American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (50 page)

63
Derr,
Frontiersman,
251. Shackford,
Man and Legend,
239.

64
De la Pena,
With Santa Anna in Texas,
52.

65
Davis,
Three Roads,
566, 739n. Long,
Duel of Eagles,
266, 387n. Pablo Diaz,
Tejano Accounts,
44, 76. Hanson,
Alamo Reader,
527-32.

66
Hansen,
Alamo Reader,
530. Long,
Duel of Eagles,
266. Davis,
Three Roads,
566. Pablo Diaz, “The Alamo Bones,”
San Antonio Express,
July 1, 1906.

67
Quoted in Hansen,
Alamo Reader,
530-31, and Long,
Duel of Eagles,
266. Interview by Charles M. Barnes.

Epilogue

1
Gary L. Foreman,
Crockett: The Gentleman from the Cane
(Dallas, 1986), 57.

2
John Seelye,
“On to the Alamo”: Colonel Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas
(New York, 2003), xi. Crockett,
Narrative,
xviii-xix.

3
Seelye,
“On to the Alamo,”
xi. Crockett,
Narrative,
xix. Foreman,
Gentleman from the Cane,
57.

4
Arpad,
Original Legendary,
187-88.

5
Ibid
,
188.

6
Foreman,
Gentleman from the Cane,
57. Seelye,
“On to the Alamo,”
xii.

7
Michael A. Lofaro,
Davy Crockett: The Man, the Legend, the Legacy 1786-1986
(Knoxville, TN, 1985), 106-7.

8
Quoted in Lofaro,
Crockett: The Man,
111, from Isaac Goldberg and Hubert Heffner, eds.,
America’s Lost Plays
(Bloomington, IN, 1963), vol. 4.

9
Lofaro,
Crockett: The Man,
112.

10
Ibid, xxi-xxii.

11
Seelye,
“On to the Alamo,”
xii.

12
Roberts and Olson,
A Line in the Sand,
240.

13
Derr,
Frontiersman,
23-24. See also Richard Boyd Hauck, “Making It All Up,” in Lofaro,
Crockett: The Man,
116-18.

14
Roberts and Olson,
A Line in the Sand,
243-44. Paul F. Anderson,
The Davy Crockett Craze: A Look at the 1950s Phenomenon and the Davy Crockett Collectibles
(Hillside, IL, 1996), 49. For a detailed consideration of the 1950s Crockett craze and merchandising, also see Margaret Jane King, “The Davy Crockett Craze: A Case Study in Popular Culture” (Ph.D dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1976).

15
Roberts and Olson,
A Line in the Sand,
244. Anderson,
The Davy Crockett Craze,
87-160. King, “The Davy Crockett Craze,” 8-17.

16
Gordon Wood,
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
(New York, 2004) 176. Roberts and Olson,
A Line in the Sand,
244.

17
Roberts and Olson,
A Line in the Sand,
245.

18
Ibid. Anderson,
The Davy Crockett Craze,
49-73. Final sales figures are not yet in for merchandise attendant to
Spider-Man
and
Spider-Man 2,
so the wiry web shooter may one day outstrip Crockett.

19
Ibid, 247.

20
Derr,
Frontiersman,
268.

21
Ibid, 267.

22
Hauck,
Bio-Bibliography,
95.

23
Ibid, 95-96. See also Roberts and Olson,
A Line in the Sand,
257-76, and Hauck, “Making It All Up,” in Lofaro,
Crockett: The Man,
118-20.

24
Wood,
Benjamin Franklin,
2.

25
Ibid, 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature on David Crockett is substantive and can be overwhelming, especially when including the works that focus on the Crockett legend and the attendant mythology. For those wishing to embark on further Crockett reading and study, the best place to commence is certainly David Crockett ’s own work,
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee.
The standard is edited by James A. Shackford and Stanley J. Folmsbee, published in 1973, and includes extensive annotations that are useful and interesting. Another good one is the 1987 version edited by Paul Andrew Hutton, which includes an excellent and extensive introduction.

Of the biographies, since 1956 the definitive work has been James A. Shackford’s
David Crockett, The Man and the Legend.
The groundbreaking study, which was originally a dissertation presented by Shackford to the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University and was subsequently published by the University of North Carolina Press, remains essential to the Crockett canon. To date, the most authoritative and thorough treatment of Crockett ’s life is William C. Davis’s 1998
Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie,
and
William Barret Travis.
The book is a monumental volume, masterfully crafted and researched, with an extensive (nearly book-length itself ) notes section. Professor Davis, a noted historian, brilliantly and seamlessly interweaves what could effectively be three stand-alone biographies into one tome, and the result is an impressive volume that promises to stand the test of time and be the standard by which others are measured. Mark Derr’s 1993 biography
The Frontiersman: The Real Life and Many Legends of Davy Crockett
is also very good.

Numerous scholars have contributed richly to the ongoing Crockett study, and some are particularly worthy of mention. Joseph Arpad’s 1970 Ph.D. dissertation for Duke University’s Department of English, entitled “David Crockett: An Original Legendary Eccentricity and Early American Character,” is a fascinating study dealing with Crockett’s relative “originality” and the shape and formation of the United States’ national identity. Richard Boyd Hauck’s 1982
Crockett: A Bio-Bibliography
is an excellent and comprehensive (yet economical) treatment of Crockett’s life, legend, fictions, and folklore. A series of articles by Stanley J. Folmsbee and Anna Grace Catron in the
East Tennessee Historical Society Publications
and
West Tennessee Historical Society Papers,
written over nearly twenty years spanning 1956 to 1974, provide augmentations and revisions to the Shackford biography. The articles to note are: “The Early Career of David Crockett,” “David Crockett, Congressman,” “David Crockett in Texas,” and “David Crockett and West Tennessee.”

Two scholarly collections are fundamental to an overall understanding of both David and “Davy” Crockett. Michael A. Lofaro’s 1986
Davy Crockett: The Man, the Legend, the Legacy
is a first-rate anthology with a well-considered chronology and interesting essays by the finest Crockett scholars. Another collection, published in 1989, is
Crockett at Two Hundred,
edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Joe Cummings. The work commemorates the two-hundredth birthday of David Crockett and offers significant insight into Crockett’s place in American culture.

Finally, Manley F. Cobia Jr.’s 2003
Journey into the Land of Trials: The Story of Davy Crockett’s Expedition to the Alamo
presents a compelling itinerary of Crockett’s journey from Tennessee to the Alamo, which is to my knowledge the only book-length work to focus primarily on that expedition.

The sheer volume of works dedicated to the Alamo precludes detailed commentary here, with a few notable exceptions. Todd Hansen’s 2003
The Alamo Reader: A Study in History
has been called the “definitive Alamo resource,” and indeed it places, for the first time, many of the existing Alamo-related documents under one cover (adding up to nearly 800 pages). It is a worthwhile and long overdue collection.

Two excellent and highly readable studies of the Texas Revolution were published in 2004. The first is William C. Davis’s
Lone Star Rising,
which is a necessary supplement and companion to his
Three Roads to the Alamo. Lone Star Rising
delivers exquisite detail of the political and social situation in Texas leading up to the siege, and the work is especially interesting in its illumination of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin, two significant architects of Texas. Also fine is H. W. Brand ’s 2004
Lone Star Nation,
which reads like a good novel while delivering strong history of the fight for an independent Texas.

Thomas Ricks Lindley’s 2003
Alamo Traces
is a fine forensic study of the Alamo’s most perplexing problems, and his careful research and severe scrutiny of facts (he’s a former detective) yield new evidence and conclusions, making the work essential for any serious further study of the Alamo. Also superlative is Stephen L. Hardin’s 1994
Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution,
a fabulous military account of the entire revolution, exquisitely illustrated by Gary S. Zaboly. The most engaging and readable rendition of the Alamo story is Walter Lord ’s timeless 1961
A Time to Stand.
Lord employs spare and unadorned prose to create a deeply enjoyable narrative account.

A few fictionalized versions of the story are worth reading. Of these, Stephen Harrigan’s 2000
The Gates of the Alamo
is the most fulfilling. Dee Brown’s classic 1942
Wave High the Banner: A Novel Based on the Life of Davy Crockett
is also quite enjoyable.

Literature devoted to the controversial death of David Crockett forms a monstrous and unwieldy subcategory of Texana and Alamo writing, and the arguments will no doubt continue on into perpetuity, mostly because there remains insufficient conclusive evidence to allow us to know definitively how he perished. Supposition and speculation based on the various “eyewitness” accounts form the central list of possibilities. The discussion (in many cases a very heated argument) can be addressed by perusing the following works: William C. Davis,
Three Roads to the Alamo,
737n; William C. Davis, “How Davy Probably Didn’t Die,”
Journal of the Alamo Battlefield Association
2 (Fall 1997): 11-37; Dan Kilgore,
How Did Davy Die?
(Texas A&M Press, 1978); Bill Groneman’s following books and articles—
Eyewitness to the Alamo: Revised Edition
(Republic of Texas Press, 2001);
Death of a Legend: The Myth and Mystery Surrounding the Death of Davy Crockett
(Republic of Texas Press, 1999);
Defense of a Legend
(Republic of Texas Press, 1994); “The Controversial Alleged Account of José Enrique de la Peña,”
Military History of the West
(Fall 1995); and “A Rejoinder: Publish Rather Than Perish—Regardless—Jim Crisp and the de la Peña Diary,”
Military History of the West
(Fall 1995). For some time now, a vigorous repartee has raged between Bill Groneman and antagonist James Crisp, whose essays on the subject of Crockett’s death include the following: “The Little Book That Wasn’t There: The Myth and the Mystery of the de la Peña Diary,”
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
98 (October 1994): 260-96; “Texas History—Texas Mystery,”
Sallyport—The Magazine of Rice University
(February/March 1995): 13-21; “When Revision Becomes Obsession: Bill Groneman and the de la Peña Diary,”
Military History of the West
(Fall 1995). Finally, Todd Hansen’s 2003
Alamo Handbook
(791-98) itemizes sources and supposed firsthand accounts and provides an interesting ranking system of their relative reliability.

Some very useful resources exist in the form of Crockett chronologies and bibliographies, and to date the best of these are as follows:
Crockett at Two Hundred: New Perspectives on the Man and the Myth,
edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Joe Cummings, 1989. Within this work exists an exhaustive bibliography that is cleverly arranged, in the form of Miles Tanenbaum’s “Following Davy’s Trail: A Crockett Bibliography” (192-241). Richard Boyd Hauck’s previously mentioned
Crockett: A Bio-Bibliography
(1982) also presents a concise chronology as well as an incisive bibliography and discussion of the Crockett record.

Two recent books worth noting include a very interesting overview and contextual primer called
Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution
(Abilene, TX, 2004). This study is written by Richard Bruce Winders, noted historian and curator of the Alamo, and is part of the Military History of Texas series. The book does a nice job of establishing historical background and context for why the siege at the Alamo took place at all. Finally, James E. Crisp’s newest effort,
Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution
(New York, 2005), condenses more than a decade of scholarly research on the Alamo and the Texas Revolution into one tidy and very personal volume, along the way peeling off some cherished layers of mythology that have long threatened to obfuscate “truths” about the Texas Revolution.