9

Flames Rising High

With the sulphurous smoke of battle yet hovering over the conquered Alamo on the early morning of March 6, and with the Mexican tricolor, planted by Lieutenant Torres, waving in triumph from its north wall, Sergeant Manuel Loranca of the Dolores Cavalry Regiment never forgot the scene of carnage. Loranca had seen the sheer brutality demonstrated “by the lance” when so effectively utilized by Tampico, Dolores, and Vera Cruz lancers on the unfortunate escapees. He described that last pitiful act on this tragic day: “There in front of the [fort, near the west end of the Alameda] were gathered the bodies of all those who died by the lance.” ¹

Backing up his earlier promise that “he would burn the last one of them,” Santa Anna ordered that all bodies of the Alamo defenders be burned. Perhaps this gesture was calculated to be a special insult to the memory of these mostly Protestant soldiers, because the act of cremation had been outlawed by the churches of Europe in centuries past. Cremation denied these citizen-soldiers from so far away the Christian burial enjoyed by generations of their ancestors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Since so many young men and boys had been killed outside of the Alamo, perhaps lying as far as several hundred yards away, two main funeral pyres were built by Santa Anna’s soldados on either side of the leafless cottonwoods of the Alameda. A distinctive landmark on the open prairie, the Alameda had been named for the stately Mexico City boulevard so beloved by upper class Creoles. ² Ironically, perhaps no place in all San Antonio was more picturesque than the tree-lined Alameda, which meant a shaded public thoroughfare in Spanish. A Tejano of the town, Don Pablo, whose brother served in Santa Anna’s ranks during the attack, described the Alameda as “a broad and spacious place used as a promenade and also as a highway of ingress to and egress from the city on the east side of the [San Antonio] river [and] On each side of the Alameda was a row of large cottonwood trees.” These trees had been planted around 1804 by Spanish soldiers as part of a beautification effort. ³

But marring the Alameda’s beauty on March 6 was that its vicinity had been transformed into a place of slaughter. Because so many Alamo defenders had died near the thoroughfare, Santa Anna reasoned that it would be far easier for his men to drag the fewer number of dead from the Alamo to the Alameda. Here, around 5:00 p.m on March 6, as Pablo explained, the bodies of the Alamo men “were burned on two different pyres[.] These two separate pyres were located about 250 yards apart and one was on each side of the Alameda.” ⁴ If this estimation of distance is correct, it would indicate that some escapees might have managed to reach a point beyond the south side of the Alameda. The funeral pyre south of the road was about ten feet wide and sixty feet in length. The other pyre was larger, at around ten feet wide and some eighty feet long. ⁵ A smaller third pyre was later created to burn more bodies as they were found.

In the late afternoon of March 6 the yellow flames, fueled by additional offerings of dry mesquite and cottonwood “from the neighboring forest”—interspersed with layers of defenders’ bodies—leaped everhigher into the late winter sky. Perhaps some abatis limbs from in front of the fort’s palisade were used to fuel the flames. Here, the bodies of garrison members burned for some time. Santa Anna desired that no traces of his vanquished enemy should remain to be mourned. He hoped that this final act in the Alamo’s drama would serve as an unforgettable lesson to the other revolutionaries—Texan, Tejano, or Mexican—who dared to oppose him and his Army of Operations.

As the sun lowered over San Antonio and temperatures grew colder during this relatively short day, red and yellow flames continued to leap higher, as the fire was fed by more fuel for an intense heat. Even the bones of the Alamo men were incinerated by Santa Anna to eliminate all traces of the defiant rebels who had dared to oppose him.

Eventually, the flames died away, like this horrific day for so many young men from the United States, Texas, Europe, and Mexico. Then, the soft, swirling palls of smoke ceased rising through the lonely, twin rows of stately cottonwood trees that made the Alameda such a picturesque setting even in late winter. Finally, the last bodily remains of the Alamo men were no more. They had been reduced to ashes and shattered fragments of charred bone. Strangely, these piles of ash remained in place in forgotten piles unburied by soldiers or civilians, Tejanos, Mexicans, or Anglo-Celts, for months to come.

Some family members learned of the sad fate of relatives at the Alamo not long after the slaughter. One wife especially shaken by the news was Elizabeth Crockett. She learned of both her husband’s death and his enlistment in the Texas military at the same time, from a letter received two weeks after the Alamo’s fall. ⁶

In an emotional June 5, 1836 letter to her sister in Tennessee, a grief-stricken Frances “Menefee” Sutherland lamented the tragic fate of her son, William DePriest Sutherland, a seventeen-year-old medical student who had served with the garrison for less than two months. “I have lost my William. O, yes he is gone, my poor boy is gone, gone from me. The sixth day of March in the morning, he was slain in the Alamo in San Antonio. Then his poor body [was] committed to the flames.” ⁷

As in earlier failing to provide assistance during the siege, Texas and her people almost immediately forgot about those who were sacrificed at the Alamo, despite an emotional March 24, 1836 appeal from the concerned editors ofThe Telegraph and Texas Register: “Our dead were denied the right of Christian burial, being stripped and thrown into a pile and burned. Would that we could gather up their ashes and place in urns!” ⁸

A final resting place on either side of the Alameda signified not only the physical deaths of Alamo garrison members, but also the deaths of their once-soaring personal dreams of Texas that had caused so many young men to cross the Sabine with such high hopes. After all, the Alamo defenders had gambled all and lost all in their bid to make their dreams come true. What they lost were thousands of acres of an earthly “paradise” second to none. One soldier who survived the Texas Revolution estimated that the lands that he gained for his military service equated to a monetary value of nearly $2,000—a fortune in that time. ⁹

Meanwhile, in the days, weeks, and months ahead, the majority of the families of the Alamo men, especially those from the United States, either never learned or were informed belatedly of what happened to their fathers, sons, cousins, brothers, or uncles. For instance, Cornelia Vancleve Barnes of New Haven, Connecticut, who feared the worst, wrote in an August 2, 1836 letter that was published in The Telegraph and Texas Register on August 2, 1836: “I had a brother by the name of Wm. D. LEWIS, who was in San Antonio on the 2d of last May, nearly a year ago, since which time I have not had a line or heard any thing from him. . . . Yesterday, we beheld the name of LEWIS among the murdered ones at San Antonio [and] My brother was [from] Philadelphia, but his father was from Wales.” ¹⁰

A distraught Cornelia was searching for news about Virginia-born Private William Irvine Lewis, age 29. The pampered son of a prominent physician in Philadelphia, he had been visiting a friend in North Carolina when he suddenly decided to head for Texas and what he thought would be an adventurous life in the distant southwest. William’s grieving mother never recovered from her son’s tragic loss at the Alamo. As late as October 1840, the poor woman even placed an appeal that was published in The Telegraph and Texas Registerbegging for a small memento of her long-lost son, who never returned home from his trip to North Carolina. Therefore, a “small monument carved from a stone from the Alamo ruins was sent to her.” ¹¹

In the end, and like Mexican dead at both the Alamo and San Jacinto, the Alamo’s forgotten victims were the hundreds of loved ones and family members these young men had left behind not only in Texas but all across the United States and Europe. In this sense, the Alamo’s saddest legacy lived on for generations, including seemingly endless legal complications. An example was when a grieving Elizabeth Rowe petitioned “Probate Court of Gonzales Co. . . . for letters of adm. in 2 cases [regarding the estate] of her late former husband James GEORGE, who died at the Alamo, and also in [the] case of her bro[ther] William DEARDUFF, who also died in same battle.” ¹²

Private James George, age 34, was one of the ill-fated Gonzales Rangers reinforcements who had voluntarily ridden into the death-trap on March 1. He had married pretty Elizabeth Dearduff on February 29, 1821. George’s team of oxen had transported the little “Come and Take It” cannon of Gonzales that had helped to spark a war when Neill fired the first shot of the Texas Revolution in early October 1835. George’s brother-in-law was Tennessee-born William Dearduff, who had settled in the DeWitt Colony. Both men had served in the Gonzales Ranging Company before meeting their Maker at the Alamo. ¹³

Even from faraway Germany came a property claim for a family member who had died at the Alamo. In December 1838, “John Jacob MATHERN of Frankfort, Germany, seeks succ[essor] of [the] est[ate] of Peter MATTERN, who was killed at the Alamo in March 1836.” ¹⁴

Meanwhile, in a strange, perplexing irony, the young men and boys who had been needlessly sacrificed at the Alamo continued to be forgotten by a victorious Texas for decades after San Jacinto. Life had seemingly moved on for everyone, as Texas and her people enjoyed a boom period of growth, development, and prosperity. Land speculation, unrestricted immigration from the United States, and securing the most fertile lands for development took precedence in Texas after San Jacinto. No one had much time to contemplate the Alamo’s meaning or the lost defenders who had so easily slipped from memory. After all, this was now a time to look ahead, not backward. As appearing in the November 16, 1836 issue of The Telegraph and Texas Register, a special committee voted down a resolution for a $500 donation for the “relief for Mrs. Susannah DICKINSON and her child by late Lt. DICKINSON who fell at the Alamo.” ¹⁵

Even Travis’ slave, Joe, who had survived the Alamo, became a hunted fugitive after he escaped from a new master in the less racially tolerant environment of post-San Jacinto Texas. As revealed in the May 26, 1837 issue of The Telegraph and Texas Register: a “$50 reward will be given for delivering to me on Bailey’s Prairie, 7 miles from Columbia, a Negro man named JOE, belonging to . . . the late Wm. Barret TRAVIS, who ranaway [sic] and took with him a Mexican, two horses, saddles and Bridles. This Negro was in the Alamo with his master when it was taken, and was the only man from the colonies not put to death.” ¹⁶ Only later, with the beginning of the rise of the mythical Alamo that captured the national imagination, would Susannah Dickinson and Joe become revered as Alamo survivors. But clearly such was not the case immediately after the Alamo’s fall.

While Alamo garrison members would eventually be transformed into honored heroes, the average Mexican soldados who gave their lives for their republic on March 6, 1836 were largely forgotten by their own nation. In 1836, Lieutenant Colonel José Juan Sánchez-Navarro, an aspiring poet who served on General Cós’ staff, proposed the erection of a stately monument to honor the Mexicans who gave their lives to reclaim part of the national homeland. He not only sketched the monument’s design but also wrote, on March 6, a poem that contained inspiring words in a tribute to be chiseled in stone:

The bodies lying here were inspired by souls, since ascended to heaven, to savor the glory they’d gained by the deeds they’d done on earth.

Their last human tribute they paid, with no fear of death at the end, for the patriots death, far from death, is transition to far greater life.” ¹⁷

However, the proposed monument would never be erected in memory of the Mexican soldados who fought and died at the Alamo in order to preserve their country’s integrity and to save the fragile Mexican union of states. Therefore, only the memory of what these young men of the Republic of Mexico had accomplished at the Alamo remained vivid in the minds of those who fought there. Ironically, like the defenders who they had so systematically slaughtered on March 6, the final resting place of Republic of Mexico soldados lies not in their native homeland to be honored but in obscurity in San Antonio.

Under the care of Father Refugio de la Garza, the Mexican dead were buried by Santa Anna’s soldiers—and not by Tejanos of San Antonio as often assumed—in the Catholic burial ground known as Campo Santo, or the town cemetery on San Antonio’s western edge. In addition, some fallen local Tejano soldiers from Santa Anna’s permanent “battalion of the Alamo” were buried by wives and family members in this cemetery. For instance, the name of one deceased local Mexican soldier—Lieutenant Jose Maria Alcala—was faithfully recorded and documented by Father Garza of San Fernando Cathedral. ¹⁸

But not all Mexican dead received a decent burial in the town’s cemetery. According to Francisco Antonio Ruiz, whose father signed the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836: “The dead Mexicans of Santa Anna were taken to the graveyard but, not having sufficient room for them, I ordered some of them to be thrown in the river.” ¹⁹ In corroboration, de la Pena recorded how only the “greater part of our dead were buried by their comrades” in the Catholic cemetery of San Antonio. ²⁰

For some time, few Texans looked to the Alameda site with any sense of reverence. John Sutherland described the irony of how “the bones of the Texians, as remained, lay for nearly a year upon the ground, while the ashes floated upon the breeze [because] There was no friend to collect or preserve” the remains. More than a year after the Alamo’s fall, Colonel Juan Sequín, as reported in the The Telegraph and Texas Register, “paid final honors of war to the remains of the Alamo heroes; ashes were found in three separate places.” ²¹

Long before the fabrication of Alamo mythology to create an enduring romantic legend, Colonel Sequín reported that at “each of the three spots . . . ashes were found,” including two located on either side of the Alameda to mark the places near where perhaps the majority of the Alamo garrison had died. ²² Unfortunately, today the exact locations of the funeral pyres and what little may remain of the Alamo defenders have been lost to historians, preservationists, and archeologists. The final resting place of these men are known only to God. ²³

After reaping an easy victory at relatively little cost, the slaughter of the Alamo garrison only fueled Santa Anna’s confidence to new heights. Nothing else was left to do but mop-up resistance, if any remained, across Texas—or so it seemed to Santa Anna. Crushing revolution in Texas was going to be Zacatecas all over again. However, Santa Anna’s overconfidence and disdain for the Anglo-Celtic fighting man, including the legendary rifleman, was destined to prove to be his undoing. Even before scoring one victory after another in Texas during this campaign, he had boasted to the French ambassador in Mexico City: “If the Americans do not behave themselves I will march across their country and plant the Mexican flag in Washington.” ²⁴

Not only Santa Anna, but also the civil and military officials in Mexico City believed that the Texas campaign of 1836 had already been won with the Alamo’s fall. From Mexico City and with the Alamo’s capture in mind, Lucas Alaman penned with delight how: “Senor Santa Anna has so prevailed over the Anglo-American colonists who have rebelled in Texas that we may consider the matter over and done with.” ²⁵

People across the Mexican republic basked in the belief that the conquest of all Texas was now inevitable. In a cathartic scene that symbolized the emotionalism surrounding the issue of Texas, Secretary of War Tornel and Mexican Congressional members symbolically stomped upon the trophy—the blue, silk flag of the New Orleans Greys that Santa Anna had sent back to Mexico City to demonstrate that the Texas insurrection was not only fueled primarily from the United States but also could be easily crushed by his Army of Operations. ²⁶ With the Alamo’s fall and the Goliad disaster occurring hardly before the 1836 Texas campaign had begun, a wave of panic swept Texas, and shock waves reverberated throughout the United States. Written by a citizen of New Orleans, a letter published in the Troy Daily Whig from Texas predicted a grim future for Texas arms: “The garrisons of La Bahia, or Goliad, as well as that of San Antonio, have been cut off almost to a man. Houston, with a small force, much exaggerated I imagine, is falling back behind the Colorado [River]. My opinion is, they will be nearly exterminated! It has become a war of fanaticism.” ²⁷

And the National Intelligencer lamented the fates of the remaining settlers in Texas: “It is a war of extermination. I am afraid, unless Uncle Sam gives them a helping hand, the Texians will be in a bad situation.” ²⁸ And with some understatement, the stunned editor of the New Orleans True American could only write: “We learn by [river boat] passengers . . . that the war in Texas has at length assumed a serious character. Many of those who left this city, determined to lay down their lives in the cause of Texas, have bravely yielded them up at Béxar. Three young men from our office, we learn, are among the slain; the names of Captain William Blazeby and Private Robert [B.] Moore [of Blazeby’s infantry company] have been mentioned to us; that of the other we could not ascertain.” ²⁹

The initial reports of the Alamo disaster and the ruthless character of the war were hardly exaggerations. In Santa Anna’s own words, “In this war there are no prisoners.” Santa Anna had embraced the concept of ethnic cleansing as the ultimate solution for the long-existing Texas problem. Therefore, he was determined to sweep away every AngloCeltic man, woman, and child, both squatters and those of the colonies, from Texas soil. Quite simply, Santa Anna, and the Mexican Republic, “wanted a brown Texas, not a white one.” ³⁰

In early January 1836, a far-sighted Colonel Neill, who had wisely departed the Alamo before it was too late, had accurately predicted the harsh nature of this struggle for the heart and soul of Texas. He penned how Santa Anna and his invading army sought “to reduce the State [to what] it originally was in 1820,” before Anglo-Celtic colonization in Texas. ³¹

But the heady optimism that surged through Mexico City over a successful 1836 campaign to win back Texas was short-lived, ending even before the spring rains had ceased. After General Houston’s impossible victory on the gulf coast plain at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, and in regard to the citizens of Texas and the United States who now claimed Texas as their own, Colonel Pedro Delgado lamented Texas’s loss with a cynical, but honest, final evaluation: “Now they could, without danger, squabble over the league of land, or for the ownership of the land of plenty.” ³²

After Santa Anna’s vanguard force was crushed in a twenty-minute battle by Houston’s ad hoc army of volunteers, hundreds of families across Mexico, from Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico to Acapulco on the Pacific, mourned for the sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands, who had been slaughtered along the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou. Mexican and Indian peasant families from the Yucatan Peninsula and northern and central Mexico mourned for more than 600 fallen common soldiers, just like the aristocratic families of Mexico City and other leading Mexican cities who lamented lost officers who never returned home. Victims of a massacre that dwarfed that of March 6, Mexican dead at San Jacinto were more than three times as numerous as the dead of the Alamo garrison.

Unlike the Alamo defenders who were cremated, the Mexican slain—all except the proud, chivalrous General Castrillon—were left unburied on San Jacinto’s killing field, rotting where they had fallen and picked apart by wild hogs, dogs, and turkey vultures. But even ugly battlefield deaths were a more dignified fate than that which befell some survivors of the decisive battle. Some African infantrymen of Santa Anna’s Army who survived the San Jacinto slaughter were sold into slavery by the victors. ³³

Meanwhile, despite never having been held accountable for the Alamo’s abandonment because of his belated foot-dragging when he was commander-in-chief of the Texas Regular Army, the surprising victory at San Jacinto vaulted Houston to the presidency of the Republic of Texas. He became a hero across the United States, reaping laurels and fame, while the sacrificed martyrs of the Alamo were forgotten. What was conveniently overlooked by Americans—both then and today—was the fact that Houston had played a major role in the Alamo fiasco from beginning to end. ³⁴

For the young Republic of Mexico—even though she had yet to either fully realize or acknowledge the fact—Texas was lost forever and her national trauma would continue for generations in consequence. As if fearing as much, an angry Colonel Pedro Delgado, yet haunted by the San Jacinto slaughter, never forgot the sickening sight of the wild celebration among Texans on the first anniversary of the San Jacinto victory at Liberty, Texas, on April 21, 1837: “The ball was intended to commemorate the bloody 21st of April, 1836, on which day so many illustrious Mexicans were immolated.” ³⁵

Like other nations around the world, many of America’s most revered historical episodes are in fact little more than myths such as the Alamo last stand. Indeed, in this regard, the mythology of the Alamo last stand has been no aberration or exception to the rule. In his classic work, Founding Myths: Stories that Hide Our Patriotic Past, Ray Raphael ably demonstrated how much of what Americans cherish most about the American Revolution and their nation’s founding are simply untrue. He emphasized how mythology rather than fact has dominated the historical memory of the American Revolution, thanks to a highly imaginative “invention of history” without the need for documentation or accuracy. Like the Alamo for the people of Texas, the young American nation had needed not only to invent itself but also to morally justify and explain its birth in violent revolution.

In much the same way, the romanticized story of the Alamo’s last stand was created in a process of historical invention to produce a popular mythology. Consequently, instead of the true story of relatively weak resistance and flight among such a large percentage of the Alamo garrison, the epic last stand—with every man standing his ground to the bitter end—was created. According to the mythical Alamo, no defenders, save perhaps a craven individual or two, could have possibly attempted to escape, because it ran contrary to romantic notions of manhood, racial, and cultural superiority, and the alleged willing selfsacrifice of the garrison so that Texas would live.

Most significant, such an extensive whitewashing of the Alamo’s darker side came almost immediately, regardless of the abundance of facts that indicated otherwise. When Santa Anna’s first battle report, written at 8:00 a.m. on March 6, became known across the United States and to the American press, no part of it triggered greater disbelief and outrage than the information that a good many Alamo garrison members had attempted to flee the Alamo and were cut down by Mexican cavalry outside its walls. For instance, in the May 12, 1836 issue of the Maryland Gazette, the outraged editor wrote: “The Gazette of the 23d March contains the official report of Santa Anna of the capture of the Alamo [and] He reports that after storming the Alamo . . . General Sesma followed the fugitives, who attempted to escape, few if any of whom, remain to tell the tale of their disaster! Was there ever exhibited on the part of a commander of an army such wanton and disgraceful misrepresentation! It is a matter of history that the whole garrison of the Alamo . . . was inhumanly put to the sword within its walls, instead of flying and being pursued by Sesma.” ³⁶ Even at this time, barely two months after the Alamo’s capture, the myth of the heroic last stand had already grown larger than the facts.

Clearly, in the same month that the Alamo fell a controversy had been born, though it has laid dormant for more than 170 years, while the less significant Crockett execution controversy has continued to dominate the attention of American historians, buffs, and scholars. But in truth no controversy should have existed at all in regard to the welldocumented exodus from the Alamo, because more than half a dozen reliable and collaborating Mexican accounts of officers and enlisted men and others tell the truth of what really happened that morning.

The relatively light Mexican losses, the high level of fratricide, and the fact that the soldados so easily and quickly overwhelmed a fortified position manned by a large number of cannon all indicated that resistance was surprisingly weak. In addition, the short amount of time— from around 5:30 a.m. to about 5:50—that it took for Mexican troops to overrun the Alamo can best be explained by the flight of so many garrison members.

Therefore, the time-honored story of the last stand—the core of the mythical Alamo—has been the greatest of all Alamo legends, even as ample primary and secondary evidence have verified that it never happened as we have been led to believe. As embellished by generations of writers, journalists, painters, and historians, the traditional Alamo last stand was constructed for self-serving purposes beyond that of simply a good story—it was deliberately manufactured as a testament to an alleged Anglo-Celtic cultural and racial superiority, while obscuring the crucial roles played by slavery, land acquisition and speculation, and the fact that the conflict was only part of a much larger Mexican civil war. Indeed, the Alamo last stand was transformed into a historical “icon within an icon,” which has become a “sacred national myth.” ³⁷

Most contemporary newspapers across the United States actually got the story right in the beginning. What happened at the Alamo was nothing more than a “massacre” that not even remotely resembled the last stand of legend that has long dominated popular culture and the national consciousness. However, the creation myth of the Alamo last stand was necessary, stemming from the omnipresent process of transforming the American past into a saga of heroism, while absolving America of guilt from the ugliest legacies of Manifest Destiny, slavery, Indian removal, and massacres such as Horseshoe Bend and San Jacinto. And no part of America’s story has been more romanticized than its expansion to the west. At the heart of this myth was that white Americans fought against inferior peoples of color, Indian, Mexican, and Mestizo, in the name of progress, civilization, and the highest Christian virtues. Almost seamlessly in yet another chapter of western expansion, the myth of the heroic Alamo last stand fulfilled these same vital cultural, historical, and racial requirements for both Texas and the American nation: in a willing self-sacrifice for a greater good, a band of heroic white men bravely stood up for righteousness and liberty against barbarous hordes from an alien and inferior culture.

Therefore, for the creation of the mythical Alamo and especially the heroic last stand, the most reliable Mexican accounts, despite their validity, accuracy and number, were either ignored or purged from the history in a thorough silencing of nonconforming views and facts that challenged the romantic legend. The collaborating truths of these multiple Mexican accounts became a victim of the mythology which proved far stronger than the facts. Because the Battle of the Alamo was such a largely self-induced fiasco, the creation of a heroic last stand resulting in at least a moral triumph was necessary to maintain a posture of cultural and racial superiority. Therefore, what was required for not only Texas but also the U.S. was the fabrication of an heroic fable of how a small band of defenders willingly sacrificed themselves while slaughtering hordes of attackers to achieve a great “moral and spiritual victory.”

Perhaps an indicator of what was really most relevant for the contemporary U.S. public was expressed in an emotional letter to Mrs. David Crockett not long after the Alamo’s fall. In his letter, Isaac N. Jones, who had met Crockett on the Tennessean’s way to meet his cruel fate at the Alamo, paid a final tribute to the former Congressman, who hated slavery and how it had corrupted the American republic’s most idealistic values: “His military career was short. But though I deeply lament his death, I cannot restrain my American smile at the recollection of the fact that he died as a United States soldier should die, covered with his slain enemy.” ³⁸

Clearly, and like so many others, both then and today, Jones had allowed his imagination to take flight, because he believed that a popular personality of Crockett’s stature should have easily killed a horde of allegedly inferior opponents. Indeed, in the analysis of historian Mark Derr, who explained in part how the last stand myth—by way of a national obsession with Crockett’s demise—became so firmly entrenched in the national consciousness: “By the 1950s, American filmmakers and writers were fixated on the notion that Crockett had died while killing Mexicans, in no small measure because, fresh from the Second World War and the conflict in Korea, they were obsessed with the hero’s death in battle. The growing myth of the Alamo demanded too that all the brave defenders died fighting.” ³⁹

Ironically, the story of the Alamo last stand began to grow to mythological proportions only in the later years of the 19th century. Even a principal leader of the Texas Revolution, realistic-thinking Colonel Francis White Johnson, was bemused by the power of the growing myth: “The old popular tale of Texas that the Alamo was stormed by ten thousand men, of whom a thousand or more were killed, shows how rapidly legend may grow up even in their age.” ⁴⁰ And though without directly challenging the last stand mythology, respected historian David J. Weber concluded how: “A number of the cherished stories about the Alamo have no basis in historical fact, but have moved out of the earthly realm of reality into the stratosphere of myth.” ⁴¹

And in his recent book, Sleuthing the Alamo, James E. Crisp emphasized how in regard to the battle, “Myths offer the false comfort of simplicity, and this simplicity is accomplished by the selective silencing of the past.” ⁴² This is precisely why the truth of the mass exodus of defenders from the Alamo has been silenced for so long: because it runs so directly contrary to the iconic and romantic version of events.

This work about what really happened at the Alamo was written in the hope of presenting a more honest and realistic version of the events of March 6, 1836 than has ever been presented before. Based upon fact rather than fiction, truth rather than mythology, and an unbiased, openminded approach rather than embracing prejudicial stereotypes and an out-dated legend, this new perspective of the Alamo has also been presented in the hope of uniting many Americans who yet have radically opposing views of the Alamo’s meaning today. Perhaps the old, timehonored perceptions of the mythical Alamo, rooted in the complex dynamics of politics, economics, and race, should be erased from the national memory, especially given the new realities of American society and culture. Hopefully, a new and more honest understanding of what really happened at the Alamo will make it a story—of heroics on both sides—not from the biased perspective of a single group but of lasting importance for all Americans today. Horace Greeley’s famous words, “When the legend is better than the fact, print the legend,” should no longer apply to the Alamo.

In this sense, therefore, the Alamo should be a monument not to a mythical last stand, but as an enduring monument to folly and the inevitable high price paid by common soldiers for leadership mistakes. Ironically, the area around the Alamo church and in the compound itself very likely saw less fighting and killing than outside the fort’s walls, because of mass exodus from the Alamo. Today, now covered by parking lots, office buildings, and traffic moving along the busy, downtown streets of San Antonio, the area where most Alamo garrison members were killed has no marker or monument to memorialize the forgotten fights and last stands in and around a long-forgotten irrigation ditch outside the walls. ⁴³

Instead of the mythical “line in the sand” story in which every defender crossed Travis’ line, in reality the majority of Alamo garrison members unhesitatingly chose life when they attempted to save themselves by escaping a certain deathtrap in the cold, late winter darkness. It had been a bloody early Sunday morning that would live on as both history and legend. Even though most garrison members died outside the Alamo’s walls, romantic myth not only had these young men and boys of the Alamo garrison dying in the wrong location, but also under the wrong circumstances: the mythical last stand.