We don't often hear Davy Crockett and Ludwig van Beethoven mentioned in the same breath.  Or at least I hadn't.  Classical music, in fact, was pretty much the last thing on my mind on March 26, 2010, as I headed for Crockett country to begin reporting Born on a Mountaintop.  Then I happened upon a radio station that was playing Beethoven's Second Symphony, and it suddenly hit me that the legendary American frontiersman and the immortal German composer were contemporaries.
     They shared the planet for 41 years.  
     March 26, I soon learned, was the anniversary of Beethoven's death in 1827.  That was the year David Crockett -- who was born in 1786 -- began his first term in Congress.  It's not easy to think of them having much else in common, but let's give it a try.
     * Beethoven was responsible for some of the most beautiful music ever written for strings.  Crockett is said to have entertained his fellow Alamo defenders by playing the fiddle, though it's far from certain that he played the instrument at all.
     * Beethoven had a thing for Napoleon, initially titling his Third Symphony the Bonaparte, though he soon had second thoughts about the name.  Crockett met his end at the hands of the Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who liked to call himself "the Napoleon of the West."
     * "Throughout his life," wrote Beethoven biographer Edmund Morris, the composer"struggled against epic 

odds and prevailed with enormous courage."  You could say the same about Crockett's lifelong struggle and his courage, whether or not you think he prevailed.
     And then, of course, there's the Peanuts connection.
     At the height of the Walt-Disney-and-Fess-Parker-inspired Crockett craze of 1955, cartoonist Charles Schulz produced a wonderful run of strips in which Charlie Brown (always in a coonskin cap) debates the Beethoven-obsessed Shroeder about whose hero is biggest and best.  You can read some of these strips in John Harris's blog Roasted Peanuts -- which I highly recommend; there are more here -- but let me give you a bit of dialogue to whet your appetite:
     Shroeder: "BEETHOVEN COULD DO ANYTHING DAVY CROCKETT COULD DO!"
     Charlie Brown: "OH YEAH?  DID HE KILL A BEAR WHEN HE WAS ONLY THREE?!!  DID HE?  HUH?  DID HE?!"
     Schroeder: "BEETHOVEN KILLED TWELVE BEARS WHEN HE WAS ONLY THREE."  
     How do you top an argument like that?  Beats me, and it beat Charlie Brown, too.  The strip ends with him just standing there, clutching a rifle that's at least twice as long as he is tall, giving his triumphant opponent the final word.
     "IT'S A LITTLE KNOWN FACT OF AMERICAN HISTORY!" Shroeder says.
     
            

When people ask me how I came to write a book about Davy Crockett, I tell them it's because my elder daughter fell in love with Davy when when she was 4 years old.  This explanation is perfectly true, but it leaves out one complicating fact – which is that Lizzie fell in love with Andy Jackson at the same time.  For what seemed like a full year, she greeted visiting friends and relatives with the charmingly out-of-nowhere question: “Do you know who my favorite president is?” 
     Not many people answered correctly.
     And really, how could anyone have guessed?  Old Hickory was not a lovable man, though by most definitions he was a great one.  The real David Crockett loathed his fellow Tennessean, whom he saw as an autocratic threat to democracy.  And if you're looking to eliminate Jackson from your short list of cuddly presidents, all you have to do is think “Indian Removal” and “Trail of Tears.”
     Ah, but it was the historical Andrew Jackson who forced the Cherokees to make that brutal, deadly trek west.  The man Lizzie loved was someone else entirely.
     As portrayed in Crockett legend – especially in a 1944 book for young readers by Irwin Shapiro, with wonderful illustrations by James Daugherty – Jackson was a mythic creature who was pals with the mythic Davy we had come to know.  The starting point for Yankee Thunder: The Legendary Life of Davy Crockett was the “collection of tales, anecdotes, and plain and fancy whoppers” that appeared in Crockett almanacs for decades after Davy's death.  But as Shapiro notes in his introduction, he improved on the almanac stories in a number of ways.  He eliminated “coarse, even brutal” parts that were “not consonant with the large outlines of Davy's character”; arranged the stories in a coherent narrative; and inserted “General Old Hickory Andy Jackson” as a major character.  

     Andy and Davy meet up during the Indian wars, and pretty soon they're arguing about which one should be president.  “We're the best two men for it in these here United States,” Andy says, “and it's up to one o' us to take the office.”  He wants Davy to run.  Davy thinks Andy should do it.  A shooting match with a surprise ending eventually settles the issue, and the next time the friends see each other, they're in Washington City, celebrating Andy's inauguration:
     Andy Jackson cut loose with a regular wildcat screech.  Davy came back with a horse neigh, and they circled round each other, flapping their arms and crowing like roosters.  Then they both busted out laughing and thumped each other on the back.
     “Why, you ol' slangwhanger!” said Andy Jackson.

    “You ol' bushwhacker, you!” said Davy.
     “You backwoods galumpus!” …
     “You screechin' wildcat!” ...
     “You ring-tailed roarer!” …
     “You red-headed alligator!”
No further differences between them are mentioned, and pretty soon they're teaming up to defeat an embodiment of anti-democratic evil named Slickerty Sam.
     With Andy clearly established as Lizzie's favorite president, her sister needed one of her own.  Exhibiting excellent historical judgment, Mona picked out a tall fellow named Abe.  At some point, the girls' mother and I began to make up stories about two sisters who could step into a magic cardboard box and be transported to various points in the past.  There, they would have fantastic adventures – or at least as fantastic as two chronically exhausted parents could make them – with their good friends Davy, Andy and Abe.
     Cute, you may say, but why am I bringing this up?  
     The answer is that, after spending three years on a book about Crockett, I've got a better idea of what my family was doing with Andy, Davy and Abe.  It's the same thing people have done with Crockett's story for almost two centuries now, and it's a human instinct more powerful than any pure quest for historical facts: 
     We were turning real lives into myths that met our immediate needs.

When set out to write about Davy Crockett, I wasn't thinking of myself as someone with Texas roots.  I was born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in New England, and while I'd driven across the state a few times on my way to and from California, I'd barely taken my foot off the gas.  Sure, I knew that my grandmother had grown up in Texas, but she'd spent most of her adult life in Seattle, and that's where I've always pictured her. About a year into researching Born on a Mountaintop, however, I was digging around in a box of old family documents (for unrelated reasons) and came across a brown envelope with an inscription in her handwriting.  "The Alamo, Texas, Sept. 1915," it read.  "Taken on our wedding journey."  
     In the envelope was the negative of the photo shown above.  
     It was an eerie moment for a non-Texan deeply immersed in the Alamo story, and I was full of unanswerable questions.  Did my grandparents get to see the inside of the church, and if so, who showed them around?  Did they perhaps stay at the Hotel Bowie, a sign for which is visible in the background?  How much did they know about the men who defended the battered old mission on the morning of March 6, 1836 -- and in particular, about the bear-hunting former Tennessee congressman who fought and died there?
     Here are a few things I do know: My grandmother, Julia Bell Shands, was born in Forney (20 miles or so east of Dallas) in 1884.  The family eventually moved to San Marcos, where she went to college.  She and my Minnesota-born grandfather, William Francis Thompson, met in 1914 in Palo Alto, California, where she was getting a masters degree and he was launching a fisheries biology career.  They were married in San Marcos, and less than ten months after their Alamo honeymoon, my father was born.   
      

David Crockett and his fellow Alamo defenders spent most of the siege hoping in vain for reinforcements.  But in the early morning hours of March 1, 1836, a few brave men from Gonzales did make their way into the old mission.  "It was only a reinforcement of thirty-two," as James Donovan writes in The Blood of Heroes, but "they told of more on their way, riding to Gonzales from all points.  If those reinforcements arrived before the rest of the Mexican Army, the rebels might have a fighting chance."  
     History records "the immortal thirty-two" as including a young man named Jonathan Lindley.  And one of the first people I ran into, as I was setting out to report Born on a Mountaintop, turned out to be a relative of his. 
     Dave Lindley and his wife, Joyce, were touring Tennessee's Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park when I arrived to do the same.  Despite a longstanding interest in history, Dave hadn't known he had an Alamo connection until a friend came back from San Antonio and said, "Hey, there's a Lindley on the wall!"  Jonathan Lindley, Joyce explained, turned out to be cousin of Dave's "third or fourth great grandfather."  He had gone to Texas, as so many did, in search of opportunity and land; the Lindleys believe he was manning a cannon in the Alamo church when the Mexicans broke through.
     I thought of Dave and Joyce when my Crockett road trip finally took me to to San Antonio.  I was               

admiring the statue of Crockett that's part of the Cenotaph in Alamo Plaza when I looked down and saw a familiar name.  You can find it in the somewhat murky photo above, but here's a close-up.

     When I'd asked Dave Lindley about Crockett himself, he'd had some thoughtful things to say.  Having read up on "the real man, as opposed to the Disney character," he wasn't inclined to overglorify him.  "The real man made a lot of mistakes, like most humans do," Dave said, "so putting him on a pedestal, to me, is not a proper place."  I couldn't agree more about Crockett being human.  His human flaws and human emotions, I think, only make his story more interesting.  But it's equally true that Americans put him on a pedestal long ago, for reasons that are just as fascinating as the facts of the real man's life.  
     Here's just one: We humans need stories that give us hope, and courage in the face of darkness.  And to that end, the stories of the famous Davy Crockett and the anonymous Jonathan Lindley both serve.