The legendary Davy Crockett arose simultaneously with the emergence
of the historical Crockett as a public figure, and once
established, the man and the myth were forevermore entangled. The
present work, his Life and Adventures (1833), ushered in a series
of biographical and autobiographical books that thrust Crockett
fully onto the national and international scene. This work, quickly
retitled Sketches and Eccentricities, was the most outlandish. Its
purported author, J. S. French, mixed two nineteenth-century genres
of storytelling - the Humor of the Old Southwest and the sketch -
all presented within a historical framework to create an early
version of the King of the Wild Frontier. The Crockett encountered
here is the marksman who can shoot an elk from 140 yards with his
beloved rifle, Betsy, grin the bark off a tree knot, and choose
bows and arrows as weapons when challenged to a duel by a fellow
congressman. Within a year, Crockett disavowed this book,
preferring his autobiography - Narrative of the Life of David
Crockett, of the State of Tennessee - but this rollicking story,
often bouncing along from tall tale, hunting anecdote, faux moral
tale, to humorous pratfall, became a major source for the later
biographical writings and a later cultural industry that swept up
newspapers, books, political propaganda, plays, and films - and
almost every way in which a frontier figure could appear in popular
culture. And, while Crockett's image was a source of entertainment
and humor, it also pointed toward something far more serious: after
his death at the Alamo it presented Americans with a fictional
Frontier hero who progressively embodied their views on topics as
varied as manliness, manifest destiny, and even white supremacy.
However, the Crockett of Sketches - canny, adaptable, intelligent
but not educated, hilarious - was above all a perfect reflection of
the aspirations, interests, and beliefs of Jacksonian-era
Americans.
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