What Really Happened To Davy Crockett's Children?

The name Davy Crockett conjures up visions of a coonskin-cap wearing mountain man, a congressman from Tennessee, and a hero who fought the Mexican Army and died at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas in 1836 against overwhelming odds. Yet that's only a small part of his story. And while the legends and lies surrounding Crockett are many, from his name (he preferred David to Davy) to his headwear (he rarely wore a coonskin cap), what often gets left out is his family life. His first marriage to Mary Elizabeth Finley, known as Polly, produced three children — John Wesley, William, and Margaret. Polly's sudden death from disease at 27 left Crockett struggling to care for them.

He soon remarried. His second wife, Elizabeth Patton, whom Crockett called "a good industrious woman" in his autobiography, brought two children of her own to the marriage. Davy and Elizabeth had three more children — Robert, Rebecca, and Matilda — in the ensuing years before his death at 49. All of his children lived into adulthood, and two of his boys carved out careers that followed their heroic father's path. John went into politics, and Robert Patton continued the fight for an independent Texas.

Davy Crockett married Mary Elizabeth Finley in 1806, and they gave birth to their first child, John Wesley, the next year in Trenton, Tennessee. Unlike his father, who ran away from home as a teenager instead of focusing on his education, John Wesley was a studious pupil in public school. After marrying Martha Hamilton, he studied law under his father-in-law, Judge John Hamilton, and became a practicing lawyer in Paris, Tennessee. He soon got into politics, and after local and state positions, he became a congressman.

He was a member of the Whig party, as was his father, and represented the same district his father had. After two terms in Congress, John became an attorney general for a Tennessee district for three years. But like his father, he was prone to wanderlust. He moved his large family that included 14 children to New Orleans, where he worked for the city before going into the newspaper business. He died in Memphis, Tennessee in November 1854 at age 44. This is just a small part of the truth about Davy Crockett's sons.

Davy and Mary Crockett's second child, William, was born in 1809, and their only daughter, Margaret, in 1812. They were young — Margaret was almost 3 years old — when their mother died, probably of either typhoid or cholera. They were soon living in a blended family with two stepsiblings and (eventually) three half-siblings after their father quickly remarried. 

In March 1830, when William was 20, he married Clorinda Boyett in Gibson County, Tennessee. Four days later, his sister Margaret, only 17, followed suit, marrying Wiley Flowers after her father gave Flowers his blessing to wed his teenage daughter. Crockett was then in Washington, D.C., serving in Congress and was unable to attend the weddings. William and Clorinda had at least five children before his death. He died in January 1846 in Arkansas at age 36.

Margaret and Wiley had three children. Davy Crockett, in a letter dated January 9, 1836, less than two months before his death, wrote to Margaret and Wiley on his way to Texas. In the missive (published in The Commercial Appeal), he tells them he is still "in hopes of making a fortune yet for myself and family." He asks them to show the message to William and hopes they would "all do the best you can and I will do the same." It was Crockett's final letter. Margaret died in 1860 in her late 40s.

When Davy Crockett married Elizabeth Patton (pictured above) in 1815, she already had two young children: George and Margaret Ann (called Peggy Ann), who were about the same age as Davy's two oldest children by his first wife. When he began courting Elizabeth, he won over the children first. "I found that my company wasn't at all disagreeable to [Elizabeth]; and I thought I could treat her children with so much friendship as to make her a good stepmother to mine, and in this I wasn't mistaken, as we soon bargained, and got married," Crockett wrote in his autobiography.

By all accounts, Crockett treated his step children as his own. George married Rhoda Ann McWhorter in 1831, and Davy sold him a home and property so he and his wife could have a place to live. In 1854, George and Rhoda — who would eventually have 20 children — moved to Texas with his mother and several other Crockett family members. He died in Texas in 1880. While there isn't much information about Margaret Ann, it appears she married and remained in Tennessee rather than following other members of the family to Texas. She died in 1884.

A year after Davy Crockett married Elizabeth Patton, she gave birth to their son Robert Patton Crockett. After the death of his father at the Alamo, Robert headed to Texas and joined up with the army of the Republic of Texas and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto (seen above) that won Texas independence from Mexico. Afterward, he returned to Tennessee and married Matilda Porter, with whom he had nine children.

He returned to Texas in 1854 with his family, his mother, his sister Rebecca and half brother, George and his wife to claim land the Republic of Texas had given Elizabeth in honor of Davy Crockett's service. They lived in a log cabin and farmed in what is now Acton, Texas. Robert lived in Texas for the rest of his life, married twice more, and had nine children. A newspaper sketch of his life in the Courier-Register in 1879, described him as "modest and unassuming" and "blessed with a large and interesting family." In 1889, he died at age 73 after being thrown from a wagon and breaking his hip.

Following the birth of their son Robert, Davy and Elizabeth Crockett had two daughters: Rebecca "Sissy" Elvira, born in 1818, and Matilda, born in 1821. Rebecca married George Kimbrough in 1839 and had three children. After George died in 1846, she married James Halford, with whom she had three children. In 1854, they moved to Texas with her mother, and she died in Acton in 1879 at age 60.

It was Matilda Crockett who gave credence to her father's choice in headwear. When he rode off to fight for an independent Texas in 1835, she was a teenager. She recalled that on that day, the last time she ever saw him, he wore a coonskin cap. Unlike many of her siblings, Matilda didn't go to Texas in 1854 — instead she remained in Tennessee. She married three times and had seven children before dying in 1890 at age 68. Today, the descendants of Davy Crockett come together every other year at the Alamo to honor the hero.