Simple Old David

“The Alamo” was on TV again this past weekend. Not a week passes by where an Alamo movie doesn’t turn up somewhere on the many cable TV channels.

For the uninitiated -- The Battle of the Alamo occurred in March of 1836, when 181 Texan frontiersmen in a shabby old fort fought a Mexican army of 5000. It took 13 days for the whole drama to play out, and supposedly those 13 days were crucial to the organizing of a much larger Texan fighting unit further north. This larger group, shouting “Remember the Alamo”, eventually defeated the aforementioned Mexican army, and the nation of Texas was officially born.

It’s a compelling story which spawned no less than nine Hollywood movies. The story is further enhanced by the fact that a major celebrity of the time - Davy Crockett - was one of the Alamo defenders.

He was literally a legend in his own time, an 1830s Hulk Hogan, with both the macho aura and the fraud. His exploits -- bear wrestling, Injun fighting, and other wilderness prowess, were exaggerated to absurd proportions in the books of his time, for the provincial and the gullible. He “could ride a streak of lightning” and “leap the Mississippi”. A theater production, called “Lion of the West” was a fanciful presentation of his life -- Crockett actually attended this show, saw himself impersonated by an actor, and accepted a standing ovation at the end.

He parlayed his fame into politics, serving 2 terms in the US House of Representatives for his home state of Tennessee. But he finally overplayed his political hand, and was defeated in his attempt for a third term, a stunning rebuff for such a famous native son of Tennessee. In his concession speech he said “You all can go to hell -- I’m going to Texas”.

Now 49 years old,  he headed west with a  group of Tennessean cronies,  hoping to parley his fame, experience, and stature into  high position and a large spread of land,  in what he understood to be the newly-forming Texan Republic,  free from Mexican rule. 

Fess Parker, John Wayne, Brian Keith, and Billy Bob Thornton are the most recent movie “Davy Crocketts”, playing the cherished role in 1955, 1960, 1987, and 2004 respectively. The first three took a fairly standard approach, playing a one-dimensional hero with a coonskin hat who fought and died for Liberty and Texas Independence.

The Thornton version probed deeper, and suggested a man who had misjudged the situation in Texas, and now faced an identity crisis that would seal his fate.

In all honesty Crockett certainly hadn’t expected anything life-threatening in Texas, the 2004 movie suggests. In fact he “thought all the fighting was over”, that the Mexican army had been chased away, that Texas had an organized and sizable army, that his Texas Relocation would be easy.

Then one morning he woke up to find the Alamo surrounded by 2000  enemy soldiers, with many thousands more to come. He saw the situation grow hopeless -- and as the days built up to the final battle, he considered escaping.  There were several opportunities to gallop out in the dead of night, making a furious run for life, past the dozing Mexicans. But he stayed.



Davy Crockett (center) flanked by Colonel Travis (left) and Jim

Bowie in the 2004 version of "The Alamo"

What would the world think of The Great Davy Crockett if he’d “chickened out” and run from the heroic last stand? It would ruin The Legend which he’d cultivated over the years. On the night before the final, full Mexican assault,  knowing what was to come,  he confided to a friend,

           “If it was just me, simple old David, I’d sneak over that wall 
            and take my chances. But that Davy Crockett  feller --
            they’re all watching him..."

Of course, this statement comes strictly from the imagination of a scriptwriter. However to me it seems quite plausible that he said something like this,  to himself at least, on the last night of his life, as he pondered the difference between his real and public selves.

Just as surely, all of us are torn between what we want to be, and what people expect us to be. Even without the added complication of public fame, we all deal with people’s expectations, many of which we ourselves help to create.

Happily, I’ll never have to launch a solo frontal assault against a dozen bloodthirsty Mexican soldiers, with just a single-shot rifle in my hands. It wouldn’t work out for me any better than it did for the “King of the Wild Frontier”. But for him, as a consolation, it led to everlasting fame, through history books and the modern miracles of film and cable TV. So if it’s really important to be remembered and celebrated by millions of total strangers, hundreds of years after you’re gone, then simple old David did the right thing.