Questions to ask Davy Crockett

Crockett in brief

David Crockett, who signed himself David and was called Davy mainly by others, was born on 17 August 1786 in Greene County in what is now East Tennessee. He grew up poor, had little schooling, and at about thirteen ran away from home to avoid a beating over skipped school, working as a drover and labourer for over two years. He married Polly Finley in 1806 and moved west across Tennessee as land opened up.

He served as a scout and soldier in the Creek War of 1813 to 1814, then as a justice of the peace, militia colonel and member of the Tennessee legislature (1821 to 1824). He sat in the US House of Representatives from 1827 to 1831 and 1833 to 1835. After losing in 1835 he left for Texas and was killed when Mexican forces took the Alamo in San Antonio on 6 March 1836.

Legend or record: sort your questions first

Crockett is unusual: a legend grew up around him while he was still alive. Before you write questions, check which side each idea comes from.

Questions about the frontier boyhood

• 1. Why did you run away from home at thirteen, and what did you do for those years?
• 2. Your father hired you out to pay his debts. How did that feel?
• 3. You learned to read only as a young man. Why then?
• 4. What did you need to know to live by hunting?

What the record says: A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834), written with help from his friend Congressman Thomas Chilton, tells all of this in his own lively and boastful style. He says he went to school for about six months as a young man of around eighteen, paying with his labour, to learn to read, write and figure. Remember the book was also a campaign book, written to sell him to voters.

Questions about the Creek War

• 5. Why did you volunteer after the attack on Fort Mims in 1813?
• 6. What did you see at the burning of Tallushatchee in November 1813?
• 7. You served under Andrew Jackson. What did you think of him then?
• 8. Why did you go home when your enlistment ended, even though the war was not over?

What the record says: the Red Stick Creeks killed hundreds of settlers and soldiers at Fort Mims, Alabama, on 30 August 1813. At Tallushatchee on 3 November 1813, troops under General John Coffee killed 186 Creek warriors and some women and children; Crockett describes it in the Narrative with grim plainness. Treat this group carefully. Let him describe what he saw, do not make the violence exciting, and add a sentence on what the war meant for the Creek Nation, which lost about 23 million acres in the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson.

Questions about Congress and the break with Jackson

• 9. How did a backwoods hunter win a seat in Congress in 1827?
• 10. Why did you fight so hard for poor squatters on Tennessee land?
• 11. In May 1830 you voted against the Indian Removal Act, your own party leader's favourite bill. Why?
• 12. What did that vote cost you?
• 13. Why did the Whigs, Jackson's opponents, make you a celebrity?
• 14. What was it like to see an actor play a version of you on stage?

What the record says: his main cause in Congress was a bill to let settlers on western Tennessee land keep the farms they had cleared; it never passed. The Indian Removal Act passed the House by 102 votes to 97 on 26 May 1830, and Crockett was the only Tennessee congressman to vote no. He lost his seat in 1831, won it back in 1833 and lost again in 1835 to Adam Huntsman. Historians debate how much his vote came from conscience and how much from his quarrel with Jackson's allies; his own account stresses conscience. Our list of social reformers in history gives wider context on that era.

Questions about Texas and the Alamo

• 15. After you lost in 1835, what did you tell the voters?
• 16. Why did you go to Texas? For land, for a new start in politics, or for the fight?
• 17. When you swore an oath to the provisional government of Texas, you asked to change one word. Which, and why?
• 18. What was it like inside the Alamo during the thirteen-day siege?
• 19. Many Texans fighting Mexico were slaveholders, and Mexico had abolished slavery. Did that matter to you?
• 20. How do you answer people who say the Texas Revolution was about land and slavery as much as liberty?

What the record says: newspapers reported him telling voters that they could go to hell and he would go to Texas; it is a well-attested report, but not from his own pen. In January 1836, before swearing the oath of allegiance, he is reported to have insisted it promise loyalty to any future “republican” government. The siege ran from 23 February to 6 March 1836. Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, though Texas settlers won exemptions and used work-arounds, and protecting slavery was one of the Texas settlers' grievances; the Texas Constitution of 1836 protected it. Your Crockett can answer as a man of his time, and you can add the historians' view.

Two questions about how he died

• 21. How did you die?
• 22. Why do Americans still argue about it?

What the record says: no Crockett can answer question 21 himself, which is the point. Use it to show the evidence. Susanna Dickinson and Joe, the enslaved servant of the commander William Travis, survived and gave accounts after the battle. The diary of the Mexican officer José Enrique de la Peña, first published in 1955 and in English in 1975, says Crockett was among a small group captured and then executed on Santa Anna's orders. Some scholars question whether parts of the diary were written later. William C. Davis's Three Roads to the Alamo (1998) weighs it all.

Sample answers in his own words

For question 11, from his autobiography:

For question 16:

For question 14, on fame:

For question 12:

To close any answer, his motto from the opening page of the Narrative: “Be always sure you're right” and then, in capitals, “THEN GO AHEAD!”

What he could not know

• Speaking from 1834, he knows nothing of the Alamo.
• No photograph of him exists. Photography reached America in 1839, three years after his death, so any “Crockett photo” is false.
• The Trail of Tears (1838 to 1839) came after his death, though it carried out the law he voted against.
• Disney's Davy Crockett series (1954 to 1955) and its song came more than a century later.

Practise with a storyteller

Crockett told stories to win votes, so an interview with him needs firm follow-up questions. You can practise with an AI recreation of Davy Crockett on Yuga, by voice or text. It is built from his Narrative, letters and the historical record, not the Disney version, but it is a recreation and can be wrong. Cite the Narrative and his letters in your project.

Where to read Crockett's own words

• A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (1834), free on Project Gutenberg.
• The Register of Debates in Congress (1827 to 1835), for his speeches on the land bill, available through the Library of Congress's American Memory collection “A Century of Lawmaking”.
• His letter of 9 January 1836 from San Augustine, Texas, printed in most biographies.
• The Alamo in San Antonio, which runs a museum and research library.
• James Atkins Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend (1956), and William C. Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo (1998).

For planning the whole project, see our historical figure interview guide.