Coonskin Cap

We’re going to close the show with a historical mystery brought to us by another listener.

MARK MADELEY: My name is Mark Madeley. I am from Houston, Texas.

NATHAN: Madeley asked us about the circumstances surrounding Davy Crockett’s death at the Alamo. Crockett was one of about 200 who defended the San Antonio mission from Mexican leader, Antonio López de Santa Anna, and his army in 1836.

Up against what most considered overwhelming odds, the legendary frontiersman and his fellow soldiers all died in battle. According to state lore, the heroic sacrifice fed the fires of the Texas Revolution, and led to the region’s eventual independence from Mexico.

But Madeley wanted to know about another version of this story, one that claims that Crockett didn’t die on the ramparts, rather, that he was taken prisoner and executed by Santa Anna’s men after the battle. Madeley objected to this version of the story.

MARK MADELEY: I mean, the Alamo is what we’re told to remember, right? Especially as Texans.

I think, for me, with regards to what happened to Crockett or what after to all his men there, to find out that, you know, the story of all these guys dying at the Alamo in battle to not be true. I’m sure it’s disturbing to some people, a little bit to me, that there were guys left over.

And so to imagine that things might not have gone the way we want them to go means letting go of something that’s very important in the way we look at the world.

JOANNE: OK. So what really happened? Did Davy Crockett die defending the Alamo or not? And I guess maybe even more important, why does it matter? We put BackStory producer, Nina Earnest, on the case.

NINA EARNEST: To understand how Davy Crockett died, we first have to know more about how David Crockett lived. Not the Davy from the Walt Disney TV show of the 1950s, you know, the one dressed head to toe in buckskins, toting a rifle, and wearing a coonskin cap. I mean the real David Crockett, the man who launched 1,000 myths.

So was he born on a mountaintop in Tennessee? Did he kill a bear when he was only three? Or I guess he says b’ar, right? Killed me a b’ar.

ANDREW TORGET: Yeah, he said bar. Well, that’s what the song says. (SINGING) Killed him a b’ar when he was only three.

This is historian Andrew Torget.

ANDREW TORGET: I don’t think he was born on a mountaintop, but he definitely was born in the woods on the frontier in a lot of poverty.

NINA EARNEST: After a series of odd jobs from hunter, to gristmill operator, Crockett made a name for himself in local politics.

ANDREW TORGET: But what gave him a national prominence was when he was elected to the United States Congress in 1827. And when he went there, he was a part of this movement toward embracing the every man.

NINA EARNEST: In some ways, Crockett owed his popularity to another so-called hardscrabble man from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson. Both men portrayed themselves as champions of the poor white man, but Torget says that’s where the similarities end.

ANDREW TORGET: The reality was Andrew Jackson was actually quite wealthy and had a lot of great advantages. Crockett truly was the every man. He truly was that poor guy.

Davy Crockett, as he became known, was the true eccentric. He was the true representative of the wildness of the West.

NINA EARNEST: And Crockett played that up. He made sure not to blend in the nation’s capital, and quickly became the talk of the town.

ANDREW TORGET: He would often walk around Washington wearing, you know, his buckskins, and what became kind of a costume for him, this sort of hunting gear that he would wear on the Western frontier. And this was, you know, a sort of shocking sort of thing, but it gave him attention on a public scale that he couldn’t create on his own by any means.

NINA EARNEST: Torget says Crockett knew that his carefully crafted image could also invite ridicule.

ANDREW TORGET: And he had this problem where he wanted to be taken seriously, but he also knew that the caricature of him and who his life was, was part of the power that he couldn’t escape, as well. And he had to try to balance those two things to be taken seriously enough to do things that he was interested in doing, like helping poor folks from his district in Tennessee.

NINA EARNEST: But Crockett wasn’t the only one capitalizing on his popularity. He was irresistible for writers and journalists who published outlandish tales about him. A hit 1831 play called, The Lion of the West, further, well, lionized him. Its main character, Nimrod Wildfire, was clearly modeled on Crockett.

ANDREW TORGET: Because he seemed to be this wonderful character that could be used to represent so much about the American experiment moving westward, about the expanding United States, and about the power of this rugged individual frontiersman, that was becoming a part of how the United States was beginning to think about itself in the 1820s and ’30s as the country really starts expanding westward very rapidly.

NINA EARNEST: Unfortunately, his celebrity didn’t translate into political success. During his three terms in Congress, most of the legislation he supported didn’t pass. He also made a powerful political enemy in President Andrew Jackson, especially when he opposed the removal of Native Americans from the east.

In 1835, Crockett lost his re-election bid. Stung by this defeat, the living legend decided to leave Tennessee behind. The story goes that he told his constituents, you all may go to hell, and I will go to Texas.

ANDREW TORGET: And the question is, why? Why is Crockett going to Texas?

JAMES CRISP: He went to Texas because lots of people were going to Texas to see what kind of new life they could make for themselves.

NINA EARNEST: This is historian, James Crisp.

JAMES CRISP: These were guys looking for a second chance, because all of them had failed in their lives in the United States. And it’s true of Crockett.

NINA EARNEST: Texas, then a part of Mexico, was in a state of political upheaval. Anglo settlers had been streaming into the territory for more than a decade. When Crockett arrived in early 1836, both Anglos and tejanos, native Texans of Mexican descent, were rebelling against the Mexican government. Some kind of clash seemed imminent.

Crockett enlisted in the Texas militia as a private, never mind that he was 49 years old. Torget says he probably hoped to revive his political career, this time, as a Texan.

ANDREW TORGET: And so when Crockett goes to San Antonio, it’s probably to build up support to getting himself elected in whatever this new Texas government is, to do a tour of the area, but it certainly isn’t to get into a fight at the Alamo, because absolutely nobody saw that coming.

NINA EARNEST: On February 23, 1836, Mexican troops, led by Antonio López de Santa Anna, suddenly appeared outside San Antonio.

ANDREW TORGET: Pandemonium just hits the streets of the town. They start ringing the bell of the San Fernando church, everybody starts panicking, and there’s just this general retreat into the Alamo complex, which was on the far western edge of San Antonio at the time, because there was really no other place to go.

JAMES CRISP: The walls didn’t even go all the way around. They had to put sharp sticks into the ground just to have protection all the way around, and it wasn’t all that much protection.

ANDREW TORGET: And so Crockett and his men retreated into the Alamo with all the Texas soldiers and a lot of people in town who were just seeking refuge in someplace to hide while they saw whatever happened next.

NINA EARNEST: What happened next was that the Mexican Army laid siege to the makeshift fortress. By the time the battle ended 13 days later, all of the Alamo’s defenders, including Davy Crockett, had been killed.

ANDREW TORGET: When Crockett was killed at the Alamo, that was big news because Crockett was big news.

NINA EARNEST: But trying to figure out how he died there has never been easy. Crisp says that in the weeks following the siege, the local papers printed two competing narratives.

JAMES CRISP: You’ve got the story of Davy Crockett fighting like a tiger until the very end.

NINA EARNEST: And the other version, saying that Crockett and several others were taken captive and executed by Santa Anna after the battle. This scenario is backed up by a famous memoir–

JAMES CRISP: –written by a Mexican captain, José Enrique de la Peña–

NINA EARNEST: –which describes the scene of Crockett’s execution. De la Peña says that seven prisoners were brought to Santa Anna. One of them, he writes, was the naturalist, David Crockett, well known in North America for his unusual adventures. De La Peña adds that Crockett and the others were stabbed to death by Santa Anna’s men.

But in 1994, writer and New York firefighter, William Groneman, and lifelong Davy Crockett fan, claimed there were inconsistencies in the de la Peña account.

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: It always bothered me that how this Mexican officer, who had never been to the United States, was only in Texas for the first time. Crockett had only been in Texas two months before the Alamo fell. How would he have known, on sight, Davy Crockett?

NINA EARNEST: The more he looked into it, the more Groneman’s doubts grew. For example, he says that de la peña’s memoir wasn’t even discovered until 1955. And he’s convinced it’s a fake, or perhaps a forgery.

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: So I made that fact known back in the early 1990s, and it started a big controversy that’s still going on today.

JAMES CRISP: And one of the reasons it exploded into controversy is because I was asked to review Bill Groneman’s book.

NINA EARNEST: This is historian, James Crisp, again.

JAMES CRISP: And unfortunately, his argument didn’t close. He hadn’t proved his point.

NINA EARNEST: Crisp says de la Peña’s one of three eyewitness accounts to the execution. And he did his own research and concluded that the memoir was authentic. So it’s likely that Crockett did die after the battle. This caused an uproar among Alamo aficionados, including one woman on the streets of San Antonio, who told him–

JAMES CRISP: If I had my bowie knife, I would gut you right now, because hanging is too good for you. And I said, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Have you actually read what I wrote? And she said, no. I’m just a Crockett loyalist.

NINA EARNEST: Since then, Crisp and Groneman have been the key figures in the “how did Davy die” debate. Crisp is pretty sure he was executed. Groneman thinks the answer is unknowable. And there’s only one thing that would change his mind.

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: Somebody inventing a time machine and going back to the battle of the Alamo and actually see what happened. There’s no way to know. You can’t verify any of these things.

NINA EARNEST: In other words, the Crisp and Groneman camps will never see eye to eye. To me, this seems like a historical dispute that obscures a larger point. Can we know how he died? Not with 100% certainty. But whichever side of the debate you fall on, it’s pretty clear that, yes, Davy Crockett did die defending the Alamo. Even if he was executed afterward, he still lost his life fighting a losing battle. The bigger question is, why do we care?

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: I don’t really think it does matter. But it began to matter, like I say, a few years back, when all the spin in the media which was put on that if he was executed, that meant he surrendered. That meant he gave up after encouraging everyone else to fight to the death. And that meant he was a coward.

JAMES CRISP: Because allowing yourself to be taken captive has a lot of wrinkles to it, a lot of layers to it. And when I argued that Crockett had actually been executed, people were calling me up, and some of them were kind of asking legitimate questions, but many of them were saying, as one British guy did, would you say that Crockett was a coward? And I would say, no.

NINA EARNEST: On this point, the two men actually agree.

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: You know, if Crockett had been executed, it doesn’t take away from a whole life of good service to other people.

NINA EARNEST: But that fine difference clearly matters to a lot of people, including the woman who threatened to gut James Crisp with the bowie knife. Andrew Torget says it’s no accident that Crockett resurfaced as a pop culture icon during the Cold War, both in the Walt Disney series and in the John Wayne film, The Alamo.

ANDREW TORGET: One movie is worth 100,000 academic books in terms of how the public thinks about stuff. And so the story about the Alamo today really is that there’s this group of men who believe so strongly in freedom, and liberty, and independence, that they knew they were going to die, but it was more important to stand up for those ideals.

If Crockett, then, is seen to surrender after these new pieces of evidence come out, that seems to take away, somehow, from that idea. It doesn’t have the same kind of punch that people who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, and even ’70s and ’80s, would have had from the idea of the Crockett story, which is about no surrender, no matter how terrible the odds.

NINA EARNEST: Both in his own time and in his mythic afterlife, Davy Crockett has reflected how Americans want to see themselves.

NATHAN: BackStory producer, Nina Earnest, brought us that story. We also heard from Andrew Torget, a historian at the University of North Texas, and author of Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. James Crisp is a historian at North Carolina State University, and the author of Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution. William Groneman is author of Eyewitness to the Alamo.

BRIAN: That’s going to do it for today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about American history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org, or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu.

We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, @BackStoryRadio, and if you like the show, feel free to review it in Apple podcasts. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Ghatak, and Ramona Martinez. Our senior producer is David Stenhouse. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher.

Additional help came from [INAUDIBLE], Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Greg, [INAUDIBLE], Aran Teeling, [INAUDIBLE], and Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from [INAUDIBLE], Paddington Bear, and [INAUDIBLE]. And as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

BRIAN: And special thanks this week to Jamal Milner, who played the version of John Henry you heard after our story.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ANNOUNCER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.