When pop culture meets history: A comparison of David Crockett and Jebediah Springfield
David Crockett was one of the first American celebrities and was considered one of the most famous people in America during his lifetime.
The play The Lion of the West, a thinly disguised and highly exaggerated account of Crockett’s life, opened in New York City in 1831. The story focused on Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, a “peculiar hero — decked out in buckskin clothes, deerskin shoes, and an outlandish wildcat-skin hat.”[1] Sound familiar?
Crockett’s legendary antics and heroism have endured much longer than Lion’s run. Certainly any modern celebrity could only dream of nearly two hundred years of cultural relevance, including novels such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and film adaptations of the siege of the Alamo.[2]
More recently, Crockett — alongside other 19th Century frontiersmen — has popped up in American culture in the character of Jebediah Springfield, founder of the mythical town of Springfield (state unknown), on the television show The Simpsons.
The number of people who are closely familiar with both the history and mythos surrounding David Crockett, as well as the trivial minutiae of a tertiary cartoon character, is probably exceedingly small.[3] Nevertheless, here we make a tongue-in-cheek comparison of Crockett and Jebediah Springfield.
First, let’s examine monuments: David Crockett and Jebediah Springfield both have bronze statues erected in their honor. Jebediah Springfield’s statue features Springfield standing over a bear that he “killed with his bare hands,” reflecting a popular folk tale (however, it was later discovered that the bear actually killed him instead). [4] In reality, Crockett was a legendary hunter, and perhaps inspired the writers of the Simpsons to include a defeated bear on the statue of Springfield.[5] David Crockett’s statue resides in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. There are other statues of Crockett throughout the country, but the one in Lawrenceburg is particularly similar to the one in the fictional town of Springfield.
What about another Crockett icon — headgear? Both Crockett and Springfield wore strange hats made of animals. David Crockett, of course, allegedly wore his famous raccoon skin cap.[6] Jebediah Springfield wore a hat made of buffalo, or as he called it, “land cow.” Of course, we at the GLO condemn Springfield’s fashion choice, as the “land cow” is featured on our agency’s seal and serves as an unofficial mascot for the agency.
Like many modern celebrities, both Crockett and Springfield had a penchant for clubbing — just not the kind of clubbing one might expect. Jebediah Springfield created the holiday “whacking day,” in which Springfieldians round up and club snakes to death akin to St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, and part of the mythos surrounding Crockett is that he went down swinging his rifle like a club at Mexican soldiers as the Alamo fell.
Both Crockett and Springfield knew men who wanted to marry their cousins. Shelbyville Manhattan, who was the number two man to Jebediah Springfield and his band of frontier colonists, came to believe that the entire pioneer endeavor was undertaken so that men could marry their cousins, his reason being “because they’re so attractive.” When David Crockett was 17, he was jilted by Amy Sumner (Summer) in favor of her cousin, Robert Canaday.[7]
The nature of Crockett and Springfield’s “silver tongues” is another subtle similarity between the two men. Crockett was known for his slick oration and powerful use of language, both in the statehouse and outside of it. Springfield’s silver tongue, while equally emblematic of his personality, was revealed in quite a literal sense. Yes, Jebediah Springfield was an actual silver-tongued pirate, sporting a prosthetic built to replace his real tongue which was bitten off by a Turkish pirate during a grog house fight. Crockett, on the other hand, was truly a public servant and patriot of the Texas Republic whose (figurative) silver tongue was part of the charm and mythos that has inspired cultural references for almost two centuries.
While both Crockett and Springfield emigrated west, their motivations for these journeys diverge wildly. David Crockett, after losing his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, moved to Texas. It was at this time that he uttered the now-famous quote, addressing his former constituents:
“Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”[8]
Crockett had intended to find his fortune in Texas, claiming that it was “the best land and the best prospects for health [he] ever saw.” Instead, he found a burgeoning fight for independence which he quickly and earnestly joined.
In contrast, Jebediah Springfield’s motivations were to found a town “devoted to chastity, abstinence, and a flavorless mush I call ‘root-marm.’” Clearly neither man quite got what he bargained for. Jebediah Springfield founded a town that is the antithesis of all that he was devoted to, while Crockett paid the ultimate price while achieving independence and cultural immortality.
Over the years, Crockett’s legendary personality has appeared in songs, movies, TV, and in merchandise such as replica coonskin caps, lunch boxes, comics, books, games, toys and all varieties of other paraphernalia.[9] David Crockett truly became a cultural icon for a generation who grew up knowing him as played on TV by Fess Parker, and he lingers in the back of the minds of that generation’s children whenever they hear the phrase made famous by Jebediah Springfield, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man!”
[1] Michael Wallis, David Crockett: The Lion of the West. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2011. 231.
[2] To this day, there are figures in American pop culture that Crockett inspired. William C. Davis claims “Huckleberry Finn would be but the young David Crockett, still on the road, still having adventures, and still amusing and charming generations.”
A generation ago, it was a little more obvious, as he was a celebrated hero of the 1950s and 1960s due to the Disney Alamo movie and Fess Parker television show. (William C. Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. 576.)
[3] Lofaro, Michael A., “Crockett, David,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fcr24), accessed July 31, 2015. Uploaded on June 12, 2010. Modified on February 19, 2015. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
[4] In an episode of the Simpsons from 1990, Bart Simpson, the young 4th-grade antagonist of the show, beheaded the statue of Springfield to the horror of the town, drawing the ire of the entire community. After the head was removed, as in all cartoons, it was put back on without the need for actual repair and the whole incident is never mentioned again.
[5] As the Ballad of Davy Crockett tells us, Crockett was “Raised in the woods so’s he knew ev’ry tree, kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.” The Ballad of Davy Crockett, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAVN_n0PljQ.
Land Office documents actually refer to Crockett’s legendary bear hunts, as it was reported that James M. Rose was frequently “a companion in his bear hunts & other amusements and was inseparable” from Crockett. (John N. Rose to Claims Commissioner J.C. Collingsworth, 1 September 1857, File 7115, Court of Claims Records, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX .)
[6] Although that is probably a myth, as the first representation of Crockett with an animal-skin hat occurred in 1835 — after Colonel Nimrod Wildfire was portrayed wearing a wildcat skin as headgear on promotional material for The Lion of the West. (Wallis, 237.)
[7] Wallis, 69.
[8] David Crockett to Wily and Margaret Flowers. January 9, 1836. Special Collections Library of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
[9] Wallis, xii.
