How Davy Crockett, the Rugged Frontiersman Killed at the Alamo, Became an Unlikely American Hero
During his lifetime, Crockett—who went by David, not Davy—shaped his own myth. In the 20th century, his legacy got a boost from none other than Walt Disney
Greg Daugherty - History Correspondent
When David Crockett died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, he was already as much of a myth as a man. Known to Americans far and wide as Davy—a name he rarely, if ever, used—he was celebrated as a peerless hunter and fearless fighter, the embodiment of the nation’s rugged, pioneering spirit.
“Everything about him, including his death, was mythologized,” says Michael Wallis, author of the 2011 biography David Crockett: The Lion of the West. “And he had a lot to do with creating the mythology himself. He was a wonderful, down-home country boy storyteller.”
By the time of his death at age 49, Crockett had inspired at least one anonymously authored biography, been satirized in a hugely popular stage play, served three terms in Congress and was even touted as a possible presidential candidate.
The myth continued to grow after Crockett’s death, including the legend that he’d killed his first bear at age 3—an unlikely childhood milestone, although he would eventually slay hundreds of the animals. In the mid-1950s, he became a hero to millions of young baby boomers, thanks to a glamorized portrayal on a Walt Disney TV show and its hit theme song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” At the same time, skeptics weighed in, calling him a braggart, a drunk and a wildly inappropriate role model for America’s youth.
Historians have now spent the better part of two centuries trying to disentangle the man from the myth, often disagreeing about which was which. In fact, even the precise circumstances of Crockett’s death remain shrouded in mystery to this day.
Born, but not on a mountaintop
The lyrics of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” may have convinced generations that their hero was “born on a mountaintop in Tennessee,” but his actual birthplace was on lower ground, near the Nolichucky River in what was then known as the State of Franklin and would only later become part of Tennessee. The date was August 17, 1786, three years after the end of the American Revolution, when the new nation consisted of just 13 states and stretched no farther west than the Mississippi River. It truly was the American frontier.
Did you know? The short-lived State of Franklin
- In 1784, North Carolina ceded some of its western lands (now part of Tennessee) to the federal government. Residents of these remote counties campaigned to establish the new State of Franklin, but they failed to gather enough congressional support to secure statehood.
- Despite this setback, the State of Franklin endured, operating as an independent entity until 1789, when its counties rejoined North Carolina.
Crockett was the fifth of six sons among nine total children born to John and Rebecca Crockett. “As my father was very poor, and living as he did far back in the backwoods, he had neither the means nor the opportunity to give me, or any of the rest of his children, any learning,” Crockett wrote in a folksy 1834 autobiography. By his own account, he spent just four days in a classroom.
Crockett’s father was a farmer and tavern owner—and not very successful at either. The family moved often and was constantly in debt. As a boy, Crockett spent much of his time working on neighboring farms to help pay off his father’s debts, as did his siblings.
Married just before he turned 20, Crockett also tried his hand at farming but proved better at providing for his family as a hunter, particularly of bears, which he’d track with a pack of dogs and finish off with a rifle. He’d then butcher the animal in the field and bring its meat home to cure in his smokehouse. “Supposedly the choicest cuts from bear came from the paws and thighs, although cured side meat and the spareribs of young bears also were favored,” Wallis writes in his biography.
In 1813, Crockett joined one of the Tennessee militias that was forming to avenge the slaughter of at least 250 settlers at Fort Mims, in what is now Alabama, by a faction of the Creek Nation. Under the command of future American President Andrew Jackson, the militiamen descended on the Creek village of Tallushatchee, killing close to 200 Creek warriors, women and children.
In his autobiography, Crockett recalled seeing a Creek woman shoot an arrow from the doorway of a house where a group of warriors had taken refuge, killing a militia lieutenant. The woman “had at least 20 balls blown through her,” he wrote. “We now shot them like dogs, and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the 46 warriors in it.”
After the end of the Creek War in 1814, Crockett returned to farming and hunting, and he made his first bids for elected office, serving variously as an officer in the militia (whose leaders were voted in by their men), a justice of the peace and a town commissioner. In 1821, he won a seat in Tennessee’s state legislature. Setting his sights higher, he ran for the United States House of Representatives, losing on his first try but winning a seat in 1827.
Crockett goes to Congress
Already nationally known, Crockett became a colorful and highly quotable figure in Congress, burnishing his reputation as a man of the people, although he never managed to get a single piece of legislation passed. “Crockett revealed himself to be a champion of the poor and disadvantaged, consistently voting for or introducing proposals to protect them from laws he felt were unjust or discriminatory,” Mark Derr wrote in his 1993 biography, The Frontiersman: The Real Life and the Many Legends of Davy Crockett.
While political adversaries caricatured Crockett as a backwoods buffoon who wore a coonskin cap and hunting garb on the House floor, more objective witnesses said he dressed as formally as anyone else. In fact, Wallis and other biographers maintain that Crockett rarely wore a coonskin cap anywhere and only started donning one late in life, after the public had come to expect it.
Crockett also became a leading critic of his old commander, Jackson, who’d assumed the presidency in 1829. Despite his own reputation as a former Indian fighter, Crockett believed that Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act treated Native American tribes too harshly, calling it “oppression with a vengeance.” The act aimed to relocate the tribes from their lands in the eastern U.S. to territory west of the Mississippi River—willingly or otherwise. Crockett’s stance would cost him his 1831 re-election bid, though he retook his seat two years later.
Crockett’s opposition to Jackson, as well as his national name recognition, led the recently formed Whig Party to urge him to run for president on its ticket in the upcoming 1836 election. Crockett campaigned briefly but ultimately yielded his spot to three other Whigs, including future President William Henry Harrison and future Secretary of State Daniel Webster. They all lost to the Democratic Party candidate, Martin Van Buren.
The mystery of Crockett’s death at the Alamo
Meanwhile, Crockett lost another bid for re-election to Congress, leaving office for good in March 1835. Later that year, partly at the urging of his friend and fellow Tennessee politician Sam Houston, he headed to Texas for a fresh start. “I told the people of my district that, if they saw fit to re-elect me, I would serve them as faithfully as I had done,” Crockett reportedly told a crowd shortly after his arrival. “But, if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas. I was beaten, gentlemen, and here I am.”
At the time, Texas was fighting to gain its independence from the Mexican Republic. The promise of cheap and abundant land had drawn so many settlers from across the U.S. border that the Mexican government banned further immigration into Texas in 1830. Disputes between settlers and government officials finally erupted into the Texas Revolution in October 1835. The Mexican Army’s attempts to subdue the revolutionaries led to several violent clashes, most famously the 13-day siege of the Alamo in San Antonio in February and March 1836.
It was at the Alamo that Crockett met his end on March 6, 1836, adding a mysterious concluding chapter to his myth. In many newspaper accounts, he went down fighting. The Arkansas Advocate, for example, reported that he’d shot 23 Mexican soldiers before dying with a butcher knife in one hand and the remnants of his broken rifle in the other—presumably after swinging it like a club. Both weapons, the paper added, were “bathed in the blood of his enemies.”
Other papers, such as the Vermont Telegraph, suggested that he and several other men had attempted to surrender, but the Mexicans refused and made them fight to the death anyway, after which their bodies were “thrown into a heap and burned.”
One slightly later report, apparently originating in a Texas newspaper, claimed the men had surrendered and been taken as prisoners of war, only to be executed on the orders of Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna. While that version of events might have undermined the legend of Crockett’s heroism, it also made the Mexicans’ actions seem all the more reprehensible.
“Remember the Alamo!” became the rallying cry of the revolution, which ended in April 1836, when troops under Crockett’s friend Houston forced the Mexican Army to retreat south of the Rio Grande.
The legend of Davy Crockett lives on
Crockett’s tragic death gave his myth new life. While he might have otherwise been written off by history as a washed-up politician and relic of an earlier time, he was now a bona fide martyr, at least from the American perspective. Mexicans might have thought otherwise.
A series of publications called Crockett Almanacs, first printed in 1835, continued until 1856, chronicling the fallen hero’s colorful adventures, both real and imagined, for a new generation.
A century later, starting in December 1954, Crockett’s life received the Disney treatment in a five-episode TV series that branded him the “king of the wild frontier.” Crockett was portrayed by Fess Parker, a lanky young actor, complete with his rifle Old Betsy and, of course, a coonskin cap. Parker would later play Crockett’s contemporary Daniel Boone, also in a coonskin cap, in a 1964 TV series, resulting in a lot of confusion regarding the two frontiersmen.
The Crockett series became an unheard-of hit, driven almost entirely by elementary students and preschoolers—the first hint of the cultural power that the baby boomer generation, whose oldest members were barely 10 at that point, would wield for decades to come.
Coonskin caps became the male boomers’ first fashion craze, leading to a spike in the price of raccoon pelts, although most of the hats were made from faux fur. Director Steven Spielberg recalled being chased home from school in the third grade by a mob of classmates because his parents hadn’t bought him a coonskin cap yet. Not wanting to ignore the other half of the youthful population—or fail to cash in on them—many stores also offered a Polly Crockett hat, named after Crockett’s first wife.
By one estimate, some 3,000 different Crockett-related products filled the stores in 1955, selling more than $100 million worth of merchandise in a matter of months. A child with indulgent parents could dress like Davy from head to toe, eat breakfast from a Crockett cereal bowl, go off to school with a Crockett lunchbox and then come home to play with a cap-firing Old Betsy frontier rifle. The TV show’s theme song yielded multiple hit records, three of which were in the top ten at the same time.
All of this adulation became too much for some adults, who considered Crockett about as bad a role model for America’s youth as could be found.
Murray Kempton, a popular newspaper journalist of the day, devoted four separate columns to debunking just about every positive aspect of the Crockett legend.
Harper’s magazine called him a “juvenile delinquent” who deserted his wife and children, “weaseled his way out of the army,” and did everything he possibly could to avoid an honest day’s work. “He never was king of anything,” the magazine added, “except maybe the Tennessee Tall Tales and Bourbon Samplers’ Association.” In fact, whether Crockett actually “deserted” his family is debatable. Wallis notes in his biography that the frontiersman’s second wife, Elizabeth, took their children and moved out of their home to live with relatives, no longer able to tolerate “all the hunting, excessive drinking and his chronic pattern of abandoning his family.” The charge that he’d “weaseled his way out of the army” refers to his paying a young neighbor to serve as a substitute and finish out the final month of his enlistment—a fairly common practice at the time.
As to Crockett’s boast that he’d once killed 105 bears in less than a year, Harper’s scoffed that “his fellow tipplers refused to believe a word of it, on the sensible grounds that Davy couldn’t count that high.”
But others rushed to Crockett’s defense. “Crockett has made it popular to be an American again,” the television comedian Red Skelton told a reporter, adding, “To see our children laugh—to see ourselves laugh with our children because of the Davy Crockett craze is one of the greatest forces for good this country has had in years.”
The Chamber of Commerce in San Antonio, home of the Alamo, declared a weeklong birthday celebration in Crockett’s honor and invited the editor of Harper’s to attend. A congressman from Tennessee, Crockett’s home state, introduced a bill to install a statue of him in the U.S. Capitol. Unfortunately, the state’s two allotted slots were already taken, one of them by Crockett nemesis Jackson.
If Crockett’s modern fame peaked in the 1950s, he was far from forgotten thereafter. John Wayne donned a coonskin cap to play him in the 1960 epic The Alamo. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wayne’s Crockett doesn’t surrender and isn’t captured. Instead, after being mortally wounded, he tosses his torch into a powder magazine, blowing himself and much of the Alamo to smithereens.
In 1988, Disney produced another miniseries, The New Adventures of Davy Crockett, with Johnny Cash portraying the frontiersman in later life. As recently as 2024, Crockett was back on the big screen in the movie The Ballad of Davy Crockett.
Today, visitors to Disneyland in California can paddle one of Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes, while those at Disney World in Florida can enjoy a glass of Fess Parker Riesling or Frontier Red at Crockett’s Tavern. Vacationers at Disneyland Paris can book lodging at Disney Davy Crockett Ranch and shop at the Alamo Trading Post.
Monuments to Crockett dot the U.S., particularly in Texas and Tennessee. His name is on schools, a state park, a national forest and even a nuclear rocket launcher (since retired). Tasty tributes to him include a Crockett sandwich, a Crockett cocktail and Crockett dessert bars.
