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Who are you going to vote for?
If you're going to vote for somebody to represent you in the Tennessee legislature, are you
going to vote for some fancy well-dressed person?
Are you going to vote for somebody that's a lot like you?
That's going to be able to spin yarns and tell stories and make you laugh.
On this episode, we're naveled deep into the life of America's first celebrity back
woodsman, David Crockett, who 150 years after his death, people would call Davey.
We've learned there were four Crockett's known by America, the bear hunter, the soldier,
the politician, and the martyr at the Alamo.
We ended the last episode with Crockett leaving the military, but today things get dicey.
Crockett became America's first famous working-class populist politician.
We'll see his charm and wit on the campaign stump.
Learn of family tragedy and business failures and see the pragmatic genius of the American
frontier flow through his life, but ultimately we'll learn about Crockett's blunder.
Don't thank for a minute that Crockett's a shoe-in for the Bear Grease Hall of Fame.
Do you think he'll make it?
After this episode, I'm certain you'll have a strong leaning, and I really doubt that
you're going to want to miss this one.
Who else can you think of who's a famous politician who came literally from the laboring class?
It's Lincoln, who shares so much with David Crockett.
My name is Clay Newcombe, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things
forgotten but relevant, search for inside and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by F.H.F. Gear, American-made, purpose-built hunting and fishing gear that's designed
to be as rugged as the places we explore.
Celebrity at its core, in many ways, is the fans' interpretation of that individual.
And so it is impossible for anyone to live up to another person's interpretation of who
we are.
And so we will never know some of what motivated David Crockett also, we changed throughout
our lives.
We can't take a human being and put him in one, this person is this, because we evolve,
we grow, we learn, we fail, and I think he was a great example of somebody who did that,
who just tried to figure it out.
But he was just a fascinating, fun, interesting person in a time where there wasn't people
who were struggling to survive.
It seems like he would have been hard not to like if you actually met him.
Crockett Biographer R. Scott Williams believes that David was America's first real celebrity,
and despite our exploration of his life, we'll never know his full motivations.
Western culture has obsessed over the fleeting fame of mortal men, with the veracity of
an October Square Award in Akerns, but I think the pace has even increased in modern times.
I'm certain since our 100 gathered days as a species, we've looked for leaders and
warlords to look up to, later in history, kings, chiefs, authors, artists.
But the global celebrity is a relatively new thing and it's gaining steam.
Today with social media and television, celebrities are a dime a dozen.
From sports players, race car drivers, actors, musicians, to kundalg breeders and world-class
trotliners, that's a joke, celebrities are everywhere.
But Crockett was surely America's first.
He had widespread name recognition in America and Europe in his lifetime.
People made money off his name, image, and likeness.
They wrote books and even had a Broadway play about him in his lifetime.
In my mind, his interaction with his own fame characterizes him as a true celebrity, but
I think it's notable that the foundation of his identity and fame was that he was a bear
hunter.
Don't forget that.
On the last episode we talked about Crockett's childhood, first marriage and his time in the
Creek War.
I'd argue this was the most formative part of his life.
Crockett married Polly Finley in 1806 and he returned from the war, and in 1814 he wrote
after his arrival home, though I was only a rough sort of backwoodsman.
They seemed mighty glad to see me.
He was talking about his family, however little the quality folks might suppose it.
For I do reckon we love as hard in the backwood country as any people in the whole world.
That's good.
He loved Polly.
At an 1815 tragedy struck and we see our man expressing perhaps the most iconic expression
of humanity, grief.
So Crockett returns back to Polly in 1814, then tragedy strikes when...
She dies.
Yeah.
Soon after he returned and this was a truly traumatic loss.
He had children, he didn't like farming, his business affairs were not in good order.
He had lost his wife, beautiful, young Irish, I mean she married in her teens.
He was only 20 and he was on the front here.
Here's Crockett's account of Polly's death in his own words from his autobiography.
But in this time I met with the hardest trial, whichever falls to the lot of men, death,
that cruel leveler of all distinctions to whom the prayers and tears of husbands and even
the helpless infancy are addressed in vain, entered my humble cottage and tore from my children
in affectionate mother and from me a tender loving wife.
It is the scene long gone by and one which it would suppose I had almost forgotten, yet
when I turned my memory back on it, it seems as but the work of yesterday.
It was the doing of the Almighty whose ways are always right, though we sometimes think
they fall heavy on us.
And as painful as is even yet the remembrance of her sufferings and the loss sustained
by my little children and myself, yet I have no wish to lift up the voice of complaint.
I was left with three children, the two oldest for sons, the youngest a daughter and at that
time a mere infant.
It appeared to me at that moment that my situation was the worst in the world.
Death, the cruel leveler of all distinctions, Polly was 26 years old, Crockett wore his heart
on his sleeve.
Perhaps the most mysterious phenomenon of human life is that it ends.
Death must be one of the most written about, feared and explored occurrences in existence.
The reaction of the living to death is something that interests us all.
I suspect the curiosity is instinctual and we're hoping to learn how to respond to what
we know is coming, this inevitable crisis that no man's money, good looks, or wit can
circumnavigate death.
Even death is really a wild concept, almost unbelievable.
In death we see the greatest picture of the dual nature of human life.
It's both spiritual and physical.
The essence of a human departs their physical body in a peculiar, untraceable moment characterized
more by what is gone than by what remains.
The lifeless corpse once occupied by the energy of life and governed by the inexplicable
architecture that built the body now begins to be disassembled back into its individual
physical elements, redistributing the matter of the human body back into the chemical
cycles of the earth.
Death is wild.
This small window into Crockett's response to death is endearing, but also shows us his
pragmatism, which people on the frontier had to have.
So here's what he did very quickly.
So he had to do something and he knew there was a widow not too far away.
Elizabeth Patton, who also had kids, he was very young also.
He goes to see her and they actually get married.
He's a very different kind of person from him, he's very practical, hard working, realistic.
They say opposite to tract and I guess they do something instead.
He almost sounds like kind of like a transactional thing too, and from the mouth of Crockett
in his autobiography, he just basically says, my wife died soon enough I realized I needed
a new wife, my kids needed a new mother and there was a widow down the road and we met
and she was agreeable and we got married.
I mean it was just like, you know I'm a man, you're a woman, let's do this.
It said he was as sly about it as a fox when he is going to rob a hen house when he
corded Elizabeth and it worked.
David and Elizabeth were married at her home.
During the ceremony a hog named Hook pushed open the door and walked inside and everyone
laughed and Crockett said, old Hook, from now on I'll do the grunting around here.
That's good.
In some ways romance is a novelty of the modern prosperous world.
The original idea of marriage was primarily one of practicality.
This could be why more than 50% of marriages in America end in divorce.
Could it be that using the tickly feelings of cheap emotion as our primary guide on marriage
are leading us astray?
I'm not suggesting that a marriage should be absent of love, just a question.
In Crockett's political career he would sponsor bills that would make it harder to get
a divorce in Tennessee.
We don't know the exact date of Polly's death but she died in 1815 and he married Elizabeth
on March 6, 1815 so he remarried inside of three months of Polly's death.
It's notable too that Elizabeth's first husband was killed in the Creek War that Crockett
also fought in.
Elizabeth had two children that she brought into the marriage in David III and then they
would have three children together bringing their total number of children to eight.
That's a respectable size Tennessee family.
The pragmatism of David and Elizabeth's marriage was evidenced by their business ventures
together.
The new Crockett family would then move to show Creek near Lawrenceburg, southeast of Nashville
Tennessee.
Today there's a Crockett State Park there.
Here is an event in 1819 that shaped their family's life.
Another way that Crockett's life parallels Daniel Boone's is that both started many enterprises,
businesses and they never worked out.
They always collapsed one way or another and using his wife's money, he bills this huge
business, grist mill, powder mill, distillery and thinks, you know, well, we've got it made
now.
This comes a flood and it's all washed away.
He has to start over again.
You know, it seems like poverty chased these guys around a lot and shaped a lot of their
life.
I mean, if Crockett had been wealthy, he wouldn't have been Crockett.
If Boone had been independently wealthy, he never would have had to have taken the risks
that he took.
You know, I feel like these guys, even though if they, if you had them choose poverty or
choose wealth, they would inevitably have chosen wealth and had maybe an easier life.
It was this thing that was following them, that drove them and that drive that they had
is what made them who they were.
They were both gamblers and they were willing to take huge chances.
I think both of them had a sense that they were going to lose in practical things, but
they were willing to try really risky things because it might have a big payoff that you
might go through the Cumberland gap and get 10,000 hikers in Kentucky that yours or you
might go to West Tennessee or Texas and get land.
But also, I think Crockett felt sometimes that he was kind of born to failure.
It became a part of the persona, the public persona, the self-deplicating.
You know, I've done this, I've done that, I've, you know, this, you know, the loss of the
mill starts a streak that ends up at the Alamo.
He didn't choose failure, but he was willing to risk failure.
Yeah.
Yeah, if the Gris mill had worked out that flood hadn't come and that had been a major
source of prosperity for his family, he probably maybe would have never gone to Texas.
Oh, well, certainly you've never gone to Texas, you've probably never gone to Congress
either.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, that's a really interesting thought.
You think about the failures in your life with the difficulty, the stuff that was hard
and so often that looks like a, like a black X, but that, that black X is probably what
pushed you to do other stuff that ended up being wins for you.
The only conventional thing that you're not doing the thing that nobody expected.
I'll tell you one thing I've learned from looking at Frontier history is owning a Gris
mill, it's risky business.
Oh, man, it's just like every time when I hear that they build a Gris mill, I'm like,
oh, man, here comes financial failure.
After the failure of the mill, Crockets wanderlust for land got the best of him and he went
on an exploration into Alabama, the land formerly owned by the Creeks.
He gets down there on a several-month excursion and contracts what most likely was malaria.
He gets so sick, his buddies literally leave him for dead, return to Tennessee and give
his horse to Elizabeth with news of his death.
But as we know, reports of death aren't always true.
Again, do you remember Mark Twain's other reports of my death?
I want to ask you about that because so yeah, so these guys that were with Crockets go
back and tell Elizabeth, Crockets dead, even though they actually didn't see him die.
They just when they left him, they assumed he would.
This seems so common back during this time.
The Frontier was so dangerous, the communication was so slim.
We know it happened with Boone when he went into the wilderness for two years.
It was just assumed that he was dead.
It happened with Crockets.
It just seems like today I think about my wife or it would just be so bizarre to have
some period of your life when you did not know if your spouse or loved one was dead or alive.
The most famous case is Hugh Glass.
Jim Bridger as a 16 year old left him because he was so close to being dead.
He assumed he was going to die and went to get away from the grizzly bears and the
Sioux.
So he just left him as he was dead.
No, the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain's, man, that is when you think about human emotions and how we're geared to
deal with crisis in life, that has got to be probably one of the most dramatic things
that can happen is when you think somebody's dead that you find out they're alive and
you can even take that analogy back to the pinnacle of the Christian faith, which is Jesus
died.
And then three days later, he shows back up alive.
It's a pretty, I don't know, it just takes a human on a massive roller coaster and it's
interesting because that happened all the time back in these days.
Obviously, we're happy to see him when he showed up and she had sent somebody to look
for him.
She was a pragmatic woman, wasn't she?
She was like, I don't think he's dead.
That old sucker, you can't kill him that easy.
There's more to that near death story that's really interesting.
Will somebody on the next render please remind me to talk about his near death in Alabama?
Now, that is pragmatism.
You know, I'm amazed at how quickly they move past loss and you see that with Elizabeth
Patton, Elizabeth Crockett, when the Grismail washed away, she just kind of said, well,
there was a quote from her and she used the words, we'll scuffle around and get something
else going.
You know, they're just kind of like, let's see American way.
I mean, you move further west, you're dead, you lose everything, you're getting trouble
of the law, whatever, you know, just keep going west.
You try again, and then you try again.
It's just how the country was developed, it's people who failed in Europe or they wanted
to go.
You know, they were in Ireland as I'm married.
You know, that makes me see a real connection to the actual land of America, the physical
land, how big it is, and kind of American identity that we had room to make mistakes
and continue to move.
I mean, just the idea of a literal geographic move after some type of failure, you know,
if back in Europe, when everything was settled from coast to coast and you fail in your
little hometown, I mean, there's not a vast wilderness to the west of you to just go
and try something.
You might end up in jail in England if you got dead.
But here, there was a place to run.
I've never really thought of that as such a part of American identity and the...
Well, I think it's true in other ways than just geography, that if you fail, you know,
start another career.
I mean, somebody, you know, COVID comes and people lose their job and they go to the community
college or, you know, start another.
That's why, you know, there's so many jobs begging.
People have moved on to something else.
You think that's unique to Americans?
It's not unique, but it's certainly a part of a very character that nothing is the end
of the world.
You can do something or, you know, you can always try again.
It's a part of the character that is most successful, what we call pragmatism.
The people who are pragmatic usually win over those who are idealistic or have some fantasy
about the way things have to be.
It's said that in the Civil War, the union was much more pragmatic than the South which
had grown up on the novels of Sir Walter Scott, this, you know, chivalry and, you know,
grandness and a place that, you know, where you invent something, you have a little shop
or a factory that's hard for one to ultimately compete with the other.
You may have generals that are better, but it's the supplies, the material that finally
won the war.
That makes sense.
If we have any genius, it's pragmatism.
If we have any genius, it's pragmatism.
That's interesting to think about.
Seems to me like there should be a fine balance of idealism and pragmatism in one's life.
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The year 1817 is when the world began to take notice of Crockett.
He was 32 years old, which for the frontier was on the right side of middle age.
It was then he was appointed as a magistrate of his county, which is basically a low-level
judge.
Crockett said, this was a hard business for me for I could just barely write my own name,
but to do this and write warrants too was at least a huckleberry over my persimmon.
That was a cute way to say that this was above his pay grade, and he went on to say, quote,
I made my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man
and relied on natural-born sense, not on law-learning to guide me.
But I had never read a page in a law book my whole life.
Crockett's public life grew over the next few years when he rose out of the wilderness
of West Tennessee and declared that he was going to run for state representative.
So in 1821 is when he ran for state representative, and he was age 35.
So we've walked through his life from being farmed out to do work for his father when
he was 13, running away from home, working for John Candidate, this astute quaker who
really shaped him to getting married, and from 20 to 35, he kind of became the bare
hunter and backwoodsman and built this, you know, really was on the frontier.
And then when he was in 1821, age 35, he ran for state representative.
It said that he started his campaign at a squirrel hunt.
There was a big squirrel hunt down on the Duck River in Hickman County.
And it was a big social gathering, and they had a big frolic as they called where they
had music and bands, and it was a squirrel hunt and contest where the guys went out and
whoever could bring back the most squirrels would win.
And so they called it squirrel scouts.
Scouts, yeah, they brought squirrel scouts back.
What I took note of this, he said when he stood up before those people, and again, he's
not polished in public speaking at this point.
He's just done it a couple of times, probably.
And when he stood up before him, he got choked up big time.
And I can identify with that, standing up before people and being self-conscious and just
being...
His knees were shaking.
Yeah, just locked up.
And he made a joke, like he was stumbling for what to say.
And he said, well, when I stood up here, it was like...
There was a little bit of whiskey at the bottom of the barrel, and I thought I could get
it out by turning it over and shaking it.
And when I did, nothing came out.
And he was a metaphor about him thinking he had something to say, but didn't.
And when he did that, all the people started laughing, and it encouraged him.
And all of a sudden, he was able to give this...
The little pulverhead.
Yeah, yeah.
And I could identify with that so much, but he had a very successful first speech.
And then that became, like, the fire of his political career was standing up and talking
to people.
Well, I think he discovered this talent that when he's actually in front of people, however
nervous he was before, when he's up there looking them in the face, that suddenly the words
do come to him, that that's true for some people, and it's not.
I've always been that way.
I'm a very shy person, but when I get up in front of people, the words come.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think Crockett found out there, that was the important point.
He somehow had this rapport with the people that he kind of knew what they wanted to hear
and how he wanted to present himself, because he's creating a persona.
Every public person is an actor, and from the time he was very young, he was sort of
an actor.
He's like Boone in that way.
I mean, everybody is an actor in a sense.
You create the role of yourself.
Crockett was really good at it.
That was the real beginning of his political career, when he got up there, and was it
LBJ who said, if you really have the talent, be a politician, and you walk into a room,
you've got to know within, I don't know, 45 seconds or something, what people's attitude
to you are, you just sense it, if it's a people in a hostel or a friendly, or believe
you, and he had that.
Crockett would win the election, and it would set a new course for his life.
Here's Scott Williams with some context.
So you have to look at what was going on in the country at the time.
So expansion is what everybody was all about.
America was needing to grow.
There needed to be a lot more farmland.
A lot of trade was going on internationally, and all of the area where I am, all around
us for thousands of miles, is prime agriculture land.
People at East, though, were curious, they were trying to figure out, what is this land
like?
There were songs, and there was a lot of, the media was really writing about it, and a lot
of people writing books about it, and so it was very romanticized.
People like Andrew Jackson, who were the last person you would ever think would be running
for office, could win, and someone like a David Crockett, who were you going to
vote for?
If you're going to vote for somebody to represent you in the Tennessee legislature, are you
going to vote for some fancy, well-dressed person, or are you going to vote for somebody
that's a lot like you?
It's going to be able to spin yarns and tell stories and make you laugh, and I guess back
in the East, that was the typical political leader.
Oh, 100% in it was the standard.
I read, I think it was in your book, that a lot of the politics back East, maybe weren't
even that much different than Europe, what these people had left, and so when Crockett
was, when he rose up, America was like, yeah, that's who we are, we're not, we're not
those guys, this is who we are, that's exactly right.
Crockett Bogger for Michael Wallace said, political campaign evoked in Crockett a fulxiness
and frontier flair that displayed his expansive personality and full force.
He would continue to use this template of folksy speeches that vividly differed from
the stuffy political vibe of his opponents.
The founding fathers weren't exactly commoners, you know.
Wallace also said, Crockett never put on heirs.
He was trying to represent the common men and women, just like himself, and not the landed
gentry, creating an ethic for this western portion of Tennessee that challenged the
hierarchical structure of the plantation culture, and to quote, he would maintain this
stance as whole political career and become America's first frontier populist politician
as he would later go to Congress.
So 1821, he's a state representative.
This is his first time to really be in the public eye, and he's in the chamber of the legislature.
One of the more prominent legislators stand up and they're talking about Crockett, and
he belittles Crockett when he says, the gentleman from the cane.
This was designed to be, basically it was just saying, this is a common man, an uneducated
man, a man that doesn't need to be here, and he was trying to take the knees out from
Crockett, and then what does Crockett do?
He calls himself the gentleman from the cane.
At the time, there were vast expanses of river cane associated with wilderness.
That's what he's talking about when he says the cane.
The man who belittled him wore a rough, which was a high frilly collar, you know, like
those European guys wore, and the next day Crockett stood before the Congress wearing a rough
and calling himself a man from the cane.
This made his aggressor the laughing stock of the Tennessee legislature.
And that's, remember how difficult it is to come from his background, and to be in
a chamber of people who are much better dressed, who have the confidence of people who have
more money.
This is really challenging, somebody really from the working class, particularly when things
get difficult.
You may be able to act confidently when things are going smoothly, but when you're criticized,
somebody's making fun of you, and you still act with confidence.
Not many people can really do that.
Another option would be for someone to make a fool of themselves and get mad and go on
a rant.
I mean, if you're just thinking about all the options, you know, option one, option two,
when you're be littled by people in power, and he did the absolute best option.
He used it the rest of his life.
His enemies gave him a beautiful plan for marketing and branding for his career.
We could also say that he created that role in American politics, that in the era of
the founding fathers and the early 19th century, almost all politicians who are from advanced
backgrounds.
And somebody that's still as true, you know, you find out policies about the Harvard or
Princeton, however, folks he may act, but Crockett's the real thing, I mean, he did come from
the cane.
In Wallace's book, he said, quote, one of Crockett's favorite ploys developed early on in his
political career was to campaign in a buckskin hunting shirt with two large pockets.
One pocket, he kept a big twist, a tobacco, and then the other, a bottle of liquor.
Crockett said, when I met a man and offered him a dram, he would throw out his quid a tobacco
and take on.
And after he had taken his horn, I would out with my twist and give him another chal.
And in this way, he would not be worse off than what I found him.
End of quote.
Now, I could do without the hard liquor and mouth tobacco, but the concept is solid.
And I'll give you one guess who also wore buckskin in the state legislature.
I compared him to Michael Jordan on the last episode, and he's clearly the goat, the American
frontier.
Yep, old DB, Daniel Boone, you know, I might run for political office one day.
First of all, so I could represent my people.
But secondly, so I could wear my first light and pair of briar proof bibs into the state
house to lecture those crusty yuppies on the virtue of true Arkansas living.
You know what, Brit Reeves might even be my running mate.
We might even run for governor and vice governor.
They'll cut that out.
That's ridiculous.
I've got to read another excerpt from Wallace's book.
The rocket certainly didn't know it at the time, but with his victory in 1823, he was
well on his way to becoming a folk hero in a nation that had heroes such as George Washington,
but no genuine folk heroes.
There were plenty of mythologized heroes from the past and the founding fathers, including
some of who were still alive, who were admired and respected, but not other than Washington,
the stuff of legend.
In the admirable Daniel Boone, who died in old man just a few years before Missouri, seemed
distant and removed, particularly since he had much preferred solitude to the legend
that overshadowed him.
Andrew Jackson and other notable political leaders were objects of hero worship in many
circles, but especially the so-called common man saw something else in the brash yet
unpretentious David Crocket of Tennessee.
The common man was on the rise as Jackson's political success revealed, and Crocket also
had the makings to become one of America's first heroes for the masses.
End of quote, this helps me understand a difference in Boone Crocket's persona.
Boone would become an American archetype for manhood, freedom, independence, and the natural
man connected to nature.
Wallace calls Crocket a folk hero.
A more modern word we've used would be celebrity, because all this happened in his lifetime.
Crocket would serve a two-year term from 1821 to 23 and win re-election in 23 to serve
a second-term and state government.
While in office, Crocket was very effective, and his primary focus was helping Tennessee
settlers buy land at a reasonable price, but he also sponsored bills promoting navigable
rivers, marriage with widows, things that oppose divorce, banning dueling, and opposing
prisoner labor.
But he did lose his first national race in 24 for a seat in the Senate.
His opponent had more money.
By now, his family had moved to West Tennessee, living near real-foot-like and later near
present-day Rutherford, Tennessee, near Memphis.
After these two terms, he returned home, and a literal shipwrecked business venture
would lead him to his next step, Congress.
But one thing that I did pick up on about David Crocket is he was a good friend.
If you were a friend of David Crocket, he kept you by his side.
One of my favorite stories in his life, this is a great little example of how things went
for David Crocket.
You know, back then, think about it.
Barrels were the most important thing you can have, whether you're on the farm or in
the city or wherever you are, a barrel is crucial because you would store things in it.
It kept things dry.
It kept major transportation of commodities.
Absolutely barrels.
Barrels were huge.
So, the O'Brien River is near here in O'Brien County, so his house was, his cabin was close
to the O'Brien River.
He and his wife owned that land, and so his idea was I'm going to pay you to cut the
barrel pieces, and then we're going to build a boat, two boats, and then we're going to
take them to New Orleans, and we're going to sell them.
Go down, though, by onto where it hits the Mississippi.
Mississippi.
We're going to go down the Mississippi, and then staves to New Orleans.
Yep.
That's what they were called.
Barrel staves.
Then he'll pay you.
So these guys had a lot of trust, so they get into the Mississippi River, and suddenly
he's like, wow, I really didn't realize.
It was this crazy out here on the Mississippi River, and the people he had hired to do this
also didn't realize.
So there is a place near Memphis called Paddy's Hand and Chicken Island, something like that.
They hit it, and when they hit it, one boat fell apart.
They had to get everybody to get on the other boat, and he was asleep at the time, and his
crew pulled him through the window when they did.
They pulled all his clothes off.
There's Robert Morgan on the Mississippi River wreck.
When you read that passage of him going down the Hawaiian River and getting on the Mississippi,
you have to remember a wonderful book by Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, and what's
brilliant passages in it, what's brilliant writing by him and possibly an American literature
describing how you navigate on the Mississippi, that a pilot has to memorize the whole thing.
He knows the currents, he knows when the sandbars are, he knows where the eddies are, the
sucks.
I mean, it's a, you know, it takes you years, and here are these people with these two flat
boats, and there are absolutely nothing about the Mississippi, hoping to navigate it.
It seems like he would have known better than that.
Well, there's something in Crockett.
I don't have a name for it.
I'm still working on it.
That, like Edgar Allan Poe, I don't want to call it a death wish, but it's something
like that.
That when he does something, he has to know it's so risky, it probably won't work.
Crockett was wild, and that ever-present thing Mr. Morgan can't put his finger on would
eventually kill him.
Here's Scott on the rest of the shipwreck story that ultimately leads him to a run for
Congress.
So he is hovering naked on this island when a boat comes down from Memphis and picks
him up and takes him to Memphis and they get him something to drink and something to eat
him and his crew.
Of course, I don't know what he's thinking in his mind, because-
This is like a disaster.
Everything is worth the work.
He's amazed.
He's gone.
He's gone.
And these guys, I'm sure, are we going to get paid?
And so, you know, here he is, you know, going to Memphis and they introduce him to Marcus
Winchester, who is the mayor of Memphis, and the son of Winchester, who was one of the
founders of all of West Tennessee, and so they just hit it off like gangbusters, you
know.
And Marcus Winchester is this guy who's from, you know, very fancy background, great schools,
well respected, but who had actually married a woman who was part Native American possibly,
some African American blood, and so he was in many ways a figure with a lot of controversy
swirling around him at the time.
So Marcus Winchester and his wife were having to live outside the city of the city limits
of the city he was the mayor of.
And from then on, Marcus Winchester funded a lot of David Crockett's campaigns.
Winchester would encourage and fund Crockett to run again for a national seat in Congress,
which he did in 1827.
And this river wreck was a major crisis with over one years of work completely lost in
a near death experience on the Mississippi River that would have made a great story on
a meteor close calls audio book.
Him ending up half naked on the banks of the Mississippi in his vulnerability opened
a door for a political alliance.
You would think that strength would land big deals, but sometimes it's weakness.
It was in these highly contested campaigns for Congress that Crockett's campaign style
began to rock the free world.
He was a force of nature to be reckoned with on the campaign trail.
They typically traveled with the person they were running against and they'd go from
town to town, given stump speeches.
Once Crockett's opponent paused his speech when a flock of guineas began to chatter loudly
and he asked some people to run off the guineas.
Crockett stood up after and he said his opponent was the first person he'd ever known to understand
the language of guinefals, everyone laughed.
Another time Crockett asked his opponent if he could go first at the next town and then
Crockett proceeded to recite the man's campaign speech word for word.
His opponent was flustered and speechless.
Once Crockett was running against a man with a peg leg, a prosthetic leg, and they stated
this farmer's house who had a beautiful young daughter.
In the night, Crockett took a wooden chair and thumped it down the hall and knocked on
the girl's door and quickly ran back to his room before the irate, awakened father
accused Crockett's opponents of some serious misconduct.
Crockett was playing chess while these boys were playing checkers.
Here is Robert Morgan introducing us to the political rival that would define Crockett's
life.
Andrew Jackson.
Actually like David Crockett had from his youth had this resistance against the upper classes
also because the upper classes had owned all the land and charged them money for renting
it.
In fact, trying to make them serve, people tied to the land doing all the work.
It's very interesting to think of Crockett's relationship with Andrew Jackson because Jackson
was ostensibly four of the poor people.
He was a populist, but Jackson had become a great landowner, many slaves.
As Crockett became much more familiar with politics and then with Washington, he understood
that that Jackson had really become a friend of the ruling classes, the slave owning ruling
class.
It's very important to understand that he'd been a Jacksonian earlier because he thought
that the Jacksonians, not just Jackson himself, but his whole party were people for the poor
people.
Then he came to realize that was absolutely not true, that they were very much for the
ruling class and had little interest in the squatters on land who needed land and needed
title to the land.
This resentment, this war really between the Scotch Irish and the ruling classes went
all the way back to Scotland and almost to the middle ages.
And that really defined who Crockett would become in that he was constantly communicating
to people that he was a common man and kind of had a chip on his shoulder against the
entitled the rich.
It's almost like you can trace that thing in him all the way back across the Atlantic
to the history that their family brought with him, even though he was never there.
He was born in Tennessee.
To me, it's interesting how generational ideas and worldviews just pass down.
Well Crockett is one of the few leaders of the United States who actually came from the
laboring working class, that if you look at the great politicians of the 19th century
at the founding fathers, they're mostly from middle class anyway, but Crockett and we
really came from the laboring classes, people who had very little education.
And that's very important in thinking about him, but also in thinking about the politics
of the 19th century.
Who else can you think of who's a famous politician who came literally from the laboring class?
It's Lincoln, the greatest president of all, who shares so much with David Crockett, including
the sense of humor, backwards humor, and who tried so much for working for the poor people
and the black people, the slaves.
He had that sympathy, but Lincoln is one of the few people of the 19th century who comes
literally from the working class.
So think about that when Crockett has an enormous influence on the political culture.
So you think he influenced people's ideas of who could be a leader, but also directly
influence Lincoln as a politician?
Absolutely.
I mean, Lincoln shares so much with Crockett, including telling corny jokes all the time,
and also being kind of like a poker player with his policy.
Remember, I think it was Chase who said early in Lincoln's administration, Mr. President,
you've got to tell us what your policy is, and Lincoln famously answered my policy as
to have no policy.
And both Crockett and Lincoln were deeply influenced by the culture of the frontier which was deeply
influenced by Indian politics and culture.
That's exactly the way a famous Indian chief would act.
You didn't know what he was going to say, you didn't know what his policy was going to
be to the last minute, and that's exactly the way Lincoln acted.
So Crockett being this kind of first significant American frontier populist, and he kind of
emerged as this political leader and kind of forged a pattern.
And he for sure was the first guy that was a notable politician that was absolutely
uneducated, that was foreshore from the frontier, and he created this space that then influenced
American politics from there on out.
He's the model.
Yeah.
As Boone was the model for the frontiersman, Crockett is the model of the frontiersman,
the laborer who arrives in Washington and becomes a very famous iconic figure.
That's big fodder for quantifying how Crockett influenced America, he influenced Lincoln.
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There's Scott with the DL on the Jackson Crockett feud.
I was happened to be researching and writing my book during one of the most contentious
eras in recent memory when Trump was in office and so I couldn't help but have a lot of
that resonate with me, the comparisons between Trump and Andrew Jackson and how some of
those...
Tell me about that.
Interesting.
Trump, Andrew Jackson was like, hey, I'm going to do things my way.
No matter.
I don't care what anybody says.
I'm the anti-government person and also at the time political campaigns were vicious.
You think they were vicious during the Trump era.
They were even ten times more vicious during Andrew Jackson's.
Him and his wife, Andrew Jackson's wife, she may or may not have still been married
when they got married.
So she was likely a little bit of a scandal, you know, apolygamist and if you go strictly
by the law and the stress of the media coverage and his political enemies using that, killed
her.
So imagine the anger and the fury that was directed towards him by Andrew Jackson.
And this is a guy that was involved in I think like a hundred duels.
Oh yeah.
I mean, it was literally in shootouts, like constantly.
And so I was researching David Crockett.
You can help but also research Andrew Jackson quite a bit.
And you know, here the bullets that were still in his body caused long term lead poisoning.
Yeah.
And so he lived for, you know, a really long time.
Yeah.
But oh my gosh.
So here's bullets from the duels, at least one or two bullets lodged in his body.
They couldn't get out.
He just slowly leaked into his body until he just, he died a horrible death.
They exhumed his hair from the grave.
Yeah.
I guess they dug him up.
Yeah.
And found all that lead.
And the analysis on it, modern analysis and found that he died of lead poisoning.
This is what's ultimately killed him.
But he was just, I mean, he was a hothead.
And you know, he, he was really the antithesis ultimately of what David Crockett was about.
And you would think these two guys would have more in common than they had different.
But they really had more difference.
So Andrew Jackson was anti-government, right?
But now Crockett, where would Crockett have stood?
Well, what Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, what they needed more than anything was for
all the congressmen to fall into line.
And so if Andrew Jackson and if they needed something done, they wanted, they wanted David
Crockett to vote yes, when they wanted yes and no, when they voted no.
And I tried to figure out was David Crockett in many cases that he went against him, was
he going against him because he knew they wanted him to go for them or was he truly,
and I do think it's a mixture of the two.
So, so it could be that he was actually not playing politics and just doing what he thought
was right in the situation.
Correct.
Yeah.
That would be the most noble.
Yeah.
I think it's somewhere in the middle.
That's most usually is the case.
Yeah.
You know, he wasn't going to let anybody boss him around.
He wasn't going to let anybody push him around.
So probably the most notable was the 1830 Indian removal act where Andrew Jackson was spinning
it as, hey, you know what, we're going to do something nice for the Native Americans.
We're going to help them preserve their way of life and we're going to send them, you
know, to Oklahoma, out west and David Crockett knew enough to knew that that was not true.
And that a lot of the Native Americans had actually assimilated, but they had assimilated
and their tribe still owned a huge amounts of land.
And so David Crockett, there's a quote that's in the book that probably, to me, his most
noble moment is when he said, look, I know Native America.
My territory that I represent has more Native Americans touching it than any place else.
And I can tell you, this is not a good bill unless they choose to go.
If they choose to, great, but I'm going to vote no.
And so, you know, that is what really at the end of the day, that was the last straw for
Andrew Jackson and his cronies.
Do you think that Crockett's motivations inside of that were truly, he was empathetic towards
the Native Americans?
I mean, I've tried to figure that out.
It's impossible really to ever know, but I do think so because in that particular case,
it wouldn't have hurt him in any way to vote yes, unless he really truly believed that
it was the wrong thing to do.
And so I do think, especially by that point in his life, you know, you got to think by
then, you know, I mean, this is a guy, and it's hard for us, because for us, David Crockett
is, you know, deity, deity Crockett, King of the Welfare and Deer.
It's so ingrained in our culture.
It's hard to think about the fact here's this real person who is going to Washington and
there are plays on stage about him and he's going to a play that is about him, you know.
And so there are books and magazines, I mean, he has reached the height of fame unlike
really anybody else.
I mean, there were lots of congressmen and senators and there was lots of politicians
and, you know, but other famous people, yeah, but he just by far was the most, most
well-known, most recognized, most famous.
And so by voting no on that bill, he was the only Tennessean to vote no and it was in
all the papers, everybody wrote about it and wrote about it and wrote about it.
And here's the other thing that's interesting.
So he had a campaign coming up to be re-elected, but by voting against Jackson, they all put
his much force and energy as they could behind Adam Huntsman suddenly to win.
And ultimately, it hurt him politically.
It did.
It really did.
And the wigs, so the wigs were funding this little book tour and, you know, these guys
are all, you know, for the most part, easterners, you know, and they're all, you know, these
are the guys that have the-
So the guys in the east are funding Crockett, because I think he could be-
I think maybe he could be a wig, maybe we'll convert him over to us, he'll run for president
and he could win.
But he needed to win his next campaign.
So if he had won, then he could potentially have gone on.
So that could have cost him voting against the Indian Removal Act.
He couple of bounces away, it could have kept him from-
Yep, running for president.
Yep, because he really lost.
He lost to Adam Huntsman by just a few hundred votes.
Wow.
And so if he had not lost, history would have been a lot different.
Crockett was the only Tennessee Intervote node to Jackson's Indian Removal Act.
It's important for me to try to peer into the inner workings of his vote.
We've got to decide if this guy is going to be in the Bear Grease Hall of Fame.
I think there's a line of thought that could be- Crockett, his identity was that he was
a poor kind of overlooked from a marginalized group of people.
I mean, that was his whole identity.
He's like, these rich folks don't know what's going on.
We're these poor folks from the cane.
Right.
I think that would lend itself to having a genuine empathy towards people that he saw
being abused, misused by the establishment.
Well, I mean-
And think about this.
So the other thing that could have made him win is before the land was truly surveyed
and before it was truly able to be purchased legally, a lot of people came in here, a lot
of people were just flooding in here, setting up a space and saying, surely the government
will let me have this once it becomes available.
So they're setting up farms.
Some people, the father and the grandfather set up the farm will by the time the young
man is in his 20s and he's farming, that's his whole, that's where he's from.
Well, they didn't even own the lands.
They were squatters.
And so what David Crockett was trying to do is pass legislation that would allow these
people to purchase their land.
Well, first he tried to allow them to have it.
If they had been farming in a certain amount of time, they could have it.
But then there was no way that was going to go.
So it became, could they get it at a reasonable amount of money, which they could never
settle upon what is reasonable?
There were a few times he got close, ultimately no legislation was ever passed.
And when he would have really been in there fighting for that legislation, the time he
should have been he was out promoting his book.
So it was sort of a missed opportunity there.
So would you say that his two main things that he did as a politician was fight for essentially
squatters rights to have their own land.
And then the Indian removal act and a general opposition to anything Andrew Jackson did.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
And that was anti-political career.
Anti-establishment, but Andrew Jackson was anti-establishment.
So I guess he was anti-anti-establishment.
He was anti-squared, David Crockett.
David Crockett, anti-squared.
You know, we skipped over an important part of Crockett's political career that will
sum up quickly.
The Wigs, which would be equivalent to modern-day Republicans, saw him as a potential presidential
candidate.
They courted him, flattered him, brought him to Washington DC, and funded his famous
autobiography Booktour.
Yes, it's the book we've been reading stuff out of.
The Booktour was during a political session, and so he didn't show up to Congress.
And this would end up biting him in the bookskins.
This was Crockett's blunder.
This is where Crockett really gets in trouble, because he starts overplaying it, encouraged
by the newspapers and the audience.
He's the man from McCain, and he's the real thing, and he's working hard in Congress,
but the Wigs begin to perceive that he's against the Jacksonians.
He's fallen out with him.
He's from Tennessee, and it's deadly to be from Tennessee, and against Jackson, and
it's a popular person in the country.
So, huh, the Wigs from the Northeast primarily say, we can use this guy, and they encourage
other people and even Crockett himself to exaggerate this, it becomes sort of the clown,
the buffoon, and there's a book published about him that really hypes that image, and
he may have had a hand in it.
Was it Ego, I mean, were they planned to his ego, and he kind of fell for it?
To his ego and his vanity, yes, that he was a handsome fella, and I mean, nobody could
resist this, of course, that this fella from the back with the Tennessee is in the finest
parlors, and is told he's great, he's a greater future, and you know, we're going to maybe
one year from president, eventually they've convinced him, you know, that he's gone
for president, and the more he's a clown, the more it's going to be, the better it's
gone to be.
It's a Crockett begins to go off track in that period.
I think this really gives us some solid insight into who Crockett was, and what defined
his political career.
All this stuff is really important to me, because internal character plays a big part of
being in the Bear Geese Hall of Fame, but does being enamored with fame kind of ginsed
you in the realm of internal character.
In some ways, I can see the argument of my friend, Cleaves Tonella, at Mediter, who thinks
Crockett was a vain and self-serving man, but that seems like it's kind of part of being
a celebrity, which doesn't necessarily make it right.
Here's Scott with the tough question.
You know, in my little talk that I give, I do ask people, what do you suppose, David
Crockett, the man would think about Davey Crockett, the entertainment brand that sprung
up around parts of his personality, and my answer is always, you know, I think he would
love it if he could capitalize off it some way and make money off of it.
He would be one of those folks at those celebrity things where you're signing autographs, he'd
be signing autographs, he'd have a podcast, surely, you know, he'd have a big social media
presence.
Crockett would have a huge social, he would have a huge Instagram, Instagram, he'd be
TikToking with the best of them, and so he would, but also having researched him, he would
spend a whole lot more than he made on doing those things.
But I keep going back to this though.
Does that not spoil the authenticity of Crockett for you personally to think that he would
have, because I feel like as Americans, we want this guy that never wanted fame, but fame
found him because of his character and how great a man he was, it's sort of what's the
lore around boon, which isn't entirely true.
He did quite a bit of stuff to help raise his fame.
Like probably any of us would if we had the opportunity, but that's where I keep going
with Crockett, because I'm torn.
I mean, look at, look at like, you know, the earn hearts and race cars driving, you
know, look at, you know, I think they're bad people because they want to capitalize off
of, I mean, other people were making money off his name, image and likeness.
Why shouldn't he be compensated as well?
And see, that's where I think we're totally hypocritical, me hypocritical, because when
I think of this, this guy that was formative in America's identity, I don't want him
to be a celebrity.
I don't want him to be someone that had awareness of his own fame and would have done things
to manipulate that and grow it.
I want him to be this guy in West Tennessee that just woke up one day and was famous,
you know, kind of like boon and you're always comparing these two guys.
But and that doesn't make me discount Crockett at all.
It's just something that I think about.
Do you think about that?
I know.
Honestly, he was so much on the front of this fame, you know, people hadn't really been
famous in America, like that.
And so I think about, you know, I think about some of the people that I've worked with
in my career who are famous, quote unquote, who manage when they get ready to have a photograph
taken, they manage where the lights are, they manage how they look, they want to see
a clip of what if you're shooting video, they want to manage how their images projected
publicly.
And so there were no cameras yet then very soon thereafter, there would be photography.
You know, but I think what you're saying is that we can't blame Crockett for doing the
same thing that all our heroes today are doing.
Well, or any of us would do.
I mean, if you're smart, you want to, how many of us have a photograph taken and you
say, oh, don't post that.
You know, I mean, we control our self images, but Crockett had a painting done and he controlled
the gun he was holding, the dogs that were in the shot, he wanted to be holding a hat
like he was waving at his neighbor, you know, and that's a photograph that, you know,
if he orchestrated that painting and the painter lived to be a, you know, very old man, and
he wrote about the whole experience of painting David Crockett and he wrote about what it was
like, what they talked about.
Crockett was dealing with some family issues at the time and his son was upset with him
because he was spending too much time in DC and he said, the dogs you're using, those
are not what I would use if I were hunting a bear and a hurricane, as he called it.
And he took the painter into the streets of DC and they rounded up dogs that he thought
he would use.
He had, when he's looking at, he said, right, I'm on the gun, right, go ahead.
And so the painter wrote, you could see where the painter wrote, go ahead on the gun.
The painter writes that Crockett was just not quite happy with the painting.
He just kept saying, I'm not quite there.
And that one day he came in and he was just exuberant and he said, I've got it.
Here's what I want you to do.
Paint me holding my hat up, waving like I'm waving to my neighbor and saying, howdy, you
know, because he wanted to be approachable.
He wanted to be, he didn't want to be a stuffy painting.
And he also said, he also wrote, every painter always makes me look like a Methodist minister.
So he didn't want to look like a Methodist minister.
He wanted to be in his books.
He wanted the dogs in his gun.
He wanted the dogs in his gun.
That's right.
And so that's a famous painting.
And that gave America a template for the folk hero too.
We came from the white Europeans that primarily established the colonies in the States and
the East came from Europe.
And their aristocracy was very stuffy, very, very proper, very prim.
And so Crockett was like, I didn't like those guys.
Right.
He rewrote the book.
He rewrote the book on what it means to be famous.
He also would love to have been able to capitalize off of it financially and making
enough money to where he could support his family.
And who could blame him for that, don't we all want to do that?
Numerous people painted Crockett.
And he said he always looked like a Methodist preacher.
That's funny.
But in 1834, John Gadsby Chapman set out to paint the authentic Crockett who was then
47 years old.
The original painting, after Crockett's death, the Alamo was acquired by the state of
Texas and hung in the state capital building.
And Austin, Chapman had the painting for sale for $1,000, but was never paid by the state
of Texas.
Or at least that's what they say.
Tragically, a faulty stove pipe burned the entire state capital building to the ground,
including the painting.
So the original painting is gone.
Today, what we have is replicas.
Crockett would die two years after the painting was complete.
And Chapman wrote a memoir about painting Crockett called Rhymonizes of Colonel David Crockett.
Chapman wrote, quote, with all the disadvantages, consequent upon deficiency and timely educational
training, Colonel Crockett's command of verbal expression was very remarkable.
Say what he might, his meaning could never be misinterpreted.
He expressed opinions and told his stories with unhesitating clear-ness of diction, often
embellished with graphic touches of original wit and humor, sparkling and even startling,
yet never out of place are obtrusively ostentatious.
As for his backwood slang, it fell upon the ear meaningly and consistent as the crack
of his rifle or the hallue from a hurricane or from a cane break.
It was to him truly a mother tongue, in which his ideas flowed most naturally and found
most empathetic and unrestrained utterance.
During the progressive intimacy that grew out of familiar intercourse with Colonel Crockett
while engaged upon his portrait, he rarely, if ever, exhibited either in conversation
or manner, attributes of coarseness of character that prevailing popular opinion very unjustly
assigned him, I cannot recall to mind an instant of his indulgence of gaskinade or profanity.
There was an earnestness of truth in his narrations of events, circumstances of his adventurous
life that made it obvious, while the heroic type of his grand physical development equal
to any emergency of achievement, his clear unfaltering eye, with all gentle and sympathetic
play of features, telegraphing as it were directly from a true heart, overflowing with
kind feeling and impulse, irresistibly dispelled suspicion of insincereity and braggartism.
The ease and readiness with which Colonel Crockett adapted himself to circumstances of personal
position and intercourse were remarkable at times even masterly.
He would seem to catch in the first moment of introduction, the tone and characteristics
of a new acquaintance and was well to comprehend and rarely failed and agreeably confirming
pre-intertained opinions and reference to himself.
End of quote.
Wow, that was some incredible writing and description.
I always seem to be moved by the accounts of these portrait painters.
If you recall a young painter by the name of Chester Harding, traveled to Missouri in
1820 and painted the only portrait of Daniel Boone we have just months before his death.
Chester Harding wrote a fascinating piece about meeting the elderly Boone.
Here's what he wrote.
Remember, this is Boone.
In June of this year, I made a trip of 100 miles for the purpose of painting the portrait
of Colonel Daniel Boone.
I had much trouble finding him.
He was living some miles from the road and one of the old cabins of an old block house
which was built for the protection of the settlers against the incursion of the Indians.
I found that the nearer I got to is dwelling, the less was known of him.
Even within two miles of his house, I asked a man to tell me where Colonel Boone lived.
He said he did not know of any such man.
Why yes you do, said his wife.
It's that white haired old man who lives on the bottom near the river.
A good illustration that a prophet is not without honor, save his own country.
End of quote.
For some reason that passage almost brings me to tears every time I read it, I don't
really know why.
Harding went on and he wrote, I found the object of my search engaged in cooking his dinner.
He was lying on his bunk near the fire and had a long strip of venison wound around
his ramrod and was busy turning it before a brisk blaze and using salt and pepper to
season his meat.
I at once told him the object of my visit.
I found he hardly knew what I meant.
I explained the matter to him and he agreed to sit.
He was 86 years old and rather infirm.
His memory of passing events was much impaired, yet he would amuse me every day by his anecdotes
of his earlier life.
I asked him one day just after his description of one of his long hunts if he never got lost,
having no compass.
No he said, I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
End of quote.
The intimacy with which these portrait painters interact with people to create their art
and the pictorial expression of their candidate's humanity, birds a unique angled story.
And I think it may be one of the most accurate.
Clearly they're viewing these people in their best light.
This even an idealized one.
But who is qualified to tell the story of any man?
What angle gives the clearest, most true version of the human?
Every man has his own version of his life, which is one version.
His enemies also have a version.
His family, his friends and even the people that never knew him.
Who do we believe to interpret for us who a man is?
Let me ask you a question.
Who do you hope gets to release the canonized version of your story?
Brothers and sisters, you may have already seen my hand, but I love Crockett.
But perhaps by contrasting these two portrait sessions of these great American backwoodsmen,
we can see the differences in these men.
Boon was just so much less aware of his own fame, and that lensing credibility to me.
But I do believe that Crockett was a good man, really an incredible man who wore his flaws
on his sleeve.
And though I'm kinda disappointed with the way Crockett would handle his fame, as we're
gonna talk about in just a second, it seems like a lot to ask a guy who came from absolute
poverty on the backwoods frontier of America to get this global fame and just respond
with perfect humility in this idealized way that I have in my mind.
It just doesn't seem fair.
Did I ever tell you about the time he stopped to pay a widow, a $1 debt that he owed
our husband from 10 years before?
Did I tell you about the bill he sponsored that kept freed slaves from being able to
be repurchased?
Did I tell you that he owned some slaves in this lifetime?
There's Robert Morgan on Crockett's demise.
And Crockett was so really intoxicated by all this adulation, apparent adulation, and
the play about him, everybody knew it was about him, but you know, been so successful.
And they laughed at it, and they forgot they were laughing at it.
So the new York, and they put him from fancy hotels, and that, you know, that would turn
any of us really, and we find it hard to resist that.
He kind of went for it, and it probably was at the most disastrous thing he'd done his
whole life.
It was more damning than losing his mill and on the flood, or his flat boats on the Mississippi.
It hurt him more.
I think it really hurt him when he lost that election in 1831, and then again in 1835,
Morgan went off to Texas.
Oh, that ominous trip to Texas.
Crockett's book tour cost him the election in 1831, and again in 1835, and he never recovered.
On the next and final episode, we're going to dive in deep into Crockett's last stand
at the Alamo, and all the drama and controversy that surrounds him.
I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Geese.
I hope you're enjoying Brent Reaves' this country life podcast, and I look forward to
talking to the folks on the render next week.
Be thinking about whether you think Crockett should be in the Bear Geese Hall of Fame.
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