The King of the Wild Frontier was no great writer, but he certainly lived through some interesting times. The prose style is conversational, with often fascinating outbreaks of nineteenth-century backwoods slang (Davy gets "plaguy thirty" and knocks back "a leetle of the creater"), although the constant military campaigning of the first half can get a little repetetive.

The matter-of-fact way in which he writes about slaughtering Indians can be quite shocking, the more so for being described in this down-home laid-back style. At one point during the Creek War, his unit burns 46 Indians alive in a house; the next day, running short of food, they discover a stash of potatoes in the cellar of the house. Crockett remarks that

hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had a little rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.

Jesus, what a detail. There are a few times in the text where such things reach across the years and give you quite a shock. (Later he goes some way to redeeming himself by speaking out against the Indian Removal Act.)

When he wrote this, he was a Congressman with a not-unrealistic chance at the presidency. There are several passages of political grandstanding which haven't dated all that well, unless political history is your forte. But really the overriding feeling when you read these expressions of political ambition is one of pathos, knowing that soon after the autobiography was published, this man with all his big dreams lost his seat in Congress, and headed ultimately towards Texas – and the Alamo... ( )