TV Casting News and the Latest Davy Crockett Conspiracy

I’ve been asked to audition for an on-camera role for an upcoming documentary series about ancient history and artifacts. Normally, I wouldn’t share this kind of information publicly, but since the casting call is posted on the web as well as on Facebook, I don’t think there’s any harm in in saying that a casting agent forwarded this to me and suggested that I contact the producers about the hosting role. I haven’t decided if I’ll try out. Here’s the casting call:

Do you have a vast historical knowledge of the ancient artifactual world?

When you talk about ancient history, does everyone listen?

Are you passionate about knowing how ancient structures – like the pyramids – were made?

Are you fascinated with ancient ingenuity and unexpected historical gadgets?

Are you a relatable guy with a huge personality and a desire to uncover ancient historic secrets?

If so, we want to hear from YOU!

The producers of History’s smash hits “American Restoration” and “Pawn Stars” are working on an exciting new project. We’re on a mission to find a modern day Indiana Jones to host a new show!

If this sounds like you, please email us with your name, location, contact information, photos of yourself, and a brief blurb about why you’re the perfect man for the job.

I would not be the only person to comment that the casting call presupposes that the host must be male (as Facebook users noted), but I suppose it’s hardly a surprise that they’re looking for another Indiana Jones types. After Scott Wolter, David Hatcher Childress, Giorgio Tsoukalos, and Scott A. Roberts—and I’m sure I’m forgetting somebody—I’d have thought we were about full up with “real life Indiana Jones” figures.

I don’t know anything more about the program or for whom it’s being produced. I’m fairly certain, though, that “relatable” and “huge personality” are not words likely to be used to describe me, and I doubt that my journalism-inflected urbane broadcasting style would mesh particularly well with the apparently brash and emotional presentation they’re looking for.

Remember the Alamo!
Speaking of brash and emotional: Scott Wolter, posted a blog entry adding more context to his recent attempt to argue that Davy Crockett lived on after the Alamo, where history records that he died in March of 1836, on the basis of a land deed made out to a David Crockett in 1859 and a newspaper article from April of 1836 incorrectly reporting that Crockett had survived the Alamo.

Wolter suggests that the Masons prepared Crockett’s retirement:

One thing that impacted me was the land deed was signed by the President, James Buchanan, another Mason, who likely knew Crockett was alive and made sure the land transaction was approved for a “Brother” who had served his country with honor and distinction even then, and deserved a peaceful and quiet retirement.

Yeah, but that’s not the worst part. Wolter believes that even though the Masons rescued Crockett, the U.S. government suppressed this fact in order to manufacture the takeover of Texas, which somehow still managed to take ten years to complete:

…the United States Government propaganda machine didn’t want news to leak out about any survivors. They likely feared the now famous slogan, “Remember the Alamo” might not been the powerful inspiration it came to be had a famous person like Crockett been known to survive.

Remember: According to no less an impeccable source than Scott Wolter, the Mexicans supposedly rescued Crockett. Mexican President Santa Anna somehow forgot to tell anyone about it, despite the fact that in Wolter’s reading it would allegedly have made his fight to keep Texas a part of Mexico, and eventually the U.S. out of Mexico, that much easier! Does this mean that Wolter now argues, too, that Santa Anna, also a Freemason, purposely lost the war of Texas independence because he wanted to fulfill a Masonic plan for America, one involving a sovereign country that half of Texans in 1836 didn’t want to be part of America? (Texas joined America through a popular referendum in 1845.) These conspiracies just get more and more convoluted as we struggle to force ever wider swaths of history to bend around an imaginary fact.

Incidentally, the slogan “Remember the Alamo!” was the battle cry at the Battle of San Jacinto, on April 21, 1836, which was fought just three days after Wolter believes news broke in the United States that Crockett was alive (in the incorrect newspaper report he cited). In other words, given that it took far longer than three days to travel from Alabama or New York to Texas, the battle cry had already done its job, and Texas had won its Revolution before news of any survivors could have had any conceivable effect on public enthusiasm in the United States.