Travel Photo of the Week (And some history)
Davy Crockett. Frontier legend, Alamo hero, and presidential provocateur.
August 17 was the 238th anniversary of the 1786 birth of Davy Crockett, the frontier folk hero. The above photo is of a reconstruction of the Crockett Tavern, which was also Davy’s boyhood home in what is now Morristown, Tennessee.
Crockett was a frontier legend in the early 1800s. He was especially famous for his bear hunting skills and later served three non-consecutive terms in Congress in 1827-35, before dying in battle at the Alamo in 1836. His legend came back to life in the 1950s when Walt Disney produced a television series about him, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier.
At the same time, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the song associated with the TV series, became the sixth most popular song on the Billboard charts in 1955 (and three versions of the song were all among the top 24 hits of the year!). Here is actor Fess Parker singing it.
Meanwhile, a Crockett craze swept the country in the mid-1950s, with replicas of Crockett’s coonskin cap selling by the tens of thousands to children across America. Even some adults got in the game. In 1956, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver (that year’s Democratic vice presidential nominee) sometimes wore a coonskin cap during the campaign.
Three other interesting facts about Crockett, including two connections to presidential history …
He was born in a state that never became a state
The area where Crockett was born in eastern Tennessee was at the time part of the fledgling state of Franklin, which had separated from North Carolina and was trying to enter the Union as a new state. It failed in that effort and later became part of the new state of Tennessee in 1796.
He helped Andrew Jackson fend off a would-be assassin
In 1835, Crockett helped disarm an individual who tried to assassinate President Andrew Jackson. The president was walking out of the Capitol building when a gunman fired two shots at him from near point blank range. Both shots misfired, possibly because the powder was damp. Jackson attacked the shooter with his cane, while Crockett helped wrestle the man to the ground and disarm him.
He provocatively compared Martin Van Buren to a woman during a presidential campaign
In 1836, when Vice President Martin Van Buren was the Democratic candidate to succeed Jackson as president, Crockett wasn’t a fan. So he published a biting book-length attack on Van Buren in which he wrote that the vice president was “laced up in corsets, such as women in a town wear, and if possible tighter than the best of them. It would be difficult to say from his personal appearance whether he was a man or a woman, but for his large red and gray whiskers.” Ouch. Well, goes to show, at least, that personal attacks are nothing new in presidential politics!
See more Travel Photos of the Week here.