I think every American over the age of 30 has probably heard the Ballad of Davy Crockett, “Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.” By coincidence my name is David and I was called Davy for most of my childhood. So, of course, I felt a certain kinship to the most famous Davy in history. I even got myself a coon skin hat that I wore until, I’m sure, my mother probably threw it out.
Davy Crockett is one of those figures in history that is almost made to stick in a child’s imagination. The buckskin, the coon skin hat, the rifle, creeping through the woods, hunt’n him a bear. He embodies an archetype that’s really at the center of the American cultural identity, that of the frontiersman, the woodsman, the explorer, the man who goes to nature to escape the restraints of his civilization even while pushing out its boundaries. The man of two worlds.
But he was not just a folk hero. He was a real man whose extraordinary life coincided with the early days of westward exploration and expansion back when the United States of America was a very young country.
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For more, listen to the Podcast episode and check out my book, History Stories for Everyone, where I dive deeper into this and some of history’s other most fascinating and relatable human stories:
