Perhaps no American traveler of the first half of the nineteenth century was better known to American audiences than David Crockett. Like Daniel Boone before him, "Davy" Crockett stood tall in the national imagination as a paradigm of the frontiersman, a popular type that appropriately had taken early form in travel books. Crockett's popularity and renown, however, far exceeded Boone's, driven by--and, in turn, driving--the production of an extraordinary body of mythmaking literature that elevated Crockett into one of the first and most enduring American mass-culture heroes.

Although more literate than he pretended, Crockett the writer (as opposed to Crockett the self-promoter) played a limited role in the production of this literature. Of the various works attributed to him, all were to some extent ghostwritten, even his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834). Still, A Narrative of the Life of...