Davy Crockettthe BonfireESFP

On 26 May 1830, the most entertaining man in the House of Representatives voted against his own president.

David Crockett of Tennessee had been born poor on the frontier in 1786. He made himself famous the way Bonfires often do, by being the best story in any room. He claimed to have killed 105 bears in a single season. He campaigned, the stories go, by talking a crowd round and then marching it off to the drinks stand. His 1834 memoir sold the country a frontier legend: the joker, the hunter, the man who could out-talk anybody.

People loved him for it. They didn't expect him to be serious.

Then came the Indian Removal bill, President Andrew Jackson's plan to clear Native nations off their lands. Many of the people who had sent Crockett to Washington wanted it. A week before the vote, his printed remarks told the House he would oppose it even “if he should be the only member of that House.”

Hear the phrase. Even if I am the only one. That is the sound of a man who has counted the room, found himself alone in it, and decided it doesn't matter.

The bill passed, 102 votes to 97. Crockett was the only member of Tennessee's delegation to vote no.

It cost him. His district voted him out in 1831. He won the seat back two years later, lost it again in 1835, and nothing he wrote suggests he ever regretted the vote. He did what Bonfires do with a loss: he made a joke of it. He liked to say he had told his voters they might go to hell, and he would go to Texas.

Look at what the joke did. It didn't explain the vote away or promise to do better next time. It kept the vote standing. Most people use humor to dodge a hard conversation. Crockett used it to stand by one.

By January 1836 he was in Texas. On the 9th, eight weeks before he died, he wrote home from San Augustine to his daughter Margaret and her husband.

Near the end of the letter he added: “I hope you will do the best you can and I will do the same. Do not be uneasy about me for I am with friends.”

On 6 March 1836 he died at the Alamo, aged 49. His legend grew enormous after that, much of it invented. A famous screen version later gave him a rousing speech against the removal bill that he never made. What survives is plainer, and braver: a few printed lines saying he would stand alone if he had to, and a vote that proved he meant it.