Quote of the Day (Davy Crockett, on Hell and Texas)

“Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”—Defeated Tennessee Congressman David Crockett, in his farewell to constituents at the Union Hotel Bar in Memphis, quoted in J. R. Edmondson, The Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts (2000)

It galled David Crockett ("Davy" to posterity) that he lost to Adam Huntsman, a one-legged lawyer supported by President Andrew Jackson and Gov. William Carroll, by less than three hundred votes. But typical of his talent for raw but effective storytelling, he turned it into a crowd-pleasing anecdote, which he duly recited to an appreciative audience upon arriving in Nacogdoches, Texas, on or about this date in 1836.

Savagely disillusioned with politics (the Whigs had hoped to run him for President), Crockett had come to Texas in the hope of turning around his life, much as another Tennessean (who unlike him, remained on good terms with Jackson), Sam Houston, had done—though he wanted instead to make his fortune as a land agent.

The ex-Congressman and frontiersman was right about a revolution being in the offing in this Mexican-held land, but he was wrong about his long-term prospects. Two months later, he fell at the Alamo and, like everyone else in that garrison, passed into legend.

I used the phrase “passed into legend” in that last sentence, but it might have been just as correct to write “became part of an endless controversy,” for the arguments involving Crockett after that became even more contentious than what had already happened back in his home state, when he became the only member of Tennessee’s Congressional delegation to vote against Jackson’s Indian Removal Act.

Did he go down fighting the overwhelming forces of Mexican dictator Santa Ana? Or was he executed after having surrendered? The latter interpretation has endured, based on the alleged eyewitness account of a Mexican officer who was there.(For an examination, pro and con, see this piece by Michael Lind in the Winter 1998 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.)

Crockett—and Alamo—partisans fiercely disclaim that any such thing occurred. Who knows when, if ever, the dispute will be resolved?

This Day in Military History (Houston, Crockett Battle Indians)

November 3, 1813—In what can only be termed an early American version of “perpetuating the cycle of violence,” 1,000 Tennessee volunteers—including future Texas legends Sam Houston and Davy Crockett—avenged a recent massacre at Fort Mims in present-day Calhoun County, Alabama, with their own wholesale atrocity at the Battle of Tallushatchee. At the end of the day, more than 180 warriors—every adult male—had been slain and another 84 women and children captured.

For 30 years after the Treaty of Paris that concluded the Revolutionary War, Americans had progressively crowded Indians, concluded treaties with them, and resumed the crowding. Naturally, the tribes were annoyed—something that, just as in the American Revolution, the British exploited by inciting the tribes to violence during the War of 1812.

The Fort Mims Massacre and the Battle of Tallushatchee were the opening salvos in the Creek War, a conflict that swelled the military reputation of Andrew Jackson. A month after the Fort Mims bloodletting—as well as a gunfight with brothers Thomas and Jesse Benton that nearly killed him—Old Hickory was back in command, ordering his subordinate, Gen. John Coffee, to attack the Creek Indian village of Tallushhatchee.

When he reached the village, Coffee divided his force into two columns encircling the settlement of Red Stick warriors. After two companies ventured into the settlement, the Indians attacked, only to find themselves surrounded. Retreating into the buildings didn’t save the warriors. Let Crockett tell the rest of it:

“We shot them like dogs as they retreated. Some backed into their lodge, and we set it on fire. We burned it with 46 warriors inside. The next morning we found roasted potatoes in the cellar under the lodge. We ate them because we were hungry as wolves even though the oil of the Indians we burned had run down on them, and they looked like they had been stewed with bear meat."

Further engagements would ensue at Talladega and Horseshoe Bend, each lifting Jackson’s reputation before the one that made him a certified national hero—the Battle of New Orleans.

One of the great ironies of Tallushhatchee was that it made an Indian fighter out of a man who, as a youth, had lived with Indians, and who, in the lowest moment of his adult life, would return to them. Sam Houston became nicknamed “The Raven” while staying with Cherokees as a young man. Later, when a mysterious separation from his wife led him to resign as governor of Tennessee, he lived for several years with the Cherokees again, even adopting their style of dress and manner of living, until, like Crockett, more fatefully, he threw in his lot with the Texas settlers revolting against Mexican rule.

Except for bit parts in movies and TV shows about the Alamo, I’m not aware of any big- or small-screen treatments of the life of Houston. American filmmakers are really missing out on a story that I believe even surpasses in drama that of another immense Lone Star presence, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

From his youthful days as “The Raven” to his heroic last-ditch attempt to keep Texas part of the Union before the Civil War (a stand that John F. Kennedy rightly honored in Profiles in Courage), Houston made an impact on his state and the life of the United States that few others have surpassed. The Battle of Tallushhatchee is one part of that life which must be reckoned with.