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readallthenewberys2017-09-05 01:20 pm
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Newbery Honor: Davy Crockett (Constance Rourke)
It's harder to liveblog rereads, because I have Opinions about them. Also, I've owned and loved this book since I was three. (I was a precocious child.) So, yeah, I might be cutting this one some slack. ^_^ Still and all, it's a legitimate scholarly biography that includes tall tales entertaining enough to hold a toddler's attention, how often does that happen? :-)
* There is a brief Foreword, concluding with the statement "A full biography has seemed his due, in which his purposes, his rash and engaging character, the circumstances of his many adventures, and the bold legends about him should all have a place." This was in fact, if my information is correct, the first-ever scholarly biography of Colonel Crockett. It has a bibliography in the back and everything. :D
* We begin with a brief history of the area where Crockett was born. This was originally part of North Carolina, is now part of Tennessee, and at the exact time of Crockett's birth, belonged to the short-lived Republic of Frankland or Franklin. Rourke doesn't go into all that, but I find it entertaining.
* We get an overview of the atmosphere young Davy grew up in -- his father kept a small tavern in the Tennessee backwoods, where Davy would have heard tall tales and political chatter, and from the age of eight he spent much of his time out hunting. "In fringed deerskin he looked like a young Indian. He could run like an Indian."
* When Davy was twelve, he was "bound out" to a cattle farmer traveling east to Virginia. He traveled back home with some wagoners, attended school for a few weeks, then ran away and earned his living for a while doing various jobs -- driving cattle, helping wagoners, plowing fields, and even spent some time apprenticed to a hatter. By the time he returned home he was fifteen. He spent the next few years working for two creditors of his father's in order to pay off the two debts.
* Those three bullet points took up thirty pages of the book to tell. It's well written, lots of evocative description and background, lots of details taken from Colonel Crockett's autobiography and other writings closely associated with him.
* We hear about the dances or "frolics" where teenagers could socialize, and about Davy's wedding at age eighteen to one Polly Finley. He tried farming for a while, but grew restless and moved his family westward. We get a lot of detail about the river flatboats that were the main form of transportation in the thick Tennessee woods.
* We hear about hunting, raccoons and possums and bears and wild turkeys. Wild turkeys are by far the most difficult and easily spooked prey to hunt; we get a several-page-long description of the process and of the patience required.
* We also hear a string of stories told by hunters at a tavern, about hunting turkeys and bears, and about Davy's reputed ability to grin a coon right out of a tree. We see the hunters' game of "snuff the candle", shooting the tip off a candlewick but leaving the candle flame lit. Then a big wind comes through, maybe a tornado, though it's referred to as a "hurricane", which confused the hell out of me as a kid, as did Davy's statement that "an earthquake may follow". I still don't know exactly what this refers to.
* Anyway, then Davy and his family move even further south and west, near the boundary of Mississippi Territory, now the states of Mississippi and Alabama. This far out from civilization there are deer, "painters" (panthers aka cougars / pumas / catamounts), and "wildcats" (bobcats, named for their short "bobbed" tails).
* We hear how there are few other settlers or hunters this far into what is still "Indian country". Sometimes traders come through. We get a story about a stranger from back east who insisted on being taken hunting, but who "knew no more about handling a rifle than a goose knows about rib stockings", in the words Rourke gives Crockett, and another story about finding a Native burial ground, and some rumors about the caves up in Kentucky (the best known of which is Mammoth Cave).
* We hear of how the Native peoples have been pushed back as whites settle their lands, and of how Tecumseh asks the Creek Nation to join his pan-tribal confederacy and fight back against the white invaders. A faction of Creeks known as the Red Sticks favor war, and after the Red Sticks win a battle known as the massacre of Fort Mims, Crockett joins a militia of Tennessee volunteers led by one Colonel John Coffee under the command of General Andrew Jackson.
* Coffee's company of volunteers participates in most of the major battles of the Creek War. Crockett, because of his experience as a hunter, leads various scouting parties. When Jackson's army runs short of food while encamped, Crockett's skill at telling stories helps keep everyone cheerful.
* Most of the militiamen enlisted for sixty or ninety days of fighting, and when they have been on the trail for several months, they ask permission to go home and get fresh supplies and winter clothes. Jackson refuses, so they go anyway. ^_^ When they return, Jackson demands they reenlist for a full six months; many of them refuse and go back home, but Crockett stays.
* In the next battle, at the Talapoosa River, Crockett and his band of scouts are assigned as part of a rearguard. The main body of the rearguard break and flee, led by two colonels, but Crockett and his squad on horseback force a large portion of the attackers to retreat, and General Jackson personally took over firing a cannon to drive off the rest. Andrew Jackson was an asshole, but he wasn't a coward.
* Then, for reasons unknown, Davy goes home again to Tennessee for some time. He always said it was because his horse had been injured in the fight; Rourke speculates that Jackson may have given him permission to leave on some secret mission, or that he may have just plain decided to go. When he goes back to Alabama, the Creek War is over and peace talks are in session.
* We get a brief dissertation on interpreter George Mayfield, a white child raised by Creek adoptive parents, and an overview of the treaty terms, in which the Creeks ceded half their land to the United States. This was the first step in the complete removal of Native peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi, and Ms Rourke makes sure we know what's coming.
* After the war, Polly Crockett died. Davy moved west again with his three small children, and eventually married a widow, Elizabeth Patton, who had two children of her own. He was elected colonel of the local militia regiment, then elected magistrate. Since he'd had only a few months of formal schooling in his life, he had to practice his reading and handwriting in order to do the magistrate's job.
* Rourke tells us, "It was at this time that he began to inscribe a motto at the end of documents: 'Be always sure you're right, then go ahead.'" This phrase has been associated with Davy Crockett ever since, and as simple as it is, it struck a hell of a chord with three-year-old me.
* Anyway. In 1821, Crockett was elected to the state legislature, but while he was away legislaturing, a spring flood washed away the grist mill he had built on his land, leaving him heavily in debt -- as indeed he was off and on for most of his life. Davy Crockett was not a monetarily successful man. However, he was able to sell up his land and move on, further into the frontier.
* We now get a brief history of the New Madrid earthquakes -- I will note that it's pronounced MAD-rid, not ma-DRID, because Murricans. These were the most powerful earthquakes east of the Rocky Mountains in recorded US history; among other effects, the Mississippi River at that place temporarily flowed fucking backwards. O_O The area around New Madrid was known to settlers afterward as "the Shakes", because the aftershocks continued for many years.
* Davy and his family move to the Shakes, build a cabin, and raise a crop. When he runs out of gunpowder, he makes a harrowing winter journey across the flooded Obion river to bring back a keg of powder from a friend's cabin.
* We hear all sorts of exciting tales about hunting elk and bears in the canebrakes (tangles of overgrown canes), known locally as "harricanes". This takes up the better part of a chapter, but it's not a slog to read at all, at least I don't think so.
* We also hear some of the tall tales that Davy tells, including one about a pet bear called Death Hug, who eats at the table like a human and is reportedly "smart enough to go to Congress". Death Hug will feature in several more of the tall tales scattered through the book.
* Crockett is again elected to the Tennessee legislature and serves out a term there. Afterward, he and his boys cut some thirty thousand staves over the course of the summer, thinking to sell them downriver in New Orleans, and he also builds a pair of riverboats to transport the staves and hires men to crew the boats, then sets out with the two boats. But the pilot he hires doesn't know the river well, and the boats are swept along by the current. Eventually one boat overturns, and Davy is almost trapped and drowned below decks; however, the boatmen manage to pull him out of a side hatch. Both boats are sucked underneath a raft of drift timber and break up, and the staves are lost, but Davy is happy to have escaped with his life.
* Stories of Davy's tall-tale exploits are already spreading all over the district, as are rumors that Davy is planning to run for Congress. In 1827 he does actually run for Congress and win; we hear stories from the campaign trail and from his time in office. One of the stories told has Crockett saying he can "whip my weight in wildcats, hug a bear too close for comfort, and eat any man opposed to Jackson!"
* Then we get a long and fairly clear explanation of the situation surrounding land speculation in Tennessee. Rich men have bought up most of the good land, leaving only "patches and refuse scraps" for the settlers who live there. An expensive survey of land boundaries has caused more settlers to be taxed off land "so poor it wouldn't even raise a fight. Now the majority of Tennessee representatives want to sell off the rest of the "refuse scraps" of land to speculators at a high price, claiming the settlers have no legal title. Crockett fights against this, but loses. It is noted that Andrew Jackson, now President, had been involved in land speculation "on a large scale from an early day".
* And now we have the Indian Removal Act, the infamous piece of legislation that expelled the remaining Native peoples east of the Mississippi from their land. Davy Crockett was the only Tennessee representative in Congress to vote against the bill. He said, "If I should be the only member of the House who voted against the bill and the only man in the United States who disapproved of it, I would still vote against it."
(This brings up a complicated question about the rights and wrongs of legislature, which I have often debated and still have no answer to. Obviously Davy was in the right, morally speaking. However, the whole principle of representative government is based on the idea that the representative should vote the way his constituents would vote if you added them all up. Voting your conscience against the beliefs of your constituents is damn hard, if not impossible, to defend within the principles of a representative government. Nor would I want to defend it as a general practice, given the amount and types of assholery people's consciences can come up with. But the Catholic part of me insists it has to be possible to make a single coherent set of rules which always lead to doing the right thing, and this right here, this is where that falls down. *headdesk*)
* Aaaanyway! Obviously the Indian Removal Act passed, though the vote in the House was very close -- 101 to 97. The Trail of Tears was a thing that happened. Davy Crockett was defeated for reelection in 1831. However, in 1833, he was elected again.
* This time, having gotten through the srs bsnss writings about Crockett's time in Congress, we get to hear some funny stories. I can't quote them all in full, and the way they're told is as much of the fun as their contents, but god damn, if you have a chance to get ahold of this book I highly recommend at least flipping through it for some of the stories. :D
* Eventually, however, Crockett was again defeated for reelection, and in November 1835 he set out for Texas, where the Texas Revolution was going on. Nobody knows exactly how he went or with whom he traveled, but Ms Rourke analyzed all the available facts and rumors, and put together what she claims to be the most likely course of events.
* Crockett takes a steamer up the Arkansas River to Little Rock, then travels west overland to Clarksville. We have an eyewitness account from a Mrs Caroline Clark placing him there. Then there is a gap of nearly two months before he arrives in Nacogdoches, Texas; Ms Rourke opines that he may have detoured northward to check out Oklahoma, where the Native people who survived the Trail of Tears were being settled, but there is no evidence either way.
* At some point in his travels, Crockett assembles a group of some sixteen or seventeen men, mostly Tennesseans, who would later be known as "Crockett's Company". Eventually, he arrives with this group in Nacogdoches. From there he writes a letter to two of his children, saying he plans to settle along the Red River valley in peacetime, but first has signed up for a six-month tour of duty as a volunteer in the Texas army. In early February he sets out with a small group of men for Bexar, where the Alamo is.
* But before we go to the story of the Alamo, there is one more chapter, "The Story of Five Strange Companions". This story of Crockett's last travels appeared in print a few months after his death, claiming to be based on his diary, and Ms Rourke chooses to include it as part of the legend. "Here is the story. Take it as true for a time."
* On the steamboat down to Natchitoches, Crockett meets a con artist, called in the story "Thimblerig" after the shell game he uses to fleece people, and beats him at his game by picking up the right thimble before Thimblerig can do so. In Natchitoches, he meets a young man referred to as the Bee Hunter, who also knows Thimblerig, and the three agree to travel together to Bexar on horseback. A few days' ride on their way, they meet two other men, one a retired pirate from Lafitte's band (Jean Lafitte himself had died some thirteen years before), the other an old Indian of unknown tribal affiliation.
* Along the way, they encounter a herd of buffalo, and Crockett gets lost following them. Then his horse joins temporarily with a herd of mustangs and he gets even more lost. Then he has to fight a cougar, and then his horse appears to have died from exhaustion, but it is faking and sneaks away in the night. Then a group of Comanches happen by, having seen the smoke from his campfire, and being impressed by his skill at killing the cougar, agree to guide him as far as... the Colorado River? *googles* Oh, I see. The other Colorado River.
* On the way, they catch Crockett's runaway horse and shoot some buffalo. Near the river, they find Thimblerig and the Bee Hunter again, and then are rejoined by the Pirate and the Indian, who have stolen a pair of Mexican soldiers' horses. The group also has a brush with some actual Mexican soldiers before reaching the Alamo.
* Ms Rourke then goes over which scraps of the story may have some foundation in fact, and points out that though the story is not as it stands "true", its atmosphere is accurate, and the central figures of Thimblerig and the Bee Hunter have been linked to historical personages.
* Okay, back to history. At the Alamo are about 145 men, among them James Bowie (noted for his connection to the bowie knife) and William Travis. Crockett was offered a position of command, but refused it. Bowie's original orders had been to evacuate and abandon Bexar, but he decided, in his own words, "We had rather die in these ditches than give it up to the enemy."
* A quick note: the only part of the Alamo complex now standing is the small mission church. However, at the Battle of the Alamo, these 145 men were also defending an enormous two-acre walled courtyard and a pair of barracks buildings. The length of the outer wall is what spread the defenders unsustainably thin. Ms Rourke estimates at least a thousand men would have been needed to defend the complex adequately.
* In late February the Mexican army arrived, 1500 strong, and laid siege to the Alamo complex. James Bowie became ill and bedridden at this point, and Travis assumed command, though he was also ill.
* Travis sent a messenger to Gonzales, seventy miles east, asking for reinforcements. Part of the reason the Alamo became so famous is this letter, addressed To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World, a dramatic piece of writing which ends with a triply underlined "VICTORY OR DEATH", and which was published in broadsheet and in newspapers while the siege was still going on. Ms Rourke quotes it in full.
* Thirty-two volunteers came from Gonzales to join the Alamo defenders. Texas historians, being Texan, refer to these men as the "Immortal Thirty-Two".
* Colonel James Fannin and three hundred men also attempted to reach the Alamo, but (Ms Rourke says politely) were "obliged to turn back". Wiki states more bluntly that "Fannin blamed the retreat on his officers; the officers and enlisted men accused Fannin of aborting the mission."
* Santa Anna's army begins shelling the Alamo in preparation for their final attack. As the story goes, Travis gathers the defenders and draws a line on the ground with his sword, asking everyone who will stay and fight to step across the line. James Bowie has to be carried across, but everyone crosses the line, with the possible exception of one man who may have tried to escape. "It has been denied, with good evidence," Ms Rourke says, "that even this one man left."
* On March 6, Santa Anna's army, now numbering five thousand, attacks. Ms Rourke says that "the men within the Alamo had been expecting such an attack"; Wiki cites more recent research suggesting that the defenders had gone to bed once the shelling stopped. Either way, the Mexican army swarmed the walls; Travis was among the first to die fighting there. Bowie was one of the last, fighting from his bed. Crockett died outside the mission church, surrounded by sixteen Mexican corpses. Five men surrendered and were then shot. The women, children, and Travis's slave Joe were spared -- Santa Anna hoped to inspire a slave uprising against the Republic of Texas.
* Ms Rourke touches briefly on the rest of the fighting in Texas, then turns to the stories told after Crockett's death, claiming he was still alive or just ignoring the matter of his death -- tales of him cooking buffalo steaks over a wild prairie fire, of taming a wild buffalo he named "Mississippi" which would sing bass at church and "lend the leader his horn for a tuning fork", even tales of him diving for pearls in the South Seas.
* One tale tells that Crockett and his tame bear Death Hug, unable to secure passage on a river steamer, simply cut down an old hollow gum tree, made it into a canoe, and smoking their pipes for smokestacks, "they made that hollow log canoe walk in and out and along the water until the fishes stared, and soon they passed the steamboat."
* Another character who turns up in stories of this era is one Ben Hardin, extremely loosely based on a Congressman from Kentucky by that name. Ms Rourke recounts some of the stories that team Crockett and Hardin -- how they meet, how they go hunting together, an escapade with riding a streak of greased lightning across the sky, a tale about a daughter of Crockett's who befriends a pack of panthers and can out-dance anything on two legs. Stories of winking out lightning and dancing up fire and sailing over Niagara Falls on an ice floe, and of a pet alligator that could swim up Niagara Falls and a hyena that could laugh the lightning out of countenance, and of Davy and all the various tame animals dancing the polka while Ben Hardin whistled the tunes. "Ben could outwhistle the prettiest clarionette that ever talked music."
* Oh, and the story about Davy hanging his powder horn on the moon! I ran across that in another context, in some other Newbery a ways back, I forget which. And one where he jumps up and lands on the sun at sunrise, thinking to catch a ride home, but he's forgotten that he's to the west of his cabin, so he has to ride around the whole world in twenty-four hours before dropping off on his own doorstep.
* And the very last story in the book, set in 1835, known as the Winter of the Big Snow. It's a near-mythological piece, told in the first person. "On one of those winter mornings it was all screwen cold," begins Crockett. The trees are frozen so stiff they can't shake; the fire in the tinderbox won't light; even the sparks Davy strikes from his knuckles freeze and go out before he can collect them. So he trots along whistling to keep himself unfrozen, and after climbing Daybreak Hill to Peak o' Day, he finds that the earth has frozen fast on its axis, and the sun is jammed between two cakes of ice under the wheels, and is frozen fast in its own cold sweat.
* So Davy throws down a big old bear he'd killed on the road and squeezes the warm grease out of it and thaws the earth and the sun loose. "Then I gave the earth's cogwheel one kick backward till I got the sun free and whistled 'Push Along, Keep Moving'." The earth starts to roll around properly again, the sun walks up the sky, "saluting me with such a wind of gratitude it made me sneeze. I lit my pipe by the blaze of his topknot and walked home, introducing people to the fresh daylight with a piece of sunrise in my pocket."
* After that comes a short essay about the writing of the book, and a humongous bibliography intermixed with thanks to the various people who helped Ms Rourke scrounge up all her information.
This book has influenced me more than any other single book I've ever read, and I think I would even include Lord of the Rings in that assessment. It's absolutely worth reading if you can get ahold of it, especially if you have any interest in folklore.
* There is a brief Foreword, concluding with the statement "A full biography has seemed his due, in which his purposes, his rash and engaging character, the circumstances of his many adventures, and the bold legends about him should all have a place." This was in fact, if my information is correct, the first-ever scholarly biography of Colonel Crockett. It has a bibliography in the back and everything. :D
* We begin with a brief history of the area where Crockett was born. This was originally part of North Carolina, is now part of Tennessee, and at the exact time of Crockett's birth, belonged to the short-lived Republic of Frankland or Franklin. Rourke doesn't go into all that, but I find it entertaining.
* We get an overview of the atmosphere young Davy grew up in -- his father kept a small tavern in the Tennessee backwoods, where Davy would have heard tall tales and political chatter, and from the age of eight he spent much of his time out hunting. "In fringed deerskin he looked like a young Indian. He could run like an Indian."
* When Davy was twelve, he was "bound out" to a cattle farmer traveling east to Virginia. He traveled back home with some wagoners, attended school for a few weeks, then ran away and earned his living for a while doing various jobs -- driving cattle, helping wagoners, plowing fields, and even spent some time apprenticed to a hatter. By the time he returned home he was fifteen. He spent the next few years working for two creditors of his father's in order to pay off the two debts.
* Those three bullet points took up thirty pages of the book to tell. It's well written, lots of evocative description and background, lots of details taken from Colonel Crockett's autobiography and other writings closely associated with him.
* We hear about the dances or "frolics" where teenagers could socialize, and about Davy's wedding at age eighteen to one Polly Finley. He tried farming for a while, but grew restless and moved his family westward. We get a lot of detail about the river flatboats that were the main form of transportation in the thick Tennessee woods.
* We hear about hunting, raccoons and possums and bears and wild turkeys. Wild turkeys are by far the most difficult and easily spooked prey to hunt; we get a several-page-long description of the process and of the patience required.
* We also hear a string of stories told by hunters at a tavern, about hunting turkeys and bears, and about Davy's reputed ability to grin a coon right out of a tree. We see the hunters' game of "snuff the candle", shooting the tip off a candlewick but leaving the candle flame lit. Then a big wind comes through, maybe a tornado, though it's referred to as a "hurricane", which confused the hell out of me as a kid, as did Davy's statement that "an earthquake may follow". I still don't know exactly what this refers to.
* Anyway, then Davy and his family move even further south and west, near the boundary of Mississippi Territory, now the states of Mississippi and Alabama. This far out from civilization there are deer, "painters" (panthers aka cougars / pumas / catamounts), and "wildcats" (bobcats, named for their short "bobbed" tails).
* We hear how there are few other settlers or hunters this far into what is still "Indian country". Sometimes traders come through. We get a story about a stranger from back east who insisted on being taken hunting, but who "knew no more about handling a rifle than a goose knows about rib stockings", in the words Rourke gives Crockett, and another story about finding a Native burial ground, and some rumors about the caves up in Kentucky (the best known of which is Mammoth Cave).
* We hear of how the Native peoples have been pushed back as whites settle their lands, and of how Tecumseh asks the Creek Nation to join his pan-tribal confederacy and fight back against the white invaders. A faction of Creeks known as the Red Sticks favor war, and after the Red Sticks win a battle known as the massacre of Fort Mims, Crockett joins a militia of Tennessee volunteers led by one Colonel John Coffee under the command of General Andrew Jackson.
* Coffee's company of volunteers participates in most of the major battles of the Creek War. Crockett, because of his experience as a hunter, leads various scouting parties. When Jackson's army runs short of food while encamped, Crockett's skill at telling stories helps keep everyone cheerful.
* Most of the militiamen enlisted for sixty or ninety days of fighting, and when they have been on the trail for several months, they ask permission to go home and get fresh supplies and winter clothes. Jackson refuses, so they go anyway. ^_^ When they return, Jackson demands they reenlist for a full six months; many of them refuse and go back home, but Crockett stays.
* In the next battle, at the Talapoosa River, Crockett and his band of scouts are assigned as part of a rearguard. The main body of the rearguard break and flee, led by two colonels, but Crockett and his squad on horseback force a large portion of the attackers to retreat, and General Jackson personally took over firing a cannon to drive off the rest. Andrew Jackson was an asshole, but he wasn't a coward.
* Then, for reasons unknown, Davy goes home again to Tennessee for some time. He always said it was because his horse had been injured in the fight; Rourke speculates that Jackson may have given him permission to leave on some secret mission, or that he may have just plain decided to go. When he goes back to Alabama, the Creek War is over and peace talks are in session.
* We get a brief dissertation on interpreter George Mayfield, a white child raised by Creek adoptive parents, and an overview of the treaty terms, in which the Creeks ceded half their land to the United States. This was the first step in the complete removal of Native peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi, and Ms Rourke makes sure we know what's coming.
* After the war, Polly Crockett died. Davy moved west again with his three small children, and eventually married a widow, Elizabeth Patton, who had two children of her own. He was elected colonel of the local militia regiment, then elected magistrate. Since he'd had only a few months of formal schooling in his life, he had to practice his reading and handwriting in order to do the magistrate's job.
* Rourke tells us, "It was at this time that he began to inscribe a motto at the end of documents: 'Be always sure you're right, then go ahead.'" This phrase has been associated with Davy Crockett ever since, and as simple as it is, it struck a hell of a chord with three-year-old me.
* Anyway. In 1821, Crockett was elected to the state legislature, but while he was away legislaturing, a spring flood washed away the grist mill he had built on his land, leaving him heavily in debt -- as indeed he was off and on for most of his life. Davy Crockett was not a monetarily successful man. However, he was able to sell up his land and move on, further into the frontier.
* We now get a brief history of the New Madrid earthquakes -- I will note that it's pronounced MAD-rid, not ma-DRID, because Murricans. These were the most powerful earthquakes east of the Rocky Mountains in recorded US history; among other effects, the Mississippi River at that place temporarily flowed fucking backwards. O_O The area around New Madrid was known to settlers afterward as "the Shakes", because the aftershocks continued for many years.
* Davy and his family move to the Shakes, build a cabin, and raise a crop. When he runs out of gunpowder, he makes a harrowing winter journey across the flooded Obion river to bring back a keg of powder from a friend's cabin.
* We hear all sorts of exciting tales about hunting elk and bears in the canebrakes (tangles of overgrown canes), known locally as "harricanes". This takes up the better part of a chapter, but it's not a slog to read at all, at least I don't think so.
* We also hear some of the tall tales that Davy tells, including one about a pet bear called Death Hug, who eats at the table like a human and is reportedly "smart enough to go to Congress". Death Hug will feature in several more of the tall tales scattered through the book.
* Crockett is again elected to the Tennessee legislature and serves out a term there. Afterward, he and his boys cut some thirty thousand staves over the course of the summer, thinking to sell them downriver in New Orleans, and he also builds a pair of riverboats to transport the staves and hires men to crew the boats, then sets out with the two boats. But the pilot he hires doesn't know the river well, and the boats are swept along by the current. Eventually one boat overturns, and Davy is almost trapped and drowned below decks; however, the boatmen manage to pull him out of a side hatch. Both boats are sucked underneath a raft of drift timber and break up, and the staves are lost, but Davy is happy to have escaped with his life.
* Stories of Davy's tall-tale exploits are already spreading all over the district, as are rumors that Davy is planning to run for Congress. In 1827 he does actually run for Congress and win; we hear stories from the campaign trail and from his time in office. One of the stories told has Crockett saying he can "whip my weight in wildcats, hug a bear too close for comfort, and eat any man opposed to Jackson!"
* Then we get a long and fairly clear explanation of the situation surrounding land speculation in Tennessee. Rich men have bought up most of the good land, leaving only "patches and refuse scraps" for the settlers who live there. An expensive survey of land boundaries has caused more settlers to be taxed off land "so poor it wouldn't even raise a fight. Now the majority of Tennessee representatives want to sell off the rest of the "refuse scraps" of land to speculators at a high price, claiming the settlers have no legal title. Crockett fights against this, but loses. It is noted that Andrew Jackson, now President, had been involved in land speculation "on a large scale from an early day".
* And now we have the Indian Removal Act, the infamous piece of legislation that expelled the remaining Native peoples east of the Mississippi from their land. Davy Crockett was the only Tennessee representative in Congress to vote against the bill. He said, "If I should be the only member of the House who voted against the bill and the only man in the United States who disapproved of it, I would still vote against it."
(This brings up a complicated question about the rights and wrongs of legislature, which I have often debated and still have no answer to. Obviously Davy was in the right, morally speaking. However, the whole principle of representative government is based on the idea that the representative should vote the way his constituents would vote if you added them all up. Voting your conscience against the beliefs of your constituents is damn hard, if not impossible, to defend within the principles of a representative government. Nor would I want to defend it as a general practice, given the amount and types of assholery people's consciences can come up with. But the Catholic part of me insists it has to be possible to make a single coherent set of rules which always lead to doing the right thing, and this right here, this is where that falls down. *headdesk*)
* Aaaanyway! Obviously the Indian Removal Act passed, though the vote in the House was very close -- 101 to 97. The Trail of Tears was a thing that happened. Davy Crockett was defeated for reelection in 1831. However, in 1833, he was elected again.
* This time, having gotten through the srs bsnss writings about Crockett's time in Congress, we get to hear some funny stories. I can't quote them all in full, and the way they're told is as much of the fun as their contents, but god damn, if you have a chance to get ahold of this book I highly recommend at least flipping through it for some of the stories. :D
* Eventually, however, Crockett was again defeated for reelection, and in November 1835 he set out for Texas, where the Texas Revolution was going on. Nobody knows exactly how he went or with whom he traveled, but Ms Rourke analyzed all the available facts and rumors, and put together what she claims to be the most likely course of events.
* Crockett takes a steamer up the Arkansas River to Little Rock, then travels west overland to Clarksville. We have an eyewitness account from a Mrs Caroline Clark placing him there. Then there is a gap of nearly two months before he arrives in Nacogdoches, Texas; Ms Rourke opines that he may have detoured northward to check out Oklahoma, where the Native people who survived the Trail of Tears were being settled, but there is no evidence either way.
* At some point in his travels, Crockett assembles a group of some sixteen or seventeen men, mostly Tennesseans, who would later be known as "Crockett's Company". Eventually, he arrives with this group in Nacogdoches. From there he writes a letter to two of his children, saying he plans to settle along the Red River valley in peacetime, but first has signed up for a six-month tour of duty as a volunteer in the Texas army. In early February he sets out with a small group of men for Bexar, where the Alamo is.
* But before we go to the story of the Alamo, there is one more chapter, "The Story of Five Strange Companions". This story of Crockett's last travels appeared in print a few months after his death, claiming to be based on his diary, and Ms Rourke chooses to include it as part of the legend. "Here is the story. Take it as true for a time."
* On the steamboat down to Natchitoches, Crockett meets a con artist, called in the story "Thimblerig" after the shell game he uses to fleece people, and beats him at his game by picking up the right thimble before Thimblerig can do so. In Natchitoches, he meets a young man referred to as the Bee Hunter, who also knows Thimblerig, and the three agree to travel together to Bexar on horseback. A few days' ride on their way, they meet two other men, one a retired pirate from Lafitte's band (Jean Lafitte himself had died some thirteen years before), the other an old Indian of unknown tribal affiliation.
* Along the way, they encounter a herd of buffalo, and Crockett gets lost following them. Then his horse joins temporarily with a herd of mustangs and he gets even more lost. Then he has to fight a cougar, and then his horse appears to have died from exhaustion, but it is faking and sneaks away in the night. Then a group of Comanches happen by, having seen the smoke from his campfire, and being impressed by his skill at killing the cougar, agree to guide him as far as... the Colorado River? *googles* Oh, I see. The other Colorado River.
* On the way, they catch Crockett's runaway horse and shoot some buffalo. Near the river, they find Thimblerig and the Bee Hunter again, and then are rejoined by the Pirate and the Indian, who have stolen a pair of Mexican soldiers' horses. The group also has a brush with some actual Mexican soldiers before reaching the Alamo.
* Ms Rourke then goes over which scraps of the story may have some foundation in fact, and points out that though the story is not as it stands "true", its atmosphere is accurate, and the central figures of Thimblerig and the Bee Hunter have been linked to historical personages.
* Okay, back to history. At the Alamo are about 145 men, among them James Bowie (noted for his connection to the bowie knife) and William Travis. Crockett was offered a position of command, but refused it. Bowie's original orders had been to evacuate and abandon Bexar, but he decided, in his own words, "We had rather die in these ditches than give it up to the enemy."
* A quick note: the only part of the Alamo complex now standing is the small mission church. However, at the Battle of the Alamo, these 145 men were also defending an enormous two-acre walled courtyard and a pair of barracks buildings. The length of the outer wall is what spread the defenders unsustainably thin. Ms Rourke estimates at least a thousand men would have been needed to defend the complex adequately.
* In late February the Mexican army arrived, 1500 strong, and laid siege to the Alamo complex. James Bowie became ill and bedridden at this point, and Travis assumed command, though he was also ill.
* Travis sent a messenger to Gonzales, seventy miles east, asking for reinforcements. Part of the reason the Alamo became so famous is this letter, addressed To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World, a dramatic piece of writing which ends with a triply underlined "VICTORY OR DEATH", and which was published in broadsheet and in newspapers while the siege was still going on. Ms Rourke quotes it in full.
* Thirty-two volunteers came from Gonzales to join the Alamo defenders. Texas historians, being Texan, refer to these men as the "Immortal Thirty-Two".
* Colonel James Fannin and three hundred men also attempted to reach the Alamo, but (Ms Rourke says politely) were "obliged to turn back". Wiki states more bluntly that "Fannin blamed the retreat on his officers; the officers and enlisted men accused Fannin of aborting the mission."
* Santa Anna's army begins shelling the Alamo in preparation for their final attack. As the story goes, Travis gathers the defenders and draws a line on the ground with his sword, asking everyone who will stay and fight to step across the line. James Bowie has to be carried across, but everyone crosses the line, with the possible exception of one man who may have tried to escape. "It has been denied, with good evidence," Ms Rourke says, "that even this one man left."
* On March 6, Santa Anna's army, now numbering five thousand, attacks. Ms Rourke says that "the men within the Alamo had been expecting such an attack"; Wiki cites more recent research suggesting that the defenders had gone to bed once the shelling stopped. Either way, the Mexican army swarmed the walls; Travis was among the first to die fighting there. Bowie was one of the last, fighting from his bed. Crockett died outside the mission church, surrounded by sixteen Mexican corpses. Five men surrendered and were then shot. The women, children, and Travis's slave Joe were spared -- Santa Anna hoped to inspire a slave uprising against the Republic of Texas.
* Ms Rourke touches briefly on the rest of the fighting in Texas, then turns to the stories told after Crockett's death, claiming he was still alive or just ignoring the matter of his death -- tales of him cooking buffalo steaks over a wild prairie fire, of taming a wild buffalo he named "Mississippi" which would sing bass at church and "lend the leader his horn for a tuning fork", even tales of him diving for pearls in the South Seas.
* One tale tells that Crockett and his tame bear Death Hug, unable to secure passage on a river steamer, simply cut down an old hollow gum tree, made it into a canoe, and smoking their pipes for smokestacks, "they made that hollow log canoe walk in and out and along the water until the fishes stared, and soon they passed the steamboat."
* Another character who turns up in stories of this era is one Ben Hardin, extremely loosely based on a Congressman from Kentucky by that name. Ms Rourke recounts some of the stories that team Crockett and Hardin -- how they meet, how they go hunting together, an escapade with riding a streak of greased lightning across the sky, a tale about a daughter of Crockett's who befriends a pack of panthers and can out-dance anything on two legs. Stories of winking out lightning and dancing up fire and sailing over Niagara Falls on an ice floe, and of a pet alligator that could swim up Niagara Falls and a hyena that could laugh the lightning out of countenance, and of Davy and all the various tame animals dancing the polka while Ben Hardin whistled the tunes. "Ben could outwhistle the prettiest clarionette that ever talked music."
* Oh, and the story about Davy hanging his powder horn on the moon! I ran across that in another context, in some other Newbery a ways back, I forget which. And one where he jumps up and lands on the sun at sunrise, thinking to catch a ride home, but he's forgotten that he's to the west of his cabin, so he has to ride around the whole world in twenty-four hours before dropping off on his own doorstep.
* And the very last story in the book, set in 1835, known as the Winter of the Big Snow. It's a near-mythological piece, told in the first person. "On one of those winter mornings it was all screwen cold," begins Crockett. The trees are frozen so stiff they can't shake; the fire in the tinderbox won't light; even the sparks Davy strikes from his knuckles freeze and go out before he can collect them. So he trots along whistling to keep himself unfrozen, and after climbing Daybreak Hill to Peak o' Day, he finds that the earth has frozen fast on its axis, and the sun is jammed between two cakes of ice under the wheels, and is frozen fast in its own cold sweat.
* So Davy throws down a big old bear he'd killed on the road and squeezes the warm grease out of it and thaws the earth and the sun loose. "Then I gave the earth's cogwheel one kick backward till I got the sun free and whistled 'Push Along, Keep Moving'." The earth starts to roll around properly again, the sun walks up the sky, "saluting me with such a wind of gratitude it made me sneeze. I lit my pipe by the blaze of his topknot and walked home, introducing people to the fresh daylight with a piece of sunrise in my pocket."
* After that comes a short essay about the writing of the book, and a humongous bibliography intermixed with thanks to the various people who helped Ms Rourke scrounge up all her information.
This book has influenced me more than any other single book I've ever read, and I think I would even include Lord of the Rings in that assessment. It's absolutely worth reading if you can get ahold of it, especially if you have any interest in folklore.
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It was a yarn about an encounter between Davy Crockett and a band of Red Sticks fighters during the Creek War. One of my siblings misheard a bit about "Red Sticks braves" as "Red Stick's reins", and was unshakeably convinced that the story was about Davy Crockett finding a lost horse named Red Stick.