Stuff You Should Know - Why was Davy Crockett king of the wild frontier?

Episode Date: August 13, 2013

If there is an American legend who is both real-life and larger-than-life it is Davy Crockett. While he may not have ""kilt him a b'ar"" when he was three, he definitely did personify both the best and the worst of American individualism during the age of Manifest Destiny. Learn all about the man behind the coonskin cap in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is Operation Trade Bomb, an Apple original podcast hosted by Mark Smerling. Follow Operation Trade Bomb on Apple podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Spack. Yeah. Where's that little plastic clappie machine? We can just...

Jerry's back. Yeah. Jerry, can I mention, had surgery on her back. To add a third limb. She does not have a third limb, but she has spent a while on her back recuperating, then eventually was in a chair and now she's walking around and now she can do push ups with that third arm coming out of her back, it's pretty awesome. But soon enough Jerry will be like pain free for the first time this year, which is very

exciting. Yes. But for the time being she's on some pretty dynamite pills. Oh yeah? Did you get a hold of this? Have you tried to talk to her? Jerry, how are you doing over there? So welcome back Jerry, we didn't know how much we missed you until you were gone.

For real. All right. Again, the appositing. That's about as much sentimentally as we allow. I know. My throat dried up. Boohoo. I had some sort of adverse reaction to that.

All right. Let's do this. Oh really? Yeah man. Fine. Let's... It's Davey Crockett. I should point out first off that when I was a kid visiting my grandparents in Memphis,

Tennessee. Yeah. Davey Crockett land. Yeah. I have a great picture and people will always say like why don't you ever post pictures you talk about, but I had this great picture of me when I was like five years old. Coonskin cap, fringe vest, boots, little plastic bowie knife, long muzzle loading musket. I think I know this very musket you're talking about.

Yeah. So I was just like totally rigged out and obsessed with watching the old Davey Crockett show even though it was like 1975 and that show ran the 50s. It was one of those deals like we still grew up on Gilligan's Island on these older shows. Well, yeah. I think Walt Disney presents or something like that, they re-ran a lot of that stuff years later. Yeah.

I was way into it. That's awesome. Because I was into camping early on and it was just... It really fit the bill for me. I love the song, the whole deal. Yeah. I had a Coonskin cap too, but... So did Jerry.

Yes, she did. The only extra accoutrement I had was a deer skin water bag filled with wine. Oh yeah. Yeah. I didn't have one, but Emily does and she still puts wine in it and sneaks it into concerts. What else is there for? All right. So let's do it.

So Chuck, you made reference to Davey Crockett from the 50s, the Disney thing. Yeah. Not Daniel Boone. No, Daniel Boone was prior to Davey Crockett. Davey Crockett became Daniel Boone's successor as the personification of the American push westward. For a long time, Davey Crockett personified the conquering of the Indian, the wrestling of the bear, the taming of this land through America.

America. Yeah. Although he spent like his entire life in Tennessee pretty much. No, that's not true. He went to Texas some... He did, but he spent a lot of time in Alabama and actually homesteaded there for a little while around Talladega. Not for too long though.

For long enough. Like his family in Tennessee are all very adamant about him being a lifelong Tennessee guy. Right. And in his heart. He would agree with that entirely. Sure. He was born in Tennessee near Knoxville.

East Tennessee, Green County. Yeah. He spent most of his life there. Even when he R-U-N-N-O-F-T, he was in Tennessee, I believe for the most part. His autobiography was titled David Crockett of Tennessee. Parentheses, really? Yeah. Not Alabama.

Yeah. He went to West Tennessee for a while too. We'll get to all this, but... Yeah. Let's go back to the Disney. He's a volunteer. So, 20 years after... Yeah.

He is. Is that where he came from? Him? No. I don't think so. Okay. Because he did volunteer. Oh, maybe.

You never know. Maybe it didn't. Tennessee is a volunteer state, and David Crockett was a big time volunteer. Or maybe he felt pressured too, because he was in Tennessee. He's like, I really... The peer pressure state. I don't want to, but I guess I must. Yeah.

So, Disney... I'm talking about Disney, whether you like it or not. No, let's do it. I love that show. So, 20 years after Disney runs five episodes, that's the run of the David Crockett show. Yeah. There was only five episodes. I even looked that up, because I was like, that can't be right.

Yeah. I saw a hundred of them. Yeah. I did. I did. So, they ran from 1954 to 1955, and he was a kid in 1975, one full year before I was born, by the way. Yeah.

I was four. I was still watching it, loving this stuff. So, I had staying power, but what had even more staying power was David Crockett himself, because the Disney thing ran a full 115 years after David Crockett died. Yeah. He was already kind of a legend in his own time as well, but there was Disney David Crockett fever in the mid-50s. Yeah.

Supposedly, at its peak, 5,000 Coonskin caps a day were selling to kids. Yeah. Within a couple of months of the premiere of the first David Crockett episode, a hundred million dollars had been made off of the David Crockett franchise. 1954 dollars. Yeah. He just came on like a ton of bricks. Yeah.

And, of course, you know the Coonskin cap, if you've ever seen the Simpsons, Jebediah Springfield, is in Skonsten. What is it? Bronze? Is that a bronze statue? I don't know. He can't really tell. It's on TV in that cartoon form, so it's a statue.

And we don't know for sure if he actually wore a Coonskin cap. He did. Well, that's not what I saw. I saw that Daniel Boone did not, for sure, and David Crockett more likely wore Wildcat or Fox and possibly Coonskin on occasion. Okay. I was going to say that it was very apropos that that picture of you all dolled up like David Crockett was taken in Memphis because that is supposedly the first time he wore

the little fringy hunting shirt and the Coonskin cap when he headed out from Memphis to Texas, which we'll talk about later. That's what I saw. Man alive. This is interesting. I think this illustrates a really great point about David Crockett. There are few people who definitively lived who have more legends and possible half-truths swirling around them than David Crockett.

Yeah. I think some people out there might even think that he wasn't even a real dude. It was just like a tall tail guy. Yeah. You know? He very much lived. And we got to mention the song. Well, first of all, Fess Parker starred as David Crockett.

Fess Parker also starred as Daniel Boone. Is that right? I guess they were like … It's typecast. Yeah. Sure. And he also, the TV theme song was sung by the Wellingtons, the famous song King of the Wild Frontier.

But in 1955, four different people recorded it and all four of them in the same year recorded the same song landed in the top ten. That's how popular that song was. Or that's how just kind of undemanding audiences were in the fifties, radio audiences. Yeah, maybe so. But Fess Parker did one of the virgins. He also sang, yeah. Oh, did it?

Man, that guy made some dough off of David Crockett. Unbelievable. Ironically, he was afraid of snakes. Fess Parker. Was he really? Isn't that a wine, too, Fess Parker? Isn't that a winery? Not that I don't know of.

That's a dingy winery right there. It's wine past your Fess Parker's Coonskin cat. There's some winery that has a name similar to that. Fess Parker. Yeah. No, no, no. Tess Parker. I don't know.

I know I'm getting confused. So tell them about the Davy Crockett, the U.S. Army's Davy Crockett. That was a rocket. Did you see that thing? No. Was it cool? Yeah. Yeah.

It was in the 1960s, the Army. It was an artillery launcher, lightweight, that fired mortars that had nuclear warheads and they called it the Davy Crockett. Yeah. The 70-pound nuclear warheads, that's what it was designed to do. And they never deployed it, but it was basically a bunch of pipes that, like, you drive up on your Jeep about one to two miles away from the enemy in Europe, the Ruskies, I guess, and assembled this thing real quick and dropped the 70-pound warhead mortar in it and shot

it off onto the enemy. It was never used, though. Not as far as I know. It was tested. Wow. And there's pictures of, like, I mean, it might as well be like a G.I. Joe drawing, like the pictures of this thing being tested with, like, the Jeep and the guy standing next to it and there's, like, it's just cool.

You'll have to check that out. Yeah. Luckily, I don't think that anyone's ever set off a warhead on anybody in battle aside from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Aside from us. Right. All right. Davy Crockett.

Shameful. All right. So he was born in Tennessee in 1786. At 12 years old, his dad sent him off to this dude, Jacob Seiler, to help drive cattle to Virginia. Yeah. And, like, you know, as a 12-year-old, like, they were working hard back then. Oh, yeah.

And this dude, the job ended up, you know, ended and the Silas guy, like, forcibly detained him as, like, a slave of sorts. Yeah, basically. And he was like, screw this, I'm going to hike seven miles in the snow out of here in the middle of the night. What's crazy is in two hours. Yeah. He ran it.

I don't even think I could run on a flat plane seven miles in two hours. Well, they don't write songs and TV shows about you, though. No, they don't. Actually, we did have a TV show and a song about us. Yeah, but we commissioned it virtually. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. All right.

So, he drops out of school, well, he does a lot of hooky, and his dad gets pretty ticked off at him. So he's like, basically, I'm going to leave home at a young age because I'm not into the schooling thing. Yeah, he, um, he, for, across his lifetime, he became a very successful person. Yeah. Um, and he kind of wore the fact that he didn't have much schooling as a badge of honor. Like he was very proud of how far he'd gotten in life without formal education.

Um, but yeah, as a kid, he hated school is the impression I have. Yeah. He called it a strategic withdrawal and left for two and a half years, came home like a grown person. It was like 16 and his family was like, who is this larger version of my son that left? And they forgave him and it was all good. Yeah. He actually stuck around and, um, helped work off some of his father's $76 debt for a year

and went to school as a peace offering for another six months and said, okay, that's it. Forget it. I'm going to go make my own way. And this is when he begins to volunteer, volunteer with the Tennessee militia. Yeah. His military career started there. Lots of militia action going on.

Like he was in a bunch of different militias, it seemed like. Yeah. And what he was part of, um, is one of the more despicable parts of American history, the removal of Indians, specifically in this case, the Southern Indians from their lands. There was a lot of land, um, in what are now the Southern United States, the Southeastern United States that was ripe for cotton growing. And there were a lot of people who wanted that land. Yeah.

And there were a lot of treaties, basically the, the, the militias would go in battle the creeks or the chalk dolls or the Cherokees or whoever. And, um, then after their defeat would force a treaty on them. And Andrew Jackson, who later became president was personally responsible for nine of 11 treaties between 1814 and 1824, which means nine of 11 Indian massacres, basically, yeah, American massacres. Yeah. And there are massacres on both sides.

And Davey Crockett actually took place in one of the massacres, a, a retributive massacre. Right. Yeah. In his first military duty, he enlisted to, uh, avenge the attack on Fort Memms, Alabama, and with Andrew Jackson, uh, did so Indian massacre. Right. Very sad. Yeah, it was, um, the, the name of the town was, uh, Tulusa Hatchee and it was in Alabama.

Yeah. Um, and I believe they killed about 200, uh, Indian men and, uh, 84 women and children were captured and then whoever's left alive, I guess Andrew Jackson came in and negotiated a treaty. Yeah. They probably kept one man alive to sign the treaty. Right. Exactly.

And it basically said, all the rest of you have to get off this land, but you can go west. And then as this happened time and time again, um, more and more Americans moved south and established plantations around this time. Right. So that's the context of what was going on when Davey Crockett was volunteering with the militia, basically. Yeah, and it seemed like he really hopped all over the place between like, uh, some military militia work because these are, when you enlisted, it was like a 90 day enlistment.

It wasn't like years and years. Um, and then like some political work before he, you know, got real serious. He was a, uh, town commissioner for a little while. He was a justice at the peace for a couple of years. So he was just sort of floating around, little militia work, little political work. Indian fighting. And he was a man of many fringe jackets, I guess he really was. Well, uh, before we keep going, you want to do a message break?

Yeah. I think it's a good time. And then things get serious for Davey Crockett. You're ready to travel in 2023. And since 1981, gate one travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let gate one handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours in your European river cruises and right now through January 30th, use promo code heart 20 to receive 20% off your tour.

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The masterminds behind it all were just getting started and would soon change the world forever. Featuring never before heard audio. This is a story told by investigators from around the world using double agents and an undercover operative to bring the bomber to justice. This is Operation Trade Bomb, an Apple original podcast hosted by Mark Smirling. Follow Operation Trade Bomb on Apple podcasts. So we were talking Chuck about how Davey Crockett wore many, many hats. Many can skin caps.

And we want to say also that he, although he was an Indian fighter and actually became very much respected as one, that's part of his initial legend was that he was an Indian fighter, which is very much admired among Americans at the time. He eventually parted from that image very publicly. But first he kind of had to create a public platform to do that on, I guess, right? Yeah. He was a commissioner for a while in Tennessee and then he was elected to the Tennessee legislature. And then finally in 1825, he won a seat in Congress.

His first like, he was actual congressional representative for Tennessee. Was it 1825? I thought it was 1827. 1827. That's right. He served two terms and then lost basically the third term because he came out so vehemently opposed to what Jackson was doing with taking back the land. So the Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans had a right to occupancy, yes, they can live

in North America, but that is trumped by Americans right of discovery. Somehow they decided that we discovered this land that you already lived on, which trumps your right to live on it. Did that anyone ever say, no, no, no, we discovered it because we're here? Right. And they were cut down where they stood probably. So I guess the idea, the issue of Indian removal in this time was being played out in the courts. Andrew Jackson becomes president, gets the Indian Removal Act passed through, which basically

says, I'm the president, I deal with treaties with Indians, I'm taking this out of the hands of the courts and I'm, by the way, Andrew Jackson and you know how I feel about Indian removal. Yeah. Y'all can get out west. Right. Right. And apparently this is egregious enough to make David Crockett say, you know what, I'm

totally rethinking this land use policy, this land grab, the Indian Removal Act. And even though we're both from Tennessee or both in the same political party, I'm publicly separating myself from you and your policies, Mr. President. Yeah. That's a big deal. Well, he lost because of it. He did, but he lost very narrowly, I believe, 252 votes. Yeah, it was close.

And actually in our, we have a video series, people called Trapped in a Meeting. And this week's Trapped in a Meeting, we learned that while Andrew Jackson was in office, he had an assassination attempt on his life. And David Crockett, this guy like this, this mentally ill guy went to shoot Andrew Jackson on the steps of the Capitol, I think. Yeah. Remember we talked about in the Insanity Defense episode? Yeah.

And David Crockett was one of the guys who subdued, he like jumped into action because he's David Crockett. Yeah. Even though they already opposed one another politically at this point. He's still going to help save the president. Sure. Stand up, guy. Yeah.

It turned out to be a pretty cool dude. Yeah. So he loses that after, for his third bid, third consecutive term, he loses his bid. And he goes off and starts making money by making and selling barrel staves, like the slats he used to make whiskey and wine barrels. Yeah. Which apparently is pretty lucrative at the time. Yeah, he almost died doing it though.

Yeah. It was a boat wreck on the Mississippi River carrying those barrel staves. And he almost died then and he almost died earlier in his life when he had malaria. When he was homesteading in Alabama. Yeah. So he's, you know, he was a rough and tumble guy. Oh, for sure. You know.

Supposedly also during this time, he killed 105 bears in a year. Yeah. Killed him one when he was only three. Which, well, that's a Disney legend. And also we should say that the idea that he was a king of the wild frontier, that term, that label came directly from Disney as well. Yeah. He obviously didn't wrestle a bear when he was only three, but he was a very well-known

bear hunter. Whether he killed 105 or not, that's kind of up for debate. But if you want to read his first-hand account of it, there's an awesome article called Bear Hunting in Tennessee, Colin, Davy Crockett Tales, Tall Tales. It's on George Mason University's website. Nice. Check it out. He's a pretty awesome author.

He's talking about how he's hunting with his eight dogs and his dogs are the best dogs on the planet, flushing out bear. And he saw some other fellas come up and they wanted to hunt with them. And they had like 20 dogs, but all the dogs were terrible. He said they couldn't bark at a bear without having to lean up against a tree to rest for a little while. So he left the dogs behind and let them chew on some bear bones and he took his dogs out. It's just awesome.

Like this guy is totally uneducated, frontiersman, who also went to Congress and kind of a humorous too. The song actually originally went high seven miles in the snow in two hours when he was only 12. They're like, let's just make something up. Killed him a bear. It wasn't even killed. It's K-I-L-T.

Killed him a bar. Yeah. Yeah. Probably that song is still just like instantly comes to my head, the lyrics and everything. So he lost his third congressional bid and then he starts gaining more fame and notoriety. And this is at a time where it was pre-internet. Yeah. Was it pre-internet?

A little. It was pre-internet. And it was a time where it wasn't the easiest thing to gain this kind of notoriety. That just shows how popular he was. He was one of the most famous people in the country. Yeah. They had these Davey Crockett Almanacs published, lots of books written about him. One lied and said that it was an autobiography to sell books.

And the Almanacs actually came out of that. They used that book as the basis of it. Oh, really? Yeah. So that just kind of perpetuated all these lies and since it was attributed to him, that gave him a reputation for spinning tall tales about himself. She didn't necessarily, that wasn't necessarily untrue. He just didn't spin them quite as much as other people did about him.

There was a play by James Kirk Paul then called The Line of the West and the character Nimrod Wildfire. It was based on Davey Crockett. And he finally did get together with a, because as he said, he wasn't educated. So he had got a little help, but he eventually did write his own autobiography with the help of a co-author. Yeah, he did. And you can very much compare it to Barack Obama writing The Audacity of Hope because

it was released at a time when the Whigs were starting to tout Davey Crockett as a possible challenger, I guess, to Andrew Jackson for the presidency. Right. A native. A narrative of the life of Davey Crockett of the state of Tennessee by Thomas Chilton and Davey Crockett was the official one. So the problem is Chuck, he didn't win his reelection bid. So his idea of going into the presidency, the primary, I guess in 1836.

Was that his plan? Yeah, he was going along with that and some of the Whigs were like, let's do it. But since he was knocked out of Congress in 1835, he did make a third trip back to Congress from 1833 to 1835. Right. But then he was defeated by a peg-leg lawyer named Adam Huntsman very narrowly. But he lost. So I think at that point he was like, I'm kind of done with Congress for a while.

Yeah, and his losing to that peg-leg lawyer as he was dubbed gave rise to his famous quote. Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas. And he was basically like, I want to go check out Texas and see what's out there. This was like he didn't go westward to California or anything like that. Like Texas was super west at the time. Yeah, it was a Mexican state that was in a struggle for independence. There was a rebellion going on there.

Yeah, that's not why he went though. No. Apparently he got caught up in that, but he went there just to explore and was going to settle down with his family and just live on the land. Right. And he said, there's a lot of money to be made there. Well, yeah, he said, what I've seen of Texas, there is a world of country here to settle. I had rather be in my present situation than to be elected to a seat in Congress for life.

Yeah. So he really thumbed his nose at politics at that time. Or he was just really happy to with Texas. Yeah, that's true. He also didn't take very long for him to get there and I guess get caught up in the rebellion that was going on that really kind of spoke to him in his spirit. Yeah. They said he loved a good fight.

Yeah. I think he just couldn't resist. Yeah. Well, I mean, he was a bear hunter for goodness sake. So he gets there and basically aligns himself with the rebel movement who asked him and his traveling companion to sign an oath of allegiance to it. And it basically says like I, Davey Crockett, pledge allegiance to this rebellion and any future government that may come out of it.

Davey Crockett was like, I'm not signing that unless you put Republican before government. Yeah. Because he wasn't about to sign his allegiance over to some, you know, tyrannical government that came out of this rebellion. He didn't know. Yeah. So he was one to hedge his bets. That's right.

Very smartly. So he signed it and very famously died at the Siege of the Alamo, which I know you visited the Alamo. Mm-hmm. And there's no basement. There's no basement. And I always hear from everybody that visits. I have not.

How small it is. Everyone's always underwhelmed. It's basically like one room. Yeah. Yeah. You me took me there and it's in San Antonio. You go in and you're like, it's this lump of history in the middle of downtown San Antonio. Yeah.

And I was like, was this a bank or was it the Alamo? Yeah. I mean, like there's, it's just, there's a couple of side rooms, but it's really just one main room. Yeah. I always just pictured, you know, some huge fort. Yeah. You'd think so.

And I'll visit it one day for sure. The gardens, the grounds are amazing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's very cool. It's worth going to for sure. Yeah. Well, I love being at historical landmarks.

You know, you should do South by Southwest to fly into San Antonio and drive to Austin. Yeah. That's what you did, right? Yeah. 覃蕊23 and since 1981. Gay 1 Travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gait One had 2021 planning for you with affordable escort it or i거든. And then right now through right Now,

during September 30. Use a promo code, Empress, restored 20% off of your tour, that. dizzy That promo code fried more information, or book your tour. That's G arteries the number one travel com once again, here's promo code. Heart 20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 223 trip 30 years ago. A van exploded in a parking garage below the World Trade Center. The plan was to send the North Tower crashing into the South.

It failed, but six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. The masterminds behind it all were just getting started and would soon change the world forever. Featuring never-before-heard audio, this is a story told by investigators from around the world, using double agents and an undercover operative to bring the bomber to justice. This is Operation Trade Bomb. An Apple original podcast hosted by Mark Smerling. Follow Operation Trade Bomb on Apple podcasts. So the Alamo is great, I'm going to visit.

He famously died defending the Alamo, but there are many versions of how exactly that went down from died surrounded by 16 dead Mexicans that he killed with his hand on a knife in the back of one to captured and executed to kill at the very beginning of the thing and didn't even see much action. But we think we have a pretty definitive story. Yeah, there's some other stuff that he supposedly did do. He was documented as running all over the Alamo, like keeping everybody animated, keeping online.

Where's the basement? Where's the basement? Right, exactly. He supposedly played his fiddle a lot, like very rousing tunes, just tried to keep everyone's spirits and energy up while they were defending this small little building. He supposedly took out five gunners in secession who were trying to shoot a cannon at the Alamo. Yeah, with old Betsy, his musket. Yeah, and he also supposedly came very close to hitting Antonio Santa Ana, the general

who was leading the siege. He just missed him, even though Santa Ana thought he was well out of range of the guns of the people in the Alamo. Yeah, I see him, but there's no way he can do it. Yeah, exactly. So he did do some stuff. He's documented doing some, probably truthful, but the problem, there was always a problem with how he died in that he was captured and a great brave Indian fighting bear hunter

who represents all of America isn't supposed to be captured because if you capture that means you put your gun down or you didn't die fighting. Well it supposedly ran out of bullets and then started clubbing them with his gun, killing them with his bare hands and a butt of a gun. Right, so that's the fictitious version. The other versions from eyewitnesses contradict that, so America long struggled with how David Crockett died. And then in 1975, the diary of one of the Mexican army soldiers who was there at the

siege was published and it basically laid to rest like, yes, David Crockett was among those captured. Yeah, it was five or six people. Yep, like everybody else had been killed or were women basically and Crockett was among like five or six soldiers who were captured despite Santa Ana saying don't take any prisoners. They did anyway. Yeah, they did. But it was not, the account says that it was not, he wasn't shamed though, he still

died bravely, they were bayoneted and shot and the quote, Pena's quote was. The Mexican soldier whose diary it was, right? These unfortunate died without complaining, without humiliating themselves before their tortures. So I think it was like one of those red dawn scenes where they start seeing America the beautiful. Yeah, probably. You're about to shoot me, but my head is held high, yeah, or like who's it we did last

week? The lady. Oh, Mata Hari, yeah, Mata Hari, yeah, David Crockett, Mata Hari, they're virtually indistinguishable. That's right. So his reputation remained intact and died at the Alamo and then Walt Disney got a hold of it and a hundred years later became a sensation. Yeah, I mean, even even beyond it, remaining intact, dying at the Alamo, defending the Alamo, it's like, yeah, it mushroom clouded his personality and his reputation is legend.

Yeah, like it just sealed it forever. Like David Crockett, American hero, king of the wild frontier. Yeah. Timbertoe. No, not a timber toe. I actually had to look that up. I was like, what does that mean? I was like, Oh, wooden leg.

Yeah. Toe timber. Got it. He was pretty clever. Yeah. Oh, and that quote, by the way, was said while he was drinking with his buddies in Memphis at the Union Hotel and I did a little digging and that is the Union Hotel was what is now the grounds of Autozone Park where the Memphis Redbirds play ball.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I need to get back to Memphis. My family is all gone from there now. So aside from visiting the graves of my grandparents, there's really no other reason to go back. Grave of Elvis. Yeah. Well, I've been there.

Yeah. We'll go again. All right. It's not going to fund itself. Yeah, that's true. Okay. You got anything else? No, sir.

David Crockett. Oh, you know what? I have one other thing. Something occurred to me while we were researching this. If you think of David Crockett and you're an American, just all these images come to mind. It's a national hero and he's complex and everything. Think about how every single country has at least somebody like that. Sure.

Think about how totally unaware we are of those people that are like that in all those other countries. Yeah. Like who is Finland's David Crockett. Exactly. Yeah. You know? But it's neat to think that there's somebody like that out there for at least one for every

country on the map. Yeah. France has a David Crockett, I'm sure. Sure. Napoleon. David Crockett. Nice. Yeah.

And you know what? In the list of mail we should ask for your country's version of David Crockett. Let's do that. Okay. So until then, if you want to learn a little more about David Crockett, you can read this article that I wrote years and years ago by searching David Crockett in the search bar and that's DAVY, the early 19th century version of David. Yeah.

And where else? What was that website we also used to get this information? Was that? If you look in the source list on the Lots More Information page of my article, it's in there. Okay. There's some good stuff. I think it's like the Texas online handbook maybe.

Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And don't forget to go read that first person account of Bear Hunting with David Crockett on George Mason University website. Since I said George Mason, that means it's time for listening to mail. This is about ECT, electroconvulsive therapy that we've podcasted on, and about civil rights of people forced into stuff like this, and it's from Jamie. Hey, guys, in your ECT podcast, you mentioned anti-psychiatry with regards to the resistance

of ECT. I hope that one day you'll do a podcast about the consumer survivor ex-patient movement, CSX. It's one of the remaining civil rights movements in the country and around the world. Mindfreedom.org is a great resource to start with. It was one of the first CSX organizations in existence and is still going strong today. Robert Whitaker, a journalist, wrote Mad in America, where he describes inventors of torture devices peddling their machines to various mental institutions, which held the

belief that patients can be shocked or tortured into sanity. Lobotomies were finally discontinued because Thorazine was introduced as he knew lobotomy through a pill. Metrizol injections and insulin shock were torturous and highly feared by patients who received them, much of what went on in one floor of the Cuckoo's Nest is still true for today's modern institutions, including forced ECT. Nowadays, the torturers are more subtle. I was on a drug personally called Haldol that to this day, I believe, would make an excellent

torture drug. I was also literally blinded by another drug called Melaril, which was forced upon me while in a hospital. My eyesight was restored many years later, thanks to Emory Eye Center here in Atlanta, but I was never warned about the possible side effects of Melaril or given a choice to take it or not. Today's modern medications routinely cause diabetes and rapid weight gain, as well as dependence and early death when people try to discontinue their use.

Their face was symptoms far worse than the symptoms for which they were originally treated. In fact, many school shooters were either on one of these drugs or withdrawing from them when you do the research. I was a patient in the mental health system for 20 plus years, and now I operate an alternative to traditional mental health services in Decatur, Georgia, which is near where I live. Recovery is possible when you reclaim your power taken from you in psychiatry. And guys, I am not anti-psychiatry, but I am no longer blinded or threatened by the tactics that they can sometimes use.

I believe in civil rights for people who have been diagnosed and labeled as mentally ill. And please understand that anyone walking into a psychiatrist's office can effortlessly walk out with a label that will follow them for the rest of their lives. Yeah, there is a stigma attached. Totally. So I hope you will consider podcasting on this powerful but often oppressed civil rights movement. I love the podcast.

I love it a lot. Thanks a lot, Jamie. God, that is very interesting. I have not heard of that before. Yeah, CSX movement. I will definitely be checking it out. That is a great listener mail, where we're told about something we've never heard of before in our entire lives, but by an intensely interesting.

That's a good one. Thanks, Jamie. Yes. If you, oh yeah, I forgot, if you have a national hero in your country and you're not in the U.S. Like myth and legend and truth all wrapped up sort of like baby traffic. Right. We want to know who that is and know a little bit about them.

If you're in the U.S. or her, oh yeah, good one, Chuck. If you're in the U.S., you can still have an opportunity to write in. Tell us something that we don't know about that's intensely interesting. There's your homework, everybody. Good to work. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast on Twitter. I should say. I don't want to presume everybody knows what tweeting is.

True. On facebook.com, you can join us at Stuff You Should Know, that's our page name. You can send us an e-mail to stuffpodcast at discovery.com and you can join us on our website, the very awesome, the inimitable, the amazing StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by State Farm. You're ready to travel in 2023 and since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less.

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