Davy Crockett probably wasn't born on a mountaintop in Tennessee. And nobody really thinks he shot a bear when he was only 3.
But that doesn't take anything away from the legend, at least for the 180 Crockett descendants gathering in Texas this week."Those kinds of things are interesting to read about, but they don't necessarily reflect the real David Crockett," said Leonard Stasney, one of the Crockett descendants holding their fifth biennial reunion at this town, 30 miles southwest of Fort Worth. Davy's widow settled in Granbury after his death at the battle of the Alamo in San Antonio in 1836.
"The myth was bigger than the man," said descendant Sandra Weaver of Granbury, who wore a cloth Crockett doll with a real coon tail on the cap, the whole thing pinned to her shoulder like a huge corsage.
Weaver and Crockett kin traded tales about their famous ancestor Tuesday at the clan picnic, swapped gossip and argued over the best place to get a genuine coonskin cap.
They debated how often a fighter could fire the muskets of Davy's day and whether Crockett was killed in action or, as some historians say, executed by the Mexicans after surrendering the Alamo.
"Davy Crockett went down swinging a rifle - he wasn't no coward," insisted Charles Edward Crockett Sr. of Falls City, Ore.
For the descendants gathered at Granbury's Plantation Inn, it's the search for a "real" Davy Crockett that matters most.
And according to them, that's not the Davy Crockett a generation of Americans knew from the Disney TV series that made the buckskin-clad actor Fess Parker an instant celebrity and prompted millions of youngsters to buy coonskin caps.
Only one descendant donned a coonskin cap for the reunion, and he was in period costume to demonstrate the rifles and muskets of Crockett's era.