Many years after Fess Parker wore his coonskin cap onto the set of Walt Disney's "Davy Crockett at the Alamo," he tried to bring the King of the Wild Frontier back to life.  He wrote a screenplay (never produced) in which Davy and his fictional sidekick, Georgie Russel, don't die in the brutal, heroic battle fought on March 6, 1836.  Captured and kept alive as hostages, they spend 25 years in a Mexico City prison.  Finally escaping, they ride back into San Antonio only to find people celebrating the Alamo anniversary by giving speeches and reading off the names of the defenders.  "Davy and Georgie look at each other," Parker once explained in a television interview, "and Georgie says, 'I know, we're heroes -- and we gotta get out of here.'  And with that, we just ride out over the hill."
     I kept thinking about this when I was in San Antonio working on Born on a Mountaintop.  
     I had followed Crockett's footsteps from his east Tennessee birthplace to the Alamo, hoping to learn how a remarkable life and a mythic afterlife had come to be permanently intertwined.  Parker's screenplay made me wonder: What would the real David Crockett think if he could somehow transport himself to 21st-century San Antonio?  How astonished would he be to find a neon Crockett Hotel sign looming above the Alamo church, or a boisterous school group posing for photos in Alamo Plaza -- perhaps within yards of where he died?  And what on earth would he make of the sight of his great-great-great grandson, David Preston Crockett, decked out in homemade Davy gear and posing in the plaza as well? 

     The 19th-century David Crockett certainly knew about the effects of fame.  Elected to Congress as an authentic backwoodsman with a knack for skewering Tennessee elites, he was soon transformed into a mega-celebrity by the media culture of his time.  What he didn't know was that he would die a hero's death in Texas, ensuring that his fame would survive him -- or that, more than a century later, Fess Parker, Walt Disney and a newly-popular medium called television would combine to magnify that fame beyond belief.
     My book ends with a chapter set in San Antonio, and reporting it was a fascinating, often moving experience.  I got to hear Crockett descendants sing backup on "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" in the Spanish Governor's Palace.  I watched the sun rise behind the Alamo, 175 years after the battle, during a ceremony that honored both the defenders and their Mexican foes.  I set out to examine every spot where David might have died, as well as all the places his ashes could have ended up.  (There are many of both.)  And I heard a couple of Crockett-obsessed Australians give a PowerPoint-enhanced lecture they called "Portraits of David Crockett's Last Stand: Iconography and Symbolism of Heroics throughout Western Culture." 

     I know what you're thinking -- but I loved it.  The image of Fess Parker's Davy, bravely swinging his rifle to the end, was part of the show, of course.
     Parker died at 85, shortly before my first San Antonio trip in 2010, and the Alamo put out a memorial book for visitors to sign. My favorite entry shows how little the line between reality and myth can matter when it comes to characters we love and stories that help us figure out who we are.
     "I'll miss you Fess (Davy)," it reads.  "You were part of my childhood.  God Bless."  

When it was time to write the opening section of Born on a Mountaintop, I was sure I had the perfect place to begin.  I planned to introduce readers to my Davy Crockett road trip -- and to the layered complexities of Davy's story -- by taking them inside a little-known Crockett site I truly love.  It's a tiny replica cabin just off the town square in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, that I wandered into one spring morning without the faintest idea of what to expect.  Instantly, I had the sense that I was walking around in a Crockett time capsule.  
     On the wall hung an old hunting rifle, wooden canteen, cloth shirt and pair of leggings, the kind that a poor but ambitious pioneer might have worn.  A binder filled with newspaper clippings lay open on a table; one article, headlined "David Crockett as ... a Businessman?" highlighted the fact that Crockett not only began his political career in Lawrenceburg, but built a mill and distillery complex there as well.  (It promptly washed away in a flood.)  Glass cases protected, among other treasures, a program from a locally-produced outdoor musical drama about Crockett -- I later tracked down its author; more on that another time -- and a exuberant celebratory poem by Linwood Polk Comer.  The poem opens with a reference to the life-sized bronze Crockett statue that Lawrenceburg erected in 1922:
        David Crockett stands right there; 
        Right up -- on the City Square! 
        Arm stretched out and Gun in hand; 
        To welcome each and every man!
The cabin's displays emphasize Crockett's time in Lawrenceburg, which is as it should be -- but the death that made him immortal is memorialized, too, along with the deaths of the other Tennessee volunteers who fought at the Alamo.  The hand-lettered texts behind the sign lay out Crockett's story in full.    

I was confused, at first, about what the cabin was intended to replicate.  A historic marker on Military Street talks about "David Crockett's Home," which is misleading, and there was no one inside to ask.  But eventually I found the answer in a framed sketch of the original structure (see below) entitled "David Crockett's Office."  A hand-written note explains that it was "drawn from memory by Lillie Belle McLean Appleton April 29, 1969 at almost 82 years of age."  Apparently the budding politician -- who served as a justice of the peace and a state legislator while he and his family lived in Lawrenceburg -- needed a place to work, and perhaps sometimes sleep, when he was downtown.

As it happened, I didn't end up beginning Born on a Mountaintop with David Crockett's office.  After a few false starts, I realized that I had reacted to it as someone already immersed in Crockett's remarkable story -- and that readers new to that story wouldn't feel the same.  I ended up putting the office on page 80, but I still love it.  And if you ever get to Lawrenceburg, I urge you to drop in and do some time traveling yourself.