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roseleaf24's review
3.0
The Pros: Thus book does an excellent job of distinguishing between narrative, tall tale, and documented fact. This is shockingly unusual in these early nonfiction books for children, so I was glad to see it here.
I'm sure all of the hunting and adventure stories were wonderful for boy readers in 1935.
The Cons: This 42-year-old woman in 2022 started skimming the hunting scenes and the tall tales. I found them boring.
Racism. The racism you would expect from a 1934 book about the settling of the frontier. That schizophrenic admission on one page that the United States was totally reneging on a treaty, then taking about how Crockett was heading forth into wild, untamed land that had no government at all until they started selling there on the next. The noble savage idea was constant, with Native Americans talked about in a childlike way while pretending to show them respect.
I'm sure all of the hunting and adventure stories were wonderful for boy readers in 1935.
The Cons: This 42-year-old woman in 2022 started skimming the hunting scenes and the tall tales. I found them boring.
Racism. The racism you would expect from a 1934 book about the settling of the frontier. That schizophrenic admission on one page that the United States was totally reneging on a treaty, then taking about how Crockett was heading forth into wild, untamed land that had no government at all until they started selling there on the next. The noble savage idea was constant, with Native Americans talked about in a childlike way while pretending to show them respect.
triscuit807's review
3.0
3 stars. While this a biography, it's one of a man who has been mythologized. Crockett figures in many tall tales of the frontier; it's hard to tell which stories are fact, which are fiction, and which are both. He's a hero of the US's westward expansion, the ideal of manifest destiny, and an Indian fighter. Yet, in this book he is portrayed as a friend to the Indians - disagreeing with Jackson's proposal to move them off their ancestral lands (the Trail of Tears). He was also the epitome of the mountain man, who then and now was a caricature of an uncouth hillbilly. Rourke does a good job of relaying his story, but after awhile the tales and the truth became a blur. I read this for my 2018 Reading Challenge and my Newbery Challenge (Honor Book 1935).
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