Perfectly put. We can't cherry pick the parts
of history we like. We have to take the whole
man. And yet, despite the complexity, pop culture
loves him. Did you know Mythbusters tested one
of his legends? The bullet splitting. Don't tell
me they actually did that. Yes. The legend was
that he could split a bullet on the blade of
an axe from 40 yards away. It sounds like pure
Hollywood nonsense. It does. But they tested
it, and they ruled it plausible. You're kidding.
They proved that with a period -accurate rifle
and a skilled shooter, it is physically possible
to split a lead ball on an axe blade. Which brings
us back to the fact that underneath the hype,
underneath the almanacs in the movies, the guy
could actually shoot. He had the skills. He could
shoot, he could speak, and he could stand his
ground. Always be sure you are right, then go
ahead. That was his motto. And looking at his
life, from the indentured servant boy walking
400 miles to the congressman who defied the president
to save the Cherokee, he lived by that. So we've
unpacked the name, the politics, and the death.
What does this all mean for us today? I think
it's a lesson in the cost of principles. Crockett
wasn't a successful politician in the sense of
having a long, powerful career. He lost. He was
pushed out. He died in a failed military operation
in a foreign land. By the metrics of a resume,
he failed. But by the metric of character. Exactly.
We remember him because he represented a certain
kind of gritty American spirit, the willingness
to start over, the willingness to say no to power
even when it hurts you, and the willingness to
fight for what you believe is your patch of ground.
That brings me to a thought I want to leave you
with. We always look at the Alamo as the climax
of his life. It's the end of the movie. But I
want you to imagine for a second that Santa Ana
decided to bypass the Alamo. Imagine Crockett
survived the war. That is an interesting what
if. If he had lived, would he be remembered as
an American icon today? Or would he just be a
footnote, a former congressman who moved to Texas
to speculate on land, maybe served a few terms
in the Texas legislature, and died of old age?
That is the provocative question. Did his martyrdom
create the legend? Does the manner of his death
matter more than the substance of his life? It's
something to chew on. Indeed. Sometimes the ending
writes the whole story. Thank you for diving
deep with us today into the life of the real
David Crockett. Always a pleasure. We'll see
you on the next Deep Dive. Be sure you are right,
then go ahead.