American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett

by Buddy Levy

  A publication has been made to the world, which has done me much injustice; and the catchpenny errors which it contains, have been already too long sanctioned by my silence. I don’t know the author of the book—and indeed I don’t want to know him; for he has taken such a liberty with my name, and made such an effort to hold me up to public ridicule, he cannot calculate on anything but my displeasure.23

  Crockett’s tongue could not have been more firmly in his cheek. It was all part of an elaborate spoof, for Crockett most certainly knew the author of the book in question, and had likely provided him, verbally, with much of the subject matter.24 He had met Matthew St. Claire Clarke back in 1828, during the early years of Clarke’s lengthy post as clerk of the House of Representatives. Clarke was a close friend of Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States, and a Whig sympathizer. Clarke was also something of a raconteur, a literary mind, and a writer.25 Crockett liked trading stories with Clarke, and he sent personal letters to the man as early as spring of 1829, during his first term in Congress. 26 The book itself was riddled with clichés, offering little new about Crockett the man but contributing greatly to Crockett the myth. Plenty of readers made the reasonable assumption that Crockett had written the book. Though Crockett publicly scoffed at the content and pretended to be affronted by the clownish caricature it made of him, he secretly could not have been happier with the timing and the attention the work received.

  Almost as if on cue, a New Englander named Seba Smith (who incidentally shared Crockett’s politics, first sanctioning and later splitting with Jackson) created a character by the name of Major Jack Downing, a down-home and likable country bumpkin who unwittingly stumbled into public life. The Portland, Maine, Daily Courier ran the letters of Major Downing, and the Yankee audiences ate the stuff up, loving the homespun vernacular and more than willing to chuckle at the unsophisticated and unrefined mind and manners of the character.27 The good-humored Crockett went along with the ruse, even responding to a letter from Major Jack addressing him personally and requesting that they meet in Washington to observe the political climate. An excerpt from the 1833 diary of John Quincy Adams reveals that Crockett remained playful and true to the artifice. Adams wrote that on leaving the Capitol building he

  Met in the Avenue . . . David Crockett of Tennessee. I did not recognize him till he came up and accosted me and named himself. I congratulated him upon his return here, and he said, yes, it had cost him two years to convince the people of his district that he was the fittest man to represent them; that he had just been to Mr. Gales and requested him to announce his arrival and inform the public that he had taken for lodgings two rooms on the first floor of a boarding-house, where he expected to pass the winter and have for a fellow-lodger Major Jack Downing, the only person in whom he had any confidence for information of what the Government was doing.28

  Crockett must have had difficulty keeping a straight face as he related this conceit to Adams. The Downing letters became widely popular, reprinted in newspapers across the eastern seaboard, filtering across the entire country, and people immediately linked Major Jack Downing with Colonel David Crockett. The country was ready for frontier heroes, real or imagined, and Crockett filled the role as best he could, confirming in human form the desired ideals of freedom, commoner-gentleman, and values like courage and independence.29

  The opportunistic Crockett took the attention and ran with it, and his campaign opponent Fitzgerald, though a strong incumbent, could do little to counter the onslaught of printed matter keeping Crockett’s name and image in the news. Commoners flocked to the polls to confirm and appreciate someone in their own mold, this bumpkin of a gentleman, this enigma named David Crockett. Crockett squeaked past in an extremely close vote, winning by a mere 173 votes out of nearly 8,000 cast, the interest in David Crockett verging on feverish. He was poised to become a cult figure, a folk hero, and bona fide celebrity, the first person in American history famous for being famous, a media-manufactured “personality” with the potential to make a living from his celebrity.30 It was clear that Crockett had earned his celebrity status, and even had a hand in its construction. What wasn’t clear was how the notoriety would affect him, or what he intended to do with his fame. One way or another, it was time to cash in on his persona.

  Crockett arrived back in Washington in November 1833 newly confident. Two years before he’d slunk home sheepishly, spiritually broken and bitter with the loss, and only a few months earlier he’d been financially strapped, paying for a crude wooden shanty on a hardscrabble tract of leased ground. His enthusiasm showed in his early arrival, well before the December 2 opening of the session. He had plenty of reason to celebrate. For Crockett, victory always salved a variety of wounds, and defeating William Fitzgerald this time around, even if by a small margin, was a kind of affirmation. But something more significant had happened just months after his successful election: members of Mississippi had come forward and requested that they be authorized to put forth his name as a potential candidate for the presidential election of 1836.31 Could they possibly be serious? Crockett possessed enough vainglory to think so, and in his own Narrative he alluded to it, connecting himself and the presidency several times. But at this point he would have taken the suggestion as an enormous compliment and also seen the political rationale behind the Whig courtship. After all, what were their other options?

  Everyone knew that Van Buren would be offered up at the end of Jackson’s second term. He represented the moneyed, propertied class of people that Crockett outwardly criticized yet paradoxically wished to be accepted by and become a part of. His known vitriol toward both Jackson and Van Buren made him an obvious choice, and it would be impossible to find someone with greater media cachet, even if his political effectiveness was dubious. If his image and popularity could be sustained, and even expanded, over the next few years, who knew what might happen? As Crockett had proved more than once by his very presence in Washington, nothing was impossible.

  At the session’s commencement, happily ensconced at his familiar lodgings in Mrs. Ball’s Boarding House, Crockett took up some old scores and readdressed one that had raged during his absence, the issue and ongoing argument over the Second Bank. Crockett’s position, and his vehement opposition to Jackson, had been faithfully trumpeted by Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, who had railed mightily against Jackson by calling him a despot, nicknaming him “King Andrew,” and aligning him with dictators like Napoleon.32 He would let that ride for a time, concentrating his attentions instead on his old obsession: land. On December 17, he introduced a pair of motions, one proposing a select committee of seven members to investigate the most prudent and equitable method for disposal and distribution of lands west and south of the Congressional Reservation Line, and the second insuring that all files, papers, and correspondence of the House related to the Tennessee Land Bill be referred to this committee.33

  Crockett’s subsequent optimism regarding the bill reveals a confidence gleaned from his recent time in the limelight, and shows that his memory for frustration, bitterness, and defeat was short. In a letter to a Tennessee constituent, Crockett rode on false hopes when he scribbled enthusiastically: “My land Bill is among the first Bills reported to the house and I have but little doubt of its passage during the present Session.”34 His con-tinued naïveté is a bit surprising given his experience with congressional debates, the sloth of their movement, and his own history with the land issue. Still, Crockett was riding high, though his mind was elsewhere.

  The congressman looking stately and reserved, which contrasts his actual ranting and raving behavior on the House floor. (David Crockett. Portrait by Chester Harding. Oil on canvas, 1834. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. Future bequest of Ms. Katharine Bradford.)

  Feeling good about himself was one thing, but being financially flush was quite another, and Crockett, as he always would, retained some outstanding debt that niggled at his pride. Nich
olas Biddle had been good enough to cancel one hefty outstanding note, and though Crockett was humbled and grateful, that only began to staunch the bleeding.35 It dawned on Crockett that the series of recent literary and media events magnifying his public image and some nudging and prodding by friends and associates, as well as constituents, during the previous election cycle all conspired to an obvious conclusion: it was time to write his own story, a narrative of his life, at once to set the record straight as well as to immortalize himself in print, and if all went as planned, financial and political success was in the offing. But Crockett knew that the scope of the project was too daunting to take on alone, doubting privately whether his own literary skills were up to the task.

  He turned to Thomas Chilton, fellow boarder for years at Mrs. Ball’s, his friend, confidant, and sometime ghost writer. Crockett trusted Chilton: they had come into the house together as freshmen back in 1827, and they had worked together productively before. Chilton had been trained in the law, so he could negotiate any contract with a potential book publisher. Crockett certainly took notice of the frenzied sales of both Clarke’s Life, and later the wildly successful Sketches and Eccentricities. Frankly, he was tired of seeing others profit from his name, image, adventures, and near-death escapades—he might as well taste the pie he had helped bake.

  The way his image had degenerated into caricature also needled Crockett, even if he had benefited from the mirage. A narrative of his life and adventures, written in his stylized vernacular and from his unique point of view, would clarify who he was, separating the flesh-and-blood Crockett from the mythical one threatening to overwhelm him. This was his chance to decide, once and for all, how he would be perceived. “I want the world to understand my true history,” he would write, “and how I worked along to rise from a cane-brake to my present station in life.”36 He would be puppet and puppeteer, his choice of words and the selection of his anecdotes cleverly manipulating the strings of the marionette that was his public image. Here was his opportunity to finally construct the David Crockett he wished to be, the authentic and legendary folk figure-cum-congressman, the true “Gentleman from the Cane.” Here was his chance to portray himself “in human shape, and with the countenance, appearance, and common feelings of a human being.”37 But most important of all, Crockett now understood that his fame was reaching its zenith, that the public craved him in many versions and permutations, and he desperately wished to capitalize on his popularity. One can imagine him grinning widely and with the dipped brow of feigned humility as he claims in his preface:

  I know that, obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world. I can’t tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will, everybody seems anxious to get a peep at me . . . There must therefore be something in me, or about me, that attracts attention, which is even mysterious to myself. I can’t understand it, and I therefore put all the facts down, leaving the reader free to take his choice of them.38

  He was certainly right about everyone wanting to get a “peep” at him. Just as he was in the preliminary stages of the writing, Thomas Chilton having mailed off a flurry of prospecting letters including one to the publishers Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, James Kirke Paulding’s blockbuster play, The Lion of the West, arrived in Washington, in its own way heralding the arrival of David Crockett. When Crockett himself went to see the benefit performance, in a much talked-about and written-about sequence, artifice and life converged. Nearly drowned by the cheers of a knowledgeable audience, Crockett was escorted like a dignitary to a special reserved seat in the front row, center, where he waited, hoots and hollers of recognition coming from all around him. At last the curtain slowly rose, and star actor James Hackett sprang onto the stage, bedecked in the leather leggings and wildcat skin hat of Nimrod Wildfire. He stepped to the edge of the stage and bowed deliberately and graciously to Crockett, who smiled, paused, then rose and returned the gesture. The enthralled audience, bowled over by the poignancy of the moment, erupted in a frenzy of cheers and applause.39 It was a powerful convergence of fact and fiction, where the mythical legend and the real man met, the past, present, and future of David Crockett all morphing into one. Crockett must have been intoxicated by the applause, and one had to wonder whether his addiction for that very praise would consume him the way “Arden spirits” had before.

  By day Crockett attended to the mundane matters of congress, growing distracted and occasionally missing sessions; he devoted the evenings to his book. He and Chilton had agreed to a collaborative effort that would retain Crockett’s “style” and “substance,” with Crockett scribbling down the tales of his boyhood, the anecdotes, and the recollections of his life up to the present, and Chilton using his editorial eye to “clarify the matter.”40 Probably at Chilton’s likely insistence, Crockett made sure to elucidate that his collaborator was entitled to “one equl half of the sixty two and a half percent of the entire profites of the work.”41 He valued Chilton’s editing skills and his strong eye for structure and grammar, but he wished to retain the flavor and nuance of his own personality. Where useful and pertinent, Chilton retained Crockett’s idiosyncratic language. In the preface, Crockett humbly explained the plain style, wondering what might be criticized by “honourable men.” “Is it on my spelling?” he reflected. “That’s not my trade. Is it on my grammar?—I hadn’t time to learn it, and make no pretensions to it. Is it on the order and arrangement of my book?—I never wrote one before, and never read very many, and, of course, know mighty little about that.”42

  Even in explaining the shortcomings of the book, Crockett was endearing himself to the audience. How could they not be enamored with his honesty, his candor, his utter lack of pretension? He came across as he wanted to, the “plain, blunt Western man, relying on honesty and the woods, and not on learning and the law, for a living.”43 It was an ingenious rhetorical device, and it worked better than Crockett, Chilton, or the publishers could ever have imagined.

  Crockett wrote furiously, knocking out a good portion of the manuscript by the end of January, and, finding he was quite comfortable with the task, he managed to finish well ahead of his initial deadline. But the long nights burning the proverbial midnight oil took their toll, and he fell weak and feverish once more with a touch of malarial croup. Feebly handing over his handwritten manuscript to Chilton for polishing, editing, and revising, Crockett must have been quite relieved, pleased with his efforts as a first-time writer, but with no idea of what, if anything, he had accomplished.

  As providence would have it, the incomparable David Crockett had written something of a masterpiece.

  TWELVE

  A Bestseller and a Book Tour

  A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, Written by Himself, hit the booksellers’ racks in early March of 1834 and flew off the shelves faster than fowl spooked from a canebrake. Publishers Carey & Hart had anticipated the frenzy, having done some promotion the minute they realized they had a winner on their hands. They must have been thrilled when they saw the readable, authentic volume—tidied up by Chilton but retaining Crockett’s quaint spelling and grammar, which he had ultimately specified remain unaltered. It was a gem of a book, and they quickly made Crockett an offer by the end of January, which he accepted on February 3.1 Mere hours after receiving his acceptance in the mail on February 7, the publishers distributed a broadside heralding the following:

  It may interest the friends of this genuine Son of the West to learn, that he has lately completed, with his own hand, a narrative of his life and adventures, and that the work will be shortly published by Messrs. Carey & Hart, of Philadelphia. The work bears this excellent and characteristic motto by the author:

  I leave this rule for others, when I’m dead:

  Be always sure you’re right—THEN GO AHEAD!

  The broadside included the very reasonable terms for what was destined to become a collector’s item: twelve copies and upwards, sixty-five cents.2 Crockett h
elped his own cause as well, writing a promotional preface that he leaked to the press just prior to the book’s release.3 Sensing interest in the narrative to be at near-hurricane levels, Carey and Hart produced the book with remarkable speed, taking it from edited manuscript to published work in less than a month. The public responded, shelling out happily for multiple copies and the first print run sold out in a matter of weeks. Carey & Hart went back to press and offered them up again. The phenomenon continued, and within a few short months the book was in its sixth printing, an undisputed bestseller.

  Everyone, from statesmen to commoners, bought the book, some out of sheer curiosity, spurred by Crockett’s name and interested in his outrageous stories and tall tales. But what they all got when they opened the 211-page narrative was an American classic, an autobiography on the order of favorite son Benjamin Franklin’s. Certainly there were similarities between the two texts, and as Franklin’s Autobiography was among the very few books Crockett owned or had ever read, he borrowed structural elements from that book.4 But the content, and the result, was pure Crockett, with just the slightest peppering of Chilton for political effect. Narrative is complex in its simplicity, revealing the playful, sincere, moral and even vulnerable voice of a real man, a man of his times. At once a morality tale, a political treatise, an adventure story, and a manifesto for the common man, the Narrative was the first truly “Western” autobiography, 5 and “the great classic of the southern frontier.”6 The book prefigures by some fifty years the literary genre of “realism,”7 with nothing remotely like it, or nearly as good, appearing until 1884 with the publication of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Crockett’s Narrative is real, vital, touching, and shrewdly humorous. It is the work of a master storyteller and truly gifted humorist.