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Even as a pup, Davy Crockett "always delighted to be in the very thickest of danger." In his own inimitable style, he describes his earliest days in Tennessee, his two marriages, his career as an Indian fighter, his bear hunts, and his electioneering. His reputation as a b'ar hunter (he killed 105 in one season) sent him to Congress, and he was voted in and out as the price of cotton (and his relations with the Jacksonians) rose and fell. In 1834, when this autobiography appeared, Davy Crockett was already a folk hero with an eye on the White House. But a year later he would lose his seat in Congress and turn toward Texas and, ultimately, the Alamo.

"In the following pages I have endeavoured to give the reader a plain, honest, homespun account of my state in life, and some few of the difficulties which have attended me along its journey, down to this time. I am perfectly aware, that I have related many small and, as I fear, uninteresting circumstances; but if so, my apology is, that it was rendered necessary by a desire to link the different periods of my life together, as they have passed, from my childhood onward, and thereby to enable the reader to select such parts of it as he may relish most, if, indeed, there is any thing in it which may suit his palate."

This easy-reading autobiography of bear hunting and Indian fighting — written in 1834, two years before Crockett met his fate at the Alamo — popularized tall tales of the frontier.

A LITTLE more than a hundred years ago, a poor man, by the name of Crockett, embarked on board an emigrant-ship, in Ireland, for the New World. He was in the humblest station in life. However, very little is known respecting his uneventful career, excepting its tragical close. His family consisted of a wife and three or four children. Just before, he sailed, or on the Atlantic passage, a son was born, to whom he gave the name of John. The family probably landed in Philadelphia, and dwelt somewhere in Pennsylvania, for a year or two, in one of those slab shanties, with which all are familiar as the abodes of the poorest class of Irish emigrants. After a year or two, Crockett, with his little family, crossed the almost pathless Alleghenies. Father, mother, and children trudged along through the rugged defiles and over the rocky cliffs, on foot. Probably a single packhorse conveyed their few household goods. The hatchet and the rifle were the only means of obtaining food, shelter, and even clothing. With the hatchet, in an hour or two, a comfortable camp could be constructed, which would protect them from wind and rain. The campfire, cheering the darkness of the night, drying their often-wet garments, and warming their chilled limbs with its genial glow, enabled them to enjoy that almost greatest of earthly luxuries, peaceful sleep. The rifle supplied them with food. The fattest of turkeys and the tenderest steaks of venison, roasted upon forked sticks, which they held in their hands over the coals, feasted their voracious appetites. This, to them, was almost sumptuous food. The skin of the deer, by a rapid and simple process of tanning, supplied them with moccasins, and afforded material for the repair of their tattered garments.

A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee. Written in 1834, this autobiography is like a tall tale of the life of a frontiersman, and established Davy Crockett as a larger-than-life American hero.