Culture May 31, 2011

The mystery is not who Davy Crockett was but how he got that way and why. In 1834, two years before he died at the Alamo at 49, Crockett himself posed the same question: “I know that, obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable fuss in the world,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I can’t tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will, everybody seems anxious to get a peep at me. . . . Therefore, there must be something in me, or about me, that attracts attention, which is