Book excerpt: The legendary feats of Davy Crockett, who could tree a ghost, ride his thirty-seven-foot-long alligator up Niagara Falls, and drink up the Mississippi River, are common knowledge to devotees of this nineteenth-century comic superhero. But what may come as a surprise to many is that the legendary frontiersman also served as the fictional narrator of a collection of outrageous tall tales about women in the same Crocket Almanacs in which he “recorded” his own adventures. Conceived as a marketing device by nineteenth-century publishers hoping to gain a share of the lucrative almanac market, such stories made these slim volumes the best-selling and longest-running series of comic almanacs published in the United States before the Civil War. Booking back at them now, the Crocket Almanacs offer a true “fun house mirror” view of the culture of antebellum America.