Bob Thompson - Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier

Copyright 2012 by Bob Thompson

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

eISBN: 978-0-307-72091-7

Jacket design by Christopher Brand
Map illustrations by David Lindroth

v3.1

For Deborah, Lizzie, and Mona

1

Minutes after I walked into Alamo Plaza, I saw my first Davy Crockett ghost. He took the form of a solidly built man in an outsized coonskin capthe kind with a cute little raccoon face as well as a bushy tailwho handed me a business card.

Hes my great-great-great-grandfather, David Preston Crockett said. Yeah, Im a grandson of the famous Davy Crockett.

David had put on his Crockett finery for the occasion, which was the 175th anniversary of his ancestors death at the Alamo, most likely within a few yards of where we stood. In addition to the cap, he wore a long fringed jacket and matching pants that looked as if they were made of buckskin but werent.

Would you believe this stuff came from Walmart? he asked. Then he told me how hed bought some chamois cloth, maybe ten years before, and learned to sew.

San Antonio, Texas, was my last stop on a search for traces of the historical and mythical Crockettfor the ghosts, as Id come to think of them, of an extraordinary American life. Colorful threads of Davys story had been spun into legend while the man himself was still alive, and that storys epic ending on the morning of March 6, 1836, had rendered him immortal. If you were hunting Crockett ghosts, on this anniversary weekend, the Alamo was the place to be.

For starters, there were all the other guys decked out in raccoon caps and brown fringed garments.

At one point, I saw two Davys in full regaliaboth associated with a production company that specialized in historical filmsshake each others hands in front of the Alamo church. Up walked a tourist whod heard that the real Crockett might have carved his name on the churchs iconic facade. One of the Davys set her straight.

Mr. Crockett was a gentleman. Mr. Crockett would not do that, he said. Ill take that to the bank.

A few hours later, waiting for a reenactment of the siege and battle to begin, I found myself standing next to two more Davys. Mike and Mark Chenault of Dallas were identical sixtyish twins wearing identical Crockett outfits. I asked one of themIm pretty sure it was Markwhat made them fans.

Just Crocketts devotion, his patriotism to America, he told me. He came all the way from Tennessee, you know, and the timing was just so perfect.

I dont think Davy would have agreed about the timing. The former congressman hadnt planned on coming to Texas just to die. Still, dying was what the Crockett wed all come to see was about to do.

Doug Davenport was a craggy-faced reenactor from the San Antonio Living History Association; he wore the usual cap and fringed coat, but his legwear set him apart. I had no idea whether the real Crockett ever wore white pants, but the unusual look, oddly enough, made Davenport seem more authentic, less like a Hollywood clone. This was a good thing, because the thirteen-day siege and battle about to be re-created were desperately serious. General Antonio Lpez de Santa Anna had just marched into town to quash the Texas Revolution, taking Crockett and the rest of the vastly outnumbered garrison by surprise.

Get everyone into the Alamo! someone yelled.

Give us a position, and me and the Tennessee boys will protect it for you, Davy told his commanding officer, William Barret Travis, who assigned him to defend a wooden palisade that filled a gap in the south wall.

Then it was hurry up and wait.

It is not easy to evoke twelve tense days in which little actual fighting occurred, but in the short time allotted to them, Davenport and his colleagues did their best. Defiant cannon shots were fired. Messengers rode out and back. Longed-for help failed to arrive. I would just as soon march out there and die in the open, Crockett confessed at one point, just as the real Crockett is said to have done.

He didnt get his wish. On the thirteenth day, shortly before dawn, Santa Anna finally ordered his men to storm the walls.

I lost track of Davenport during the booming, smoky chaos of the assault, then spotted him slumped against the palisade. There he stayed, cap twitching occasionally, until the words Remember the Alamo! came over the loudspeaker and the defenders sprang back to life. All available Davys were soon posing for photographs. Adults and children crowded around, and as I watched, I heard a young ponytailed mom try to convey to her son the seriousness of the moment he was experiencing.

You are walking where Davy Crockett walked around, she told him. That is really cool!

Decades before that mom was born, Walt Disney made Davy Crockett the coolest guy in American historyand walking where he walked can still give people chills.

Davys 1950s apotheosis came about through a wildly unpredictable combination of circumstances. Among them were the emergence of television as an irresistible cultural force; Disneys drive to fund his innovative new Anaheim theme park; Fess Parkers bit part in a film about giant mutant ants; and possibly the stickiest song ever written, with lyrics thrown together by a man who had never tried writing a song before. (All together now: Davy, DAY-VEE Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier!) Disney hadnt planned to spark a Crockett craze any more than Crockett had planned to get killed at the AlamoWalt just thought he was making a three-part TV serieswhich goes to show that even a marketing genius needs a helping hand from fate now and then.

Americans obsession with Davy Crockett also showedand not for the first timehow powerfully his story resonated with that of the nation itself.

For anyone who loves U.S. history, Crockett is a wonderful point of entry, because he intersects with so much of it. Youll find him in the middle of the bitter struggle between settlers and Indians, for example, taking different sides at different times. He personifies the radical expansion of democracy in the age of Andrew Jacksonfar better, in fact, than the patrician, plantation-owning Old Hickory himselfas well as the unstoppable migration westward that drew ambitious, adventurous men and women to places such as San Antonio. Crockett was constantly pulling up stakes. He spent a lifetime striving to escape the have-not side of a class divide that Americans like to pretend doesnt exist. A fierce resentment of the haves sparked his political career; getting too cozy with them helped end it.