If you’re from the Lone Star State, then you know that Davy Crockett is an important figure in Texas history. Although a native of Tennessee, Crockett left his home state after serving as a member of Congress when another individual was voted into his seat. This spawned his famous quote, “You may all go to hell, but I’m going to Texas.”
Although initially attracted to Texas by the allure of cheap land and natural resources, upon arriving, Crockett had many adventures which eventually lead him to advocate for Texas independence. He fought for the Texas army in its quest to become its own nation, free from the rule of Mexico. Crockett famously died defending the Alamo.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
An avid outdoorsman, Crockett is mythologized for many of his skills as a woodsman, such as killing a bear with a knife when he was only three years old and wearing a coonskin cap. While some of these feats might be fantasies, there is plenty of evidence in Crockett’s own journals and correspondence with friends and family that document his skill in the wild.
One encounter that you may not know about is the time that Crockett allegedly met Bigfoot. Upon traveling into the interior of Texas, in what is close to the national forest that’s named after him, Crockett wrote in a letter to his brother-in-law about an encounter he had with a creature that was “the shape and shade of a large ape man.”
Photo: Flickr/US Forest Service-South
Crockett’s report goes on to describe a specimen much like many historical and modern-day Sasquatch sightings. The one anomaly to Crockett’s encounter is that he claims the beast spoke to him, issuing a warning of the events that would occur at the Alamo where Crockett died six months later. “Abner,” Crocket allegedly wrote, “it told me to return from Texas, to flee this Fort and to abandon this lost cause. When I began to question this, the creature spread upon the wind like the morning steam swirls off a frog pond.”
Was this a true sighting of a bizarre, undiscovered species? Or was it simply an encounter with a tall, uncouth, and unkempt person who lived in the backwoods of east Texas? Scholars still debate it. As Crockett readily admits, he had been working and walking hard all day with little food and water. It could have been a hallucination or a vivid dream.
You can read his letter and decide for yourself. Whatever the case, this encounter is strangely left out of the tales we tell today about Davy Crockett.
