Thanks for digging that up. Your conclusion matches what I wrote in my notes about it at the time. The details were changed, perhaps synthesized into one for the purpose of storytelling, and certainly embellished with details we couldn’t possibly know, but the basic concepts are based on events that did occur. Nice work pulling that stuff up so fast.
Nah, thank Wikipedia. They had a link to the specific pages in their article on the story. I simply posted the pages on my Photobucket page.
Crockett was known for embellishing things, and Ellis himself may well have done so (as was common with so many 19th Century authors). And certainly Ellis never got the story directly from Crockett, having been born 4 years after Crockett's death. So, whether there were other, extant, Crockett materials Ellis was privy to, or whether Ellis embellished the story to make it more readable will likely never be known. But if it came from Crockett, then there must have been something we're unaware of...