born on a mountaintop by bob thompson - excerpt

7/29/2019 Born on a Mountaintop by Bob Thompson - Excerpt

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PRAI SE FOR BORN ON A MOUNTAINTOP

Born on a Mountaintop explores the blurry boundary between America's legends and histories, andhow the relationship between the two often tells us much about the construction of belief in the absenceof hard facts. And it is also a great road trip one that leaves you wanting to have ridden shotgun

along the way.--Charles Frazier, author of Nightwoods and Cold Mountain

Bob Thompson's shrewd and heartfelt account of his year-long journey through the thickets of DavyCrockett lore is essential reading for anyone who's ever worn a coonskin cap, dreamt of the wildfrontier, or remembered the Alamo.

--Gary Krist, author of City of Scoundrels

Highly personal and witty looks with perception at the real Crockett as opposed to the mythical'Davy,' how Americans embraced the latter in his own time, and how popular culture has handled hismultiple personae since his death. Crockett is a virtually irresistible character in his own right, but

Thompson somehow succeeds in making him even more appealing.--William C. Davis, author of Three Roads to the Alamo

Bob Thompson blazes the dangerous trail between myth and history with the skill of a fine scholarand the wit of a born storyteller. I never realized the search for Davy Crockett, real and imagined,could be so enlightening and so much fun.

--Michael K azin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

A splendid job of evoking the life and legend of David Crockett the immortal 'Davy' who captivatedyoung Americans because of Fess Parker's portrayal in the 1950s, served as an icon for Anglo-Texanswho venerated the memory of the Alamo, and served as a touchstone for anyone drawn to the image of

backwoods characters who triumphed in America. By turns engrossing, hilarious, and moving.--Gary W. Gallagher, author of Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular ArtShape What We Know about the Civil War

Bob Thompson can flat-out write, and he paints a vivid picture here of David Crockett, who was a farmore complex and interesting man and myth than his coonskinned, bear-hunting, Alamo-defendingiconic image . . .This is road-trip history at its best.

--Jim Donovan, author of The Blood of Heroes


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Copyright 2012 by Bob Thompson

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarksof Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

ISBN 978 -0-307 -72089 -4eISBN 978-0-307-72091-7

printed in the united states of america

Jacket design by Christopher BrandMap illustrations by David Lindroth

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First Edition


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1

Play That Song Again

Minutes after I walked into Alamo Plaza, I saw my rst Davy Crock-ett ghost. He took the form of a solidly built man in an outsizedcoonskin capthe kind with a cute little raccoon face as well as abushy tailwho handed me a business card.

Hes my great-great-great-grandfather, David Preston Crockettsaid. Yeah, Im a grandson of the famous Davy Crockett.

David had put on his Crockett nery for the occasion, which wasthe 175 th anniversary of his ancestors death at the Alamo, mostlikely within a few yards of where we stood. In addition to the cap,he wore a long fringed jacket and matching pants that looked as if they were made of buckskin but werent.

Would you believe this stuff came from Walmart? he asked.Then he told me how hed bought some chamois cloth, maybe tenyears before, and learned to sew.

San Antonio, Texas, was my last stop on a search for traces of thehistorical and mythical Crockettfor the ghosts, as Id come tothink of them, of an extraordinary American life. Colorful threadsof Davys story had been spun into legend while the man himself was still alive, and that storys epic ending on the morning of March


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2 Bob Thompson

For starters, there were all the other guys decked out in raccooncaps and brown fringed garments.

At one point, I saw two Davys in full regaliaboth associatedwith a production company that specialized in historical lmsshake each others hands in front of the Alamo church. Up walkeda tourist whod heard that the real Crockett might have carvedhis name on the churchs iconic facade. One of the Davys set herstraight.

Mr. Crockett was a gentleman. Mr. Crockett would not do that,he said. Ill take that to the bank.

A few hours later, waiting for a reenactment of the siege andbattle to begin, I found myself standing next to two more Davys.Mike and Mark Chenault of Dallas were identical sixtyish twinswearing identical Crockett outts. I asked one of themIm prettysure it was Markwhat made them fans.

Just Crocketts devotion, his patriotism to America, he told me.He came all the way from Tennessee, you know, and the timingwas just so perfect.

I dont think Davy would have agreed about the timing. Theformer congressman hadnt planned on coming to Texas just to die.Still, dying was what the Crockett wed all come to see was aboutto do.

Doug Davenport was a craggy-faced reenactor from the SanAntonio Living History Association; he wore the usual cap andfringed coat, but his legwear set him apart. I had no idea whetherthe real Crockett ever wore white pants, but the unusual look,oddly enough, made Davenport seem more authentic, less like aHollywood clone. This was a good thing, because the thirteen-daysiege and battle about to be re-created were desperately serious.General Antonio Lpez de Santa Anna had just marched intotown to quash the Texas Revolution, taking Crockett and the rest


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Born on a Mountaintop 3

Get everyone into the Alamo! someone yelled.Give us a position, and me and the Tennessee boys will protect

it for you, Davy told his commanding ofcer, William Barret Tra-vis, who assigned him to defend a wooden palisade that lled a gapin the south wall.

Then it was hurry up and wait.It is not easy to evoke twelve tense days in which little actual

ghting occurred, but in the short time allotted to them, Daven-port and his colleagues did their best. Deant cannon shots werered. Messengers rode out and back. Longed-for help failed to ar-rive. I would just as soon march out there and die in the open,Crockett confessed at one point, just as the real Crockett is said tohave done.

He didnt get his wish. On the thirteenth day, shortly beforedawn, Santa Anna nally ordered his men to storm the walls.

I lost track of Davenport during the booming, smoky chaos of the assault, then spotted him slumped against the palisade. Therehe stayed, cap twitching occasionally, until the words Rememberthe Alamo! came over the loudspeaker and the defenders sprangback to life. All available Davys were soon posing for photographs.Adults and children crowded around, and as I watched, I heard ayoung ponytailed mom try to convey to her son the seriousness of the moment he was experiencing.

You are walking where Davy Crockett walked around, she toldhim. That is really cool!

Decades before that mom was born, Walt Disney made DavyCrockett the coolest guy in American historyand walking where


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4 Bob Thompson

Davys 1950 s apotheosis came about through a wildly unpredict-able combination of circumstances. Among them were the emer-gence of television as an irresistible cultural force; Disneys driveto fund his innovative new Anaheim theme park; Fess Parkers bitpart in a lm about giant mutant ants; and possibly the stickiestsong ever written, with lyrics thrown together by a man who hadnever tried writing a song before. (All together now: Davy, DAY-VEE Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier!) Disney hadnt plannedto spark a Crockett craze any more than Crockett had planned toget killed at the AlamoWalt just thought he was making a three-part TV serieswhich goes to show that even a marketing geniusneeds a helping hand from fate now and then.

Americans obsession with Davy Crockett also showedand notfor the rst timehow powerfully his story resonated with that of the nation itself.

For anyone who loves U.S. history, Crockett is a wonderful pointof entry, because he intersects with so much of it. Youll nd himin the middle of the bitter struggle between settlers and Indians, forexample, taking different sides at different times. He personies theradical expansion of democracy in the age of Andrew Jacksonfarbetter, in fact, than the patrician, plantation-owning Old Hickoryhimselfas well as the unstoppable migration westward that drewambitious, adventurous men and women to places such as San An-tonio. Crockett was constantly pulling up stakes. He spent a life-time striving to escape the have-not side of a class divide thatAmericans like to pretend doesnt exist. A erce resentment of thehaves sparked his political career; getting too cozy with themhelped end it.

There is far more to the Crockett story, however, than a fascinat-ing mans real life.

To start with, theres Legendary Davy, a character who took shape


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left Tennessee for Texas. Created by the image-conscious politicianhimself, Crocketts exaggerated backwoods persona was magniedand distorted, especially after he arrived in Washington, by the po-litical and media culture of his time. The rapid spread of Crockettsfame may come as a revelation to those who think of celebrity poli-tics as a recent phenomenon. Here was a nineteenth-century JohnF. Kennedy whose PT- 109 equivalent, ghting Indians, became gristfor a campaign biography. Here was a Ronald ReaganSarah Palinblend whose common touch and theatrical persona inspired a playcalled The Lion of the West, with an unmistakably Crockettesquegure playing the title role.

David Crockett went to check out his alter ego at a Washing-ton theater in December 1833 . Congressman and actor exchangedbows.

Twenty-seven months later, the real man would be dead andMythic Davy would take his place. Over the next 175 years, thisCrockett would shift his shape from Texas martyr to tall-tale super-hero, from silent-movie star to icon of the TV generationand,more recently, to symbolic ash point of the culture wars. Elusiveand immortal, an Everyman who is also larger than life, MythicDavy has always reected Americans evolving sense of who we are.

Why did fate cast David Crockett in this role? Crockett himself is said to have offered the beginning of an explanation. Fame islike a shaved pig with a greased tail, he has been quoted as ex-plaining, and it is only after it has slipped through the hand of some thousands that some fellow, by mere chance, holds onto it!As with many sayings attributed to Crockett, unfortunately, thisone has been disputed, but it has a nice, self-deprecating ring and itsuggests part of the answer.

Not all of it, though.Something besides luck drew people to David when he was alive,


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6 Bob Thompson

was plenty of thatdrew them to his story after he was dead. Un-derstanding his attraction and its staying power was one of my chief goals when I set out in pursuit of Crockett ghosts.

I had a more personal reason, too.Its not what youre thinking. Unlike so many members of my

generation, I had no fond childhood memories of Disney Davy,mostly because I never saw those Crockett shows. My father didntwant a TV in the house, and as a New England kid, growing up justa few miles from Lexington and Concord, I was more attached toPaul Revere and Johnny Tremain anyway.

All of which meant that I was hopelessly unprepared whenforty years after his Disney debuthistorys most charismaticfrontiers man took over my familys life.

The car music was doing what car music is supposed to do. It was anold Burl Ives collection, folksy and melodic, and it was keeping thegirls quiet while their mother drove. Burl sang Shoo Fly, Monasfavorite, his opulent voice caressing each line (I feel . . . I feel . . . I

feellike a morning star . . .). He sang Big Rock Candy Mountain,What Kind of Animal Are You?, and Polly Wolly Doodle, thenbroke into a bouncy number that Mona and her older sister, Lizzie,had never heard before.

Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, Burl Ives sang. Green-est state in the land of the free . . .

When the music stopped, there was a moment of silence fromthe back seat. Lizzie broke it.

Play that song again, she said.Shed hit her fourth birthday not long before, and her sister was


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getting us into. Deborah and I didnt know either. We were newparents, just beginning to understand that children rarely learn any-thing in exactly the way, or at precisely the time, adults expect themto. Kids see the universe as an endless web available for browsing.Click on Burl Ives. Click on Davy Crockett. Hmm, thats interest-ing: lets go to the next level, and the next, and now lets followthat line over there. Before you can say Remember the Alamo,your rstborn is trying to make sense of the brutality of nineteenth-century Indian wars, the gender gap in frontier legends, and thecomplex relationship between heroic narratives and historical truth.

All before youve had time to research essential facts, such as:Where was Davy Crockett born, anyway?

Not on any mountaintop, it turns out.After that rst replay request, Lizzie began to ask for The Ballad

of Davy Crockett again and again, and her mother started havingashbacks. Deborah, unlike me, could summon fond images of thelittle yellow record with the song in its grooves and of the hunky,buckskinned Parker playing Crockett on TV. So she elded thegirls initial questions as best she could, and we set out to supple-ment our knowledge.

One part of the task was to separate fact from ction. Anotherwas to explain the difference.

As it happens, there was quite a lot on Davy in the childrenssection of our local library, most of it divisible into two categories.There were works of the Davy Crocket: Young Rieman variety,which were either fact-based junior biographies or ctionalized ver-sions of the historical Davys life. And there were tall tales, bookswith titles such as The Narrow Escapes of Davy Crockett, in whichDavy appeared as a wholly legendary, Paul Bunyanlike gure whohitched rides on lighting bolts, climbed Niagara Falls on the backsof alligators, and walked across the Mississippi on stilts. One of the


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8 Bob Thompson

bridged the genres; the main text narrated the real history, while inthe margins, a skeptical cartoon raccoon debunked assorted Crock-ett myths.

For weeks, Lizzies bedtime reading was all Crockett, all the time.When we hit the library, shed head straight for the Crockett biosand start pulling them off the shelf. By now both she and Monahad memorized the Davy song. Was it true, they asked, that he kilthim a bar when he was only three? Probably not, we explained;that was a tall tale. Was it real that, as the Burl Ives version hasit, he fought and died at the Alamo? Yes. Was he, in fact, born onthat Tennessee mountaintop? Well, no, he was born on a river banknear where Big Limestone Creek ows into the Nolichucky River,but yes, it was in what we now call Tennessee, except that Tennes-see wasnt quite a state yet, and . . .

There are a number of concepts in that Crockett ballad thatrequire explanation when youre talking to a preschooler. Theresstatehood, for example, which gets you into the federal system, andtheres Congress, as in He went off to Congress an served a spell,which gets you into the whole notion of politics and representativegovernment. Still, Id never have predicted that wed get so far intoDavys historical context that wed end up reading Lizzie, at her in-sistence, a 150 -page American Heritage Junior Library biography of Andrew Jackson.

The real Crocketts career was closely linked to Jacksons. Davydid not ght single-handed in the Indian wars, as the song hasit, but as a volunteer under General Jackson. After Jackson be-came president, Representative Crocketts outspoken oppositionto his fellow Tennessean became an irritant. Tennessees Jackson-dominated Democratic machine turned Crockett out of ofce andsent him on his fateful way to Texas.

But those are facts, and we werent conning ourselves to facts.


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tall-tale books, Irwin Shapiros Yankee Thunderthey formed atwo-person mutual admiration society.

Youre the best man I ever clapped eyes on, Shapiros Davy tellsAndy, and o course Im Davy Crockett.

Then by the great horn spoon, Andy roars in reply, lets ndout which one o us is the best o the two! And that man will runfor president!

Bragging, roaring, battling: alert readers will have noticed that,while our children are both girls, Davy is as stereotypically guylikeas they come. We noticed, too, and were glad to see that Crockettnever got rejected as a boy thing. At the same time, we found itimpossible to view him as anything other than what he was: theexceptionally likable hero of an exceptionally male narrative.

Neither of Davys real-life wives, we learned, gets much play inthe biographies, although their stories, if they were better known,would shed light on both Crocketts character and the Americanfrontier experience. The legendary Davy comes with a legendarywife named Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind, a rough-and-ready charmer who grins the skins off bears and wins Davys heartby knotting six rattlesnakes together to form a rope. Lizzie andMona liked Sally Ann Thunder Ann well enough, but there wasnever any question of divided loyalty. There is, after all, no Queenof the Wild Frontier.

We worried about this some, but not too much. Thats becausewe had a far more troubling part of the Crockett saga to deal with.

More than a year after Lizzie discovered Davy, we got her a plasticAlamo set, complete with bayonet-wielding blue plastic Mexicansand rie-toting brown plastic Texans. She and her sister took to itimmediately, arranging Crockett, Travis, Santa Anna, and the restin a variety of warlike congurations. Yet Deborah and I couldnthelp but notice, at least until a neighbor boy joined the game, that


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10 Bob Thompson

Crockett story, which had opened some wonderful historical win-dows. Precisely what happened at the end of the Alamo ght wasone window we didnt mind keeping shut for a while.

When Lizzie was rst memorizing the Crockett ballad, she askedto hear the penultimate verse, the one with Burl Ivess fought anddied at the Alamo line, a few extra times. Beyond that, the girlsdidnt actively pursue the idea of Davys death. They didnt ignoreit but seemed to be giving it time to sink in. The childrens booksand audio tales we got them handled it gently. We lost the battle,but we won the war is how the CD from the Rabbit Ears Treasuryof Tall Tales wraps things up, with narrator Nicolas Cage evokingDavy-the-Legends continued blissful existence in the celestialvapors from where I speak.

We did learn, well into our Crockett phase, that a historicaldeath scene couldproduce obsessive interest. Looking for a favoritepresident to complement her sisters beloved Andy, Mona settledon Abraham Lincoln. When we checked out picture books aboutAbe, she would stare at the inevitable assassination illustrationsand ask us to read the relevant text over and over. A bit later, sheasked her mother, Is dying real?

None of this, however, prepared us for what happened when wegot to the end of that American Heritage biography of Jackson. Lizziewas curled up in bed, with Deborah reading. Davys sparring part-ner had retired to his Tennessee home, where as spring drifted intosummer along the Cumberland, he wrote a last letter to President

James K. Polk, advising him on some incomprehensible nancialmatter. Deborah read on as the old man bade farewell to servantsand friends and expired quietly on June 8, 1845 , long before thelate-setting June sun had sunk behind the western hills. Then sheturned to Lizzie, and saw that tears were ooding down her face.

Lizzie loved Andy Jackson. His location in time was confusing.


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I have to admit that I got choked up, too. Not by Jacksons death, though I was movedas any parent

would beby my daughters grief. The more I had read aboutthe real Andy, the less lovable he had seemed. And not by anyDisney-implanted worship of his coonskin-capped adversary. Bynow, researching Davys story during our family recapitulation of the Crockett craze, I was fully aware that there was a awed humanbeing behind the irresistible Fess Parker reinvention.

And yet . . .Theres a great scene in that Rabbit Ears narration in which

Davy, to raise the spirits of the embattled Alamo defenders, climbsup on the ramparts one night, aps his arms, crows like a rooster,and hurls a good round of brag into the menacing darkness. I amhalf alligator, half horse and half snapping turtle with a touch of earthquake thrown in! he roars as David Brombergs ddle picksup the tempo in the background. I can grin a hurricane out ocountenance, recite the Bible from Genosee to Christmas, blowthe wind of liberty through squash vine, tote a steamboat on myback, frighten the old folks, suck forty rattlesnake eggs at one sit-tin and swallow General Santy Anna whole without chokin if youbutter his head and pin his ears back. . . . I shall never surrender orretreat.

Listening to this for the rst time, I was astonished to nd thatmy eyes were moist.

Why had I found that ctionalized brag so moving?I didnt know.The question would become one I set out to answeryears later,

long after Lizzie and Mona had moved on from Davy, Andy, andAbeas I marched deeper and deeper into Crockett territory.


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12 Bob Thompson

me, and I wanted to explore the way the transformation got made inDavys case. Yet at the same time, no matter how many legends andmyths I encountered, the real Davids story continued to move me.

Here was a man who started life as anonymous as you could getand almost as poor. He struggled, failed, pulled himself together,and struggled some more. He turned out to be better at politicsthan anything else, bear hunting excepted, and his feel for his fron-tier audience, along with a gift for humorous gab, earned him ahigh-prole job in Washington. There, like a lot of other politi-cians, he got in over his head. His friends built him up, then lethim down when he stopped being useful. The road to Texas lookedlike the road to redemption, and when he got there, he thoughthed found the Promised Land.

I am in hopes of making a fortune yet for myself and family badas my prospect has been, he wrote in his last letter home.

That letter was written in San Augustine, in east Texas, not farfrom where Crockett volunteered to ght for Texas independence.I wanted to go there. I wanted to check out the landscape farthernorth, near present-day Honey Grove, that Crockett called therichest country in the world. I wanted to visit Crocketts birthplaceon that east Tennessee riverbank, from which I was hoping youcould at least see a mountaintop, and to look for traces of him innearby Morristown, where he grew up in conict with his father,a debt-ridden tavern keeper who liked to drink. I wanted to go toAlabama, where he and Jackson fought the Creeks; to the site of Mrs. Balls Boarding House, a few blocks from the White House,where Congressman Crockett bedded down; to Lowell, Massachu-setts, one of the most revealing stops on his epic political booktour; and to more Crockett sites in middle and west Tennesseethan I could keep track of, among them Lynchburg, Beans Creek,Lawrenceburg, Rutherford, and Memphis. I wanted to dig up rare


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Parker thought he might get red before his Davy could even getto the Alamo, and, of course, make a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Texas Liberty itself. Along the way, I gured, I would seek out histo-rians, museum curators, park rangers, fellow pilgrims, and Crockettobsessives of all stripesanyone who might help me get a feel forthe real, legendary, and mythical character I was pursuing.

At some point, before my travel plans were complete, Deborahintroduced me to a familiar-sounding childrens song by familyfavorites They Might Be Giants. It seemed, in its own weird way,to sum things up:

Davy, Davy CrockettThe buckskin astronautDavy, Davy CrockettTheres more than we were taught

Yes, there is. The ghosts of David Crockett haunt the Americanpsychic landscape. I couldnt wait to start tracking them down.


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born on a mountaintop by bob thompson - excerpt

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