Davy Crockett: A Handbook by Richard Boyd Hauck (review)

74 Western American Literature Davy Crockett: A Handbook. By Richard Boyd Hauck. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 169 pages, $6.95.) li&uck’sHandbook, originally published in 1982 as part of the Greenwood Press series of popular culture bio-bibliographies, combines a factual biog­ raphy of Crockett, a study of materials dealing with his life and legend, the history of his image and idiom in popular culture, and a helpful chronology. Hauck makes a good case for his thesis that “the legendary Crockett is a collective invention which the real Crockett initiated and which his audience has perpetuated.” Even in the book’s factual segment, one sees Crockett savor­ ing his own legend. At an 1833 performance of Paulding’s Lion of the West with James Hackett playing the Crockett-like hero, Hauck tells us: The curtain rose and Hackett stepped forward, dressed in the resplendent costume of Colonel Nimrod Wildfire. He bowed to Crockett. Crockett rose and bowed to Hackett. The audience went crazy. As he greeted his image, which was greeting him, what thoughts must have crossed Crockett’s mind? Perhaps he was dis­ turbed by recognizing that he had begun, all too explicitly, to meet himself coming back. Hauck sometimes becomes mired in detail, giving more than the reader wishes about the putative genealogy of the phrase “half-horse, half-alligator,” for example. Additionally, the prose is transiently infected by the hero’s pen­ chant for hyperbole. Of the television series starring Fess Parker, Hauck assures us, “In no time at all, every kid on every block in every town in the United States was singing at the top of his or her lungs, ‘Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.’” Despite these flaws, the book is largely interesting, and it gives the reader moved to learn more about Crockett facts or fictions a useful guide. JANE H. MADDOCK Western Montana College Alias Billy the Kid: The Man Behind the Legend. By Donald Cline. (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1986. 145 pages, $12.95, paper.) When John Poe, who was with Pat Garrett on the night the Kid was killed, published in 1922 in Los Angeles his account of the final hunt for the Kid, the controversy over whether the Kid did in fact die in 1881 was appar­ ently finished. In the words of another writer hearing the news, “one can at least realize that he [the Kid] is dead enough to stay dead.” In retrospect, however, the Kid had the good sense during his short life to distort or refuse to provide information regarding his parents, birthplace, early years, first crimes—even his real name. Such gaps in our knowledge of the Kid’s biog­ raphy have been instrumental in his not being good enough to stay dead, for ...