David Crockett: The Lion of the West
Page 25
“Colonel Wildfire…[is] an extremely racy representation of Western blood, a perfect non-pareil, half steamboat, half alligator, and etc.,” read an early newspaper review.
[He] possesses many original traits which never before have appeared on stage. The amusing extravagances and strange features of character which have grown up in the western states are perhaps unique in the world itself…. Of the play itself…we cannot speak too highly of it. Possessing all of the peculiar points, wit, sarcasm and brilliancy of Paulding, it shows him in a quite pleasing light—that of a successful delineator of native manners and indigenous character. There are materials enough in this wide country to construct a school of comedy peculiarly our own. Why not collect them? Mr. Paulding has set an example worthy of being followed up.15
A native of the state of New York, Paulding was a prolific and talented writer of mainly satirical plays and novels. His confidant, early collaborator, and brother-in-law was Washington Irving, another highly acclaimed early American writer and the author of such enduring tales as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”16 Both men were associated with the Knickerbockers, a group of authors who, by 1832, ruled the literary community in New York City. Included in their ranks were James Fenimore Cooper, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and William Cullen Bryant. Another well-known Knickerbocker, and a possible source of Paulding’s interest in Crockett as a lead character, was Gulian Crommelin Verplanck. He was the New York congressman who had written a letter of support for Crockett in the wake of trumped-up stories about his behavior at a dinner with President John Quincy Adams, who by 1831 had been elected to Congress.17
Paulding had written The Lion of the West in 1830 for a competition sponsored by James Henry Hackett, a noted actor who put up a cash prize for a new and original American comedy. Hackett, considered one of the finest Shakespearean comedians of his day, coveted a leading role for himself and was delighted when he learned that his friend Paulding was gathering material based on the experiences of frontiersmen. Paulding wrote the portrait painter John Wesley Jarvis, asking him for some “sketches, short stories, and incidents of Kentucky or Tennessee manners, and especially some of their peculiar phrases and comparisons.” He also suggested that Jarvis “add or invent, a few ludicrous Scenes of Col. Crockett at Washington.”18
Not surprisingly, Paulding’s play was the one Hackett selected for production. Months before Lion premiered, word got out that Hackett’s portrayal of Nimrod (a synonym for hunter) Wildfire was a caricature of Crockett loosely based on episodes from his colorful life.19 Paulding and Hackett, most likely fearful of legal action, emphatically denied any connection between Wildfire and Crockett. On December 15, 1830, Crockett himself received a note from Paulding reassuring him that there was absolutely no intentional use of Crockett’s image and life experiences in the comedy. At first Crockett accepted Paulding’s denial as the truth. “I thank you…for your civility in assuring me that you had no reference to my peculiarities,” Crockett wrote to Paulding on December 22. “The frankness of your letter induces me to say a declaration from you to that effect was not necessary to convince me that you were incapable of wounding the feelings of a strainger [sic] and unlettered man who had never injured you.”20
However, when the play opened in New York in late 1831 and audiences saw Hackett in full frontier regalia and heard him utter his first words, the Crockett influence was unmistakable. “My name is Nimrod Wildfire—half horse, half alligator and a touch of the airthquake—that’s got the prettiest sister, fastest horse, and ugliest dog in the District, and can out-run, outjump, throw down, drag out, and whip any man in all Kaintuck.”21
Throughout the drama Wildfire spouted a stream of backwoods witticisms, such as “You might as well try to scull a potash kettle up the falls of Niagara with a crowbar for an oar,” or the insensitive boast that he was “primed for anything from a possum hunt to a nigger funeral,” reflecting the racist language of the day. Newspaper articles about Crockett may have inspired much of the play’s language, but many of the frontier epithets were straight from the pen of Paulding and not from the tongue of Crockett. Some of the news stories were of dubious origin, such as one published in late 1828 that called Crockett “one of the most eccentric and amusing members of Congress,” and said that his family coat of arms included a rifle, a butcher’s knife, and a tomahawk.22 The article went on to tell of Crockett’s boast that he could whip any man in the House of Representatives and also “could wade the Mississippi, carry a steamboat on his back and whip his weight in wild cats.”
What is certain is that the national mythologizing of Crockett had already begun, even in his lifetime, making it difficult to separate what Crockett actually said from what others made up about him. The Paulding play was replete with backwoods lingo and bastardized words that, over time, several sources erroneously attributed to Crockett. He did, in fact, use much of the slang, idioms, and sayings of the time in his daily lexicon and various writings, but he did not coin the more colorful words uttered by Nimrod Wildfire, such as catawampus, jubus, tetotaciously exflunctified, gullywhumping, flutterbation, and the popular ripsnorter, which probably originated in 1840, four years after Crockett’s death.23 But it was sockdolager, a word that meant the ultimate or decisive, as in a knockout punch, that became most associated with Crockett as a result of its usage in the Paulding play. While preparing for a duel, Wildfire in speaking of his opponent brags, “He’ll come off as badly as a feller I once hit with a sledge hammer lick over the head—a real sogdolloger [sic]. He disappeared altogether; all they could ever find of him was a little grease spot in one corner.”
Interestingly, the term sockdolager was widely used for many years, including by Mark Twain, who, as a young Samuel Clemens, was taken with frontier stories. Twain was influenced by reading Crockett’s 1834 autobiography as well as the fictionalized accounts of the buckskin hero in the many Crockett almanacs that appeared for more than twenty years after his death. In fact, sockdolager actually appears in Twain’s classic work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Like Twain, Abraham Lincoln was yet another historical figure who fell under the spell of the mythical Crockett, incorporating his style of self-effacing humor into the fabric of his political life. Lincoln admired Crockett, a man, like himself, who grew up in poverty and became a national icon. Both Crockett and Lincoln also had gregarious personalities and a penchant for telling humorous stories, though Lincoln had a brooding, introspective side that Crockett, a more unselfconscious sort, could not have appreciated. Ironically, the humorous word sockdolager figured in one of the most tragic moments in American history. On April 14, 1865, during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth was poised outside the box where Lincoln, his wife, and their guests sat watching the action below. A veteran thespian who knew the play well, Booth waited for the line to be spoken that always got the most laughs: “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap.”24 As the audience roared in delight, Booth stepped inside the box and fired his small pistol.
Thirty-two years before the first presidential assassination, when Lincoln was a young Whig politician, Crockett had his own memorable moment in another Washington, D.C., theater. On the evening of December 21, 1833, at a benefit performance of The Lion of the West staged at the Washington Theater, Crockett, who had returned to the capital, was escorted to a special reserved seat in the front row, stage center.25 The capacity audience cheered and hollered in recognition. Then the curtain slowly rose and James Hackett sprang onto the stage, dressed in the leather leggings and wildcat-skin hat of Colonel Nimrod Wildfire. He walked to the edge of the stage and ceremoniously bowed to the smiling Crockett, who, in turn, rose from his seat and returned the bow to Hackett. The crowd responded with a volley of thunderous applause. All the while, the actor portraying the legend and the real man continued to bow and smile.
THIRTY-ONE
THE LION OF THE WEST became the inspiration for and the cornerstone of future writings about Crockett. This satirical spoof sparked a seemingly endless series of unauthorized biographies and ghostwritten books attributed to him.
In his role as Nimrod Wildfire, James Hackett enjoyed great success and garnered brilliant reviews and the praise of adoring audiences. Noted a New York critic in late 1831, “At the fall of the curtain there was one universal and continuous call kept up for Mr. Hackett, who promptly answered it [and] returned thanks for ‘the indulgence the public had uniformly extended, not only to himself in the [im]personation, but to the inexperienced attempts of our native dramatists in drawing characters indigenous to this country.’”1 Hackett thus came to absorb much of the heartfelt attention that the defeated Crockett now enjoyed.
In 1833 Hackett took the revised show—retitled A Kentuckian’s Trip to New York in 1815—to London’s fashionable West End, introducing the indomitable Nimrod Wildfire to audiences at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Crockett’s reputation had reached across “the big pond,” as Wildfire called the Atlantic Ocean, creating an image of the American West that would spread throughout the continent.2 Even when British critics unfamiliar with American frontier culture failed to understand the simple storyline and audiences were puzzled by the American dialect, Hackett consistently won praise for his portrayal of the lead character’s tough sensibility that the refined British specifically associated with their former colony. Hackett also was the party most responsible for establishing the coonskin cap as Crockett’s headgear. As Crockett scholar Paul Hutton pointed out: “No authentic contemporary portrait or written account identifies such a crown upon the ‘King of the Wild Frontier’s’ regal head before 1835. The first drawing of Crockett in a fur cap (it is a wildcat skin) graces the cover of Davy Crockett’s 1837 Almanack, and it is a copy of a drawing of Hackett as Nimrod Wildfire that was used to publicize the play.”3
Paulding continued to churn out more literary works, reaching the zenith of his fame as a popular American writer in the 1830s. Besides his writing, Paulding also held various governmental positions and went on to serve as the secretary of the navy under President Martin Van Buren from 1838 to 1841.4 With a change in administration, Paulding, though effectively forgotten today, returned to his literary pursuits at his farm near Hyde Park, New York, where he died in 1860, leaving behind a bounty of writing including The Lion of the West, the most-often performed play on the American stage before a dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin premiered in 1852.
By the time Crockett finally saw the play and had his memorable face-to-face session with Wildfire in December 1833, his life had rebounded somewhat. He remained estranged from Elizabeth and constantly scrambled for money, but the notoriety generated about him from the play continued to sweep the country. As one writer, mindful of Crockett’s favorite activity, put it, “he surfaced refreshed but famished, like a bear rousing from hibernation.”5 While Crockett accepted the realities of misfortune, violence, and even death, he focused on the present and embraced the collection of possibilities that life offered. As a variation of a later adage put it: “Some days you eat the bar, some days the bar eats you.”6 It was a fatalistic view that Crockett would have appreciated.
At the beginning of 1833, a book sparked in part by the Paulding drama and entitled The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee was published in Cincinnati. Later in the year, after a few changes were made in the text, the book was reissued in New York and London as the Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee. For many years the anonymous author was reputed to be a Virginia novelist, James Strange French. Although French always denied writing the book, its authorship was ascribed to him based on the opinion of the illustrious Edgar Allan Poe, who, in his early literary career, was best known as a scathing critic rather than as a writer of fiction and poetry.7 As critic for the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836, three years after Sketches appeared, Poe wrote a piece about French’s recently published two-volume novel, Elkswatawa; or, The Prophet of the West. Featured in the novel was the “Crockettrean character,” Poe wrote, named “Earthquake,” an obvious allusion to the “land of the shakes.” Poe mentioned in passing that French also had written the Sketches book about Crockett.
“This novel [Elkswatawa] is written by Mr. James S. French of Jerusalem, Virginia—the author, we believe of ‘Eccentricities of David Crockett,’ a book of which we know nothing beyond the fact of its publication.”8 From that point forward, French was most often cited as the author of Sketches. In 1956, however, over a century later, James Shackford’s Crockett biography made the claim that, although French had the copyright for Sketches and received royalties, he did not write the book. According to Shackford, the author was Matthew St. Clair Clarke, a staunch Whig who—due to his political affiliation—had lost his post as clerk of the House of Representatives under Jackson.9
“If Clarke was the author, why did he copyright the book in the name of another?” That was Shackford’s rhetorical question. “The answer is evident,” he wrote. “The volume was composed as part of an effort to re-elect David Crockett to Congress as an anti-Jacksonian and supporter of the United States Bank, and to increase his usefulness through a multiplication of his fame.”10
Clarke knew Crockett from his first days in Congress, and the two became friends. Like most others, Clarke was known to enjoy listening to Crockett’s yarns about hunting and life in the backwoods. The two men traveled together at various times when Crockett visited back east, and Clarke may have visited Crockett in west Tennessee. “The country which it falls my lot most particularly to describe, is the western district of Tennessee; and of that, to me, that most interesting spot, was Col. Crockett’s residence,” the author writes in the introduction to Sketches. “There, far retired from the bustle of the world, he lives, and chews, for amusement, the cud of his political life. He has settled himself over the grave of an earthquake, which often reminds him of the circumstance by moving itself as if tired of confinement. The wild face of the country—the wide chasms—the new formed lakes, together with its great loneliness, render it interesting in the extreme to the traveler.”11
The book was immensely popular and sold well, but anyone who read it and had also seen the stage drama Lion of the West would have recognized the curious similarity in language and choice of story content. In creating dialogue for the book, lines from the play were directly pirated from Nimrod Wildfire and put into Crockett’s mouth, as if now the stage creation provided the source for biography. In many instances the phrasing was altered but the intent retained. For example, in Lion of the West, Wildfire boasts: “I’m half horse, half alligator, a touch of the airth-quake, with a sprinklin’ of the steamboat! If I an’t I wish I might be shot! Heigh! Wake snakes, June bugs are coming.” The book version read: “I am that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust; can whip my weight in wild cats,—and if any gentleman pleases, for a ten dollar bill, he may throw in a panther,—hug a bear too close for comfort, and eat any man opposed to Jackson.”12
In general the book is overwritten, in stylized prose filled with clichés and odd characterizations. Several chapters consist of folk tales written in a thick Dutch accent, a popular form of storytelling on the frontier. There is little of substance about Crockett as a man but mostly a series of tales and anecdotes that bolstered, as it did in the later style of action-hero comics, the image of a mythical frontier character. The writing played to the masses of disenfranchised whites who craved stories about feats of great strength, stalking wild beasts, and killing Indians. “Davy Crockett was famous for tales of his hunting, fighting, and joking,” one writer pointed out. “No one bothered to invent similar high-flown stories about Congre
ssman Crockett.”13
While appealing to the masses, the book met a mixed reception elsewhere, particularly among the highbrow classes who considered Crockett nothing more than a bumptious court jester and buffoon. Typical of these detractors was the critique of Sketches that appeared in the New England magazine:
The gentleman who is the subject of these Sketches, was not much known beyond the circle of his neighbors and fellow-hunters, till, a few years ago, when, by one of those strange and erratic concurrences of circumstances, which sometimes happen in the political system, he was found in one of the seats of the House of Representatives of the United States…. The writer of these Sketches has, creditably to himself, withheld his name, and, in that respect, we cannot but think he was more careful of his own reputation than he has been of that of his illustrious subject, or that of the multitude of counselors of which the subject is so useful and ornamental a member.14
Although Crockett claimed to have been irate and embarrassed by an unauthorized biography, he recognized the tremendous impact the book had in expanding his name recognition with the public, elevating his stature on the national political scene—albeit not always in the most flattering manner. Still, it deeply bothered Crockett, given his impecunious circumstances, that he never enjoyed any financial reward from the book and that not one cent of royalties was offered to him. Crockett determined that his pocket and reputation would be better off if he were to pen his own book. After all, there was no one was more qualified to tell the story of a man’s life than the man who lived it. Before any book could be written, however, other business more immediate had to be addressed.
Out in the canebrakes Crockett continued to hear the siren call of Washington City. An election for the Twenty-third Congress loomed in August 1833, and Crockett had a hankering to get back his seat from William Fitzgerald. By then he took nothing for granted when it came to politics. He fully understood that the reelection of Andrew Jackson to a second term in 1832 would make it that much more difficult to unseat the incumbent Fitzgerald. Crockett would need all the help his friends in the Whig Party could muster on his behalf.