Davy Crockett had thus far never met any danger of a nature to inspire fear, any difficulty he could not overcome, any hardship he could not lightly endure. He now encountered one enemy greater than any to be met with in the wilderness--that great and menacing foe, the political machine. He found to his sorrow that honor and manhood will not always serve, and at the summit of his success he met his first and irremediable defeat.
Crockett, once the politician, now grown into Crockett the eager student, the earnest statesman, had stirred up animosities too great for him to overcome. The relentless hand of Jackson smote hard upon Crockett's district. There was talk of money, and of votes influenced by its use. Poor Davy, who went into this last campaign of Congress as blithely and as sure of success as ever in his life, learned that he had been defeated by a total of two hundred and thirty votes! Then there arose from the honest and generous soul of this strange child of the wilderness a great and bitter cry. He was among the first to exclaim against the creed of politics pursued as politics, of statesmanship that is not statesmanship--the creed of party and not of manhood.
"As my country no longer requires my services," he writes, "I have made up my mind to leave it." Expressing his determination forthwith to leave Tennessee and to start for the distant land of Texas, he says, "I have a new row to hoe, a long and rough one; but I will go ahead." He adds as quaintly as ever, "I told my constituents they might all go to hell, and I would go to Texas."
We come now to the third and closing stage of the life of David Crockett, and in order to understand it we must bear in mind the nature of the opinions then current concerning the new land that to the Southerners of that time was "The Great West," the land beyond the Mississippi. Texas, a magnificent realm eight hundred and twenty-five by seven hundred and forty-five miles in extent, already had an American population of nearly forty thousand; and of all wild populations ever gathered together at any place or time of the world, this was perhaps the wildest and the most indomitable. There was hardly a soul within the borders of that great land who was not a fighting man and who had not come to take his fighting chance. It was fate that Davy Crockett should drift into this far Southwest and take his chances also.