Alamo Traces (35 page)

Texas prickly pear cactus

The route described by the Zuber account is seventy-five or more miles. A modern infantryman can travel fifteen miles a day. When required, such troops can double time thirty miles a day. A couple of days of such intense marching, however, renders soldiers unsuitable for immediate and effective combat. Also, while the account does not state it, Rose would have had to have slept a large part of the day on March 4. Otherwise, we must accept that despite his “old age” and the thorns that “continued to work deeper into his flesh,” he walked for twenty-four
hours before stopping to make “his bed on the soft mesquite grass.” Quite a feat. In reality, given the conditions described by Zuber, the journey should have taken Rose five days or about sixty hours at twelve hours per day. Yet Zuber would have his readers believe that the trip was accomplished in forty-eight hours or less; a twenty-four-hour walk and, say, twelve hours per day on March 5 and 6. Then, one must consider that if Rose slept all day on March 4, the trip only required about thirty-six hours.
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Secondly, the Zuber story locates Rose on the Gonzales to Columbus road on March 8 or 9, when according to Zuber: “The families were retreating before the threatened advance of the enemy, and between the Guadalupe [River] and Colorado [River] every family on his route had left home.” The claim is absurd. Sam Houston did not arrive at Gonzales to take command of the Texian forces until 4:00 p.m. on March 11. The retreat from Gonzales and the “Runaway Scrape” did not start until about 11:00 p.m. on March 13. If Rose had been where Zuber said he was on March 8 or 9, he would have probably encountered Houston and his staff or other Texians on the way to Gonzales.
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Thus the conflicts and inconsistencies show why knowledgeable officials and scholars in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century did not accept Zuber's tale of Moses Rose as the truth. Texas Adjutant General William Steele was the first to challenge Zuber on the story. In 1877 Steele wrote Zuber, requesting his help in compiling an official list of the Alamo defenders. At the same time, Steele wrote Zuber that the Moses Rose escape story did not match the data the adjutant general's office had obtained from Susanna (Dickinson) Hannig.
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Unfortunately, Steele's copy of this letter is missing from his letter book in the Texas State Library. However, we do have Zuber's response, and it is extremely revealing. Zuber wrote:

Zuber's defensive tale of Mrs. Dickinson being secreted in the San Fernando church tower and Neill finding her on Cibolo Creek is false. More than that, it appears to be an outright lie to cover his trail of lies about Moses Rose. Thus, the evidence shows that Zuber, when questioned about the veracity of the Moses Rose escape story, responded with an explanation that contains only one truth: Dickinson and Neill were real persons associated with the Alamo. Is it not reasonable to assume, since Zuber defended his Rose narrative with a lie, that the Rose story is also a fabrication? Such is the nature of liars and lies. Once a lie is told and questioned, it requires many secondary lies to stay afloat.
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Total acceptance of the Rose tale continued to elude Zuber. On April 22, 1901, he read a paper defending the Rose narrative to the annual reunion of the Texas Veterans Association and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Zuber opened with: “I wish to say something in self-defense and for the truth of history, concerning my published account of the escape of a man whose name was Rose from the Alamo, March 3, 1836. The occasion of what I have to say is that I have been reliably informed that my account of that escape has been contradicted. I have not seen any published contradiction of it by any reliable authority,
neither do I know of any reliable person who has publicly contradicted it; yet I am led to believe that such contradictions, though unreliable, have made an impression upon the minds of some well-meaning persons. Therefore I feel called upon to present the case more fully.”
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Then, after reviewing the story's provenance, Zuber said: “The men in the fort (all but Rose), were killed, none surviving to tell the story. Mrs. Dickinson and Travis's negro were shut up in rooms, and could not see what was done outside the fort, nor much that was done in it. None of the Mexicans knew all that was done, and the official reports of the Mexican officers were not distinguished for veracity. Then, how can any person at this late period disprove Rose's statement of what occurred about the fort?”
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Given Zuber's allegations in the previous statement, one would think he had been in the Alamo during the last days. He could not have known what Dickinson or Joe did or did not do while in the Alamo. Also, the statement conflicts with Zuber's 1877 letter to Adjutant General William Steele. Remember, Zuber said that Dickinson had been taken out of the Alamo before March 3. But in 1901 Steele had been dead since mid-January 1885, so Zuber did not have to worry about what he had written Steele, or any contradiction from Dickinson, who had died in 1883. Thus Zuber was right about one thing. In 1901 there was probably no living person who could have contested his Moses Rose tall tale.
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Another challenge Zuber addressed in the talk was the time of John W. Smith's departure from the Alamo with Travis's March 3 letters. Zuber wrote: “Rose left the Alamo on the afternoon of March 3d, and historians say that the courier, Captain Smith, left on the
night
of the 3d. If it were certain that Smith left on the night
following
the 3d after Rose left, this would prove Rose's statement to be false; for Smith said nothing of Travis's speech. But Smith certainly left before that night. I have no doubt that he left on the 3d, and in the night; but his departure evidently was on the morning of the 3d, between midnight and daybreak – say soon after midnight.”
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Old age surely had caught up with Zuber's ability to spin a tall tale. His story about Smith contains a major flaw that even Zuber should have seen. Travis wrote that “J. [James] B. [Butler] Bonham (a courier from Gonzales) got in this morning at eleven o'clock. . . .” Travis also wrote: “A reinforcement of about one thousand men is now entering Bexar from the west and I think it more than probable that Santa Anna is now in
town, from the rejoicing we hear.” Travis appears to have been writing about the entry of the “battalions of Zapadores, Aldama, and Toluca” that marched into Bexar between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. Thus, Travis was writing a long letter to the Washington-on-the-Brazos convention at the time Zuber claims Rose said Travis was drawing his line in the sand. Moreover, Smith could not have departed the Alamo on the morning of March 3 because Travis had yet to write the March 3 letters.
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Mrs. Adele B. Looscan, historian for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, also noticed the Bonham data and challenged Zuber on his departure time for Smith. Then she concluded that Smith had departed “in the evening of 3d of March, in all likelihood after dark. Zuber responded the way many Alamo historians do when they are confronted with evidence opposing their opinions. He argued, without any evidence to support his view, that
Travis was wrong
about when Bonham entered the Alamo. Zuber wrote: “I believe that my note in the QUARTERLY of October, 1901, –
The Escape of Rose From the Alamo
, – proves that Travis being weary and pressed for time, made a blunder (surely not an extraordinary one), and that his meaning was ‘yesterday morning,' ‘last evening,' or ‘tonight.' ”
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Zuber then continued with a long-winded argument detailing why Smith could not have obtained “good roadsters” (strong American horses) to ride, so “he could not have performed the trip in less than four days; and therefore that, as he arrived at Washington on the sixth, he left the Alamo soon after midnight on the morning of March the third.” Never mind that “four days” travel would have had Smith arriving in Washington-on-the-Brazos after midnight on March 7.
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Concluding his response to Looscan, Zuber said: “I deem the time of Smith's departure from the Alamo a subject of special importance, because it directly bears upon the proof of the reality of Travis's speech as orally reported by Rose and published by me.” On that point Zuber was right. He was just wrong about when Smith left the Alamo.
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Almonte's diary was not readily available until 1945 when it appeared in the
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
. Thus Looscan and Zuber probably did not know it contained two March entries that verified Travis's report of a large enemy reinforcement entering San Antonio on the afternoon of March 3. The Jose Enrique de la Pena Campaign Diary, which shows that the Mexican troops entered Bexar between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., was not even known when Looscan and Zuber were debating
the Rose story. The manuscript has yet to be translated and published. The two Mexican sources, coupled with Travis's March 3 missive, leave no doubt about when Travis wrote the missive.

Moreover, in March 1838 John W. Smith, in the probate of Alamo defender James Lee Ewing's estate, testified that: “He [Smith] left him [Ewing] in the Alamo on the Friday night previous to its fall. . . .” Friday night would have been the night of March 4, 1836. Clearly, Smith rode out of the Alamo after the alleged time of Travis's speech and Rose's escape.
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The evidence, however, suggests that Smith did not carry Travis's March 3 letters out of the Alamo. First, Travis's February 23 note to Andrew Ponton at Gonzales took fifty-three hours to reach San Felipe, and Washington-on-the-Brazos was about forty miles farther north. Thus if Smith had taken the missive out on the night of March 4, the letter would have had to have made the trip to the convention in forty hours or less. Second, given that Travis appears to have written his missive to the convention in late afternoon of March 3, it seems unlikely that he would have waited over twenty-four hours to send it out. However, if that were the case, one would think there would be a second letter or postscript that detailed the daytime events of March 4. There is no such document. Everything considered, the March 3 letters were most likely taken out of the Alamo by David Crockett on the night of March 3, when he and two other men rode to the Cibolo ford on the Gonzales road in search of Colonel James W. Fannin's relief group. At the ford the documents were probably transferred to another rider, perhaps Crockett's nephew William Patton, who carried them to Gonzales. William Bull appears to have been the final courier who carried the letters to Washington-on-the-Brazos. In the end, given Zuber's own requirement of proof (Smith's departure time), the Rose story is false.
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Given the totality of the evidence, the Moses Rose escape yarn appears to have been Zuber's creation, rather than the report of a true event. Or is that the whole story? One element in this long running argument that historians and Alamo aficionados have failed to notice is that the first report of Travis's alleged speech to his men on March 3 did not originate with Zuber. The story first appeared in the summer of 1836 with the publication of
Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas
, a spurious David Crockett diary. The alleged journal's entry for March 3 reads: “We have given over all hopes of receiving assistance from Goliad
or Refugio. Colonel Travis harangued the garrison, and concluded by exhorting them, in case the enemy should carry the fort to fight to the last gasp, and render their victory even more serious to them than to us. This was followed by three cheers.” While it is impossible to know for sure, the Crockett diary entry appears to be the springboard Zuber used to create the Moses Rose story.
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