The study of Crockett's life shows us an America yet loose and scattered, not knit together into a national whole; and the political problems of that day were still those arising from geography. Backwoods Davy was after all not so poor a thinker, nor so far from getting to the marrow of things. After his visit to the North, and his reconciliation to the doctrines of a protective tariff, he makes one comment which, while it may not settle political argument, ought to teach a national courtesy and a human tolerance on both sides in any national difference.
"If Southerners would visit the North," he says, "it would give different ideas to them who have been deluded and spoken in strong terms of dissolving the Union." A trifle ungrammatical this, perhaps, but startling reading, when one remembers that it was recorded in 1834. Again we find our independent thinker discussing freely the questions of transportation, which were then and always have been so important in this country. He was opposed to Jackson in the first place because Jackson "vetoed the bill for the Maysville road." He was opposed to Van Buren because he "voted against the continuance of the national road through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and against appropriations for its preservation." He opposed Van Buren further because he "voted in favor of toll gates on the national road, demanding a tribute from the West for the right to pass on her own highways, constructed out of her own money,--a thing never heard of before."
Crockett's changes of residence, ever drifting farther to the westward in his native state, and his final long pilgrimage to the Southwest, where he certainly, though his autobiography does not so state, visited different parts of Texas and the Indian nations, is index of the tendency of the times. The West of that day is the South of to-day. Thus, a writer of 1834 states, "The West is settled by representatives from every country, but it is very largely indebted for its inhabitants to Virginia, Georgia and the two Carolinas." History and our census maps show us that the day of the upper West was yet to come. Boone and his like had led across the Appalachians. Crockett and his like had crossed the Mississippi. The march toward the Rockies was now steadily and determinedly begun, under what difficulties and with what results we shall presently observe.