"The Death of David Crockett " Topic

"Before sunrise on March 6, 1836, the most famous siege in American history came to an end. More than a thousand troops under the command of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the military dictator of Mexico, stormed the Alamo fortress in San Antonio, where Texan rebels against Mexican authority—Anglo-American settlers, Tejano natives, and soldiers of fortune from the United States and Europe—had been waiting for reinforcements that never came. All of the defenders—roughly 180 or more—were killed in battle or executed soon afterward.
News of the fall of the Alamo sent shock waves far beyond war-torn Texas, where secessionists had just declared the independence of their republic. Among the fallen defenders were two celebrities from the United States. The knifefighter James Bowie was one. But his renown was overshadowed by that of David Crockett, the "congressman from the canebrake" of Tennessee who had replaced Daniel Boone as a symbol of the American frontiersman. After being defeated in a race for Congress, Crockett—whom the Whig party had once considered as a possible presidential candidate—had made his way to insurgent Texas to make a fresh start. A fellow graduate of Tennessee politics, Sam Houston, commander of the weak and disorganized Texan army, had assigned Crockett to the garrison at San Antonio. There, with Bowie and less known figures such as the garrison's young commander, William Barret Travis, Crockett met his death.

In the legend that grew up around Crockett, he died fighting in the last-ditch defense of the Alamo. Recent scholarship, however, has suggested another possibility: that Crockett was executed by Santa Anna along with several others after the battle was over. I discovered just how controversial this question remains when I published The Alamo, a narrative poem about the Texas Revolution. In my first draft, I followed some recent historical accounts of the Texas Revolution that treat Crockett's execution at the hands of Santa Anna as an established fact. As I researched the subject further, however, I concluded that the story of Crockett's execution, like the equally well-known story of the line Travis drew in the dust at the Alamo, was folklore. In the final version of the poem, Travis does not draw that line, and Crockett, a minor character in the story I tell, falls in battle. In a vituperative attack on The Alamoin the New York Times, the journalist Garry Wills accused me (along with Wills's bête noire, the late John Wayne, in his movie The Alamo) of purveying patriotic "hokum" to the American public by showing Crockett being killed in battle. The ensuing debate has involved several exchanges in print between Wills and my fellow Texan, CBS news anchor Dan Rather…"
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Amicalement
Armand

The truth may well never be known, yet it remains popular and trendy to destroy all American folk heroes and the traditional values they represent. All countries have folk heroes. Their tales, sometimes based on fact, but just as often laced with apocryphal elements, are a means to passing on values and ethics from one generation to the next. Deconstructing those folk heroes is a means to marginalizing the values they represent.

The "recent scholarship" is all based on one secondary Mexican source, written by a man who was not present from his uncle's (?) diary. The uncle WAS present, but wouldn't have known Davy Crockett from Andrew Jackson. So he might have believed any prisoner who claimed to be Crockett on the hope that Santa Anna wouldn't execute a US congressman.

On the other hand, Susanna Dickinson, who DID know Crockett, claimed to have seen his body among the knot of last ditch defenders. And Mrs. Dickinson didn't like Crockett at all, and would hardly have lied to protect his reputation.

Your choice.