Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
Rose did not volunteer information about himself, but when acquaintances asked him why he hadn’t stayed in the Alamo, his invariable reply was, “By God, I wasn’t ready to die.”
Blake told of Rose’s final years, when he left Nacogdoches in the early 1840s. After a brief stay in Natchitoches, Louisiana, he drifted to Logansport, Louisiana, where he was given a place to stay by Aaron Ferguson, who owned a plantation nearby. He died in 1851 or 1852. Blake wrote that Ferguson’s daughter “stated that the old man was a great deal of trouble during the latter years of his life, because of the chronic sores caused by the cactus thorns in his legs, picked up during his flight from the Alamo… that for some time prior to his death, at the age of sixty-odd years, he was bed-ridden by reason of those chronic sores.”
Blake wrote a fulsome account of his findings, “Rose and His Escape from the Alamo,” though it was never published in his lifetime. (It was not until 2003, in researcher Todd Hansen’s monumental and comprehensive compendium of Alamo material,
The Alamo Reader,
that it saw publication.) But a brief overview by Blake (containing little of the background documentation) was included in a 1939 publication of the Texas Folk-Lore Society edited by well-known historian J. Frank Dobie and entitled
In the Shadow of History
. The book also reprinted Zuber’s 1873 account and an analysis of the subject by Dobie, an admitted romantic, who believed the story.
Blake’s findings were enough to persuade popular historian Walter Lord of the truth of the old Frenchman’s story, and he incorporated both Rose and the line into his 1961 book about the Alamo,
A Time to Stand
(although seven years later he professed doubt about Travis’s line, or at least about the evidence for it, in an article entitled “Myths and Realities of the Alamo”). But William C. Davis, in his superbly researched book on the Alamo’s major personalities,
Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis,
dismissed the story of Rose and the line. “Nothing in the story stands up to scrutiny,” he wrote of the Zuber account in an endnote, and concluded, “So far as this present work is concerned, the event simply did not happen, or if it did, then something much more reliable than an admittedly fictionalized secondhand account written thirty-five years after the fact is necessary to establish it beyond question.”
Davis is a rigorous historian, but he wrote that before a few other documents came to light.
A
MELIA
W
ILLIAMS
, author of the first extensive study of the battle—“A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo and the Personnel of Its Defenders,” which began life as her doctoral dissertation and from which five chapters were excerpted in modified form over four issues of the
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
in 1933 and 1934—also dismissed the story of the line, pointing out that she had not found it printed before 1873:
There is some indication, however, that it was in earlier circulation. Mr. A. D. Griffith… told me in 1929, that he had, in the early sixties, heard the fate of Rose discussed by his uncle, A. J. Griffith, and Captain Frank Dupree. Historians have been divided in their opinion concerning this story, the most careful students having discredited it. At best they consider it a legend, plausible perhaps, but almost certainly the creation of a vivid imagination.
Her statement on historians is accurate. Her private papers and correspondence, however, tell a richer and fuller story. In a 1932 letter, she expanded on what she had heard from Griffith:
Mr. Griffith [A. D. (Almeron Dickinson) Griffith, grandson of Susanna Dickinson, who was taken by his father after his mother, Angelina, separated from her husband] says that when he was a small boy just after the Civil War, he was wont to sit around and listen to his uncle, H. A. Griffith, and Captain Frank Dupree talk about wars and battles. He says he first heard the Rose story from them. This was down near Matagorda—in the old Caney country. He is quite sure this was before the story was published by Zuber. Mrs. Sterling [Susan Sterling, who lived with her grandmother Susanna Dickinson as a child] says that she heard her grand mother (Mrs. Dickinson) tell it many times. At first she was positive that she had heard it prior to 1873, but upon several weeks consideration she said she could not be certain whether she heard her grandmother tell the story before 1873 or not.
And in Ms. Williams’s handwritten rough notes of an interview with A. D. Griffith (found by Todd Hansen during his research for
The Alamo Reader
but not included there), there is even more:
As young boy sat for hours and listened to his uncle J. D. Griffith and Capt. Frank Dupree talk about early days. Says that some time in 60s heard them talk about Rose…. When he made his appearance at home and told about his escape from the Alamo—told all people he was sure Travis and all his men were dead by that time for there was no chance for them to hold out against St. Ana’s force. Said when Travis gave him chance to go he took it…. Capt. Frank Dupree saw Rose—When Rose said when all hope
lost
—
all
—Rose—said Rose crawled thru aqueduct after dark—said crawled 4 or 5 hundred yards in thistle—went home. Frank Dupree: You damn dirty coward or you would have stayed; Got chance at life and took it—All against him—worked on him so people talked about mobbing him—Afraid
and skipped out.
[Griffith] Must have been in 50s for was about 8 or 10 yrs old.
This is a significant document. Captain Frank Dupree (who earned that rank serving with the Texas Cavalry, then part of the army of the Confederate States of America, during the Civil War) told the Griffiths in the 1850s that he talked to Rose, who supplied the details listed above—many years before the Zuber account was published in 1873, and before A. D. Griffith could have heard it from his grandmother, whom he saw very little of as a child. Moreover, some details supplied by Dupree have never been published anywhere before now.
Corroboration of the A. D. Griffith claim appeared the next year from Dobie. In a 1940
Dallas Morning News
story entitled “The Line That Travis Drew,” he wrote: “Charles W. Ramsdell, professor of history in the University of Texas, and one of the pillars in the Texas State Historical Society, married A. D. Griffith’s daughter. Ramsdell tells me that he, too, used to hear Griffith relate the story—not however, as coming from Mrs. Dickinson but as coming from his paternal family, who were among the early colonists. When the revolution broke out, they were living in what is now Grimes County. According to tradition in the Griffith family, Rose came to their home on his way east from the Alamo and told of his escape.” (More information on the Zuber account—or at least the likelihood that the Rose story could have been accurately passed from Rose to Mrs. Zuber to her son—would be supplied in a July 4, 1967, column by Frank X. Tolbert. He quoted a June 9, 1935, affidavit by a grandson of Mary Ann Zuber, who wrote: “Grandmother had a wonderful memory. She could read any book and recite the gist of it from the beginning to end. I have heard her recite Shakespeare, Byron, or Milton’s Paradise Lost line for line. I have heard the Rose story many times and always told as the truth.”)
And in another letter, Williams related the opinion of Griffith’s sister as to the truth of the line story: “Mrs. Sterling [granddaughter of Susanna Dickinson, and raised by her] avowed that it was.”
Hansen found even more corroboration of the Rose story’s existence pre-1873 in Williams’s papers. She corresponded with a neighbor of the Zubers, W. T. Neblett, who wrote to her in 1935: “Now the Rose story published in 1873 was common Zuber family history and I cannot say definitely when I first heard the story but I feel sure that it was before 1873. I was born in 1857 and between 10 and 16 years old and living within 10 miles which was a neighbor distance in those days; and especially with our families friendly and intimate and my parents educated for those days I feel sure that I heard of it before 1873.” And in a subsequent letter, Mr. Neblett relayed a letter received from his sister, Mary Neblett Brown, on the subject:
“Yes, I heard the ‘Rose story’ from Pa himself. He had gotten it from the Zuber family. I heard Pa speak of it. He believed it. I see no reason to doubt it. Pa died in 1871.” [Their father, William H. Neblett, was an attorney who had lived in Texas since 1840 and had practiced law in Grimes County since about 1852.] No doubt I heard this story at the same time that my sister did which must have been 1868 or 69 as I know he had some business with J. R. Edwards, brother-in-law to Zuber, who lived close neighbor to the Zubers…. I know of my own knowledge that the older people of the community and the county talked of the Rose story and regarded it as a fact but I cannot fix on exact date prior to 1873.
Mrs. Brown is most emphatic about whom she heard it from—her father—and remembers quite clearly that “he believed it.” Her father died in 1871, before the appearance of the Zuber story in the 1873
Texas Almanac
.
A
S
I
WAS CONDUCTING THE RESEARCH
for the book you hold in your hands, I found a few items that, combined with the previous information, strongly point to the truth of the story of Rose and the line.
Frank Johnson, an early Texas colonist, was one of the firebrands of the Texas Revolution, involved from the outset in the territory’s fight for independence. He knew Travis, another member of the war party, well. Johnson moved to Austin in the early 1870s, and began researching and writing a comprehensive history of Texas. Left unfinished at his death in 1884, it would be completed by Eugene C. Barker and Ernest W. Winkler and published in 1914 in five volumes as
A History of Texas and Texans,
a tome well respected for its accuracy, information, and insight.
Johnson’s papers, most of them his handwritten notes and transcriptions, fill several boxes in the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. In one file labeled “Historical Notes—Alamo,” there is a transcription of Zuber’s 1873 Rose story. On the next page, in Johnson’s own hand, is written the following:
The foregoing communication was read to Mrs. Dickinson, now Mrs. Hannig, the only living witness of the lamentable and sad catastrophe of the Alamo. Says that she did not know Rose personally, but recollects that a man escaped at the time mentioned; that the troops were drawn up in line and addressed by Col. Travis.
Between the time of Rose’s escape and the fall of the Alamo, she heard the men speak of the escape, but none believed that he would get away alive.
We were well acquainted with the elder Zuber, during his lifetime, and knew him as a man of strict veracity. The family is highly respectable, and any statement made by them is entitled to full credit and belief.
Johnson and Susanna Dickinson Hannig both lived in Austin when Zuber’s “An Escape from the Alamo” reached the public late in 1872. It seems likely that Johnson—an indefatigable researcher, who died in Mexico while on a research trip—read the Zuber account soon after publication and decided to hear from Mrs. Hannig directly what she thought of the story. Certainly, participants sometimes incorporate the accounts of others into their memories—but Johnson makes clear that this was her first reaction to hearing the Zuber story, not an account rendered months or years later. The extra details she adds (“she heard the men speak of the escape, but none believed that he would get away alive”) sound genuine, particularly for a woman who was not known to possess a vivid imagination. (Despite some inconsistencies in interviews, possibly inserted by reporters, there is a conspicuous absence in hers of the absurdities that populate so many other Alamo survivor accounts.)
That Johnson talked directly to Mrs. Hannig, and believed Zuber’s story of Rose’s escape—at least in its essentials—once he heard her corroborate it, is clear from a December 26, 1875, story in the Galveston
Daily News
. Entitled “Heroes of the Alamo” (and sloppily edited and proofread, with a strikingly large number of misspelled names), it is chiefly concerned with the ongoing attempt by adjutant general William Steele to ascertain a correct roster of Alamo defender names. Steele had enlisted the help of Johnson, and a list is included in the article. On it is “Moses Ross,” obviously “Rose” misspelled. And immediately following the list is this: “Col. Johnson says Moses Ross escaped before the assault…. This list Colonel J. regards as full and complete as any that can be made at this distance of time.” The article continues:
The child who survived [Susanna Dickinson], and is now living in Austin, remembers a circumstance which might account for one of the absentees and reduce the number to that extent. The captain of one of the companies, the company being in line, called upon all his men willing to remain and fight to the last to step forward. All responded but one, and he was permitted to go. Whether this was the man sent with dispatches or the one who is reported to have escaped before the assault, or a third person who has never been heard from since, we can not tell. If living even, it is not likely he would at this time step forward to explain.