The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (59 page)

De la Peña’s quote regarding the chaos in the courtyard in the last minutes of the battle is in
With Santa Anna in Texas,
p. 51.

The story of the Navarro sisters is drawn from Juana Alsbury’s account, reprinted in Hansen, pp. 87–88. Joe’s story derives from his account, reprinted in Hansen, pp. 74–76.

The description of Crockett’s injuries is related by Eulalia Yorba in her account published in the
San Antonio Daily Express
of April 12, 1896.

The earliest mention of Robert Evans and his attempt to fire the powder magazine is in the March 24, 1836,
Telegraph and Texas Register
article on the battle, details of which were supplied by John W. Smith and Gerald Navan after talking to Susanna Dickinson: “Major Evans, master of ordnance, was killed in the act of setting fire to the powder magazine, agreeably to the previous orders from Travis.” Mrs. Dickinson also told her grandchildren about Evans and his mission (Hansen, p. 59).

The scene of the Mexican soldiers grabbing the valuables from Bettie is related in file 3 (Notes, Handwritten, Interview with Enrique Esparza), box 2M129 (Descendants of Gregorio Esparza), Adina de Zavala Papers, BCAH.

The description of the fort after the battle, and the soldiers stripping the corpses, is related by de la Peña in
With Santa Anna in Texas,
p. 52 (“Quite soon some of the bodies were left naked by fire, others by disgraceful rapacity, especially among our men”), and Ivey, “¡Viva la Patria es nuestro el Alamo!” p. 13, in which he translates Sánchez’s journal: “the troop was allowed plunder.”

An hour as the total time elapsed since the beginning of the attack until the battle’s end is from Almonte’s journal, quoted in Lamego,
The Siege and Taking of the Alamo,
p. 37: “By six-thirty in the morning not a single enemy existed.”

The scene of the execution of the captured Texians is in Caro’s account, translated and quoted in Castañeda,
The Mexican Side of the Texan Revolution,
p. 106. See also the anonymous Mexican account quoted in Huffines,
Blood of Noble Men,
p. 182.

David Crockett is frequently cited as being one of the prisoners brought before Santa Anna and executed. Since the publication of
With Santa Anna in Texas,
the English translation of José Enrique de la Peña’s reconstructed memoir of the 1835–36 Texas campaign, several historians have used that account and a half dozen other second- and thirdhand accounts to write, as history, that David Crockett did not perish in the Alamo battle but was executed afterward with a few other defenders. But if these accounts are examined critically, there is little evidence to support such a scenario—certainly not enough to write it as history. Each of the accounts has serious credibility problems.

Though unsubstantiated rumors placing Crockett among the executed began to circulate just weeks after the battle, the claim took root in the public mind soon after the appearance of the 1975 English translation of
With Santa Anna in Texas,
first published in Spanish in Mexico City in 1955. De la Peña was an officer in Santa Anna’s Army of Operations who took part in the assault on the Alamo—and who was also an observant, eloquent, and passionate writer. In one passage, he claimed to have witnessed the execution of “some seven men” who “had survived the general carnage” and had been brought before Santa Anna. One is described at great length and identified as “the naturalist David Crockett, well known in North America for his unusual adventures, who had undertaken to explore the country and who, finding himself in Bejar at the very moment of surprise, had taken refuge in the Alamo, fearing that his status as a foreigner might not be respected.” Santa Anna orders the troops closest to him to execute Crockett (and presumably the other men); neither these men nor their officers support the order, but several nearby officers draw their swords and fall upon the defenseless men, hacking them to death.

If Crockett really was one of the executed prisoners, for some reason it was not mentioned in the accounts and reports of several members of the Mexican army present, including Colonel Almonte, Santa Anna himself, and his secretary, Ramón Caro, all of whom wrote accounts of the campaign and the Alamo battle shortly after their return to Mexico. Neither did José Juan Sánchez, who kept a journal of his experiences, mention it, though his reference to “the death of an old man named Cocran” has been used as evidence of a Crockett execution and indeed is one of the Mexican accounts often cited by the Crockett execution theorists. A Crockett execution is not mentioned in an account by Sergeant Manuel Loranca, who does relate the finding in the
convento
of “all refugees which were left,” and says that Santa Anna “immediately ordered that they should be shot, which was accordingly done.” It’s also not mentioned by General Vicente Filisola, Santa Anna’s second in command, who wrote a detailed account of the campaign and the Alamo battle gleaned from participants’ oral and written accounts. In short, several high-ranking witnesses who would have been aware of such an event never mentioned Crockett as being one of the executed, even though most or all of them would have had good reason to. And neither in his March 6 report, written just an hour or two after the battle, nor in his lengthier 1837 account did Santa Anna ever mention Crockett’s execution—though in his March 6 report, he listed Crockett as “among the corpses” and in his memoirs, written much later in life, he wrote of the rebels, “Not one soldier showed signs of desiring to surrender.” Santa Anna would have been eager to brag about killing such a prominent U.S. citizen, particularly since it would have been further evidence of a claim he was constantly making—that many of the rebels were American citizens. And the others were all highly critical of Santa Anna in the years after the campaign, and would have gladly seized on such a cold-blooded act to make him look worse in the eyes of the world. But none of them mentioned Crockett as one of the executed. Also worth considering is the fact that in the extensive (more than two-hour) interrogation of Santa Anna immediately after he was captured, and during the seven months in which he was a captive in Texas and the U.S., there was no mention, or at least none was recorded, of Crockett being one of the men executed after the battle—by him or his interviewers.

The heavy reliance of Crockett execution theorists on the de la Peña memoir is weakened by several facts. We must keep in mind that, although popularly referred to as a “diary,” the manuscript is clearly a reconstructed memoir, written in the years after the battle and based on a reworked diary that de la Peña only began months after the battle. Following common practice at the time, de la Peña incorporated (a) various Mexican accounts he gathered from disparate sources, such as other army officers and newspaper accounts, and (b) letters and reports written by Texians such as Travis and Houston. (De la Peña’s original holograph diary is not known to exist.) As William C. Davis, author of
Three Roads to the Alamo,
points out in his article “How Davy Probably
Didn’t
Die”: “De la Peña openly admitted that he did not see all that he recounted and that he had adopted the recollections of others. The highly derivative and contradictory nature of his Crockett account suggests powerfully that it is one of those episodes ‘to which I have not witnessed.’ ”

Though I am convinced of the authenticity of the de la Peña materials—yes, they were written (or dictated; there are at least three or four different hands) in the de la Peña manuscript written in the years after the campaign and before his death in 1840—their accuracy in several places is highly questionable, and sometimes demonstrably wrong. For instance, de la Peña claimed to have seen Travis, “a handsome blond,” shot in the Alamo courtyard, though no historian argues against the traditional location of his death as testified to by Joe, Travis’s slave, and acting
alcalde
of Béxar, Francisco Antonio Ruíz: on the north wall. He also wrote that “all of the enemy perished, there remaining alive only an elderly lady and a Negro slave,” though it is generally accepted that there were as many as twenty survivors. Counting against the veracity of de la Peña’s Crockett execution scene are these points: first, the brief account of Crockett’s execution is contained on a single slip of paper—the verso of folio 35—and was not only written on a different kind of paper from the rest of the manuscript (consisting of 105 folded “quartos” of four pages each) but was also written in a different hand. Folio 35 was tucked into the manuscript just as several other slips of paper were—suggesting that it was one of many accounts, rumors, and stories obtained from other sources and inserted where it belonged chronologically, rather than with accounts of episodes witnessed by de la Peña himself. In addition, de la Peña did not mention Crockett’s execution in a pamphlet he published in 1839,
Una Víctima del Despotismo
(A Victim of Despotism), which discusses the execution of “a few unfortunates” but does not name David Crockett as one of them, though he describes “a man who pertained to the natural sciences”—a brief description of an unnamed defender who somehow became Crockett in de la Peña’s note tucked into his manuscript. And, just as telling, he does not claim to have witnessed the executions himself in
Una Víctima del Despotismo.
Furthermore, neither Crockett’s name nor the executions are mentioned in de la Peña’s rewritten diary, supposedly the source of his main narrative—that manuscript doesn’t even contain entries for the dates from March 3 through March 7. Moreover, on that slip of paper (folio 35), de la Peña (or someone) claims to have witnessed the execution, and in the same sentence disingenuously suggests that General Ramírez y Sesma—an officer de la Peña despised, as he makes abundantly clear in his narrative—was one of the attacking officers, though de la Peña says he “will not bear witness to this, for though present, I turned away horrified in order not to witness such a barbarous scene.” That de la Peña the eyewitness would not have known if this was true is hard to believe on the face of it, but it’s highly unlikely that Ramírez y Sesma was there, since he was in command of the Mexican cavalry outside the fort and was quite busy overseeing the corralling and killing of some sixty Texian defenders there.

The other Mexican accounts cited by Crockett execution theorists are even weaker—all hearsay, second- and thirdhand accounts purportedly derived from Mexican soldiers (supposedly six officers and one sergeant), most of them so shaky as to emphasize the fact that few of those who cite them have examined them closely and critically. On the surface, as researcher Bill Groneman has pointed out in
Death of a Legend,
the most thorough examination of the accounts, “Six officers and a sergeant are a pretty impressive array of witnesses when taken at face value. However, when you scratch the surfaces of these accounts they reveal themselves to be other than pristine firsthand accounts.” The Dolson account, supposedly given to a Texan army sergeant, George M. Dolson, by an anonymous officer of Santa Anna’s, contains only a few historical inaccuracies (Crockett and five others are found in “the back room of the Alamo”; “Santa Anna’s interpreter knew Crockett,” a highly unlikely situation; and the captives are “marched to the tent [or possibly the flag, depending on the translation] of Santa Anna”)—but its author’s anonymity makes it highly suspect as a reliable source. The Colonel Urriza account—reported from memory twenty-three years after the battle by a man who claimed to have heard it from Urriza in 1836—tells of Castrillón leading “a venerable-looking old man by the hand” to Santa Anna, who orders his soldiers to shoot the prisoner, of whom the narrator says, “I believe… they called him Coket.” This vaguely worded identification (“I believe”? Who are “they,” and why were they qualified to identify him as “Coket,” and why would this mean “Crockett” and not “Cochran” or anyone else?) is little support for Crockett execution theorists. Even the staunchest of them, Dan Kilgore, author of
How Did Davy Die?
, labeled the Urriza account as “a controversial remembrance perhaps erroneously perceived and personally biased”—though he proceeded to cite it as one of the accounts supporting Crockett’s execution. Speaking of “Cochran,” another account offered as evidence—that of José Juan Sánchez—states: “Some cruelties horrified me, among them the death of an old man they called ‘Cochran’ and of a boy approximately fourteen years.” No executions are described, and of course “Cochran” is assumed to be Crockett.

Another account, this one attributed to General Cós, is just as unlikely, with Cós “searching the barracks” when he comes across “alive and unhurt, a fine-looking and well dressed man, locked up, alone, in one of the rooms.” When Cós asks him who he is, the defender in a lengthy answer reveals that he is Crockett, a noncombatant, who has been prevented from leaving the fort. When he is brought before Santa Anna, he draws a knife and leaps at Santa Anna, but is himself bayoneted. The historian who related the story, William P. Zuber (he of Moses Rose fame), denounced it as a gross falsehood, yet Kilgore presented it as supporting evidence for David Crockett’s execution. And the Sergeant Becerra account offers more absurdities: Becerra kills Bowie, then discovers Travis and a sleeping Crockett in another room, where Travis pulls out a large roll of money that he hands to Becerra in an attempt to buy his freedom. Then three Mexican generals and a colonel enter the room, and that’s when it really gets outrageous. That these last two accounts are cited as evidence of Crockett’s execution is especially shameful—and shameless. Todd Hansen, the highly respected author of
The Alamo Reader
and an impressively impartial analyst, rates the reliability of these accounts as either “rejected,” “poor,” or “marginal,” with only the Sánchez account receiving a “good” rating. (And to my knowledge, no one save Bill Groneman has pointed out that Crockett execution theorists conveniently ignore the fact that several other Mexican accounts testify to Crockett dying in combat—Madame Candelaria [Andrea Castañón Villanueva], Sergeant Felix Nuñez, Captain Rafael Soldana, and an unidentified Mexican army captain—accounts that suffer from some of the same reliability problems as those listed above.)