All this is but imagination; and there is all reason to suppose that there never was any surrender of these six last survivors. The commoner story is that Crockett fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed against the wall, before him lying the bodies of some twenty Mexicans. The usual impression is that he killed these twenty Mexicans himself before he was cut down, but this is perhaps the result of emotional writing. No one knows how many foes had fallen to his arm. No one can tell how many Mexicans each of these raging, fighting men destroyed before he himself went down. Earlier in the siege Crockett recounts picking off five cannoneers one after the other. He tells how the Bee Hunter and Thimblerig did their sharpshooting, how the Pirate died of wounds received in a sortie, how the Bee Hunter--a most unlikely thing--burst into poesy and song at the hoisting of the Texas flag. Some of these things have too unreal a sound. There is something not quite Crockett, though à la Crockett, in the conclusion of Crockett's so-called, or rather alleged, diary:
"March 5.--Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! throughout the day. No time for memorandums now. Go ahead. Liberty and independence forever!"
These are the last recorded words of dear Davy Crockett. It is probable in the extreme that he never wrote them. It is unlikely to an equal degree that, in all the turmoil of the Alamo fight, he could deliberately have kept a diary, or that it could have been preserved after all the horrible details of that bloody and disastrous conflict. As to the end of Davy Crockett, there is and has been no living human being who could speak with absolute accuracy and authenticity. Bloody San Jacinto, the field where the cry "Remember the Alamo!" was the watchword of a dire and just revenge, left but few Mexican eye-witnesses of the Alamo.
Be that as it may, we know that Davy Crockett died fighting, that he died with his face to the enemy, like the brave man that he was, undaunted, unafraid. No politics now, no statesmanship, no little ambitions now for Davy Crockett. He was once more the child of the wilderness, stark, savage, exultant, dreadful, one more of those Titanic characters that swept away a weaker population, beat down all opposition, conquered the American wilderness and made way for an American civilization.