Davy Crockett Davy Crockett was one of the leaders who inspired the Texas Revolution. A Tennesseean, he was both a legendary frontiersman and a US Congressman, not to mention being a distinguished soldier and world-famous marksman with his Kentucky rifle Old Betsy. He was renowned as the prime example for shrewd frontier common sense and American backwoods humor, and all classes of people, rich and poor, loved him. Davy Crockett was quite a fiddle player, too, and during the siege of the Alamo, you better believe he played for the men in the evening when things had quieted down on the military front. In a war of nerves hard to imagine suffered, surrounded in the dead of night by thousands of enemy troops driven by Santa Anna bent on taking their lives, you can bet those Tennessee fiddle strings heated up morale plenty, too.
Davy Crockett was known for his humorist wits as well as practical, down-to-earth wisdom seen in one of his favorite sayings, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead." Known and revered nationwide as a legendary frontiersman, he had also fought under Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States and hero of the War of 1812. So practical and honest was Davy Crockett that when he went to Congress, he dressed just as practically ... in buckskins with his coonskin cap on. Buckskin leather clothes are very cool and comfortable, by the way, whether jacket, pants or boots. Besides buckskin clothes, another trademark of Davy Crockett was Old Betsy, his famous Kentucky long-rifle always kept with him. In the scene depicted above, by the famous Texas cowboy artist Harry Anthony DeYoung, Crockett plunged forward in hand to hand combat with Old Betsy raised high and strong as he fought bravely to the last.
Crockett and his men defended the weakest part of the Alamo, the east side wall by the chapel. This was one of the most fierce moments of the Battle of the Alamo, when the troops of General Cos attacked Crockett and were repulsed three times. (This is the same General Cos that was captured a couple of months earlier at the Alamo by Texican forces and then released with his army to return to Mexico. They gave him his life, and he returned to take theirs. How ironic!) But then, with a 3,000 strong column storming over the north wall, Crockett left the east post to help his friends fight over the north wall. They fought their way to the plaza to use a cannon that, according to historian and author Monte Barrett, Santa Anna said did more damage to his army than all the other Alamo cannons added together. There next to that cannon, with Old Betsy still in his hands, he met a glorious end. The choice to cross the line of Travis meant certain death for every last one of them, yet though their bodies were thrown together, dowsed with kerosene and burned to ashes on Santa Anna's orders, these heroes and their impact on Texas and the world will continue to live on. Death for them, and glory, but hope of life and liberty for their fellow Texans.
Davy Crockett