Davy Crockett, Texas, and Shared Identities

Paula Marks

The 2002 Davy Crockett exhibit at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, and the museum itself, stimulates considerations of American and Texan identity—how we define ourselves, how we are expected or encouraged to define ourselves, and what use we make of the symbols and definitions offered.

My brother Phil was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in November 1954, just a few weeks before the first installment of Walt Disney's Davy Crockett trilogy appeared on national television. As Phil's senior by three and one-half years, I was soon caught up in the Davy Crockett craze, my prize possession in 1955 a coonskin cap. By the next year, the national Crockett fervor had faded, my father's seminary training in Fort Worth had ended, and our family was moving on to Kansas, where I learned the state flower/bird/song and somehow gained an indelible impression of wagon trains bumping rhythmically across grassy prairies. That image of American frontier mobility fit well with our family experiences, as my father's career as an army chaplain whisked us to nine different addresses in twelve years. But I was never sure how to answer when people asked where we were from. I had no "hometown" to offer, and this question seemed loaded with more profound ones: "Who are you? How do you define yourself? How can and will I define you?"     The eighty-million-dollar Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum stimulates considerations of Texas identity. Photo courtesy of Heather Brand/Bob Bollock Texas State History Museum.

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By contrast, Phil always knew he was a Texan, and that was a good thing to be. The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, which opened in Austin in April 2001, explores what it means to be a Texan—heritage, definition, myth. The museum, conceived by former Texas Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock and funded by the State of Texas to be a profit-making attraction, resulted from extensive collaboration among state officials, preservation and museum specialists, architects, exhibit designers, multimedia specialists, and historians. It has three themed floors of exhibits: the first "Encounters on the Land," the second "Building the Lone Star Identity, 1821—1936," and the third "Creating Opportunity." The museum has proven extremely popular, with 770,000 visitors in the first year. Between 1,000 and 2,000 people tour daily. 1 Director Lynn Denton has estimated "it would take a family 5 1/2 hours to read every wall text, listen to every recorded story, and see every interpretive film." 2 Seven hundred artifacts are on display, from a Comanche hide painting to the incredibly grim-visaged Goddess of Liberty statue that topped the state capitol dome from 1888 to 1985.

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