Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
What seems never to have occurred to Kilgore, who claimed that these clearly faulty accounts were “mutually corroborative,” is that several of them derive from one rumor or fabricated story—a story either (a) based on erroneous or conflated information or (b) deliberately fabricated by a captive for his own purposes—to damage someone, most likely Santa Anna himself, or simply to curry favor with his captors. (William C. Davis, in “How Davy Probably
Didn’t
Die,” explains how and why some of these scenarios likely occurred, and how such a story could easily have spread.) As several historians have pointed out, from Walter Lord to Davis and Wallace Chariton, several of these Mexican accounts were rendered soon after San Jacinto, when imprisoned Mexican soldiers would say anything to their captors that might please them. (Another question never answered or even brought up by most Crockett execution theorists is how the Mexicans knew who Crockett was or what he looked like, though convoluted explanations of Almonte’s knowledge of him, sometimes involving paintings of Crockett that Almonte may have seen on a visit to the United States, have been made.)
The final argument against the Crockett execution theory is the fact that two men—Joe, Travis’s slave, and Béxar’s acting
alcalde,
Francisco Antonio Ruíz—were asked to identify Crockett’s body after the battle and did so, and they described their identification and the location in a manner that makes it extremely difficult to accept his death as being the result of a post-battle execution. Clearly, Santa Anna would not need Crockett’s body identified if he had just witnessed his execution. And Susanna Dickinson, in her earliest accounts of the battle, claimed that “he [Crockett] and his companions were found surrounded by piles of assailants.” Joe also described Crockett’s body as being found with the bodies of a few of his friends, with twenty-four dead Mexican soldiers around them, and Enrique Esparza (albeit in an account rated “marginal” by Hansen) also placed Crockett in front of the church’s large double doors, surrounded by a heap of slain attackers. Ben, Almonte’s servant, was also said to have pointed out the body of Crockett, whom he knew by sight, and to have found “no less than 16 dead Mexicans around the corpse of Colonel Crockett and one across it with the huge knife of Davy buried in the Mexican’s bosom to the hilt”—hardly the scene of an execution. Finally, Joe is quoted in Niles,
A History of South America and Mexico,
p. 327, as giving this information: “One man alone was found alive when the Mexicans had gained full possession of the fort; he was immediately shot by order of the Mexican chief”—no mention of Crockett being executed.
As Michael Lind points out in his article “The Death of David Crockett,” to believe the Crockett execution theory, “one must believe that Santa Anna executed the famous David Crockett, but neglected to mention the fact in his after-action report an hour or so later; that his personal secretary, describing and denouncing the execution of Texian prisoners in 1837, also failed to mention this fact; and that Enrique de la Peña himself neglected to mention it, in his account of the executions written in 1839.”
Clearly, the documentation presented thus far by the Crockett execution theorists falls far short of the level necessary for it to be considered fact. David Crockett may have been executed after the battle, but until stronger evidence is presented, let history show that he died fighting with his comrades.
For further information on the subject, see Chariton,
Exploring the Alamo Legends
(“Crockett vs. Kilgore, Santos, et al.: Davy’s Last Fight,” pp. 37–63); Chemerka, “The Death of Davy Crockett at the Alamo”; Connelly, “Did David Crockett Surrender at the Alamo?”; Crisp, “Davy in Freeze-Frame,” “Documenting Davy’s Death,” “An Incident at San Antonio,” and
Sleuthing the Alamo;
Davidson, “A Forensic Look at Crockett’s Death,” “How Did Davy Really Die?” and “When Propaganda Becomes History”; Davis, “How Davy Probably
Didn’t
Die”; Dettman, “Davy’s Death”; Durham, “
Where
Did Davy Die?”; Groneman,
Death of a Legend,
“A Witness to the Executions?” and “Some Problems with the ‘Urriza’ Account”; Hansen,
The Alamo Reader,
chapter 5 (“Special Commentary: Deaths of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett,” pp. 783–798); Harburn, “The Crockett Death Controversy”; Hawkins, “How Did Davy Die?”; Kilgore,
How Did Davy Die?
; Lind, “The Death of David Crockett”; and Lindley, “Killing Crockett,” parts 1–3.
De la Peña’s description of Santa Anna addressing his men is from
With Santa Anna in Texas,
pp. 52–53.
Joe (as heard by two independent witnesses who set down what they heard) described the single survivor who was executed as “a little man named Warner” and “a little weakly body, named Warner” (Hansen, pp. 75, 70)—an accurate description of Henry Warnell, the small former jockey. The execution of “Warner” was also mentioned in one of the earliest newspaper stories about the battle, which appeared in the March 24, 1836,
Telegraph and Texas Register
, details of which were provided by John W. Smith after talking to Susanna Dickinson. As far as is known, no one named Warner died at the Alamo.
Francisco Esparza’s request for his brother’s body is given in his 1859 deposition, reprinted in Matovina,
The Alamo Remembered,
p. 34.
Crockett’s dead body is described by Eulalia Yorba in her 1896 account, reprinted in Hansen, p. 527. Though Susanna Dickinson in one interview located Crockett’s body as “lying dead and mutilated between the church and the two story barrack building and [I] even remember seeing his peculiar cap lying by his side” (reprinted in Hansen, p. 46), in another interview she said of Crockett, as related by the interviewer, “He was killed, [I] believe” Hansen, p. 48), which sounds as though she didn’t know where Crockett’s body was. But the account of acting
alcalde
Francisco Antonio Ruíz, in which he says that he was asked by Santa Anna to identify the bodies of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett—“On the north battery of the fortress lay the lifeless body of Col. Travis on the gun-carriage, shot only in the forehead. Toward the west, and in the small fort opposite the city, we found the body of Col. Crockett” (reprinted in Hansen, p. 501)—is to me highly credible. Ruíz was most likely referring to one of the batteries or entrenchments along the west wall of the fort. His location is corroborated by the first serious historian of the battle, Reuben Potter, who talked to several Mexican soldiers, including some officers, during the research for his three extensive accounts, written in 1840, 1860, and 1878. In his final account, he wrote that “the body of Crockett was found in the west battery just referred to,” that being “the twelve-pound carronade which fired over the centre of the west wall from a high commanding position” (reprinted in Hansen, p. 702). However, in two subsequent commentaries, Potter refined the location. In the January 1884
Magazine of American History,
he wrote a letter to the editor (in response to an article about Crockett) in which he said, “Crockett’s body was found, not in an angle of the fort, but in a one-gun battery which overtopped the center of the west wall, where his remains were identified by Mr. Ruiz.” Finally, in his last known comment on the subject, he wrote another letter to the editor, this one in response to an article on Sam Houston. The letter was published in the October 1886 issue of
The Century,
where the editors related: “Captain Reuben M. Potter… states that Crockett was killed by a bullet shot while at his post on the outworks of the fort, and was one of the first to fall”—a location that appears to match Ruíz’s “small fort opposite the city,” most likely the outer half-circle entrenchment delineated on the map and view of the Alamo drawn by José Juan Sánchez (see Nelson,
The Alamo,
pp. 58–59), though the artillery battery atop the center of the west wall is also a possibility.
The account of the young woman dipping her handkerchief in her sweetheart’s blood is reprinted in Hansen, p. 469.
Santa Anna’s March 6, 1836, report to Tornel is reprinted in Hansen, pp. 340–41.
The number of the Mexican dead and wounded has been a point of mild controversy since the battle. The first reports making their way east to the colonies grossly exaggerated the casualties, which were often reported to be in the thousands—in one of the first newspaper stories about the battle, in the March 24, 1836,
Telegraph and Texas Register,
“about 1500 killed and wounded” Mexicans were reported. The most reliable Mexican accounts tally between sixty dead and 251 wounded (Andrade report, Hansen, p. 393) and about seventy dead and three hundred wounded (Santa Anna to Tornel, March 6, 1836, reprinted in Hansen, pp. 340–41); Almonte tallied sixty-five dead and 223 wounded (Hansen, p. 367). But Joseph Field, a physician captured at Goliad and sent to Béxar to minister to the many Mexican soldiers wounded in the Alamo battle, wrote on April 21: “There are now about one hundred here of the wounded. The surgeon tells us that there were five hundred brought into the hospital the morning they stormed the Alamo, but I should think from appearances there must have been more. I see many around the town who were crippled,—apparently two or three hundred,—and the citizens tell me that three or four hundred have died from their wounds” (Hansen, p. 612). Those figures are supported by a Mexican casualty report noted in Davis,
Three Roads to the Alamo,
p. 739, n. 22 (Mariano Arroyo report from the military hospital at Béxar, August 1, 1836, Expediente XI/481.3/1151, Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, Archivo Historico Militar Mexicano; also in Hansen, p. 378), which documents a total of 456 men treated from March 6 to August 1 in the Mexican hospital at Béxar (though that number includes the wounded men of Cós’s command from the Battle of Béxar in December—probably approximately sixty), seventy-five of whom died from their wounds. But as Todd Hansen points out in his thorough analysis of the subject (Hansen, pp. 778–783), “Undoubtedly many other sick were treated during the period covered”; he suggests that those additional men might be half the total number listed as treated. I suggest, for no concrete reason save that Hansen’s number of additional sick men seems somewhat high, that a figure closer to one hundred might be more accurate. Thus, total casualties likely comprised about seventy-five killed during the battle and approximately three hundred wounded, some seventy-five of whom died later of their wounds—figures in line with accounts by Santa Anna, Andrade, de la Peña, and Filisola. See also Thomas Ricks Lindley’s three-part article “Mexican Casualties at Bexar.”
The quote describing the Mexican army returning to Béxar after the battle is from Juan Vargas’s account, reprinted in Matovina,
The Alamo Remembered,
p. 101.
Sánchez’s journal diary decrying the empty victory is in Sánchez-Navarro,
La Guerra de Tejas,
p. 85 (my translation).
S
EVENTEEN
: T
HE
B
LEEDING
C
OUNTRY
The chapter title phrase is from Sam Houston, who referred to Texas as such in his March 2, 1836, proclamation: “The patriots of Texas are appealed to in behalf of their bleeding country” (reprinted in Houston,
Texas Independence,
p. 151). The epigraph is from Houston’s March 15, 1836, letter to James Collinsworth, reprinted in Chariton,
100 Days in Texas,
p. 370.
Susanna Dickinson’s post-battle ordeals were described to her grandchildren, whose memories, recorded years later, are reprinted in Hansen, p. 59, and in Williams to Asbury, January 31, 1934 (box 2, file 52, Samuel Erson Asbury Papers, BCAH), and in several of her interviews, primarily the one conducted on March 14, 1878, and reprinted in Hansen, p. 50. “Assist her safe” are the words of historian Edward Stiff, who also interviews her in
A New History of Texas,
p. 312.
Santa Anna’s missive, which begins “The General-in-Chief of the Army of Operations of the Mexican Republic to the Inhabitants of Texas,” dated March 7, 1836, is reprinted in Chariton,
100 Days in Texas,
pp. 345–46. That Ben was given this message and delivered it to Houston is corroborated in two places. Houston, in his March 15, 1836, letter to James Collinsworth, wrote: “Enclosed you will receive the address of General Santa Anna sent by a negro to the citizens. It is in Almonte’s handwriting” (reprinted in
100 Days in Texas,
p. 370), and a letter written by Joaquín Ramírez y Sesma to Santa Anna on March 15, 1836, says: “I ordered at once the proclamation to them in English that Your Excellency has served to direct to the people of Texas” (reprinted in Borroel,
Field Reports of the Mexican Army,
vol. 1, p. 19). Finally, Yoakum, in
History of Texas,
vol. 2, p. 106, writes: “Mrs. Dickinson brought with her a boasting proclamation of Santa Anna, which she had received from the hands of General Sesma, then at the Cibola, on his route, with the advance of the enemy, to Gonzales.” Yoakum was Houston’s friend and law partner at the time of writing, and had excellent access to the general, as is evident from the wealth of reports, orders, and memoranda included in the book’s appendixes.
That the veracity of Travis’s March 3, 1836, letter was questioned is noted in Lancelot Abbotts’s letter to General Steele of January 26, 1876 (box 1037, file 19, Lindley Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University).