David Crockett (5 page)

Almanac
cover, 1839. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

Almanac
cover, 1841. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

Almanac
cover, 1846. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

Almanac
illustration. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

Almanac
illustration. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

Almanac
illustration with text. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

I
T’S HARD FOR ANYONE BORN,
say, after 1958 to recall the “Davy Crockett” frenzy that swept America in the 1950s. So profound was the cultural inundation that no baby boomer can fail to recall this charismatic American hero’s name. Such recognition, to my way of thinking, is a good thing, but the veritable flood of misinformation about Crockett’s life that resulted—which I became aware of only later in life, and which in part has motivated me to write this book—created a mythology that continues to this day.

My first exposure to this inimitable American icon came, and I can vividly recall the date, on the frosty night of December 15, 1954, in my hometown of St. Louis. The ABC television network had just aired
Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter
, the first of three episodes produced by Walt Disney for his studio’s then new series, which had premiered two months earlier. Called simply
Disneyland
during its first four years, this anthology series, under a variety of other names, including, most commonly,
The Wonderful World of Disney
, was to become one of the longest-running prime-time programs on American television.

I was just nine years old that December evening, but I could have predicted the show’s success. I was hooked moments after hearing the theme music, “When You Wish upon a Star,” sung by cartoon insect Jiminy Cricket from the soundtrack of the movie
Pinocchio
. Longtime Disney announcer Dick Wesson introduced host Walt Disney and, with some visual assistance from a flittering Tinkerbell, Uncle Walt unleashed the legendary frontier character Davy Crockett from the twelve-inch screen of our 1950 table model RCA Victor television set into our living room, as if from a runaway train.

I was a goner. Within only minutes the larger-than-life Crockett, clad in buckskin and wearing a coonskin cap, had won me over. My fickle nine-year-old heart pounded. The previous summer, at two separate events in a department store parking lot, I had shaken the hand of Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid, but now they were instantly demoted to lesser status on my list of heroes. Even Stan Musial—“swinging Stan the Man,” the legendary St. Louis Cardinal All-Star slugger, whose name was etched in granite at the top of that list—was in jeopardy of being topped.

By the time that first episode ended, the image of Crockett, as portrayed by twenty-nine-year-old Fess Parker, was firmly ensconced in my psyche. I did not even consider staying up for
Strike It Rich
and
I Got a Secret
. I forgot about the promise of fresh snow and the good sledding sure to follow. Instead I headed straight to my room, where I pored over the
World Book Encyclopedia
entry for Crockett, dreaming of the swash-buckler with a proclivity for dangerous behavior, a most commendable quality for any red-blooded American kid.

As I would quickly learn, I was not alone. More than forty million others tuned in to
Disneyland
that Wednesday night. By the time the next episode,
Davy Crockett Goes to Congress
, aired (on January 16, 1955), followed, on February 23, by
Davy Crockett at the Alamo
, I, along with much of the nation—especially the growing ranks of what would later be called the baby boom generation—was swept up by the Crockett frenzy. We wanted more.

And more came in the form of an unprecedented merchandising whirlwind, in which Crockett was commercialized in ways that would have been unthinkable to the man himself. Every kid had to have a coonskin cap like Davy’s, and almost overnight the wholesale prices of raccoon pelts soared from twenty-five cents a pound to six dollars, with the sale of at least ten million furry caps. Within only months of the series premiere, more than $100 million was spent on at least three thousand different Crockett items, including pajamas, lunch boxes, underwear, comics, books, moccasins, toothbrushes, games, clothing, toy rifles, sleds, and curtains. The catchy theme song “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” sold more than four million copies and remained No. 1 on the Top Ten list for thirteen weeks. On May 7, 1955, I proudly wore my coonskin hat when Gisèle MacKenzie sang the top tune of the week on
Your Hit Parade
. Like every one of my pals, I knew the words were true. We sang Crockett’s ballad at the top of our lungs as we built forts from old Christmas trees and cardboard boxes, transforming the neighborhood into our own version of Crockett country.

Davy Crockett quickly became our obsession. Until he came into our lives, we had mostly played cowboys and Indians; other times, we went to war as pretend soldiers, using the helmets and canteens our fathers and uncles brought home from the war. The nearby woods where we skinny-dipped in the creek turned into our hunting ground for imaginary ferocious bears like the ones Davy stalked. The dusty hill topped by a stand of oaks on the edge of the playground became our Alamo, and every day we pretended that we were in pitched battle against the forces of Santa Anna. We became Davy Crockett, William Travis, and Jim Bowie, the trio of legendary Alamo heroes. No one wanted to be with the Mexican side, so our enemy, as if borrowing a page from the cold war, was largely invisible. In the end we died anyway, just as our heroes did so long ago, but we knew we would miraculously be resurrected and come back the next day for another round of combat.

The following year, in the summer of 1955, Walt Disney unveiled his fantasy world, Disneyland, in southern California. But our family, eager to introduce me to the historical origins of Davy Crockett, opted not to go west on Route 66 and visit the Magic Kingdom. Instead we headed due south out of St. Louis to the state of Tennessee. Proudly wearing my new coonskin hat, with Mom riding shotgun and Dad at the helm of our dark green 1952 Plymouth—dubbed the Green Dragon—we cruised into real Crockett country.

After crossing the Mississippi River and entering Tennessee, we skirted Reelfoot Lake, studded with cypress trees, not far from the last place that Crockett called home. In Nashville, we saw the regal Capitol and the cavernous Ryman Auditorium, at that time home of the Grand Ole Opry. We paused at the Hermitage, the residence and final resting place of President Andrew Jackson—a Crockett political mentor who was to become his student’s chief nemesis.

During those dozen or so days spent traversing my new hero’s old stomping grounds, we experienced southern culture—the South that carries on with its own state of mind. We dined on crunchy southern fried chicken, catfish and hush puppies, country ham, biscuits and gravy, and pecan pie. I even recall that we sampled those creamy grits that came on every breakfast plate whether ordered or not. When we tangled with succulent Delta barbecue I pretended it was bear steak. At Chattanooga, near the Tennessee–Georgia line, we obeyed the commands of the signs that seemed to be painted on every barn rooftop—see beautiful rock city and seven states—from atop Lookout Mountain.

Everywhere we went we also saw flags and decals bearing the Confederacy’s stars and bars, as if the Civil War had not ended ninety years before. And, in every town we drove through, life-size stone likenesses of Confederate soldiers stood at ease in the tidy courthouse squares where old men in open-collar white shirts and straw hats sat cross-legged and traded yarns about the past. The tableau seemed endless.

From the car windows I watched harvest hands stooped in the fields, tending cotton that once was king when great plantations flourished. In Memphis, where Elvis was on the verge of stardom, we ate a picnic lunch in a city park near a huge bronze statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the planter and slave dealer who became a Confederate general and first imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. To those who recall the South of the midtwentieth century, these icons were both all too familiar and hardly considered invidious.

In that distant summer of 1955, not only throughout the South but well beyond, we saw signs designating which toilets and drinking fountains people could use depending on their skin color. These were images that were likewise familiar and staunchly accepted. Six months after our trip, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, began after a resolute black seamstress refused to give her bus seat to a white man. But the summer of 1955 was before we knew of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., or Medgar Evers and James Meredith.

In fact, nothing could distract me from my infatuation with Davy Crockett. I knew that a vaccine had been found to stem the polio epidemic that panicked every mother in the land, including mine. Although the tirades of a paranoid Joe McCarthy and frequent “duck and cover” drills at school kept much of the nation fearful, life was pretty good for a nine-year-old boy gliding through Davy Crockett’s stomping grounds in the Green Dragon.

The highlight of that summer vacation came when we neared the Davy Crockett birthplace, in eastern Tennessee, and the days that followed, in the nearby Smoky Mountains. We checked into a mom-and-pop motel in Gatlinburg, the resort town that billed itself as the “gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains.” We hit the pottery and souvenir shops in the nearby town of Pigeon Forge, and I ate my share of taffy and fudge from the sweetshops along Gatlinburg’s main drag. In a few years these mountain towns would mushroom in size, thanks to a commercial boom, as Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park became important tourist destinations. But back then there was no Dollywood, nor were there discount shopping malls, theme parks, and hordes of tourists.

I dipped my bare feet in icy cold Little Pigeon River, rode with my dad on the new ski lift to the top of Crockett Mountain, and saw the first black bears I had ever glimpsed in the wild. I slept in my coonskin hat.

The woman who ran the motel where we stayed told my dad about a good place to gather blackberries, and one morning we walked up the road and found the patch just as she described. In no time we filled a big coffee can to the top and my coonskin hat overflowed with fat juicy berries. Back at the motel the woman generously made a batch of blackberry cobbler that was the best I ever put to my lips. I called it “Crockett Cobbler” and imagined it was just like the kind that my hero ate when he was nine years old. We went to the berry patch again, and when we left to drive back to Missouri, my dad put a couple of empty milk cartons of berries in the ice chest.

All the way home, I gazed out the windows of the Green Dragon and thought about what it must have been like to be Davy Crockett. Now, all these many years later, I still cherish the memories of that trip. I think of it whenever I take out a photograph of my father and me sitting on the living room sofa. He is clowning around and has me hold a napkin to my chin while spoon-feeding me Crockett Cobbler. On my head is my coonskin hat. For the life of me, I cannot remember whatever happened to it.

M
ICHAEL
W
ALLIS
Tulsa, Oklahoma May 6, 2010

Author Michael Wallis (in coonskin cap) eating “Crockett Cobbler” with his father, Herbert Wallis, St. Louis, Missouri, 1956. (Wallis Collection)