This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 4/18/2024
[CROCKETT, Davy (1786-1836)]. “Go Ahead!” Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Wild Sports in the West, and Life in the Backwoods. Calculated for All the States in the Union. 1835. Nashville: Snag & Sawyer, [1834]. Extracted pamphlet, small 8vo (184 x 121 mm). Original pictorial self-wrappers, sewn (margins trimmed close, partially affecting imprint, some spotting to title, lacking 2 leaves at pages 41-44). Numerous vignettes throughout, 5 full-page wood-engravings including one on the rear cover showing Crocket fighting with “the great bear”. Provenance: Sally Cole (early ownership signature on rear cover). THE RARE FIRST OF THE CROCKETT ALMANACK, this issue published during Crockett’s lifetime, and then annually until 1855. Streeter states in his Bibliography of Texas, that although the first two Crockett almanacks have no Texas interest, they are “choice pieces for any collection on American sport and folk lore” (Streeter 1194). It was these almanacks which made Crockett a legendary figure with these now celebrated American stories of the frontiersman contained within its pages, which according to Constance Rourke, Crockett’s biographer, “constitute one of the earliest and perhaps the largest of our cycles of myth, and they are part of a lineage that endures to the day, in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ozark Mountains”. Drake 13405; Grolier, American One Hundred 39; Howes C897; Reese, Celebration of My Country 177 (third almanac).