In 1833 there were twenty thousand Americans that wished Texas to have an organization separate from the state of Coahuila. They were not so particular as to what government claimed their state, but they wished to organize and run it for themselves. Meeting a natural opposition from Mexico in this enterprise, in the year 1835 they banded their forces, overturned the Mexican government, and set up a provisional government of their own. Henry Smith was chosen provisional governor and Sam Houston commander-in-chief of this wildest of all American republics. On December twentieth, 1835, these Texans issued their proclamation of independence, some sixty years after the Declaration of the American Independence. This meant but one thing. Santa Anna, then as much as anybody governor of affairs in Mexico, marched with an army, stated to have numbered seven thousand five hundred men, to besiege the Texans, whose main body was located at San Antonio. No American doubted the ultimate issue. All the South knew that the wild and hardy population of this new region would beat back the weak Latin tenants of the soil. The matter was well discussed and well understood. It was not knight-errantry, therefore, so much as politics, that led Davy Crockett southward into this wild hornets’ nest. Rather should we say that all this movement was part of the mighty, inexplicable, fateful, irresistible Anglo-Saxon pilgrimage across this continent. It was a New World. These new men were those fitted to occupy and hold it. At this time the historian of Crockett falls on a curious difficulty. There is published what purports to be an autobiography of David Crockett’s life, a linsey-woolsey affair, made up partly of good English and partly of rough backwoods idiom such as we are accustomed to associate with the speech of this singular man. This “autobiography” purports to be continued after Crockett leaves his Tennessee home for far-off Texas. Yet at this point its style and subject matter assume such shape as to lead one inevitably to conclude that Crockett did not write it. There are many contradictions and discrepancies, and much of the detailed story of Crockett’s wanderings in the Southwest is denied by practically the only eye-witness of the time qualified to tell of his experiences—that Jonathan H. Greene (the “Harrington” of Crockett’s correspondence), once gambler and later reformed man, who was with Crockett for a time before the Alamo fight. Greene’s story does not in all points tally with the so-called autobiography of Crockett, nor with many of the popular histories of his life.