Born on a Mountain Top LbNA #69113

First thing you ought to know about Davy Crockett is that he warn’t born on no dadburn mountaintop in Tennessee. Fact is that Tennessee warn’t no state in 1786, the year of Crockett’s birth. That mountaintop was in North Carolina at the time. Whoever writ that song probably put it in Tennessee cause North Carolina wasn’t the “greenest state” and it didn’t rhyme with “land of the free”. He also preferred to be called David. But Davy is a good word to use in a song, and it’s that dang song — “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” — that’s the problem. America knows it all too well. Readers of a certain age hearing those words will have it spinning in their heads, complete with visions of coonskin caps and buckskins. If Americans remember Crockett today, they remember him because of that song and the Disneyfication of his legacy, which was considerably Disneyfied before Walt Disney was even born. From the distance of nearly two centuries, we are not really sure who Crockett was (he is often confused with Daniel Boone, except in Texas, of course). A legendary frontiersman, hunter, scout and Indian fighter who liked to jaw and pull a cork, Crockett did not have much education. He got into politics, first locally and then serving three lackluster terms in the House of Representatives. His most significant career move was dying at the Alamo in the company of Jim Bowie (he of the knife) and William Barret Travis, holy figures in Texas history. He was 49. Crockett’s life or afterlife belongs solidly in the realm of the stories of Buffalo Bill Cody, Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok, Jim Bridger and other ghosts of the wild frontier, real or imagined. The reader is always wondering, and reasonably so, how much of this is true. Crockett is an appealing if confusing hero. Is he in fact a hero? If he had not died at the Alamo, we might not know him at all. Hollywood helped, too. If we do know Crockett, we perhaps know him as Walt Disney’s Crockett: that would be Fess Parker, Crockett Lite (Parker also played Daniel Boone, but that’s another story). John Wayne portrayed Crockett in “The Alamo” (1960) at the height of the Cold War. (The Duke saw him as the enemy of communism!) And more recently, Billy Bob Thornton took on the role, too. Personally, I think Billy Bob’s portrayal is the most plausible. He looks and sounds like the barely literate “canebrake congressman” that Crockett was — by his own admission “a screamer” much in love with the sound of his own voice and his public persona. He was a celebrity at a time when we did not have so many of them. Crockett’s legacy is considerably larger than his actual life. He spent a number of weeks when he ought to have been in Washington on congressional business making what appears to have been the nation’s first book tour — peddling a book about himself. The voters of the greenest state in the land of the free were not amused. They did not send him back to Washington. So he headed west, leaving us with what Thompson justifiably labels as one of the greatest exit lines in history. Crockett is reputed to have said (and there are a few versions of this, so I will paraphrase) that the voters of Tennessee could go to hell because he was going to Texas, and that’s what he did, by crackey! In fact, he walked, or rode a horse on a piece of real estate that is within the boundaries of this very park, once called El Camino Royal or the Old San Antonio Road. That’s where he was headin’ the last time he passed this way.

Directions:
If Davy Crockett could find his way to this park, I'm sure you can too. Park by the mission, just like he shoulda done. Walk back done the road and take the trail to the OSAR (Old San Antonio Road). You'll come to a grassy road, so take it to the right. If you really want to walk where Davy, excuse me, David, walked, find the barbed wire fence on the right and cross over to the trace. I looks light a ravine, almost, because people, horses and wagons wore it down for a couple of hundred years. Anyway, follow that barbed wire to where it ends. Notice how the wires go right through that big ol' tree. Standing at the end of the fence, look to the right and you'll see an old curved oak with big roots kinda looking like a big bird's foot. David's box is behind it among the bird toes covered with a rock and stuff.