Which One Kilt Him a B'ar When He Was Three and Who Was the Dream-Come-a-Truer?

Every so often in the Moviehouse, we ponder the great questions of history. Like, what if the Confederacy had won the Civil War? Did extraterrestrial visitors help the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids? What happened to pioneer aviatrix Amelia Earhart? Was there a real King Arthur? And did Davy Crockett ever meet Daniel Boone?

This portrait of Davy Crockett was painted by John
Gadsby Chapman, who met Crockett in the early 1830s.

They did live in adjoining states, Davy Crockett in Tennessee, Daniel Boone to the north in Kentucky, although he moved to eastern Missouri for the last two decades of his life. Daniel Boone was already 51 years old when Davy Crockett was born in 1786. Crockett met his demise at the hands of the Mexican Army in the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Boone lived to the ripe old age of 85 before passing in 1820. Which means there had been plenty of time for the two to cross paths or at least correspond.

An unfinished oil sketch by Chester Harding is the
only portrait of Daniel Boone painted from life, a
few months before his death. Boone's last words
were, "I'm going now. My time has come." 

Unfortunately, historians universally agree that the two never met nor wrote one another. There was, however, one connection, and that sole connection came in the person of a Dutchman, Jacob Siler. Siler was a common name in those parts, and historic information on Jacob is sketchy at best. What is known is that when Davy Crockett was 12 years old, his father, John Crockett, indentured him to the service of Jacob Siler to relieve the Crockett family debt. Davy helped tend Siler's cattle as a buckaroo on a 400-mile drive to near Natural Bridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia. Young Crockett was treated well and was paid for his work, but when Siler forcibly tried to detain him in Virginia, he escaped and returned home.

A contemporary view of Rockbridge County's unchanging landscape

It turns out that Jacob Siler was also a friend and associate of Daniel Boone. According to local lore, Siler once made a rifle for Boone.

Assumedly, the close association between Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett might be traced to the fact that both folksy frontiersmen were portrayed in buckskin and raccoon hats by actor Fess Parker in the 1950s and '60s. From 1954 to 1955, Parker played Crockett in five one-hour episodes of "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color." The shows became a worldwide sensation, and Walt had the programs re-edited into two theatrical features that were equally popular, even though it was the same material TV audiences had already enjoyed for free. In 1964, Parker was cast as the star of the NBC series "Daniel Boone." The network originally wanted to buy the rights to a Davy Crockett series from Disney, but Walt wasn't selling, so Parker became Daniel Boone and wore the coonskin cap anyway.

Which came first? Historically, it was Daniel Boone, but for Fess
Parker, it was Davy Crockett (top), then Daniel Boone (bottom).

In reality, Daniel Boone didn't wear coonskin caps, preferring instead a wide-brimmed felt or beaver hat, not unlike the Quaker style worn by men in Pennsylvania, where he was born and spent his early childhood, as illustrated below in a modern depiction of Daniel leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap.

On the other hand, Davy Crockett often sported a raccoon cap. Crockett's daughter, Maltilda, who was 14 years old when her dad departed Tennessee for his fate at the Alamo in Texas in October 1835, would later write of the last time she saw him as "dressed in his hunting suit, wearing a coonskin cap and carrying a fine rifle presented to him by friends in Philadelphia." In an 1875 interview, Susanna Dickinson, one of the survivors of the Mexican siege of the Alamo, recalled, "I recognized Colonel Crockett lying dead and mutilated...and even remember seeing his peculiar cap lying by his side."

Painter-art teacher Robert Jenkins Onderdonk's 1903 masterpiece
was "Fall of the Alamo," depicting Davy in his coonskin hat.

A word or two about the coonskin cap. Originally fashioned from the pelt of the raccoon, from head to tail, the hat was traditional Native American headgear before being adopted by colonists in Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as other American and Canadian frontiersmen and hunters in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A Native American wears an authentic fur cap.

Former U.S. Army Captain Meriwether Lewis was fond of wearing a coonskin cap on the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804 to explore and map the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase (pictured below).

Edgar S. Paxson's 1912 mural "Lewis and Clark at Three Forks"
shows Capt. Meriwether Lewis, with Second Lt. William Clark and
Lemhi Shoshone guide Sacagawea, wearing a coonskin cap.

In the 1955 movie "The Far Horizons," Fred MacMurray (as Lewis) and Charlton Heston (as Clark) traded off wearing coonskin hats. In the scene below, with Donna Reed (embarrassingly miscast as Sacagawea), Heston's Clark took his turn under the tail.

The 1936 adventure picture "Daniel Boone" starred George O'Brien, an actor in silent pictures who started out as an assistant cameraman before finding work as a bit player and stuntman. Legendary director John Ford selected O'Brien to star in his 1924 silent film "The Iron Horse," based on the construction of the transcontinental railroad, and used him in a number of other movies.

Leading a wagon train of settlers to Kentucky in this early sound film, Daniel, inaccurately portrayed in a coonskin cap, has to contend with Native Americans and the sneering villain, Simon Girty (John Carradine). Girty, a character who popped up in various movies about Boone, was a real personage who served as a liaison between British troops and their Indian allies during the American Revolution. He had been taken captive in Pennsylvania by a raiding Seneca tribe and lived with them for seven years. After returning to his birth family, he harbored a sympathy for Indians.

The heavenly named Heather Angel (that was her given name -
Heather Grace Angel) wonders if that thing on George O'Brien's
head is going to bite her in "Daniel Boone," filmed in the
frontier of San Bernardino, California.

The fashionably striking coonskin hat was on display in 1940's "Kit Carson," not atop the head of the mountain man of the title, played by Jon Hall (star of "The Invisible Man's Revenge" and "Cobra Woman"), but by his trustworthy sidekick, "Ape," portrayed by John Ford stock company player Ward Bond. Research turns up no historical evidence of an actual companion of Carson called Ape.

Even Al Capp's Senator Phogbound in the "Li'l Abner" comic strip wore a coonskip cap (pictured below).

Real-life politician Estes Kefauver of Tennessee donned a coonskin cap as a personal trademark during his successful election to the U.S. Senate in 1948. Tennessee political boss E.H. Crump had accused Kefauver of being a raccoon-like Communist puppet, in response to which Estes replied in Memphis, "I may be a pet coon, but I'm not Boss Crump's pet coon." He continued to wear the hat throughout his political career, (pictured below), which included unsuccessful presidential and vice presidential nominations.

As members of the lodge known as the Royal Order of Raccoons, Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) and Ed Norton (Art Carney) wore snazzy uniforms with epaulettes and, appropriately, raccoon hats (pictured below) on early 1950s episodes of "The Honeymooners."

Davy Crockett achieved fame during his lifetime for supposed larger-than-life exploits that were popularized in stage plays and books. Even after his death, feats of mythical proportion were still heaped upon him, which led to numerous screen portrayals, starting less than 80 years following his death.

In a cheap 1937 picture titled "Heroes of the Alamo" (pictured below), Davy Crockett was depicted as something of an oaf by Lane Chandler, a Montana rancher's son who specialized in westerns. After the battle, a mortally wounded Crockett is crawling to a ladder before being rifle-butted by a Mexican soldier. Davy's last words are the odd, "And be danged to ya!"

"Heroes of the Alamo" reused battle scenes from the same producer's
1926 silent film "Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo."

Let's get back to Fess Parker's take on Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Fort Worth-born Parker enlisted in the U.S. Navy during the latter part of World War II with the desire to be a pilot, but at 6' 5½" he was considered too tall for the controls. He then attempted to be a radioman gunner but, again, was too big to fit comfortably into the rear cockpit. He was finally transferred to the Marine Corps as a radio operator and shipped out to the Pacific just before the atom bombs ended the war. At the tail end of his G.I. Bill, he studied drama at the University of Southern California and became a contract player at Warner Bros. in the early 1950s.

In 1954, Walt Disney attended a screening of "Them!", now considered a classic of science fiction about atomic tests in the New Mexico desert causing ants to mutate into gigantic man-eating monsters. The film starred James Arness (of later "Gunsmoke" fame) as an FBI special agent who teams with a state trooper (James Whitmore) and an ant expert ("Miracle on 34th Street's" Edmund Gwenn) to take on this threat to humanity. Walt wanted to check out Arness as the possible star of his upcoming Davy Crockett television shows.

FBI agent James Arness interrogates civilian pilot Fess Parker
in "Them!" In 1953, Arness and Parker appeared in the aviation
adventure picture "Island in the Sky," starring John Wayne.

What caught Disney's eye, however, was a brief, four-minute scene featuring Fess Parker as a civilian pilot whose plane had been downed by what he described as flying saucers shaped like huge flying ants and now finds himself detained in a mental institution. Disney was markedly impressed by the actor's fervid portrayal of a man who remained unswerving in his conviction despite the forces of authority against him. Walt had found his Davy Crockett.

Buddy Ebsen, the star of TV's "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Barnaby Jones," started his show business career as a talented, lanky but graceful dancer in supper clubs, vaudeville, and early sound motion pictures, having danced onscreen with Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. Walt Disney hired Ebsen to be filmed performing dance moves in front of a grid as an aid for his staff in animating Mickey Mouse dancing in "Silly Symphony" shorts in the 1930s. Walt later had Buddy dance for his team of Imagineers devising the audio-animatronic robotics utilized in the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln exhibit and the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. For whatever reason, Ebsen came to believe that Disney was going to cast him as Davy Crockett.

Ebsen's disappointment in being passed over for the starring role was short-lived as he landed the substantial supporting part of Georgie Russell, Davy's stalwart companion. The character was loosely based on a historical George Russell, an associate of Crockett, who, as a youth, fought in his father's company under Major General Andrew Jackson at the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend during the War of 1812, defeating the Red Sticks of the Creek tribe.

In exchange for off-camera dance lessons from Buddy,
Fess taught Ebsen how to play a guitar.

On December 15, 1954, "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" presented the debut of "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter," and virtually overnight, the character became the idol of over 50 million television viewers in a global craze. Just six months after that episode aired, $100 million worth of merchandise was snapped up by Crockett-frenzied consumers. There wasn't a boy, or even a girl, who didn't want a coonskin cap and a toy replica of Davy's flintlock rifle "Old Betsy."

The children's hats were invariably skull caps lined with fake fur and a faux raccoon tail attached. Girls' caps were made of white rabbit-like fur and called Polly Crockett hats. At the peak of the fad, coonskin caps sold at the rate of 5000 a day.

Coonskin caps were proudly worn by
Donald Duck's Junior Woodchucks.

The coonskin cap craze was capitalized on by Charles Schulz in a series of "Peanuts" comic strips in the summer of 1955 (pictured below).

Fess Parker's "Daniel Boone" series, which debuted September 24, 1964, didn't ignite the fan furor that Disney's "Davy Crockett" did, but it proved to be a reliable family-oriented adventure program that kept viewers comfortably entertained for six seasons. One of the main differences between the two characterizations was that Parker's Crockett was a wandering explorer, while his Boone was more of a family man, content to not roam far from the homestead he founded called Boonesborough in Kentucky. Another difference was that Davy, along with his pal Georgie, frequently sported several days' growth of whiskers, while Daniel was always impeccably clean-shaven (pictured below).

Speaking of family, Daniel Boone fathered 10 children. For the most part, the series gave him one son, Israel, played by Darby Hinton. Actress Veronica Cartwright (best known as Lambert the navigator in "Alien") initially appeared as a daughter, Jemima, but she disappeared without a trace toward the end of the second season.

Interestingly, from 1960 to 1961, "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" broadcast four, one-hour episodes of a "Daniel Boone" series, starring Dewey Martin, a compact tough guy in such movies as "The Thing from Another World," with James Arness as the monster, and "The Desperate Hours," as Humphrey Bogart's kid brother. Like the real Daniel, Martin's Boone preferred wide-brimmed felt hats. Rebecca Boone was played by Mala Powers, who starred opposite Jose Ferrer in 1950's "Cyrano de Bergerac," while Boone children James, Israel, and Jemima were portrayed by real-life siblings Kevin, Brian, and Kerry Corcoran (pictured below). Richard Banke appeared as Daniel's brother, Squire Boone.

Kevin Corcoran (with the bandaged head) was a regular child actor
for Walt Disney Productions, with roles in "Old Yeller," "The Shaggy
Dog," "Toby Tyler," "Swiss Family Robinson," and "Babes in Toyland."

In comparison, here's Fess Parker and family on "Daniel Boone,"
with Darby Hinton as Israel and Patricia Blair. Character actor and
voice artist (Buzz Buzzard in several Woody Woodpecker cartoons)
Dallas McKennon played Boonesborough innkeeper Cincinnatus

When he starred in, produced, and directed his long-planned labor of love, 1960's "The Alamo," John Wayne must have taken heed of young Matilda Crockett's account of seeing her father leave for Texas "wearing a coonskin cap," as that was an essential accessory in his wardrobe for the epic saga of the Mexican Army's 13-day siege of the mission fortress.

1960 was not the first time John Wayne modeled a coonskin cap. "The Fighting Kentuckian" was a fanciful 1949 drama about a Kentucky militia man who falls in love with an exiled Bonapartist French settler in 1818 Alabama. The film, written and directed by George Waggner (best known as the producer-director of the classic 1941 horror film "The Wolf Man," starring Lon Chaney Jr.), was noted for pairing Wayne with a Stan Laurel-less Oliver Hardy in a memorable screen team (pictured below).

Unfortunately, "The Fighting Kentuckian" did not lead to further
Wayne & Hardy (not unlike Laurel & Hardy) pairings.

As early as 1945, Wayne decided he wanted to do a movie about the Battle of the Alamo at Republic Pictures. He hired screenwriter James Edward Grant, whose career included a dozen collaborations with Wayne. However, Wayne and the president of Republic clashed over either Wayne's proposed budget of $3 million dollars or the fact that he wanted to direct the picture. Wayne parted company with the studio over the feud but wasn't allowed to take the script he had worked on with Grant. That screenplay was later retooled for the 1955 movie "The Last Command," with the focus on Jim Bowie, played by Sterling Hayden. Grizzled character actor Arthur Hunnicutt was cast as Davy Crockett.

Sterling Hayden and Arthur Hunnicutt listen to Slim Pickens
in "The Last Command."

John Wayne and producer Robert Fellows formed Wayne/Fellows Productions in 1952 as a way for Wayne to produce his own films. When Fellows left the company a couple of years later, Wayne renamed it Batjac Productions (Batjak was a fictitious trading company in Wayne's 1948 film "Wake of the Red Witch"). Wayne still wanted to produce and direct his vision of the Battle of the Alamo, but not act in it. Once again, he brought in James Edward Grant to write the script.

Wayne found financing a tough sell unless the project had the box-office guarantee of his onscreen appearance. When he said he would play General Sam Houston, relatively a bit part, to let him concentrate on directing, investors insisted he take the leading character of Davy Crockett. Wayne then cast Richard Widmark as legendary frontiersman Jim Bowie and English actor Laurence Harvey (Wayne wanted a touch of "British class") as the garrison commander, Colonel Travis.

Not to do with anything, but John Wayne cast Argentine-born Linda Cristal (best known as Victoria Cannon on the western series "The High Chaparral") as a Mexican woman called "Flaca" ("flaca" means "skinny" in English) Davy Crockett rescues from a forced marriage. We in the Moviehouse came across a pair of production stills from "The Alamo" we just felt compelled to share, one from the scene by a river where Davy bids Flaca a poignant farewell, the other an off-camera moment at the same location.

What just happened here? Before the lights were
set and the motion picture camera rolled, did producer-
director John Wayne demand a wardrobe check?

On the silver screen, John Wayne's coonskin-capped Crockett goes out in a blaze of glory, literally, when the frontiersman, wounded by a Mexican soldier's lance, falls back into a powder magazine with a torch (pictured below).

How Davy Crockett really died in the battle has been discussed and debated for over 180 years. Some accounts claimed he tried to surrender, but as Mexican General Santa Anna had ordered no quarter be given the mission's defenders from the onset, he was summarily executed by sword for his trouble. Stories such as that may have been stirred up by Texans eager to paint Santa Anna as a despicable villain.

Forty-four years after John Wayne, in the revisionist "The Alamo,"
directed by John Lee Hancock ("The Blind Side"), Billy Bob Thornton
put his own spin on Davy Crockett by appearing hatless throughout.

James Arness had been a protégé of John Wayne in a handful of motion pictures in the 1950s, including "Big Jim McLain" and "Hondo." The Duke personally recommended Arness for the starring role as Marshal Matt Dillon in "Gunsmoke" and even introduced the actor on the premiere episode of  the series. (When Arness said he didn't want the TV show because it would "ruin" his movie career, Wayne retorted, "What career? You haven't done a damn thing yet!"). After being denied the supporting role of Sam Houston in "The Alamo," Wayne's first choice for the part before Richard Boone was Arness. Wayne had a meeting set up with the studio, but Arness didn't show up. Wayne set up another meeting, but again, without a word why, Arness was a no-show. Wayne was furious, and the incident virtually ended their friendship.

In the late 1980s, a decade after the Duke's passing, as if in atonement, James Arness starred in a pair of television movie remakes of the classic John Wayne pictures "The Alamo" and "Red River," the latter with Arness, Bruce Boxleitner, Gregory Harrison, and Ray Walston reprising the original roles played by Wayne, Montgomery Clift, John Ireland, and Walter Brennan.

Unfortunately, 1987's "The Alamo: 13 Days to Glory," written and directed by western film veteran Burt Kennedy, played out like an AARP version of the storied siege. The 49-year-old Davy Crockett was portrayed by 66-year-old Brian Keith (pictured below), 39-year-old Jim Bowie was played by 64-year-old Arness, and 72-year-old Lorne Greene, in his last acting role, was 43-year-old Sam Houston. At least, the 29-year-old Alec Baldwin and 47-year-old Raul Julia were relatively close to the ages of their roles as Col. Travis (26) and Gen. Santa Anna (42).

"The Alamo: 13 Days to Glory" unabashedly recycled battle footage from the aforementioned 30-plus-year-old "The Last Command" for the climactic assault on the mission.

As for Fess Parker, after "Daniel Boone," he starred in one outdoorsy made-for-television movie before retiring. In 1972's "Climb an Angry Mountain," Parker played a rugged sheriff in northern California's Siskiyou County partnered with an abrasive city cop in a contemporary manhunt for a fugitive Native American up Mt. Shasta. The urban lawman was played by Barry Nelson, probably most recognizable as Mr. Ullman, the congenial manager of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," while the man on the run, an escaped Indian convicted of manslaughter, was convincingly portrayed by former Minnesota Vikings quarterback Joe Kapp. During his brief flirting with acting, Kapp had memorable roles in Burt Reynolds' "The Longest Yard" and "Semi Tough," and Charles Bronson's "Breakheart Pass." The supporting cast in "Climb an Angry Mountain" included Stella Stevens and Arthur Hunnicutt.

When Fess Parker decided to hang it up, he was 49, the same age as Davy Crockett when he met his demise. "I left the business after 22 years," Parker remarked. "It was time to leave Hollywood...Who needed a guy running around in a coonskin cap?"

Parker devoted much of the rest of his life to operating Fess Parker Winery and Vineyards in Los Olivos, California, located in the Santa Ynez Valley of Santa Barbara County. Appropriately, the wine labels bear the logo of a golden coonskip cap, while the winery itself vended souvenir coonskin hats. The winery was featured in the 2004 film "Sideways" as the "Frass Canyon Winery," where Miles (Paul Giamatti) attempts to drink the spit bucket.

Fess Parker attended the funeral of his old Walt Disney Productions sidekick Buddy Ebsen in 2003, while he himself passed away March 18, 2010, age 85, near his beloved winery.


Postscript

Parker would be pleased that the spirit of the coonskin cap carries on. One is depicted atop the statue of town founder Jebediah Obadiah Zachariah Jedediah Springfield in "The Simpsons" (pictured below).

As a Khaki Scout at Camp Ivanhoe, orphan Sam Shakusky (played by Jared Gilman) sports a nifty coonskin hat in Wes Anderson's charming 2012 coming-of-age fable "Moonrise Kingdom" (pictured below).

Jared Gilman holds the hand of sweetheart Kara Hayward.

...Yep, ol' Fess would be smilin' wider than a raccoon eatin' an ear of corn...

Oh, on a final note, Crockett preferred to be addressed as David, not Davy.