Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier by Bob Thompson (review)

Bob Thompson, former editor of the Washington Post Sunday magazine, came late to his fascination with Davy Crockett. He escaped the great craze of the baby boomer generation only to be ensnared by his young daughter Lizzie’s fascination with the Crockett story. Lizzie’s introduction was the hypnotic—or irritating, depending on your musical tastes—“Ballad of Davy Crockett” written by Disney screenwriter Tom Blackburn as narrative transition and filler for the three-part 1955 television show. That program revived the somnolent Crockett legend and catapulted Davy back into the front rank of American heroes. Lizzie, like so many other American children, outgrew Davy and moved on, but it was not so easy for her father. He was haunted by the many ghosts of Davy Crockett, both historic and modern, and so he went in search of them and their cultural meaning. We are all the better for his quest.

Students of the literature of American memory will recognize Thompson’s book as kin to Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic (1998), although not nearly as acerbic, and Michael Elliott’s Custerology (2007), although not nearly as academic, and even a bit of a distant cousin to John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962). This is road-trip history at its best, a journey across both time and space that entertains as well as educates—much like the song that started it all. Thompson writes with grace in a breezy style that makes for a good read.

Thompson explores the life of the real Crockett from his Limestone, Tennessee, birthplace (in a valley of course, not on a mountaintop) through his various incarnations as bear hunter, Indian fighter, politician, freedom fighter, and martyr. In his own lifetime Davy was many things, and after his death he became even more. A living symbol of the Jacksonian “Age of the Common Man,” he became in death a martyr to national expansion and the embodiment of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to conquer a continent. His 1955 rebirth, with Walt Disney as able midwife, spoke to the symbolic Crockett as a buckskin-clad Cold Warrior who was also racially tolerant, a fighter for social justice, and disdainful of political corruption. He was the perfect hero for a generation that would soon embrace John F. Kennedy and usher in an era of vast social change.

Thompson’s journey ends, of course, at the Alamo, where he cannot resist that great issue of the manner of Crockett’s death. His interviews with the two leading protagonists in that grand debate, William Groneman and James Crisp, are more informative on the reasons for the continuing fascination with Crockett than on the actual details of the hero’s death, but that is the nature of this delightful book. A bevy of Crocketteers from all walks of life also appear along the way, from Tennessee school teacher Jim Claborn and businessman Joe Swann to Hollywood film-maker David Zucker, Professors Michael Lofaro and Stephen Hardin, National Park Service historian Danny Martinez, Alamo hostess Joan Headley, and bestselling Texas novelist Stephen Harrigan. All share a mutual fascination with the author on both the real and imagined Crockett. All, in one way or another, are still haunted by the ghost of Davy Crockett.

Buckle up and go on the road with Bob Thompson and Davy Crockett. It is not about the destination, of course, but rather all about the journey. You will come away amused, enlightened, and perhaps a bit haunted by the vivid personalities, complex histories, and many ghosts you meet along the way.