David Crockett: American Hero from Limestone

            Washington and Greene Counties in Tennessee have a rich history.  The area was in what is now known as the “Lost State of Franklin,” an area that applied to become the 14th state of the United States but was rejected.  It was home to Andrew Johnson and, for a short time, Andrew Jackson.  Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, Fess Parker played two nearly mythological giants on screen: David Crockett and Daniel Boone.  Daniel Boone had been an early explorer of the area that would become East Tennessee.  A carving in a tree in Washington County pronounced that “D. Boon cilled a Bar 1760 [sic].”[1]  Boone was an early “trailblazer” who traveled the frontier creating trails people would follow into frontier lands. The other, David Crockett, native son of “Lime Stone [sic], on the Nola-chucky [sic] river”[2], was born in a cabin on land straddling the Greene and Washington County borders in humble beginnings before he rose to grace the halls of the US Capitol and became a martyr at the Alamo. 

            Crockett had several siblings there in Limestone.  In one story he recounted how his four older brothers and another youth he called Campbell decided to leave David on the shore and take their father’s canoe on the river.  David was angry but became somewhat delighted and felt justified that he had been done wrong by being left ashore when the canoe would not paddle the direction the Campbell boy attempted to paddle it.  The canoe quickly headed towards the falls on the river.  Seeing the boys on the canoe, a neighbor identified as Kendall started in a full-on sprint toward the canoe, stripping off his clothing as he made a mad dash towards the river.  Kendall was able to save the boys, but Crockett stated that he was comforted because of his “belief that it was a punishment on them for leaving me on the shore.”[3]

            Crockett, in his autobiography, told other stories of how he would skip school only to be caught and beaten by his father.  At one point he was sold as an indentured servant by his father.  He then escaped and began to make a life of his own before returning home.  His early life was quite extraordinary though it is possible that some of his stories were tall tales.  That may not have been that uncommon for life on the frontier.

            Yet when Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States, he made what he intended to be a negative entry about Crockett, though its very possible that Crockett and many other frontiersmen would have considered the entry quite powerful.  Crockett had moved to Western Tennessee by this time.  Tocqueville stated that the voters in the western district of Tennessee “sent to the House of Representatives in Congress an individual named David Crockett, who has had no education, can read with difficulty, and has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods.”[4]

            What Tocqueville likely saw to be a negative is a virtue of what it meant and still means to be an American.  A young Crockett, born into poverty, with no formal education, never owned anything really.  Yet he rose to prominence as a Congressman.  He was thrown into conversations as a potential presidential candidate. Yet he chose to continue to Texas where he would become a martyr and grow to be one of the greats of that early United States’ pantheon.

           

Sources

Crockett, David.  A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
            Press.

Heale, M. J. “The Role of the Frontier in Jacksonian Politics: David Crockett and the Myth of the
            Self-Made Man.” The Western Historical Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1973): 405–23.  
            https://doi.org/10.2307/967284. 

WJHL.  “‘Bars’ vs. ‘Bears’ Controversy Stirs Discussion in Washington County, Tenn.” 
            February 22, 2019.  Accessed July 1, 2023. https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/bars-vs-
            bears-controversy-stirs-discussion-in-washington-county-tenn/.

 

 


[1] WJHL, “‘Bars’ vs. ‘Bears’ Controversy Stirs Discussion in Washington County, Tenn.,” February 22, 2019, accessed July 1, 2023, https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/bars-vs-bears-controversy-stirs-discussion-in-washington-county-tenn/.

[2] David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 17.

[3] Ibid., 18-20.

[4] M.J. Heale, “The Role of the Frontier in Jacksonian Politics: David Crockett and the Myth of the Self-Made Man,” The Western Historical Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1973): 405, https://doi.org/10.2307/967284.

  

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