Some biographers of Crockett accord to him in this act the motives of bold knight-errantry; yet impartial review of known facts leads one to believe that Crockett’s abandonment of his family and his somewhat erratic journey into Texas were most easily explicable by reasons of a plausible self-interest. He was seeking political advancement along lines of less resistance. Then, finding himself a member of a party of souls as adventurous as himself, souls reckless and unrestrained, ardent, eager, fearless, yet without a leader and without a definite plan, Crockett the backwoodsman, Crockett the thinker, the orator, the statesman, if you please, flings himself with the others into a needless and fatal fight, rages with them in the most glorious struggle yet chronicled in the pages of American history, fights like a Titan, dies like a gallant gentleman, helps write the shining history of that squalid hut in old San Antonio, and makes possible one of the most burning sentences that ever adorned monument above hero’s grave: “Thermopylæ had three messengers of defeat; the Alamo had not one!” Here are contradictions that might be thought sufficient to give us pause; yet not contradictions large or conclusive enough to rob Davy Crockett of aught of the fame that has been accorded him by the American people. In order to reconcile or explain these contrarieties, and hence to understand this strange early American, we shall do well to review the better known and most authentic incidents of his peculiar career. Crockett does not go so far back in the history of the west-bound American as does Daniel Boone. The latter died at the age of eighty-six. Crockett, who died about ten years later than Boone, was but fifty years of age. His life falls in the trans-Mississippi period of the Western population movement. He was born August seventeenth, 1786, in Greene County, Tennessee. His grandfather was an Irishman who came to Pennsylvania, thence moved west in order to avail himself of the settlers’ right of four hundred acres of land, which carried the preemption right of an additional one thousand acres. A goodly portion of a goodly earth lay ready to every man’s hand in that day of American opportunity. The second Crockett homestead, on the Holston River, was broken up by the Indians, who killed the parents and several of the children, John Crockett, David’s father, being one of the few that escaped. John Crockett became a Revolutionary soldier, and after the Revolutionary War moved to North Carolina, just as did the father of Daniel Boone.