Richard Penn Smith & John Seelye Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PREFACE.

  CHAPTER I. - Adventures in Texas.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  APPENDIX

  Explanatory Notes

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  “ON TO THE ALAMO”

  COL. CROCKETT’S EXPLOITS AND ADVENTURES IN TEXAS

  DAVID (a.k.a Davy) CROCKETT was born in Tennessee in 1786 and was raised in frontier country, suffering much hardship during his early years. As a young man he served under Andrew Jackson during the Creek War (1814) and soon began establishing a reputation as a mighty hunter and a teller of even mightier tales. These qualities, along with quick wit and considerable charisma, led to his election to the Tennessee legislature (1821) and then in 1827 to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was an advocate for the frontiersmen of western Tennessee until defeated for reelection in 1835. Elected as a Jacksonian Democrat, he soon began to differ with the president on a number of issues and by the end of his career had drifted toward positions held by the Whig Party. Early on, the rough-hewn congressman began to call public attention to himself through his humorous remarks and tall tales; by 1830 he had inspired a popular theatrical farce and shortly thereafter collaborated on several autobiographical works, including the well-known A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834).

  Out of office and suffering from financial reverses, Crockett headed for Texas in 1836, hoping to buy land to which he could relocate his wife and children. But his plans were changed by the armed revolt of other American emigrants who hoped to throw off Mexican rule and establish an independent republic. Crockett joined the small garrison at the Alamo in San Antonio, where he gained a further measure of fame as a martyr to the cause of Texan freedom, dying a heroic death at the hands of the attacking Mexican Army led by President Santa Anna.

  JOHN SEELYE is a Graduate Research Professor of American Literature at the University of Florida. He is the author of two novels and a number of books dealing with American culture from the colonial period to the twentieth century. He has written several essays on the mythic Davy Crockett, devoted to separating fact from fiction. He serves as consulting editor of the Penguin Classics.

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  Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas first published in the

  United States of America 1836

  This edition with an introduction and notes by John Seelye published in

  Penguin Books 2003

  Introduction and notes copyright © John Seelye, 2003

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Smith, Richard Penn, 1799-1854.

  [Col. Crockett’s exploits and adventures in Texas]

  On to the Alamo : Col. Crockett’s exploits and adventures in Texas / Richard Penn

  Smith ; edited with an introduction and notes by John Seelye.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68442-5

  1. Crockett, Davy, 1786-1836. 2. Texas—History—Revolution, 1835-1836. 3. Alamo

  (San Antonio, Tex.)—Siege, 1836. 4. Pioneers—Tennessee—Biography. I. Seelye, John D.

  II. Title. III. Series.

  F436.C96136 2004

  976.4’03—dc21 2003053598

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  For Ham Hill

  Introduction

  I.

  It has been more than sixty years since Walter Blair, the distinguished scholar of American humor and folklore, established that there were at least “six Davy Crocketts.” They ranged from the Democratic congressman from Tennessee who set himself in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson to the “mythic” hero of comic almanacs published in the 1830s and ’40s, a figure essential to the tradition of southwestern humor that was brought to a fine art by Mark Twain. But perhaps the most enduring of the Crocketts has been the martyr-hero of the Alamo, who, with the other defenders of the fort in San Antonio, was killed in 1836 by the army commanded by General Santa Anna, president of Mexico. Texas was then Mexican territory, and Santa Anna was attempting to drive out American colonists because they were planning to establish a republic independent of his tyrannical rule.

  And if there were six Crocketts then it must be said that five died defending the Alamo: the one who was shot and killed early in the battle as he crossed the fort’s parade ground, the one who fell surrounded by the bodies of the Mexican soldiers he had killed, the one captured and executed with four other Americans on the orders of Santa Anna, the one who tried to escape that fate by claiming immunity through virtue of his status as a U.S. congressman, and the one who, on being sentenced to die, attempted to assassinate Santa Anna before being killed by the general’s men.

  The preferred version deep in the hearts of Texans is the second, and indeed it was the one reported firsthand by the two survivors of the massacre at the Alamo: Mrs. Susanna Dickinson, widow of a gunnery officer slain in the battle, and a slave named Joe, the servant of Colonel William B. Travis, who died while commanding the defense of the fort. The alternative versions may be traced to Mexican and other sources, some of dubious authority, many recounted well after the fact. Moreover, it must be said that the stories told by Mrs. Dickinson and Joe were filtered through a journalistic sieve. In short, the manner of Colonel Crockett’s death will never be known, but none of the contradictory accounts deny him his heroic stature, not even the story of his attempt to bluff his way to freedom, which is the kind of brass that passes for gold in Texas.

  The point to be made is that the fame of Davy Crockett is inseparable from the name of the Alamo, and will last so long as the other endures in the national memory. “The Alamo,” wrote the journalist Richard Harding Davis in 1892, “is to the South-west what Independence Hall is to the United States, an
d Bunker Hill to the East; but the pride of it belongs to every American, whether he lives in Texas or in Maine” (Davis: 17). The occasion of this remark was Davis’s visit to San Antonio, and the irony of it is that, according to Davis’s biographer, Arthur Lubow, the reporter had only recently learned about the Alamo. At a dinner party in New York given by Theodore Roosevelt, then a young civil service commissioner, the host was politely but firmly indignant when his guest admitted his ignorance regarding that sacred site in Texas. TR forthwith informed Davis of the history of the Alamo, which the reporter dutifully included early in his account of his western travels.

  Roosevelt in 1892 had only just begun his political career, which would be given a considerable boost by his role in the Spanish-American War, thanks in large part to the account of the fight for San Juan Hill written by Richard Harding Davis, but he was already associated with the American West in the minds, if not the hearts, of his fellow Americans. Roosevelt had written books about his adventures as a ranchman in North Dakota and the first two volumes of his Winning of the West had been published in 1889. More to the point, in 1895 he would write, in collaboration with his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Hero Tales from American History.

  This was a book intended for “young Americans,” containing the stories of “some Americans who showed that they knew how to live and how to die; who proved their truth by their endeavor, and who joined to the stern and manly qualities which are essential to the well being of a masterful race the virtues of gentleness, of patriotism, and of lofty adherence to an ideal” (xxiii). This jingoistic, chauvinistic collection was in many ways a prolegomenon to the forthcoming war with Spain, and among Roosevelt’s contributions was an essay titled “Remember the Alamo,” the famous slogan that soon enough would be updated to “Remember the Maine.”

  The hero who emerges from Roosevelt’s account of the Alamo siege was predictably Davy Crockett, who “was the last man” left standing: “wounded in a dozen places, he faced his foes with his back to the wall, ringed around by the bodies of the men he had slain” (86). But as Mexican lancers held him at bay, “weakened by wounds and loss of blood,” he was helpless against soldiers with carbines who “shot him down.” “Some say,” added Roosevelt, “that when Crockett fell from his wounds, he was taken alive and was then shot by Santa Anna’s order; but his fate cannot be told with certainty, for not a single American was left alive. At any rate, after Crockett fell the fight was over. Every one of the hardy men who had held the Alamo lay still in death. Yet they died well avenged, four times their number fell at their hands in the battle” (87).

  In Hero Tales, Crockett keeps company with, among other notable Americans, Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark, whose stories were also told by Roosevelt, a man drawn to soldiers who were also frontiersmen and mighty hunters. As the revisionist historian Richard Slotkin has maintained, Roosevelt regarded Boone and Crockett as “feasible role models as well as heroic ideals,” and his “veneration of archetypal frontiersman … was an American equivalent of the Victorian gentleman’s playing at medieval chivalry” (Gunfighter Nation: 37). In 1888, Roosevelt and Lodge founded the Boone and Crockett Club, an organization whose members were devoted to “manly sport with the rifle” and who were dedicated to the preservation of large game animals through legislation (Morris: 383-84). In that same year Roosevelt published Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, which with his earlier Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) established his fame as a man in whose arms a rifle sat easy and whose walls were covered by trophy heads of formidable beasts he had killed.

  David Crockett’s autobiographical Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (1834) contains several accounts of his encounters with large bears, the pioneer’s most ferocious four-legged adversary, from which he invariably emerged victorious. But in Hero Tales it was Crockett’s slaughter of Mexicans that Roosevelt celebrated in the name of “the freedom of Texas,” for the courageous Tennessean was representative of the other frontiersmen killed at the Alamo. They were “a wild and ill-disciplined band, little used to restraint or control, but they were men of iron courage and great bodily powers, skilled in the use of their weapons, and ready to meet with stern and uncomplaining indifference whatever doom fate might have in store for them” (85).

  Slotkin notes that the battle for the Alamo occurred too late for inclusion in TR’s Winning of the West (1889-96), the chronology of which ends early in the nineteenth century. But drawing on Roosevelt’s account in Hero Tales, he observes that “Crockett’s death at the Alamo would have symbolized the transfer of all those qualities that the hunter personified to a new field of struggle in which the primary enemy is not a ‘savage’ race but a civilized (or ‘semicivilized’) nation formed by an inferior race in which Indian and Latin stocks are mixed” (51). Certainly, Roosevelt’s description of the defenders of the Alamo suggests the qualities of the western men he would bring together as the Rough Riders in 1898, warranting Slotkin’s assertion that the Alamo signified “the shift from one form of Frontier expansion to another … provid[ing] a metaphoric anticipation of Roosevelt’s polemic on behalf of overseas imperialism, which he saw as the necessary continuation of the ‘Winning of the West.’”

  Roosevelt’s account of the Alamo drew in part on a book published in 1836, Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas, a first-person narrative supposedly based on a diary written by Crockett that was recovered by a Mexican general after the battle for the Alamo. Later found on the general’s body by an American after the subsequent battle of San Jacinto, in which an army led by Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna and took the Mexican president prisoner, the “diary” was rushed into print and was regarded as genuine for many years. Eventually the book was declared spurious and identified as a work of virtual fiction, but it was so vivid an account of Crockett’s last adventure that it continued to influence other writers. Thus the Walt Disney version of the Crockett story, filmed in the 1950s, starring Fess Parker as the “King of the Wild Frontier,” relied on Exploits and Adventures for its account of the hero’s journey across Texas toward the Alamo and immortality.

  Most recently, a lengthy excerpt from Exploits and Adventures appeared in a collection of documents, Eyewitness to the Alamo, edited by Bill Groneman, with the explanation that although the book was “not written by Crockett,” it was accepted for years as authentic, and “has served as an eyewitness account of the Alamo in the past” (43). After all, Groneman argues, so many “other accounts are phoney, or at least suspect, there is enough reason to include this one.” The thesis underlying Groneman’s collection, borrowed from Thucydides, is that the historic record is made up of such a multiplicity of contradictory accounts of events, most of which are dictated by self (or other) interests, that the truth can never be known. Since the historical record is mostly fiction, why not include fiction presented as fact?

  By 1884 the author of Exploits and Adventures had been identified as Richard Penn Smith, a Philadelphia author hired by the publishers Carey and Hart in 1836 to produce a book attributed to Crockett that would exploit his recent martyrdom. The hope was that its popularity might help the sales of another book credited to the famous Tennessee congressman, An Account of Colonel Crockett’s Tour of the North and Down East, issued by Carey and Hart the year before. It must be said that by 1836 ghostwritten autobiographical books credited to Crockett were not uncommon, starting with Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee (1833), a popular collection of hunting tales and humorous stories rendered in the first person that appeared later that same year as Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel Crockett of West Tennessee.

  There is evidence that Crockett contributed to this book, which he later disavowed as his own work because he emerged from it as something of a backwoods buffoon. He attempted to correct this comic image with his Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, a text heavily revised by another hand, for the simple reason that Crockett was strategically unlettered. Thou
gh he became a congressman, his correspondence has the orthographic and syntactical resonance of the tall tales issued under his name as the “Davy Crockett” almanacs, the first of which was published the year of his death. Inspired by the boastful hunter and Indian slayer of The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett, the almanac anecdotes were entirely spurious, though they contributed greatly to Crockett’s subsequent stature as a folk figure.

  Constance Rourke may be credited with Crockett’s twentieth-century elevation to mythic status, thanks to her biography that first appeared in 1934. In keeping with the nativist spirit of the times, her book is a melange of elements taken from the autobiographical narratives and the almanacs, and in the latter instance Rourke suggested that the fictional tall tales had parallels with traditional mythology. Rourke believed that the almanac stories were derived from authentic oral sources, originating in the backwoods and the frontier, and should be acknowledged as genuine American folklore. This uncritical stance was forwarded by Walter Blair, who also compiled material from the almanacs about the famous and soon fabulous Mississippi boatman Mike Fink, portrayed as Crockett’s boon companion. Blair conjoined them both with other “folk” figures like Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack; Mose, the courageous New York fireman; and Pecos Bill, the storied cowboy.

  In time, the heroes of this pantheon were shown to be the creation of relatively sophisticated eastern writers, print-shop hacks for the most part who may have borrowed from European mythological sources but whose stories had nothing to do with any backwoods oral tradition. Indeed, the “heroes” they created were for the most part crude, violent, racist, and misogynistic braggarts and buffoons. These savage caricatures of primarily frontier types were satiric representatives of the democratic masses whose power was associated with the emergence of President Andrew Jackson. “Fakelore,” not folklore, as Richard Dorson came to style them, the comic almanacs were expressions of eastern elitism, uneasiness regarding the threat of Jacksonian democracy. This anxiety came to full flower a half-century later during the presidential contest between William McKinley, a Republican identified as the candidate of moneyed eastern elites, and William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat with a large western agrarian constituency, the heart and soul of Populism.