The Frontiersman: The Real Life and the Many Legends of Davy Crockett

by Mark Derr

Debunks commonly held myths about Crockett, depicting him as an impoverished farmer and a rustic member of the House of Representatives who incurred the wrath of President Jackson

Genres: Biography, History, American History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1993

Reviews

[Pat Hollingsworth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed learning about the real Davy Crockett - not too far off the Disney version as it turns out - and the rough and tumble world of 1800's politics. As with most history, it opens your eyes up to so many other things. I was forever googling people like Octavia Walton LeVert, or places like Anahuac. However, the writer's style is a bit dry and did not pull me along as I would have enjoyed.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author, a distant relative of Davy Crockett, opens his book with a description of the Disney shows about Crockett from the 1950s. This is kinda fun. He then turns to what documentary evidence exists to build a reliable biography of early American frontiersman and congressman David Crockett.

The legends began to build even Crockett’s life, sometime with his help. There are cute things here that later turn pretty ugly.

Its neutral tone can sometimes make the prose a bit dry, but it also allows the author to paint a portrait of the human behind the myth.

For the full review, please go here.

[Lora Shouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty good book for a biography. It wasn't dry or boring, although it looked like it was going to go off in that direction a couple of times.

I have learned that Davy Crockett was neither the saint many of us believed him to be once, nor the buffoon or coward that he has been made out to be other times. Instead, he was a fairly ordinary Tennessean of his time who happened to get into politics, and apparently liked it. He seems to have been pretty good at campaigning, but less good at pushing his own legislative agenda. I have also learned that, although the hot issues of the day have changed, the true nature of politics hasn't changed a hair in almost 200 years. Also, I now understand how Tennessee got to be so far behind the rest of the country in education.

And, lastly, this is the first book I have read that has covered the story of the Alamo in any detail at all.

[Mark Schomburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this a little dry because I wasn't expecting all the politics detailing Crockett's ambitions in the time of Andrew Jackson. Indeed, we don't really hear many mythic stories at all because this book's focus is to concentrate on the facts. The truth is bleaker and not such a run in the woods. The biography goes chronologically, which sometimes seems like a tedious manner when some aspects of the big picture might be more clearly generalized by topic. However, it's pretty clear that what facts there are about Crockett have been carefully distilled by Derr from piles of wrongly attributed writings and legends. The book ends with Davy's death at the Alamo, and even that scene cannot reinflate his mythical legendary stature after two hundred pages of sober truth telling, so we are left with an image of him as a human being and not a wild man in the end.

[Nina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mistitled, perhaps. Davy Crockett was more of a politician than a frontiersman, albeit a backwoods, uneducated, ineffective politician. He spent more time denouncing Martin Van Buren than hunting bears. A description of his style: "Strenuously object to something, offer an absurd amendment, lose, and then vote for the original measure, providing no coherent explanation for the shift." Derr didn't seem to have as much fondness for his subject as Eckert does for Kenton, but he is more objective. Best parts of the book: Beginning, where Derr describes the Disney/Crockett phenomena, and very end, where he describes the Alamo and the evolution of the Crockett myth.