As the early nights came on in Washington, which was then an unkempt city of scarcely twenty thousand people, and which twelve years afterwards the English traveller, George Combes, wrote of as a “straggling village in a half-drained swamp,” Davy looked across the marshes of the Potomac and the Anacostia, and pictured to himself a far-away scene upon the Rutherford Fork: a little space in the wilderness, where the corn-stalks rustled in the autumn wind; the sturdy cabin, built of logs and chinked with clay, before whose door his faithful hounds slept a fitful sleep, awaiting their master’s call; the near-by “harricane,” where the bears ever grew fatter, undisturbed by the crack of rifle or the baying of dogs; bright, loving faces looking wistfully across the unnumbered miles on which he had followed the flickering torch of Fame. He believed himself a great man. Against the polished learning and the subtleties of the aristocrat, he measured with a rather excusable complacency his own common-sense and his own victories. As the days wore on and he became used to the daily grind at the Capitol, he found himself known to every public man in the city, and became more reconciled to political life. His idioms of speech were watched for with an intentness that flattered his pride. He no longer wore a coon-skin cap or homespun clothing, but there was something in the way in which he traversed the quagmires of Pennsylvania Avenue, that was different from the more mincing gait of the aristocratic statesmen and diplomats who found relief from their official labors in leading the minuet. Davy entered into politics in dead earnest, and by the time he had been sought out by such men as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and others eager to turn to account every factor in politics, he began to dream. Andrew Jackson had come of lowly parentage, from a cabin in the wilderness; he was sure to be elected President, if he lived, in two years more. If Andrew Jackson, why not Davy Crockett? Davy’s ambitious nature is revealed in his own story, written or dictated during his career as a Congressman, and after his departure from the Republican, or Jackson, fold. In this he makes these remarks, as he tells one of the reasons for recounting his experiences in book-form: