This a very sad day for all coonskin cap lovers. Fess Parker who played Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett and also TV’s Daniel Boone passed away of natural causes at his Santa Ynez Valley home. He was 85.
The king of the coonskin cap was a giant of a man who was loved by all youngsters of the 1950’s and 60’s. Parker’s characters stood for honesty and righteousness. At 6 foot 5 inches Parker had a charm that made him instantly liked by all who met him or watched him. He embodied the spirit of the American frontier and Frontierland is still a major attraction at Disney’s theme parks 55 years later.

Back when TVs were the latest electronic gadget, Fess burst into living rooms across the nation in December of 1954 as Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier and was responsible for thousands of TV set sales. Every child bugged their parents into buying the new medium. Coonskin caps became the instant craze. So many were sold that there became a shortage of real raccoon tails for the caps. In 2004 Parker donated his original coonskin cap that was worn on the set of Davy Crockett to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

I never met Fess Parker. I had contacted him to do an interview for this site last year but sadly it could not be arranged. I had wanted to discuss the coonskin cap and it’s effect on the boomer generation. I should have done it years ago.
The Texans in 1836 remembered the real Davy Crockett’s death with the cry “Remember the Alamo”. For all of us, we just have to insert one of Fess Parker’s many DVD’s. He had a giant impact on all of us who watched him dressed in those buckskins and coonskin cap cradling “old betsy” so many years ago.
I have included a copy of the “The Ballad of Fess Parker” . It is a parody theme song medley from both famous shows associated with Fess Parker. The song quality is not great but the ballad is.
Enjoy.

Here is the last video on how to make a coonskin cap. Learn how to make a real, authentic Davy Crockett coonskin cap or hat. Also learn to make a coonskin hat or cap pattern and to sew fur.

Here is part two of how to make a coonskin cap. We continue to learn how to to make this real, authentic raccoon skin cap from scratch.

Learn how to make a coonskin cap pattern and to sew fur.

Included is the conclusion of the article published on Feb. 13/09.

Mrs. Dickinson, who knew the men well, stated the following:

“I knew Colonels Crockett, Bowie and Travis well. Col. Crockett was a performer on the violin, and often during the siege took it up and played his favorite tunes.

“The struggle lasted more than two hours when my husband rushed into the church where I was with my child, and exclaimed: ‘Great God, Sue, the Mexicans are inside our walls! All is lost! If they spare you, save my child.’

“Then, with a parting kiss, he drew his sword and plunged into the strife, then raging in different portions of the fortifications.

Soon after he left me, three unarmed gunners who abandoned their then useless guns came into the church where I was, and were shot down by my side. One of them was from Nacogdoches and named Walker. He spoke to me several times during the siege about his wife and four children with anxious tenderness. I saw four Mexicans toss him up in the air (as you would a bundle of fodder) with their bayonets, and then shoot him. At this moment a Mexican officer came into the room, and addressing me in English, asked: “Are you Mrs. Dickinson?’ I answered “Yes.’ Then said he, ‘If you wish to save your life, follow me.’ I followed him, and although shot at and wounded, was spared.

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How Davy Crockett died? Will the battle ever end?

With the anniversary of Davy Crockett’s death approaching, there is yet another renewed move to say that Davy Crockett surrendered during the siege of the Alamo. And that he was later put to death by order of Santa Anna.

Ugh! Why is it people always jump to believe the negative side of everything? Gossip? Excitement? Nothing better to do! Maybe they just want to be a S..t Disturber!

There is written evidence from survivors both Alamo non-combatants, Mexican soldiers and the only English survivor that Crockett died fighting. That is a fact. But now instead of acknowledging accounts from right after the battle, some people want us to believe (on the word of a diary allegedly recorded by a Mexican soldier) that Crockett surrendered to Santa Anna and was put to death.

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Around forty years ago while deer hunting I shot a big old raccoon. I had the hide professionally tanned with the intention of making it into a coonskin cap. Over the last 40 years the pelt was at times stapled to the wall, rolled up in a box and lain out over a dresser top, but it never did find its’ way into a cap.

I had always wanted my own Davy Crockett cap. Never owned one during the craze years but always wanted one. So just before Xmas I decided to make it become a reality. I thought it was about time and I spent the next 3 weeks making that old raccoon into something worth while.

I got the idea to film it as when I googled how to make a coonskin cap there was virtually no information. At least not any videos. It is divided into three parts. I would like to hear any comments you might have.

Coonskin cap wearing Davy Crockett who seems have had ten lifetimes worth of fabulous experiences is also unbelievably credited with helping subdue President Jackson’s would be assassin on this day in history some 174 years ago. Crockett who became immortal with his death at the Alamo has many claims to fame experiences.

Here is an article written by Andrew Glass

On this day in 1835, Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) became the first U.S. president to be targeted by an assassin.

Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, approached Jackson as he left a congressional funeral held in the House chamber of the Capitol and shot at him. His gun misfired.

A delusional Lawrence believed that the U.S. government owed him a large sum that Jackson was keeping from him.

Release of the funds, he thought, would allow him to take his rightful place as King Richard III of England.

Jackson, who was 67 at the time, repeatedly clubbed Lawrence with his walking cane.

During the ensuing scuffle, Lawrence took another pistol out of his pocket and pulled the trigger. But that gun also misfired.

Bystanders joined in, wrestling Lawrence to the ground and disarming him. One of them was Rep. Davy Crockett of Tennessee.

The U.S. Secret Service — which is now charged with protecting presidents, members of their families and other high-ranking officials — did not undertake such duties until 1901.

Historians have come to view Lawrence as a mentally unstable person, but the Democratic president became convinced that his political enemies in the rival Whig Party had hired Lawrence to assassinate him.

At the time, Jackson was locked in a bitter struggle with the Whigs over his ultimately successful effort to scuttle the Bank of the United States.

Given the toxic political climate, Vice President Martin Van Buren took to carrying two pistols when visiting the Senate.

After deliberating for five minutes, a jury found Lawrence not guilty by reason of insanity.

He died in 1861, after spending the remainder of his life in mental institutions.

In the 1930s, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution test fired Lawrence’s derringer pistols. Both of them discharged normally on the first try.

Live auction is auctioning off a signed reciept note in a frammed picture. Very interesting.

Rare Daniel Boone Signed Receipt, Framed

Included is a rare 1777 portrait print of Benjamin Franklin wearing his coonskin cap that is up for auction by Live Auction. The same one he is suppose to have worn in his visits to Europe.

Benjamin Franklin wearing his coonskin cap

1777 Portrait Print of Benjamin Franklin, Choice Very Fine.
7.5″ x 5.5″ uncolored engraving on paper, 9″ x 6.25″ with margins. This French engraving of a young Benjamin Franklin sporting his beaver hat is on evenly toned paper with a light horizontal fold, most apparent in the margins. Another small hole in bottom margin, well away from the engraving. Statesman, inventor, member of the Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, regardless of his social status, Franklin endeared colonists and noblemen alike with his humble plain dress.

It seems according to www.badidea.co.uk that US president Obama ripped off a speech that former coonskin cap wearing US congressman Davy Crockett wrote. It seems that Crockett who was known for his backwoods humor and his martyred death at the Alamo in Texas had used the speech in addressing the Texas situation in 1836.

Here is the article in it’s entirety.

Obama Speech Scandal: Text Believed to Be Lifted From Obscure Davy Crockett Frontier Translation of Plato

News just through on a suspected plagiarism scandal involving President Obama’s speech writer Jon Favreau. It appears that the inauguration speech for the 44th US president may have been partially lifted from a Davy Crockett translation of Plato’s The Republic, which the frontiersman wrote during the Texan revolution. The Crockett text, entitled ‘Open Season’, is a mixture of parochial translations and anecdotes, and includes the following passage which has been raised to our attention:

“This is the price and the promise of citizenship. The republic is our duty and our destiny, and for all the highest calling. No diversions from service and leadership will be tolerated.

Our songs and airs, then, will not need instruments of large compass capable of modulation into all the modes, and we shall not maintain craftsmen to make them, in particular the flute, which has the largest compass of all. That leaves the lyre and the cithara for use in the town; and in the country the herdsmen may have some sort of pipe.

For it was not for no reason that our fore fathers gathered in the blood covered snow, dressed in their beaver-skin underpants, roasting buffalo balls over a pit fire. It was to found this republic, which we are all now duty bound to uphold and make immensely powerful and rich at others expense. And do we not all remember their valor? With the darkening clouds of hell approaching, they gathered their servants and delivered this apocryphal line:

‘We’d better win this bloody war, otherwise we’re screwed’.

And so they did. And you too can win your own battles with such hope and virtue. Just as our soldiers, running hands through the barley of foreign fields, their spears and arrows aimed at the throats of young maidens, negotiate their fulfillment and uphold our republic in all corners of this earth.

To the frontier my friends! Ride with hope in your saddle, harness the wind, the sun, the moon, and other celestial bodies, and make your destiny that of the gods.

Yes we can.”