Davy Crockett’s Modernism
September 11th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
…I have no doubt that it is the richest country in the world good land and plenty of timber and the best springs and good mill streams good range and clear water and ever appearances of good health and game plenty it is in the pass where the buffalo passes from north to south twice a year and bees and honey plenty… I have taken the oath of the government and have enrolled my name as a volunteer…
–Davy Crockett, in an 1836 letter to his daughter, shortly before the Battle of the Alamo
Sentiments so warmly expressed will bring a smile to even the hardest Texan heart. But these are the musings of a uniquely Texan kind of hero. Most biographies you’ll find on the web and elsewhere mention the January 9, 1836 letter. It was written shortly before Crockett made it to San Antonio de Bexar — and it is the last evidence we have of Crockett praising the beauties of revolutionary Texas before his death at the Alamo.
Unfortunately, Texas myth and Texas fact are often hard to tear asunder. And I know that as you read this, that terrible ‘king of the wild frontier’ song that accompanied the 1955 Disney movie is pounding in your head. Fact is, no one really knows if Crockett died at the Alamo or was captured and executed.
Amazon tells us: Disney’s popular action-adventure inspired millions of children to sport coonskin caps and sing “The Ballad Of Davy Crockett,” which topped the nation’s hit list for 13 weeks! What a country.
In any case, as you may have heard, Texas is paying nearly $500,000 for what the Simpson Galleries of Houston says is the long lost original version of the letter. Regardless of its authenticity, the letter’s contents, including its lack of punctuation and glowing praise for the Lone Star State are not in question.
The problem is, there are few misspellings in the state’s new letter. The signature reportedly does not match those of other legitimate Crockett documents. Several experts have said the Simpson Galleries letter is probably a copy — made contemporaneously, but not probably penned by Crockett (and thus not quite worth 500 Large).
Debbi Head, a communications specialist with the Commission says there’s no need to worry about the state paying so much for something that isn’t real, however. The money is in escrow for 120 days while Texas has a third-party team determine the letter’s authenticity. “Anytime something of this importance comes up, there are going to be a lot of questions,” she said. “We’re putting together a team and a process” and, she said, they’ll do “whatever it takes.”
The lack of misspellings is what seems to be driving the doubters. Crockett was no grad student. Really. According to his biographers, he spent more time in Andrew Jackson’s army fighting the Creek Indians than he did in school. So book learning weren’t necessarily his thing. But, given the nature of the letter, he may have been the first modernist writer.
The clamoring of the phrases one against another, the lack of commas, periods, or initial capitals — indeed, the whole feverish ‘I love Texas’ rhythm of the letter suggests an anticipation of the stream-of-consciousness fad that coursed through literature from Joyce to Hemingway in the last century (which academia now lumps together as ‘modernism’). Of course, one could also look at the letter and say that Crockett simply had a problem with run-on sentences. It’s cool. Everybody’s a critic in the Internet Age.
Regardless of the letter’s authenticity, its purchase by the state and this new round of Crockett wonder has been worthwhile — even if it only reminds us of the politics surrounding the Texas revolution. One biography notes that Crockett’s departure for Texas had much to do with him breaking with the policies and Democratic Party molded by Jackson. Crockett became a Whig for the rest of his life, we are told, and his appointment with the Alamo had much to do with the fact that he did not want to join General Sam Houston because Houston was a Jackson man — Crockett preferred the company of Col. William Travis in San Antonio — a fellow Whig. Cripes, where are the Whigs when you need them anyway?
At bottom, the question remains: does it matter whether Davy wrote this particular letter? Not really, since the state’s experts will undoubtedly find out (and if he did not, the state will get its money back) We should have some answers on that score within a couple months. The real value of all this is reliving a fairly unique moment in history (and perhaps the resurgence of the popularity of the coonskin cap).
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December 7th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
[…] said at the time that the lack of misspelling and stellar penmanship of the letter likely inidcated it […]