Davy Crockett's Death

The purpose of this research is to examine the issue of Davy Crockett's death. The plan of the research is to set forth popular accounts of precisely how and when Davy Crockett died, either during or after the famous battle of the Alamo in Texas in 1836, and then to discuss the so-called culture wars surrounding these accounts. The theme that the author wishes to develop is one of weighing probable evidence of Crockett's death in the midst of battle against comparatively improbable evidence of Crockett's death after the end of battle at the hands of General Santa Anna, who commanded the victorious Mexican army at the Alamo and who ordered the summary execution of six prisoners of war after the fighting had ended. The author takes the view that many questionable, problematic, and difficult-to-prove circumstances must be believed before it becomes possible to believe that Crockett (called, formally, David Crockett, in this article rather than Davy Crockett, as in the popular imagination) was one of the six prisoners executed. This view is also problematic in the sense that a body of textual evidence exists that identifies Crockett as one of those six prisoners; however, Lind's judgment of various accounts of the battle of the Alamo is that stories of Crockett's surviving the battle only to be singled out for a cruel execution are products of lively and romantic imagination rather than careful attention to known facts.

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to have in one version of the death over the other also has significance. The manner in which and the reasons for which evidentiary and psychological factors overlap and converge in the Crockett issue become apparent when one looks at Lind's evaluation and interpretation of the evidence. Lind cites the Pena memoir, a supposedly direct and original source of information about the Alamo, as the main agent of corroboration. However, he then proceeds to use (1) an anti-Santa Anna pamphlet Pena published in 1839 that described the post-battle execution but did not identify Crockett by name and (2) internal evidence of Pena's "supposed eyewitness account of the death of Travis" (53) to make the case against Pena's memoir account of Crockett's execution and for the contamination theory. Lind believes that Pena would have mentioned Crockett by name in both pamphlet and diary if the diary itself had been authentic, but the diary is "padded with material obtained after the war" (53). The internal evidence of Pena's account of the battle is also problematic for logistical reasons. According to Lind's analysis, if Pena had been an eyewitness to Travis's death in battle, known from testimony of Travis's slave Joe, who survived the battle, to

Category: History - D