David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

Overview

"Vivid, Comprehensible . . . cuts through decades of mythmaking." —Texas Monthly

Popular culture transformed his memory into “Davy Crockett,” and Hollywood gave him a raccoon hat he hardly ever wore. In this surprising New York Times bestseller, historian Michael Wallis has cast a fresh look at the flesh-and-blood man behind one of the most celebrated figures in American history. More than a riveting story, Wallis’s David Crockett is a revelatory, authoritative biography that separates fact from fiction and provides us with an extraordinary evocation of not only a true American hero but also the rough-and-tumble times in which he lived.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393342277
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/23/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	445,756
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Michael Wallis, the best-selling author of Route 66 and Billy the Kid, has published eighteen books and won numerous honors and awards. He is a popular public speaker and a highly acclaimed voice actor. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Table of Contents

Personal Introduction xi

Preface xvii

Part I

1 "Kilt Him a B'ar" 5

2 Born on a Riverbank in Franklin 10

3 The Crocketts Arrive 16

4 Over the Mountain 22

5 On the Nolichucky 29

6 A Boy's Learning 38

7 Coming of Age 45

8 The Odyssey 51

9 Rise Above 59

10 Lovesick 65

11 Polly 71

12 Finley'sGap 78

Part II

13 Kentuck 89

14 "Remember Fort Mims" 98

15 "We Shot Them Like Dogs" 105

16 Riding with Sharp Knife 114

17 "Root Hog or Die" 119

18 Cabin Fever 129

19 A Tincture of Luck 136

Part III

20 "Itchy Footed" 145

21 "Natural Born Sense" 151

22 Gentleman from the Cane 157

23 Land of the Shakes 165

24 In the Eye of a "Harricane" 173

25 A Fool for Luck 182

26 Big Time 191

27 "The Victory Is Ours" 197

Part IV

28 Man without a Party 209

29 Trails of Tears 217

30 Lion of the West 227

31 Bear-Bit Lion 236

32 Go Ahead 244

33 Just a Matter of Time 253

34 Gone to Texas 277

35 Time of the Comet 289

36 El Alamo 307

Acknowledgments Notes 313

Bibliography 351

Index 365

What People are Saying About This

Jim Lehrer

Michael Wallis is the master frontier story teller, having chronicled everything from Billy the Kid to Highway 66. Now he’s told the tale of the real David Crockett as distinguished from the mostly mythical one. Davy (with a show biz “y”) Crockett did, in fact, die at The Alamo but he did not kill a bear when he was only three or wear a coonskin cap except in publicity photographs. That’s just for starters. But the truth has a way of being more interesting than the made-up, most particularly when in the talented writing mind and hands of Michael Wallis.

From the Publisher

"A readable and folksy account of the actual facts of Crockett's life." —-Library Journal

Editorial Reviews

"Splendid . . . a readable and surprising biography."

Star Tribune - Allen Barra

"Wallis understands the intriguing and mysterious element of American life and history."

New York Daily News - Stanley Crouch

"Highly entertaining."

Boston Globe - Kate Tuttle

Now known as a Disney coonskin-capped country caricature, David Crockett created a lasting persona built on his survival skills, embodiment of manifest destiny, and captivating storytelling, says Wallis. Offering only perfunctory coverage of Crockett's popularly imagined martyrdom at the battle of the Alamo, Wallis (Billy the Kid) sifts through his subject's substantial failures as a wilderness family man (troubled by debt, drink, and often abandoning his family) and business entrepreneur while also detailing overlooked professional successes such as his election to the U.S. and Tennessee legislatures. While Wallis illustrates the formally uneducated frontiersman's remarkable adaptability, Crockett's physical bravery against bears and moral courage in opposing aggressive mistreatment of Native Americans shine through as the defeated legislator finally suggested to his fellow Tennesseans that they "go to hell" while he happily left for Texas. Wallis's well-documented take on the famous pop culture hero reads like fiction, enhanced by flowing prose in portraying a flawed but fascinating frontiersman who faithfully carried a treasured rifle named after his estranged wife, Betsey. 60 illus. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A readable and folksy account of the actual facts of Crockett's life." ---Library Journal

From the Publisher

Michael Wallis is the master frontier story teller, having chronicled everything from Billy the Kid to Highway 66. Now he’s told the tale of the real David Crockett as distinguished from the mostly mythical one. Davy (with a show biz “y”) Crockett did, in fact, die at The Alamo but he did not kill a bear when he was only three or wear a coonskin cap except in publicity photographs. That’s just for starters. But the truth has a way of being more interesting than the made-up, most particularly when in the talented writing mind and hands of Michael Wallis.

Jim Lehrer

Wallis’ examination of the man behind the myth is both well written and engrossing.

Booklist

Like Crockett himself [Wallis] is a storyteller. The man who emerges from these pages is vivid, comprehensible, and, in the main, historically reliable. On a subject that has come to be dominated by acrimonious debate and posturing, such serenity has a lot to recommend it.

Texas Monthly

Captivated as a child by the mythical Davy Crockett as presented by Walt Disney during the 1950s, Wallis (Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd) endeavors here to find the man behind the myth; he notes that Crockett always referred to himself in writing as David, but his mission is not specifically to debunk the mythology that surrounded Crockett so much as to present a readable and folksy account of the actual facts of Crockett's life. This is not an academic study that contextualizes Crockett in relation to many of his contemporaries or explores the milieu in which he thrived. Like Daniel Boone, Crockett was viewed as the quintessential frontiersman, but historians seem to have shied away from Crockett since a Mexican diary revealed in the 1970s that he did not die in the heat of battle at the Alamo but was instead executed as a prisoner. Wallis concludes by arguing that we should celebrate Crockett for how he lived. VERDICT Lay readers will enjoy this biography, and if it leads them to want to learn more about Boone as well, they will enjoy Robert Morgan's Boone: A Biography.—John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY

Library Journal

David Crockett didn't become a legend while hunting in Tennessee. Politics and a stint in Congress made him the stuff of plays and books. Author Michael Wallis profiles Crockett and studies the creation of his myth. John Pruden gives Wallis's book a soft-spoken reading, with just a touch of amazement. He finds a suitably folksy voice for Crockett's own words, which come from the legend's autobiography and other sources. Book tours and stump speeches may not be as exciting as hunting bear, but they do show how reality gave way to legend in America's early years. Pruden makes this look at American politics and culture an entertaining listen. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2011 - AudioFile

He wasn't born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, and he didn't kill a b'ar when he was only three. Even so, David Crockett was a force of nature, as this fine biography details.

The Scots-Irish son of the American frontier, writes Wallis (Billy the Kid, 2007, etc.), became a legend within his lifetime and "died as a work still very much in progress." Yet much of what we know about Crockett is erroneous, thanks to fictions perpetuated over the course of nearly two centuries. David Crockett—David, not Davy—was indeed an accomplished hunter of bears, having killed more than 100 of them in seven months during 1825–26, as Wallis carefully records. But more than that, he was a frontier entrepreneur who "approached nature as a science and hunting as an art," earning a considerable income supplying furs for a hungry East Coast and European trade. As a politician, an endeavor in which hunting stories were guaranteed to liven up stump speeches, he fell afoul of fellow Tennessean Andrew Jackson early on, opining against several of Jackson's policies and views, particularly on the matter of what to do about the Indians. (Crockett opposed the relocations that would culminate in the Trail of Tears.) It was on the hustings, Wallis writes, that Crockett perfected a kind of bumpkin persona, wearing a buckskin shirt with two big pockets: "In one pocket he kept a big twist of tobacco and in the other a bottle of liquor," either of which worked to sway a voter. When Crockett's card in Washington played out, he left for Texas—whose Anglo secessionists, writes the author, desired freedom from Mexico at least in part because Mexico had outlawed slavery. There Crockett met his end—but not, as Wallis notes, in quite the way Walt Disney would have it.

An excellent study likely to tick off the hagiographers.

Kirkus Reviews