My mother was ten when Davy Crockett first aired, about to turn eleven. That was sixty-four years ago now. She’s never told me of wanting a coonskin cap; actually, about the only Disney memory of her childhood that Mom has shared is of a crush on Guy Williams (who looks eerily like my dad from certain angles; Mom has a type, and Fess Parker wasn’t it), and while she let us watch the whole thing whenever it aired on The Disney Channel, I don’t remember any real enthusiasm from her on the subject. I don’t know why it connects so strongly with her in my head, but here we are, with a bit of an advance birthday present for her. Happy birthday, Mom?

Walt once said, and I regret that I could not find the exact quote to use as an epigraph, that if he’d known how popular the show would turn out to be, he wouldn’t have killed off his hero after three episodes. (This is probably why there’s a second movie, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, which we’ll get to next week.) Certainly they ended up making a fortune both off merchandising and off repackaging the three episodes as a theatrical-release movie, which is probably how I was more likely to see it when I was a kid.

The first episode is “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter.” He tangles with Indians, as per spec. Kills him a b’ar, while considerably older than three but armed only with a knife. And Does Not Get Along At All with Andrew Jackson (Basil Ruysdael). The second episode is “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress.” He returns to Tennessee, where he learns that his wife has died. He is elected to Congress. And Does Not Get Along At All with Andrew Jackson. The third episode is “Davy Crockett at the Alamo.” He goes to Texas. He fights at the Alamo. And Does Not Get Along At All with Santana’s soldiers (various).

While Polly Crockett (Helene Stanley) is a character in the series, as are two of his five children, sort of, his second wife is not. It doesn’t much matter, though, because his real life partner in the series is George Russel (Buddy Ebsen). George is there fighting Indians. George goes with him to Congress. George goes with him to the Alamo. They are tied together in a way that Davy isn’t with an actual woman—and I’m pretty sure George is just single. Also I’m pretty sure he’s not a historical figure, but that’s a different conversation.

Because, let’s face it, this is not history. Even without getting into the whole “how did David Crockett die?” thing—I lean toward executed but am willing to be persuaded—he just wasn’t kindly Fess Parker. I mean, they’re right that Crockett and Jackson weren’t friends, though this is definitely not somewhere we’re going to get into the political differences between the men. It’s interesting that I didn’t even remember until adulthood that the general he was bickering with was Andrew Jackson, because I remember the general as being a lot more classy than Andrew Jackson ever was.

But of course, it’s difficult to talk about the historical David Crockett in the first place, because he himself created a legend. He was a Westerner of a certain type, and that type was . . . not flamboyant, exactly, because “flamboyant” is hard to be in buckskin and coonskin, but mythical. There was, at the time, a certain amount of bragging expected of a good Western man, and by all accounts David Crockett excelled at it. While he wrote his autobiography, that doesn’t mean we can trust what it says.

A curious side effect of the Crockett craze is that it means there are almost no genuine ’20s-era racoon coats left. Almost all of them were recycled into coonskin caps for my mother’s generation. It’s also, of course, why the Daniel Boone TV show aired. So okay, they killed off Davy Crockett too soon. But Daniel Boone’s basically the same thing, right?

Help keep my kids in their generation’s equivalent of coonskin caps; consider supporting my Patreon!