+1
I dunno… Playing up the image of “Ooh, you’re a wild American, from the fierce wilderness!” might have helped him a great deal in his, shall we say, castorian pursuits.
So you have reason to think the quote from his daughter is false?
Crockett was - famously - from Tennessee. He was in Texas for all of four months. Where are you getting “wide open plains after hundreds of mile and a few years”?
While **Davy Crockett **really did wear a coonskin cap, Daniel Boone did not. Disney’s invention was to take Fess Parker, who had very successfully played Davy Crockett in several Disney T.V. movies, and create the Daniel Boone T.V. series around him, borrowing liberally from the earlier Davy Crockett movies, including the coonskin cap. Much of the confusion between Crockett and Boone comes from the conflation of the two characters.
That said, Daniel Boone was himself quite famous while he was still alive, and may have been the first true American celebrity. A biography published during his lifetime which was largely made up became a bestseller in Europe, and there were Europeans who came to the U.S. to try to meet the real Daniel Boone.
I have a beautiful cross-fox fur hat I’ll sell you. They are indeed very warm.
My uncle was a taxidermist, and whenever my dad found a roadkill raccoon, off it would go to Uncle Shorty’s place to get turned into a hat.
Surprisingly warm, but the dog and cat do get excited when I wear one of those things.
For some reason, carnivore fur in general seems to be better for cold-weather wear. I’ve heard that wolverine fur is also prized for some applications: Apparently, it doesn’t frost up as easily.
The practical value would be that it keeps your head warm, dry, shaded, etc. – the same practical value of any good hat.
Better off how or why? Although it’s recognizable where the coonskin hat comes from, it isn’t meant to portray a raccoon. Are you thinking of some ceremonial rite or some costume meant to make a statement? I’d venture that Crockett was thinking of keeping his head warm.
Actually, the Daniel Boone TV series was produced by 20th Century Fox. They had attempted to buy the rights to produce a show based on Disney’s Davy Crockett anthology, but Disney refused to sell, so 20th made Daniel Boone the title character and gave him elements of Davy Crockett instead.
How often is a bird turned into a hat? Sure, we’ve decorated hats with feathers probably since people started wearing hats, but I’ve never heard of bird skin in apparel aside from ostrich, and that’s probably because ostriches are so big.
Birds don’t have fur and bird skin is generally not thick or strong (think of chickens here) so it’s not my first choice.
Gutting a bald eagle and making it into a hat might be patriotic though.
The eagle might disagree.
So would the Feds.
Per Michael Wallis’ David Crockett: Lion of the West (excellent book, btw), it was kind of a case of life imitating art.
Crockett sometimes wore a coonskin cap, because the *caricature *of him was a guy wearing a coonskin cap, and he sometimes played up that image. In particular, there was a play called Lion of the West, which was a folksy humorous play about a guy who was clearly a parody of Crockett. Lots of ‘canonical’ pieces of the Crockett legend go back to that play, which was performed during Crockett’s life (and attended by Crockett at least once).
Well, Johnny Depp had that weird crow hat in The Lone Ranger. 
Going back to using a raccoon vs. a bear; wouldn’t a raccoon have been much easier to use? Just gut a properly sized raccoon and you’re most of the way there; making one out of bearskin would seem to be a lot more cutting and sewing. (I’m not a taxidermist or hunter)
Use a bear leg to make a Lincolnesque stovepipe hat for formal hunts.
Er, you need to do more than gut the animal - you have to remove and tan the skin unless you want your hat to smell rather unpleasant.
And if you do this with a bearskin, you get the material for many hats.
The version we sang said “Killed in a bar when he was only three”.
Those were some rough times.