Daniel Boone, the father of Kentucky.

        Davy Crockett, the favorite son of Tennessee.

        There they stand, joined at the heart, if not the hip. Brave, strapping young men in coonskin caps, on the wall of the Alamo. Ammunition exhausted, they swing their rifles like clubs at Santa Anna's soldiers. Then they fall side by side.

        With Fess Parker playing both roles.

DANIEL BOONE

Born: Oct. 22, 1734, Berks County, Pa.     Died: Sept. 26, 1820, in St. Charles County, Mo.     Wife: Rebecca Bryan, 1756-1813.     Children: 9.     Schooling: Little to none.     Height: 5-feet-10 inches.     Headgear: Beaver hat.     Resume: Explorer, hunter, Indian fighter, surveyor, land speculator, Virginia assemblyman, store and tavern keeper, coroner, magistrate.     Little-known fact: He was court-martialed (and acquitted).     Chronic state: Worried about money.     Saying: “I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.”     Famous feature: Very wide mouth.     Three interesting things about him: Although unschooled, he was literate and liked to read. He had a coffin made long before he needed it and tried it out every once in a while. One theory holds that his death was hastened by eating too many sweet potatoes in one sitting.

DAVY CROCKETT

Born: Aug. 17, 1786, in Greene County, Tenn.     Died: March 6, 1836, in San Antonio, Texas.     Wives: Mary “Polly” Finley, 1806-15; Elizabeth Patton, 1816-1836.     Children: 7 (and two stepchildren).     Schooling: 6 months.     Height: 5-feet-8 inches to 5-feet-10 inches.     Headgear: Coonskin cap.     Resume: Teamster, farmer, hunter, Indian fighter, author (of a sort), state representative, U.S. senator, Texas martyr.     Little-known fact: The Tennessean named his homestead “Kentuck.”     Chronic state: Worried about money.     Saying: “First always be sure you're right — then go ahead.”     Famous feature: Very rosy cheeks.     Three interesting things about him: His station in life improved greatly with his second marriage, to a well-off widow. Indians didn't bother to kill him because they were convinced he would die of malaria anyway. His late political career was animated by a hatred of his fellow Tennessean, Andrew Jackson.

        Thus the images blur in a confusing collision of history, hype and imagination.

        The trouble: When the Alamo fell, in 1836, Boone would have been 101 years old. By then, he was already in his semifinal resting place in Missouri.

        Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1734. He died in Missouri in 1820. In between, he helped open up Kentucky to settlement, and lived a life too large even for fantasy. He was surely one of the most extraordinary creatures — human or otherwise — to leave his tracks on Kentucky. And he did leave his tracks. Deep in debt, cursing Kentucky, he left for Missouri and prospered. (He was buried there, but his bones were brought back to Kentucky for reburial in 1845.)

        Crockett was born 52 years after Boone. He spent nearly all his life in his native Tennessee. Crockett might have been an irreverent nephew, or another brash kinsman of Boone. He was a soldier, hunter, politician and teller of tall tales — a wily cultivator of his own rip-roarious image.

        Crockett was hardly the only frontier figure to benefit from the pioneer version of pop culture. Boone's fame spread via a biography written by John Filson The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucky (Ye Galleon Press; $14.95).

        Carol Crowe-Carraco, a history professor at Western Kentucky University, says, “As far as opening up Kentucky, Richard Henderson probably did a great deal more than Daniel Boone. Although few people really know Richard Henderson's name, probably, and they do know Daniel Boone, thanks to John Filson's book.”

        Henderson, a North Carolina lawyer and land speculator, empowered Boone to act as his agent in negotiating with the Cherokee nation for western lands. Henderson's Transylvania Co. had vast holdings in Kentucky, and Henderson tried to establish it as a colony separate from its parent, Virginia. One could argue the upcoming Celebrate Boone County USA (which includes Taste of Boone County June 14-16) ought to be honoring Henderson.

        But for frontier flackery — committed by himself, and others in his name — none surpassed Crockett.

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        In the essay “The Real Davy Crocketts,” Richard Boyd Hauck tried to get a handle on the Crockett of truth and myth: “The stereotype of the frontiersman was already established by the time Crockett took it up, but he tailored it to his own purposes. He was the bear hunter, the common man who spoke directly to the point, a yarn spinner of uncommon talent, an irreverent humorist whose satirical barbs deflated sacred cows like burst balloons, a modest good old boy, the unschooled self-reliant backwoodsman.”

        Perhaps Crockett's presidential aspirations kept him from paying enough attention to his constituents back home in West Tennessee. He lost the 1835 congressional election to a peg-legged lawyer. Whereupon he bade farewell to Tennessee with this famous declaration: “Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may go to hell and I will go to Texas.”

        He did, seeking the fortune he never found at home.

        Crockett died at the Alamo on March 6, 1836, fighting for Texas' independence from Mexico. He was 49.

        Some harsh observers might suggest that dying was a good career move (just as it was for his fellow Tennessean, Elvis Presley). There is no question that Crockett — already an outsized figure — became bigger in death than in life.

        For more than a century, the memories of Boone and Crockett coexisted without leaving Americans particularly dazed and confused. Then, in 1954, Walt Disney and a 6-foot-6 actor named Fess Parker came along, with Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. A decade later, Parker started a six-year run as television's Daniel Boone.

        Mr. Parker, 77, notes that he played Boone and Crockett about the same way. Though, with Crockett, he allows, “I just felt a little more, personally, a sense of fun in the character.”

        James C. Klotter, a Georgetown College professor who is also the Kentucky state historian, says, “The two images have become so intermingled in the public mind that for many people, if you mention one name or the other, they have almost the same image — of somebody in a coonskin cap with a rifle, killing a b'ar when he was only 3.”

        Mr. Klotter leaves little doubt about his estimation of the two legends: “Both became larger than life, but Boone had a larger life to work from.”

        Boone biographer John Mack Faragher says the Kentuckian was “the prototype of the strong but silent frontier hero — think Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine or Gary Cooper in High Noon.”

        The archetypes of strong, silent types resonate through America's popular culture, and its self-image. So it should be no surprise that Parker reached into that vault of memory while playing Crockett.

        Davy Crockett had a catchier theme song. And the merchandising tie-ins, well, they were the stuff of dreams.

        When the Crockett craze hit American television and movie screens in the mid-1950s, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” sold 7 million copies. A craving for Crockett caps caused the price of coonskins to skyrocket. The Davy Crockett industry quickly generated around $300 million in sales.

        So, Crockett — as imagined by the Walt Disney mythmakers and embodied by Fess Parker — won the cultural war before Daniel Boone could put on his beaver hat and look out the cabin door to see what all the ruckus was about.

        But, when it comes to reality — to declaring a king of the wild frontier — Boone was the man. Yes, a big man. To quote the theme song from the TV series of the '60s. At least, that's what we gather after talking to some folks who should know.
       

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