American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (26 page)

Certainly Elizabeth would not have thought so; she had grown accustomed to fiscal irresponsibility and disaster in nearly every one of his schemes, and their relationship by now was growing distant and frayed. That he had risen in stature from regional curiosity to folk hero would have impressed her but little; Elizabeth would have seen him only as an absentee husband and father, and a financial hurricane. It did not help that the
Jackson Gazette
now supported Fitzgerald and began to print anti-Crockett propaganda and smears, including the recurring accusations of public indecency, gambling debts, and violent bouts of drinking. Though he had previously assured Elizabeth of his continuing sobriety, she surely must have suspected that at least some of the claims were true, much as she wanted to believe him. How could he always be so broke, always struggling to catch up, borrowing money from one man to pay off his debt to another?

Crockett had committed, however, and despite being a lone eagle now, essentially a party pariah, he went ahead with the campaign, fending off a running series, called
The Book of Chronicles, West of the Tennessee and East of the Mississippi Rivers
and printed in the
Southern Statesman,
that depicted his meteoric rise and cataclysmic descent. The scathing satire turned out to be the handiwork of a barrister from West Tennessee named Adam Huntsman and nicknamed “Black Hawk.”
⁵⁴
Using pseudoreligious jargon and tone, the hyperbolic parodies depicted Crockett as the would-be savior of the river-country dwellers, but who had failed—so that, instead, the river people should elect Fitzgerald. Crockett hadn’t the time or the energy to parry all the attacks, but Huntsman would be a nemesis for the next few years, and Crockett would eventually have to contend with him. Crockett generated a few responses for publication in the
Southern Statesman,
taking the opportunity to coin the nickname “Little Fitz” as a slam on Fitzerald, whom he accused of being base, unprincipled, and prone to gambling.
⁵⁵
The insults flew back and forth, and were made particularly awkward since the men ended up touring around the district virtually together on the stumping circuit, and had plenty of face-to-face interaction. Prior to one rally in Paris, Tennessee, Crockett issued a verbal warning that if the diminutive Fitzgerald continued to make spurious charges against him, he would be forced to bludgeon him.

An expectant crowd watched and listened as Fitzgerald rose to speak, first placing a white handkerchief on the hardwood table before him. Against modest restraint by his own backers, who did not like the odds or the roughness of the place that better suited Crockett, Fitzgerald stood anyway, and promised he would verify the charges he had made against his opponent. Crockett shot up and exclaimed that he had come to “whip the little lawyer” who would continue to make such claims.
⁵⁶
Eventually, as everyone in the crowd anticipated, Fitzgerald did come to the points of controversy, and Crockett flew toward Fitzgerald in a rage, storming the stand. He hardly expected what followed:

When he was within three or four feet of it, Fitzgerald suddenly removed a pistol from his handkerchief, and, covering Colonel Crockett’s breast, warned him that a step further and he would fire. The move was so unexpected, the appearance of the speaker so cool and deliberate, that Crockett hesitated a second, turned around, and resumed his seat.
⁵⁷

Crockett’s backing down showed excellent common sense, but it wasn’t the behavior expected of a man with a reputation for killing bears barehanded. Embarrassed and on the defensive, Crockett resorted to lengthy and redundant anti-Jackson harangues, most lacking his patented humor and sounding mean-spirited, not his hallmarks. He continued his petty name-calling, referring to Fitzgerald as “a little court lawyer with verry little standing” and “a perfect lick spittle.”
⁵⁸
Through the campaign Crockett remained true to his tenets of individuality, independence, and sticking to one’s principles no matter how unpopular they seemed. It was not enough, however, and in the end Crockett was out-campaigned by a man with backing much stronger, more influential, well financed, and more organized than his. With the infrastructure of the Jackson forces behind him, William Fitzgerald eked out a victory over Crockett in a devilishly close election, with a margin of only 586 votes out of 16,482 votes cast.

THOUGH HE SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING, Crockett had not expected to lose (he never did), and he officially contested the results of the election at the next Congress, citing fraud in vote counting at Madison County, but the House Committee on Elections refused him, and the vote stood.
⁵⁹
The sour Crockett had shown himself to be a poor loser, and he bowed out of Congress for the time being with anything but grace. He looked to be unraveling, his regional popularity in question (at least politically), his marital relations disintegrating, his financial situation perilous. Perhaps Black Hawk’s prediction in the
Book of Chronicles
had been correct, perhaps David Crockett’s shooting star was on the wane, crashing headlong back to earth after its brief flight to fame, to flicker until it was extinguished.

ELEVEN

“Nimrod Wildfire” and “The Lion of the West”

D
AVID CROCKETT HATED TO LOSE, and now it seemed that he was losing everything around him: his family, his spouse, his farm, his constituents. He had been ousted from office by a combination of his own failings and a political mechanism beyond his scope of comprehension, and he was left to pick up the pieces and try to move ahead. It would take some doing. Ironically, what Crockett failed to grasp completely was that while he struggled to maintain his political career and more important, his tenuous sense of self, something outside his direct influence was happening to his image, and to the desires of the American psyche. And he would be the beneficiary of that new hunger.
¹

A few years prior, in 1829, playwright William Moncrieff had introduced a play called
Monsieur Mallet; or, My Daughter’s Letter.
The play featured a notable character named Jeremiah Kentuck, played by popular actor James Hackett. The character was “a bragging, self-confident, versatile and vigorous frontiersman . . . Congressman, attorney-at-law, dealer in log-wood, orator, and ‘half-horse, half-alligator, with a touch of the steamboat, and a small taste of the snapping turtle.’”
²
The parallels to Colonel David Crockett were impossible to miss, and the play enjoyed some success. Hackett relished the role, but he wanted a play that cast him as the lead specifically, so he enlisted friend and playwright James Kirke Paulding to write a play for him. Paulding, familiar with the characteristics of Jeremiah Kentuck, sought a real-life model on which to base his play, and his muse was obvious: Colonel David Crockett. Paulding wrote his friend, the painter and writer John Wesley Jarvis, asking him to pen a few “sketches, short stories, and incidents, of Kentucky or Tennessee manners, and especially some of their peculiar phrases and comparisons.” But what he really wanted were replications, real or imagined, of the man himself. “If you can add, or
invent,
” Paulding prodded Jarvis, “a few ludicrous Scenes of Col. Crockett at Washington, you will be sure of my everlasting gratitude.”
³

Paulding and Hackett intended to draw their caricature, in the role of Nimrod Wildfire, directly from Crockett, borrowing from his antics and episodes in Washington, which would have been rich material. The play, which was hotly anticipated, given leaks regarding the subject matter and a widespread desire to see Crockett portrayed in this way, would be called
The Lion of the West; or, A Trip to Washington.
In the play, which has the distinction of being “the first American comedy to place a crude backwoodsman in a lead role,”
⁴
allusions to Crockett were beyond obvious. Nimrod (the word means “hunter”) Wildfire roared around the stage clad in hunting buckskins and a hat fashioned from wildcat skin: “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.”
⁵
Crockett was just egomaniacal enough to relish the connections when it finally opened, despite the fact that the farce was viewed as either mocking him, or as a “Jacksonian political piece” intended to deride Crockett and further alienate him from the Jackson administration.
⁶

Evidently, Paulding felt that Crockett was prominent enough to warrant his blessing—or at the very least, he wished not to offend him, and on December 15, 1830, he wrote a note to Crockett, passed via an emissary, Georgia Congressman Richard Henry Wilde, assuring Crockett rather deceitfully that he had not drawn the character for comic purposes, and had no intention of making a mockery of him.
⁷
Crockett naïvely bought the rouse, and sent a reply to Paulding on December 22, 1830, humbly accepting his assurances that the play had no direct references “to my peculiarities.”
⁸
By the time the play opened in New York in November of 1831, nearly everyone knew that the overt parallels were intentional, and Crockett ended up relishing the publicity he gained from the play’s highly successful run. In fact, Hackett went on to portray Nimrod Wildfire for years, eventually taking the play across the Atlantic to London. At the moment, though, the desire for such theater simply confirmed a ravenous American appetite for characterizations of eccentric originals who had risen against unlikely odds to power and position, and who had come to represent the personality and temperament of a nation. Such people showed what was possible for common men, illustrating the achievements of “natural gentlemen.”
⁹

Once again, just when he appeared lowest, David Crockett was buttressed by public acclaim, bucked up when it looked as though he ought to quit. The acclamation shored up his confidence when he was out of work and deeply indebted, and it gave him the notion to consider running for office again. He began eyeballing the 1833 election, writing to his financial backers in Washington to notify them of his plans and appealing to their generosity in letting his outstanding debt ride and agreeing to additional funding during his hiatus.
¹⁰
At the beginning of the new year he would write imploringly to the cashier of the Second Bank, hoping to orchestrate further bank withdrawals and suggesting that he would pay his already outstanding notes when he could.
¹¹

With some fiscal salving in place, and sights lowered on the next election, he attempted something he’d missed for the last few years—quiet and predominantly settled home life. But there wasn’t much for him to return to. Fed up with his dreams and delusions, Elizabeth had packed up and sought refuge with her more stable and solvent Patton relatives in Gibson County, taking the children with her. In Washington, Crockett had the fraternity of fellow congressmen and the social fabric of legislative life, and it would have been depressing for him to live alone on the farm, in a skeletal version of his former family life. In late August of 1831, Crockett wrote to a friend named Doctor Jones, informing him of his dire financial situation and asking for a six-year lease on twenty acres adjacent to his place on the Obion, and when Jones agreed, at decent terms and offering an option to purchase, Crockett set in to his old routine, clearing and grubbing the tough top ground, and planning a viable farm that would include a few cabins, a smokehouse, corncribs, stables, a well, and even a modest fruit orchard.
¹²
Optimistic to a fault, he determined to make the place flourish; perhaps if he made good on his plans, Elizabeth would even agree to move back in with him.

Whenever he could, David Crockett turned to hunting again. After being cooped up in the constrictive confines of a boarding-house room, he longed to lace up his knee-high moccasins, to pull on his buckskins and head out into the open air, cool breezes pouring down the valleys and draws, his feet padding soundlessly through dew-damp grasses as he struck for the pine forests and grapevine thickets. It would have been a difficult time for him, the loss of his people’s confidence lodged in his crop. He would have plenty of time to think about his indigent condition and what he planned to do about it. Crockett always believed optimistically that the answer to his problems lay in the land itself: that possession of it, at nearly any cost, was his path to freedom, his way out from under the ominous thundercloud of debt. If he could just get enough acreage, free and clear, he would be able to build security for himself and his family, but he also knew that time was running out. He certainly must have hoped that by the time his dreams were realized, there would be a family and friends left to share it with him.

When not out hunting or working around the new farmstead, Crockett traveled extensively through his own district, connecting with old friends and such political allies as remained after his last showing in Congress. He passed through Kentucky, and made it as far back East as Washington and Philadelphia, maintaining casual contact with potential backers, courting powerful figures like Daniel Webster.
¹³
Other than that, Crockett lay low, relatively quiet for a man of his notoriety. The brief caesura of 1832 to 1833 would be the quiet calm building on the national horizon before the impending arrival of the torrential David Crockett storm.