American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (28 page)

Crockett’s subsequent optimism regarding the bill reveals a confidence gleaned from his recent time in the limelight, and shows that his memory for frustration, bitterness, and defeat was short. In a letter to a Tennessee constituent, Crockett rode on false hopes when he scribbled enthusiastically: “My land Bill is among the first Bills reported to the house and I have but little doubt of its passage during the present Session.”
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His con-tinued naïveté is a bit surprising given his experience with congressional debates, the sloth of their movement, and his own history with the land issue. Still, Crockett was riding high, though his mind was elsewhere.

The congressman looking stately and reserved, which contrasts his actual ranting and raving behavior on the House floor. (David Crockett. Portrait by Chester Harding. Oil on canvas, 1834. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. Future bequest of Ms. Katharine Bradford.)

Feeling good about himself was one thing, but being financially flush was quite another, and Crockett, as he always would, retained some outstanding debt that niggled at his pride. Nicholas Biddle had been good enough to cancel one hefty outstanding note, and though Crockett was humbled and grateful, that only began to staunch the bleeding.
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It dawned on Crockett that the series of recent literary and media events magnifying his public image and some nudging and prodding by friends and associates, as well as constituents, during the previous election cycle all conspired to an obvious conclusion: it was time to write his own story, a narrative of his life, at once to set the record straight as well as to immortalize himself in print, and if all went as planned, financial and political success was in the offing. But Crockett knew that the scope of the project was too daunting to take on alone, doubting privately whether his own literary skills were up to the task.

He turned to Thomas Chilton, fellow boarder for years at Mrs. Ball’s, his friend, confidant, and sometime ghost writer. Crockett trusted Chilton: they had come into the house together as freshmen back in 1827, and they had worked together productively before. Chilton had been trained in the law, so he could negotiate any contract with a potential book publisher. Crockett certainly took notice of the frenzied sales of both Clarke’s
Life,
and later the wildly successful
Sketches and Eccentricities.
Frankly, he was tired of seeing others profit from his name, image, adventures, and near-death escapades—he might as well taste the pie he had helped bake.

The way his image had degenerated into caricature also needled Crockett, even if he had benefited from the mirage. A narrative of his life and adventures, written in his stylized vernacular and from his unique point of view, would clarify who he was, separating the flesh-and-blood Crockett from the mythical one threatening to overwhelm him. This was his chance to decide, once and for all, how he would be perceived. “I want the world to understand my true history,” he would write, “and how I worked along to rise from a cane-brake to my present station in life.”
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He would be puppet and puppeteer, his choice of words and the selection of his anecdotes cleverly manipulating the strings of the marionette that was his public image. Here was his opportunity to finally construct the David Crockett he wished to be, the authentic and legendary folk figure-cum-congressman, the
true
“Gentleman from the Cane.” Here was his chance to portray himself “in human shape, and with the
countenance, appearance,
and
common feelings
of a human being.”
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But most important of all, Crockett now understood that his fame was reaching its zenith, that the public craved him in many versions and permutations, and he desperately wished to capitalize on his popularity. One can imagine him grinning widely and with the dipped brow of feigned humility as he claims in his preface:

I know that, obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world. I can’t tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will, everybody seems anxious to get a peep at me . . . There must therefore be something in me, or about me, that attracts attention, which is even mysterious to myself. I can’t understand it, and I therefore put all the facts down, leaving the reader free to take his choice of them.
³⁸

He was certainly right about everyone wanting to get a “peep” at him. Just as he was in the preliminary stages of the writing, Thomas Chilton having mailed off a flurry of prospecting letters including one to the publishers Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, James Kirke Paulding’s blockbuster play,
The Lion of the West,
arrived in Washington, in its own way heralding the
arrival
of David Crockett. When Crockett himself went to see the benefit performance, in a much talked-about and written-about sequence, artifice and life converged. Nearly drowned by the cheers of a knowledgeable audience, Crockett was escorted like a dignitary to a special reserved seat in the front row, center, where he waited, hoots and hollers of recognition coming from all around him. At last the curtain slowly rose, and star actor James Hackett sprang onto the stage, bedecked in the leather leggings and wildcat skin hat of Nimrod Wildfire. He stepped to the edge of the stage and bowed deliberately and graciously to Crockett, who smiled, paused, then rose and returned the gesture. The enthralled audience, bowled over by the poignancy of the moment, erupted in a frenzy of cheers and applause.
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It was a powerful convergence of fact and fiction, where the mythical legend and the real man met, the past, present, and future of David Crockett all morphing into one. Crockett must have been intoxicated by the applause, and one had to wonder whether his addiction for that very praise would consume him the way “Arden spirits” had before.

By day Crockett attended to the mundane matters of congress, growing distracted and occasionally missing sessions; he devoted the evenings to his book. He and Chilton had agreed to a collaborative effort that would retain Crockett’s “style” and “substance,” with Crockett scribbling down the tales of his boyhood, the anecdotes, and the recollections of his life up to the present, and Chilton using his editorial eye to “clarify the matter.”
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Probably at Chilton’s likely insistence, Crockett made sure to elucidate that his collaborator was entitled to “one equl half of the sixty two and a half percent of the entire profites of the work.”
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He valued Chilton’s editing skills and his strong eye for structure and grammar, but he wished to retain the flavor and nuance of his own personality. Where useful and pertinent, Chilton retained Crockett’s idiosyncratic language. In the preface, Crockett humbly explained the plain style, wondering what might be criticized by “honourable men.” “Is it on my spelling?” he reflected. “That’s not my trade. Is it on my grammar?—I hadn’t time to learn it, and make no pretensions to it. Is it on the order and arrangement of my book?—I never wrote one before, and never read very many, and, of course, know mighty little about that.”
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Even in explaining the shortcomings of the book, Crockett was endearing himself to the audience. How could they not be enamored with his honesty, his candor, his utter lack of pretension? He came across as he wanted to, the “plain, blunt Western man, relying on honesty and the woods, and not on learning and the law, for a living.”
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It was an ingenious rhetorical device, and it worked better than Crockett, Chilton, or the publishers could ever have imagined.

Crockett wrote furiously, knocking out a good portion of the manuscript by the end of January, and, finding he was quite comfortable with the task, he managed to finish well ahead of his initial deadline. But the long nights burning the proverbial midnight oil took their toll, and he fell weak and feverish once more with a touch of malarial croup. Feebly handing over his handwritten manuscript to Chilton for polishing, editing, and revising, Crockett must have been quite relieved, pleased with his efforts as a first-time writer, but with no idea of what, if anything, he had accomplished.

As providence would have it, the incomparable David Crockett had written something of a masterpiece.

TWELVE

A Bestseller and a Book Tour

A
NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, Written by Himself,
hit the booksellers’ racks in early March of 1834 and flew off the shelves faster than fowl spooked from a canebrake. Publishers Carey & Hart had anticipated the frenzy, having done some promotion the minute they realized they had a winner on their hands. They must have been thrilled when they saw the readable, authentic volume—tidied up by Chilton but retaining Crockett’s quaint spelling and grammar, which he had ultimately specified remain unaltered. It was a gem of a book, and they quickly made Crockett an offer by the end of January, which he accepted on February 3.
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Mere hours after receiving his acceptance in the mail on February 7, the publishers distributed a broadside heralding the following:

It may interest the friends of this genuine Son of the West to learn, that he has lately completed, with his own hand, a narrative of his life and adventures, and that the work will be shortly published by Messrs. Carey & Hart, of Philadelphia. The work bears this excellent and characteristic motto by the author:

I leave this rule for others, when I’m dead:

Be always sure you’re right—THEN GO AHEAD!

The broadside included the very reasonable terms for what was destined to become a collector’s item: twelve copies and upwards, sixty-five cents.
²
Crockett helped his own cause as well, writing a promotional preface that he leaked to the press just prior to the book’s release.
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Sensing interest in the narrative to be at near-hurricane levels, Carey and Hart produced the book with remarkable speed, taking it from edited manuscript to published work in less than a month. The public responded, shelling out happily for multiple copies and the first print run sold out in a matter of weeks. Carey & Hart went back to press and offered them up again. The phenomenon continued, and within a few short months the book was in its sixth printing, an undisputed bestseller.

Everyone, from statesmen to commoners, bought the book, some out of sheer curiosity, spurred by Crockett’s name and interested in his outrageous stories and tall tales. But what they all got when they opened the 211-page narrative was an American classic, an autobiography on the order of favorite son Benjamin Franklin’s. Certainly there were similarities between the two texts, and as Franklin’s
Autobiography
was among the very few books Crockett owned or had ever read, he borrowed structural elements from that book.
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But the content, and the result, was pure Crockett, with just the slightest peppering of Chilton for political effect.
Narrative
is complex in its simplicity, revealing the playful, sincere, moral and even vulnerable voice of a real man, a man of his times. At once a morality tale, a political treatise, an adventure story, and a manifesto for the common man, the
Narrative
was the first truly “Western” autobiography,
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and “
the
great classic of the southern frontier.”
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The book prefigures by some fifty years the literary genre of “realism,”
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with nothing remotely like it, or nearly as good, appearing until 1884 with the publication of Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Crockett’s
Narrative
is real, vital, touching, and shrewdly humorous. It is the work of a master storyteller and truly gifted humorist.

For its apparent minimalism and straightforwardness, the
Narrative
is also remarkably multifaceted, at once deliciously revealing and frustratingly obfuscating about the man David Crockett. Crockett claimed, in a letter to his son John Wesley penned during his work on it, that “I am in-gaged in writing a history of my life . . . I expect it will . . . fully meet all expectations.”
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That the book met expectations is grand understatement, for it managed to far exceed them, giving a host of reading audiences precisely what they desired. City folks and the gentility from established centers like New York, Washington, and Philadelphia reveled in the stylized language and the original frontier humor, and the frontier folk themselves could see their own stories in the book’s narrator: a common man of humble origins and scant formal education who had risen to national prominence through his own wits, hard work, tenacity, and common sense. The book reflected their humility, decency, sense of adventure, and their role as pioneers of westward expansion. It ascertained, once and for all, that the democratic experiment of America was working and came to represent the national identity.
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