Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier - Softcover

Thompson, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 030772090X ISBN 13: 9780307720900

Verlag: Crown, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Pioneer. Congressman. Martyr of the Alamo. King of the Wild Frontier. As with all great legends, Davy Crockett's has been retold many times.  Over the years, he has been repeatedly reinvented by historians and popular storytellers. In Born on a Mountaintop, Bob Thompson combines the stories of the real hero and his Disney-enhanced afterlife as he delves deep into our love for an American icon.
     In the road-trip tradition of Sarah Vowell and Tony Horwitz, Thompson follows Crockett's footsteps from his birthplace in east Tennessee to Washington, where he served three terms in Congress, and on to Texas and the gates of the Alamo, seeking out those who know, love, and are still willing to fight over Davy's life and legacy.
     Born on a Mountaintop is more than just a bold new biography of one of the great American heroes. Thompson's rich mix of scholarship, reportage, humor, and exploration of modern Crockett landscapes bring Davy Crockett's impact on the American imagination vividly to life.

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BOB THOMPSON was a longtime feature writer for The Washington Post and the editor of its Sunday magazine. During his years at Post, he was known for his pieces on the intersection of American history and myth.

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Chapter 1

“Play That Song Again”

Minutes after I walked into Alamo Plaza, I saw my first Davy Crockett ghost. He took the form of a solidly built man in an outsized coonskin cap--the kind with a cute little raccoon face as well as a bushy tail--who handed me a business card.

“He’s my great-great-great-grandfather,” David Preston Crockett said. “Yeah, I’m a grandson of the famous Davy Crockett.”

David had put on his Crockett finery for the occasion, which was the 175th anniversary of his ancestor’s death at the Alamo, most likely within a few yards of where we stood. In addition to the cap, he wore a long fringed jacket and matching pants that looked as if they were made of buckskin but weren’t.

“Would you believe this stuff came from Walmart?” he asked. Then he told me how he’d bought some chamois cloth, maybe ten years before, and learned to sew.

San Antonio, Texas, was my last stop on a search for traces of the historical and mythical Crockett--for the “ghosts,” as I’d come to think of them, of an extraordinary American life. Colorful threads of Davy’s story had been spun into legend while the man himself was still alive, and that story’s epic ending on the morning of March 6, 1836, had rendered him immortal. If you were hunting Crockett ghosts, on this anniversary weekend, the Alamo was the place to be.

For starters, there were all the other guys decked out in raccoon caps and brown fringed garments.

At one point, I saw two Davys in full regalia--both associated with a production company that specialized in historical films--shake each other’s hands in front of the Alamo church. Up walked a tourist who’d heard that the real Crockett might have carved his name on the church’s iconic facade. One of the Davys set her straight.

“Mr. Crockett was a gentleman. Mr. Crockett would not do that,” he said. “I’ll take that to the bank.”

A few hours later, waiting for a reenactment of the siege and battle to begin, I found myself standing next to two more Davys. Mike and Mark Chenault of Dallas were identical sixtyish twins wearing identical Crockett outfits. I asked one of them--I’m pretty sure it was Mark--what made them fans.

“Just Crockett’s devotion, his patriotism to America,” he told me. “He came all the way from Tennessee, you know, and the timing was just so perfect.”

I don’t think Davy would have agreed about the timing. The former congressman hadn’t planned on coming to Texas just to die. Still, dying was what the Crockett we’d all come to see was about to do.

Doug Davenport was a craggy-faced reenactor from the San Antonio Living History Association; he wore the usual cap and fringed coat, but his legwear set him apart. I had no idea whether the real Crockett ever wore white pants, but the unusual look, oddly enough, made Davenport seem more authentic, less like a Hollywood clone. This was a good thing, because the thirteen-day siege and battle about to be re-created were desperately serious. General Antonio López de Santa Anna had just marched into town to quash the Texas Revolution, taking Crockett and the rest of the vastly outnumbered garrison by surprise.

“Get everyone into the Alamo!” someone yelled.

“Give us a position, and me and the Tennessee boys will protect it for you,” Davy told his commanding officer, William Barret Travis, who assigned him to defend a wooden palisade that filled a gap in the south wall.

Then it was hurry up and wait.

It is not easy to evoke twelve tense days in which little actual fighting occurred, but in the short time allotted to them, Davenport and his colleagues did their best. Defiant cannon shots were fired. Messengers rode out and back. Longed-for help failed to arrive. “I would just as soon march out there and die in the open,” Crockett confessed at one point, just as the real Crockett is said to have done.

He didn’t get his wish. On the thirteenth day, shortly before dawn, Santa Anna finally ordered his men to storm the walls.

I lost track of Davenport during the booming, smoky chaos of the assault, then spotted him slumped against the palisade. There he stayed, cap twitching occasionally, until the words “Remember the Alamo!” came over the loudspeaker and the defenders sprang back to life. All available Davys were soon posing for photographs. Adults and children crowded around, and as I watched, I heard a young ponytailed mom try to convey to her son the seriousness of the moment he was experiencing.

“You are walking where Davy Crockett walked around,” she told him. “That is really cool!”



Decades before that mom was born, Walt Disney made Davy Crockett the coolest guy in American history--and walking where he walked can still give people chills.

Davy’s 1950s apotheosis came about through a wildly unpredictable combination of circumstances. Among them were the emergence of television as an irresistible cultural force; Disney’s drive to fund his innovative new Anaheim theme park; Fess Parker’s bit part in a film about giant mutant ants; and possibly the stickiest song ever written, with lyrics thrown together by a man who had never tried writing a song before. (All together now: “Davy, DAY-VEE Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier!”) Disney hadn’t planned to spark a Crockett craze any more than Crockett had planned to get killed at the Alamo--Walt just thought he was making a three-part TV series--which goes to show that even a marketing genius needs a helping hand from fate now and then.

Americans’ obsession with Davy Crockett also showed--and not for the first time--how powerfully his story resonated with that of the nation itself.

For anyone who loves U.S. history, Crockett is a wonderful point of entry, because he intersects with so much of it. You’ll find him in the middle of the bitter struggle between settlers and Indians, for example, taking different sides at different times. He personifies the radical expansion of democracy in the age of Andrew Jackson--far better, in fact, than the patrician, plantation-owning Old Hickory himself--as well as the unstoppable migration westward that drew ambitious, adventurous men and women to places such as San Antonio. Crockett was constantly pulling up stakes. He spent a lifetime striving to escape the “have-not” side of a class divide that Americans like to pretend doesn’t exist. A fierce resentment of the “haves” sparked his political career; getting too cozy with them helped end it.

There is far more to the Crockett story, however, than a fascinating man’s real life.

To start with, there’s Legendary Davy, a character who took shape long before the real David--the version of his name he preferred--left Tennessee for Texas. Created by the image-conscious politician himself, Crockett’s exaggerated backwoods persona was magnified and distorted, especially after he arrived in Washington, by the political and media culture of his time. The rapid spread of Crockett’s fame may come as a revelation to those who think of celebrity politics as a recent phenomenon. Here was a nineteenth-century John F. Kennedy whose PT-109 equivalent, fighting Indians, became grist for a campaign biography. Here was a Ronald Reagan–Sarah Palin blend whose common touch and theatrical persona inspired a play called The Lion of the West, with an unmistakably Crockettesque figure playing the title role.

David Crockett went to check out his alter ego at a Washington theater in December 1833....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 030772090X
• ISBN 13: 9780307720900
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 394
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland