9781422287415

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The frontiersman Davy Crockett remains a popular and mythic figures of American history. Crockett was famed as an outdoorsman because of his crack shooting. He named his long rifle “Old Betsy.” The rifle was presented to him as a gift, and the inscription on the barrel reads: “Go Ahead.”

Davy Crockett

B y 1835, Davy Crockett was a living American folk hero. As an Indian fighter, Crockett served under General Andrew Jackson and helped defeat the Creek Indians in Alabama and Florida. His exploits as a pio- neer were also well known to the thousands of readers of the “Crockett Almanacs”—short, easy-to-read books that told about Davy’s adventures exploring the mountains of his native Tennessee. It did not seem to matter to his devoted fans that Crockett and his ghost writers made up most of the stories contained in the almanacs. His readers hungered for the tall tales and backwoods humor of the man who dressed in buckskins, carried a rifle he called “Old Betsy,” and wore a hat fashioned from a raccoon pelt .

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