Hello, and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Allen Wiener, author of "David Crockett in Texas: His Search for New Land."

Allen, thank you so much for being here today.

- -My pleasure.

- -I want to ask by just starting you to introduce this book to us.

- -Well, this is actually the second book I've done on Crockett.

I did one on him about 15 years ago called David Crockett in Congress, which I did with my friend Jim Boylston.

And that took his story up to about the time when he was going to leave for Texas.

And I wondered if we should have gone beyond.

But that book was based entirely on his letters.

We had collected all of them, and they really don't go beyond when he left for Texas.

There's only one letter after that.

So we had I decided to do this one on my own, and there weren't not a lot of letters, so I had to look for other information.

I did want to take his story to the end, and I had talked to a number of other authors and authorities on this subject, and all of them told me the same thing.

They said, there's nothing new there.

It's been done a hundred times.

Don't bother.

No one will publish it.

So I said, oh, rats.

Well, I did find one thing nobody had ever done.

They never looked into what happened to his family after he died.

And I had heard rumors about that.

That all turned out to be false.

So I said that might make a good article.

And I started doing research largely through the Texas Government Land Office's land records, to find out what did happen to them.

When did they come to Texas, what lands did they get?

And I thought that would make a good article.

But in doing that, I found so many other documents along the way that showed me there was a completely different story here.

And so I decided I'll try to do a book about his entire journey to Texas.

- -Fantastic.

Davy Crockett is a is a mythical fixture in both Texas culture, US culture, and the myths even started when he was still alive.

He contributed to his myth making.

Oh, yeah.

So how how do you how does one tackle such a mythical being in order to to provide a factual record?

- -It's not easy.

And he's the first guy you run into is Davy Crockett, not David.

And he has sort of dogged Crockett his whole life.

And he's still doing that because he's more colorful.

He is a mythical figure.

He's, Fess Parker in the Walt Disney television series in 1955.

He's the guy who can, charm a panther out of a tree by grinning at him or wade the Mississippi River, while carrying a tugboat on his back.

And you... That sells.

People like that.

And even in his time, people were familiar with that character of Crockett, and he helped to create it himself because he would tell these kinds of outrageous stories and jokes on the campaign trail back home.

And they played well because everybody knew they were jokes, the kind of stories that the people told each other and everybody was in on the joke.

But once he got to Washington, he became a national figure.

It's sort of dogged him, and he lost control of it.

Plays were written about him, songs were written about him.

He saw himself, portrayed on the stage in Washington, which must have been something for him.

And so, he lost control of that figure.

And so have we.

When we try to research his life, it's hard to get beyond that guy and find who this real David Crockett was.

So that's what I set out to do.

I hope I succeeded.

- -I think you did.

The untangling must have been not easy at all, I'm sure, but.

But I want to talk about your sources, too, because a lot of what you find are, as you said, land records, letters from others in contemporary times.

I mean, I'm sure that the first hand and the contemporary accounts are vital in a work like this.

- -Yes, and... well, one thing I should say at the beginning, I said, okay, I'm writing about Crockett's journey to Texas.

I want to know why he went there, really primarily, and what happened when he got there.

I don't want to write another Alamo book.

There's plenty of Alamo books.

Well, I found out you can't write a book about David Crockett in Texas without writing an Alamo book.

So it's sort of that 1 or 2.

And a lot of the documents did come from the collections of documents that pertain to the Texas war for independence.

Others were things like letters that other people wrote about them, observations they left behind, memoirs of people who he ran into along this way.

And so I recreated the story by recreating his journey.

And there were actually plenty of people who were there who wrote down.

He came to our house, he stayed with our parents.

He swapped watches with a guy in Long Prairie, which no longer exists.

And, that man wrote a very nice letter to Crockett's wife after Crockett was killed.

And he actually returned the watch to Crockett's family.

So, yes, a lot of the sources are from bystanders, people who are actually witnessing his journey and also witnessing how this war in Texas is growing.

There are a couple of very good sources there, people who kept diaries.

And you can just follow along every day what's going on.

So I had to rely a lot on that.

I did want to rely as much as possible on original documents as I had in the first book, because I think that's the best way to try to piece together the story.

It becomes kind of a a detective story in a way, because you never have all the information or all the clues, but it's like a puzzle with some pieces missing.

And when you get the ones you do have, you can kind of figure out, well, that's probable it was in the missing piece and you make logical conclusions about them.

So that's pretty much where it all came from.

- -Absolutely.

So let's let's talk about the book.

You mentioned that you've written a separate book.

What I love about this one, though, is that you don't have to have read anything else.

You kind of get a full story here.

So if you are familiar, maybe you can breeze past the chapter on his early life.

But if you aren't, you're getting a full account of the man.

Why was that important to include?

- -I thought that, and this has become actually more clear to me the longer this process went on that in order to understand why he went to Texas, what he was actually looking for there, you had to understand what he had been doing all his life in Tennessee.

We're familiar with him as an outdoorsman, a hunter, an Indian fighter, and so forth.

But primarily he was a business man most of his life.

And you're not going to see that on television.

That doesn't get ratings.

You know, Walt Disney isn't going to do a show called Davy Crockett Businessman.

You know, tonight's episode, he pulls off a great land deer.

So, you know, I had to get to the bottom of that and see why, he went to Texas.

And it comes directly from his experiences in Tennessee as a businessman, as a land owner and a land agent.

Land speculator, and his his career in politics.

Both of those things went south for him in different ways.

And they led to his wanting to leave the country, actually.

And Texas offered him an alternative.

But it's not going to make much sense if you don't give that background.

It's funny that in all the Crockett and Alamo movies, I've always noticed he just kind of shows up at the Alamo, like, pops up out of the grass like no reason at all for going there.

Say, I'm here to fight the Mexicans.

What else would you expect from me?

It's part of that myth you mentioned.

Sure.

That's fits that.

Sure.

But he didn't.

He didn't go to the war.

The war was under way, and he went off to explore the land in the Red River country was.

Which was about as far away as you could get, because he didn't come to fight in the war originally.

- -I think it's also important that you because you do mention his early life, the seed of of knowing and wanting land from a young age of not having something.

And at that time, that was everything.

Land was everything.

Yes.

And it's so you need you need to understand, like you say, that that has to the seeds have to be planted.

The that the reasons have to be there for him to move through his life seeking land.

- -Right.

It was the means to wealth.

Everyone was chasing land in those days.

Crockett dealt with men who dealt in quantities of land of 10,000 acres at a time, or thousands of acres at a time.

And he wanted to be one of them, that he saw that as his way up economically and socially and politically.

People who owned a lot of land were respected.

They were somehow looked up to like, I guess, the richest millionaires today, the.com owners or whatever.

And that was the coin of the realm at the time.

So he sought to do that.

He never achieved that level of land ownership.

But for a guy who started his life in poverty, he didn't even learn to read or write till he I think he was nearly 20 years old.

He was really starting way back and had to work his way up.

And he did.

He achieved hundreds of acres of land, and he was on his way.

And, things didn't go well for him.

They were in politics.

And that's what leads him to Texas.

There is the land opportunity he's really been looking for his whole life.

- -One thing, as you say, we know this myth.

We don't know the man very well.

One thing I was maybe surprised or interested to learn.

He was very ambitious.

- -He was a very ambitious man.

- -Yes.

- -That's the first word that hits me when I think about who he was to start from that kind of a background and to have that kind of ambition.

And it's interesting.

That reminds me of how he learned how to read and write.

He often had to work for local people on their farms to pay off his father's debts.

He was always chronically in debt, and he worked for a farmer who was also a schoolteacher.

And he worked off his father's debt.

And then he said to the guy, I want to work for you, for myself, but instead of money, I want you to teach me how to read and write.

And that's how he learned how to read and write.

And he worked to get an education, that rudimentary sort of education.

But it shows that he knew that he had to have at least that much going for him if he was ever going to get anywhere.

And later, I mean, he gets into politics.

He's a justice of the peace.

He's a magistrate.

He, he's a town commissioner.

And you can't do that without reading and writing and, at least, fundamental arithmetics, so it all paid off for him.

- -Sure.

- -Yeah, you're right.

That ambition is a big part of his personality.

- -And as you're saying that it's ambition, but also the willingness to work to get that what he wants to fight in the war, to get the land, to learn to read.

- -Right.

- -He backs it up with drive.

- -He was also a risk-taker, you know, and I guess you have to be if you're in business.

And, unfortunately, he took one big risk that didn't pay off for him.

He, at the time that he was really just moving up, he had about 600 acres of land.

That was a good start for him.

And he had won his first term in the Tennessee state legislature, and he borrowed, something like $3,000, which is a lot of money for him.

At that time, there was something like maybe $80,000 today to build a big mill complex on a creek near his home, a grist mill, distillery complex, powder mill.

And he thought that he would be able to pay the debt back fairly quickly once he got the mill up and running.

But no sooner did it get up and running than it was destroyed in a flash flood was completely wiped out.

He was ruined economically.

The only way he could pay back his creditors was to sell off all of that land.

Everything he had accumulated up to that point.

But to your your point, he didn't stop.

He just kept going.

He started over.

He he remarked in his autobiography how much how grateful he was to his wife for encouraging him to do that, to not skip out on the debts which would not have been uncommon in those days, I guess.

And so he does start again.

He is once again dealing in land.

He accumulates, here and there, a few hundred acres.

But he never really reaches that pinnacle that he had right before that disaster.

It really ruined him.

So, again, this is a primary motivation for looking at for a new place to find land, lots of land.

- -And then let's talk about that.

One last motivation, which was his career in politics, was coming to an end.

- -Yeah, largely of his own doing, but I think I kind of admire him for what he did.

He is elected from Tennessee.

Andrew Jackson is from Tennessee.

He is a very popular, very powerful president.

And he also does not like dissenters.

And Crockett is nominally, at least in his party.

And so he is expected to go along with the party.

You hear much of this today as well.

And so, he doesn't he is a thorn in Jackson's side.

It's almost as if he goes out of his way to antagonize Jackson, which is not a good idea.

He votes against many of his key, legislative initiatives.

He votes famously against the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which he found cruel and unnecessary and badly funded and badly planned.

So he voted against it.

Jackson really wanted that bill passed.

It did pass, but by only three votes.

So if only three other people had voted with Crockett, that wouldn't have passed.

And history might have been a little different.

But he opposed Jackson on other issues as well.

Jackson famously withdrew all of the federal funds from the second Bank of the United States, which brought on a terrible depression the following year, and it was largely out of a personal antagonism that Jackson had with the president of that bank.

So Crockett turned out to be right about that.

And he opposed him on things like internal improvements, which today we call infrastructure projects, you know, roads, highways, rivers, waterways.

Crockett really believed that it was important to build a good transportation infrastructure, as we would call it today, to move commerce more efficiently and people more efficiently.

And Jackson didn't think the government should spend any money on that at all, unless it was a military road.

But Crockett thought, well, how do you know where the next military road is really going to be needed?

You don't know where they're coming from.

So he he supported that kind of spending.

So again, for all these reasons, he had sort of crossed up Andrew Jackson and, and that got him into trouble.

The Jacksonian targeted him, to lose his next election.

They constantly affected all of his elections.

Sometimes he won.

Anyway, he was still very popular at home, but it really doomed his career in the end.

- -I do want to skip ahead to... he makes the decision to come to Texas just to look at land.

The journey - I really love that section of the book, because you're seeing the mythmaking, you know, he's he's stopping at these little places along the way and he's saying his famous line, you may all go to hell.

I'm going to Texas, which they now sell magnets at the Alamo gift shop.

I know that because I have one.

It's you're seeing, you know, these firsthand accounts of people he stayed with.

He's making his myth as he's going.

It's fascinating.

__That's a perfect example of what I was trying to say earlier, how he creates this himself.

And as you see, he does he is stopped in every city along the way, starting in Memphis, which isn't that's like his first stop, I think, after he leaves home and they want to wine and dine him, they want to see Davy.

You see this character they become so familiar with.

And of course, he obliges.

He's happy to please the crowd.

He's always playing to the crowd.

He knows what they want to hear.

The newspapers all along the way, right through Arkansas and into Texas, are saying, oh, Crockett, pass through here on his way to fight Santa Ana.

And he said, I'm going to have sand in his head on my watch chain, all kinds of things.

And I'm sure he said it.

I'm sure that's all true.

He knows it's not true.

He knows he's not going to join the Army.

But that's what they want to hear.

And he he says that over and over again.

My constituents voted against me.

They wanted me out of office.

And I told them they could go to hell and I will go to Texas.

And off he went.

He kept his word.

- -So he arrives in Texas.

He comes through the north, right through the river.

- -Right.

- -And what does he find?

What does he see?

He finds pretty much everything he's wanted his whole life.

And he is directed there by his friend Sam Carson, a congressman from North Carolina.

He's good friends with Carson.

Carson's family is friends with, Crockett's wife's family in North Carolina.

And he already owns a big plantation in the Red River country.

And he tells Crockett, if you want to look for some new land, that's the place to go.

There are thousands of acres, literally, to be had practically for free because they're still there.

The old colonization laws, if you move there permanently, you bring your family.

You can stake out your five.

It was 5 to 6000 acres.

And of course, that's exactly what Crockett wants to do.

He, in fact, when he lost his last election, he came home and told his wife he had lost the election.

And I'm off to Texas.

He wasn't even sorry he had lost, according to his his daughter.

And he wants to take the whole family with him without having even seen the place yet.

And his wife always had a more level head than he did.

And she's now in the back of Davy.

You go off and see if this place is everything you thought it was, and if it is, we'll all go.

We'll all move there.

So that was the agreement.

And he does find the land he's looking for.

And once again, luck is not kind to him.

He finds that they have closed all the land offices for the duration of the war, basically to stop crooked speculation that's going on.

Selling off public lands, by by, really profiteers who work for the who are government officials.

So, they did it for a good reason, but it puts Crockett in this terrible bind.

He can't, he sees the land he wants, and it's right there in front of him, and he can't claim it.

Legally.

There's no land offices open to file a claim.

So what does he do?

He could go home and tell his family what happened.

And, you know, maybe I'll try again later.

But, you know, Crockett isn't going to try again later.

He's finding a way to get the land now, and the way to do it, obviously, is to join the army.

That is the one way you can get hundreds, perhaps thousands of acres of land simply by joining, the army and fighting for Texas independence, this, fledgling sort of interim government that's running things at the time have been issuing posters and, recruiting posters and, broadsides.

Asking people to come to Texas and join the fight for independence.

And in exchange, we will give you thousands of acres of land, hundreds of acres, depending how long you enlist for, whether you move here or whether you bring a family here.

So he sees that and it sounds a little mercenary.

It sounds a little cynical.

Yeah.

I'm in it for the money.

I'm going to get a lot of land out of this.

There probably won't be a real war here anyway.

That isn't it at all.

He really wants to fight for an independent country.

He leaves the United States because he thinks Jackson is becoming a tyrant.

So imagine what he must have thought of Santa Ana, who was a real tyrant.

And he doesn't want to live in a country run by a guy like that, or that sort of a government.

So why bother going through all the trouble of getting the land if that's where he's going to end up?

So he's perfectly willing to join this fight to make Texas independent of that, and to live in a place like that, a place he can probably help form, a government he can help establish.

- -Because, as we discussed, he's very popular.

He's famous.

He's also a natural leader.

- -He is.

That's one of his leading qualities from the very beginning.

He is a leader.

And people look up to him to lead.

I don't know what it was because he was uneducated, and yet he seemed to have that quality.

People trusted him.

They made him a justice of the peace.

A town commissioner.

They elected him to the legislature three terms in Congress.

When he joined, the Army as a volunteer in the Creek War in 1813, he joins as a private but very quickly he's made a sergeant.

So he's being given leadership responsibilities, and he leads men into battle.

He leads them on scouting missions.

And so, people are always looking up to him.

He's made a colonel in his militia after the war, and he's even voted by his men to be the commander of the militia.

And even at the Alamo, we see in one of the earliest, we know very little about what happened in that fort, by the way, in those 13 days.

But one glimpse we get of how Crockett was treated, although he enlisted there as a private as well, was a mission he was sent out on early, by Travis, the commander of the Alamo, to move some Mexican soldiers out of these little buildings that were near the Alamo, you know, gave them, put them within rifle range of the defenders, and he wants them moved out.

He wants the buildings destroyed, and he puts Crockett in charge of a squad of men to go out and do that.

And they did.

It was a two hour engagement.

There was cannon, rifle fire, and he led the men.

And that night, Travis writes a report to General Sam Houston, who's at least nominally the commander in chief.

And he said the Honorable David Crockett was seen at all points animating the men to do their duty.

So we know right from the beginning, Travis, a seen that he can use this guy.

The men like him, he can motivate them in a way that possibly Travis can't.

He's only 26 years old.

He really hasn't had that much.

And he's not Davy Crockett, you know.

So the men he cleverly uses that.

I think that's one of the small glimpses we get inside the Alamo, during the siege and gives us a good idea of how he functioned there.

And, was treated.

- -Well, I liked the idea that he comes in as a private at a lower level, and there's already kind of a power struggle happening between Bowie and Travis on who's going to, you know, who's going to be in charge.

And and Crockett cleverly avoids all of it.

He's just there to to do his job and he's not trying to take any power, but he will take what's given to him.

He'll do his job, but never at the expense of someone else, or to the detriment of the mission.

- -No, I think he knew that.

Had he gotten involved in that dispute, it might have hurt him with the men.

He might have lost some of his gravitas or whatever.

And it was important to him to keep that for the good of the garrison.

You needed to keep him as unified as possible.

And this dispute between Travis and Bowie was threatening that.

So I think he he did cleverly navigate his way through it.

- -To me, it was an interesting character piece because we've said he's ambitious.

We said he has drive, but not not to not to the detriment, not to it, to a hubristic no point.

He's, he's he's clever and he's humble and he, he, he's he's smart about it.

- -Yes he is.

And to much of his political life, the things he did actually hurt him.

Voting against the Indian removal Bill that was very popular where he lived.

Most people down there wanted to remove the Indians, and he knew that, but he still voted against it.

So, instead, he could have helped himself.

Sure.

Saying nothing.

So yes, I agree with that.

- -But, yeah, it speaks to his character.

I want to back up just a little bit because we mentioned he comes to Texas, he's joining the war effort.

How much was he aware, and when did he learn about how kind of haphazard or how not the most.

You know, the war effort was not organized and there wasn't.

It could have been I mean, one in the end, of course, but it was not.

It was kind of messy what he was walking into.

- -It really was a mess.

And it was terribly disorganized.

They have just sort of decided they're going to revolt.

And they put in place this sort of interim provisional government, which isn't very adept at anything.

They end up just fighting among themselves.

They accomplish very little other than closing the land offices.

And I'm not sure how Crockett finds this out.

To answer your question, but it seems to me that somewhere along the way, from when he enlisted in Nacogdoches and is sent to Washington to get further instructions about where to go in Washington, he must have learned how disorganized it had become.

One group is going off to invade Matamoras, and one group is saying, no, you have to defend San Antonio.

Nobody seems to agree on anything, which really, you know, raises the question why he didn't just bail.

But none of the rest of them did either.

Maybe he thought things would just work themselves out.

That eventually they'd get it together.

And all of these men really put their faith mostly in the idea that thousands more men were going to come.

And that's all that really mattered.

Once they were there, they were going to win.

And there was a considerable hubris involved in that, because those men never did show up.

As we know, the Alamo was sort of, sacrificed, but they believed it.

I think when he gets to San Antonio, he learns even more.

I mean, if he had real good reason for leaving, it would have been there because there's one quote, and I really love this because I found it in another guy's book, and I talked to him about it, where he's helping some men on a mission gathering horses or something.

And some soldiers.

Some men show up.

They want to join this.

Is there going to be a fight here?

You know, they want they didn't want to be bored sitting around camp all day.

And he says something like, well, there would have been if they didn't take 200 of our 300 men off to this matamoras thing.

And, you know, if I had been in charge, I would have given them trouble.

That isn't the word he used, but he would have.

And he was very angry about it, clearly.

And he thought, this is who will who allowed them to leave?

Well, there was nobody really in charge.

There was nobody really to stop them from leaving.

So by that time, I think he really knew what was going on.

But in a way, unfortunately for him, Crockett really did live by that motto of his, be always sure you're right and then go ahead.

I'm not sure.

He was always sure.

He was always right.

But he did always go ahead once.

He was very single minded.

Once he made up his mind on something, he did it.

There was no dissuading him.

And in this case, he's in for the duration, so... - -When he committed to something, he committed - -Definitely.

- -Absolutely.

100%.

Well, we got another little kind of on the road story of, on his way from Washington to San Antonio again of of people he's visited more tales of Davy Crockett, which I... everywhere he goes, he is there.

Yes, yeah.

All the way to San Antonio, and I'm sure among the men, he clowned and joked.

He tried to keep spirits up in addition to whatever else he was doing.

And, that was really Davy all.

So again, those men probably expected to see him do that.

- -You've talked about his bad luck.

I mean, he arrives at the Alamo mere weeks, maybe two weeks, not even very many weeks before the siege began.

So, again, just bad luck.

- -Yeah, I think there was bad.

There actually was good intelligence that came in to San Antonio.

But for some reason, the people in charge didn't want to believe it.

They didn't really believe Santa Ana was coming back, that quickly and with that large an army.

And again, even if they did so at any minute, thousands of men are going to show up here, which never happens.

It was it was not only hubris, but sort of a blind faith in that happening.

And they really weren't prepared for when the Mexicans arrived, they were in town.

They had been partying all night because it was George Washington's birthday.

And they were.

And suddenly a century tells them, you know, there's a whole squad of Mexican cavalry.

I can see them from the church tower.

And he doesn't.

Travis doesn't even believe it.

He sends somebody out to see if there's.

And they were there and, they hastily had to get into the Alamo.

It's a wonder they had any food or provisions.

They hadn't really prepared well at all.

So, you know, he finds himself in that situation.

He has to make the best of it.

- -Well, and, you know, as somebody who grew up in the state, I've read the story of the Alamo many times.

I know you didn't want to cover it again, but I think, I think being able to cover it and read it, you know, kind of looking at one person, I thought that was a benefit to this reading the story of the Alamo now kind of honing in on one, one to figure, what happened to him, what is he experiencing that that made it a new read for me.

And I did appreciate the coverage you gave it.

- -Well, I'm glad to hear that.

I had never heard or thought about that before that, but it was a new way to look at it.

- -It's a different... a different- kind of a different lens to put at it.

Well, unfortunately, we're we're running short on time here.

So in our pat at our last minute or so, what would you say you want people to take away from this book?

- -Well, I suppose it would be to come to an understanding of who this David Crockett really was.

Who was the man behind this myth?

Don't lose the myth.

We need myths, even if they're untrue.

Even if Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill and Daniel Boone weren't really the guys we think they were, that's how we want to think of them, and we want to use that as a standard for ourselves.

We think that's the best in us.

We should try to be like that.

And so don't completely discard Davy, but really give David Crockett credit for all those things he tried to do, not just at the Alamo, but during his time in Tennessee for his constituents, standing up to a president who we thought was a tyrant, standing up for the southeastern native tribes when he felt it was necessary.

And remember him for those things, too.

That was a real man behind that.

And I think he's very well worth knowing.

- -Absolutely.

I couldn't have said it better.

Thank you so much for being here... - -Oh, I enjoyed it.

- -...for writing this book.

I really love getting a real picture of a person and not just the myth.

- -Thank you very much.

That's very nice to hear.

- -I appreciate that.

That's all the time we have for today.

The book again is David Crockett in Texas.

Thank you for joining us, and I will see you again soon.