Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Three Roads To The Alamo

  The Lives And Fortunes Of David Crockett, James Bowie, And William Barret Travis

  William C. Davis

  Epigraphs

  We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole history of man is new. The great extent of our republic is new.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1801

  What is the American, this new man? He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.

  MICHEL-GUILLAUME-JEAN DE CRÈVECOEUR

  (J. HECTOR ST. JOHN)

  Letters from an American Farmer

  Millions of men are all marching together toward the same point on the horizon; their languages, religions, and mores are different, but they have one common aim. They have been told that fortune is to be found somewhere toward the west, and they hasten to seek it.

  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America

  MEN AND LEGENDS

  Stranger! should in some distant day,

  By chance your wandering footsteps stray

  To where those heroes fought and fell,

  And some old garrulous crone should tell

  The story of a nation's birth,

  Of human ashes mixed with earth—

  The bodies of the bold and free,

  Who bled and died for liberty—

  FALL OF THE ALAMO, The Knickerbocker, SEPTEMBER 1836

  The three first met at the American Theater in New Orleans on January 10, 1828. Andrew Jackson, his eyes set on the presidency, came to the Crescent City to be honored by a grand ball on the anniversary of his defeat of the British in 1815. Every political and social light in the region was there to shine, with Stephen Austin, the great colonizer of Texas, presiding as host. Sitting at Austin's side was an honored veteran of the Battle of New Orleans, James Bowie of Louisiana, while others on the dais were Congressman David Crockett of Tennessee and young William Barret Travis of Alabama.

  What each thought of the others at this first meeting, no one can say, though Bowie was already well known in the region as a man of audacious bravery, Travis was a youthful lawyer and political writer of note, and Crockett had a national reputation as a daring hunter and larger-than-life folk character. They came as a committee to go to Texas in advance of a host of future colonists, to spread American civilization and what would become Jacksonian democracy to the new Southwest. All three made speeches, Crockett extolling the transcendent virtues of Old Hickory, the man who would be the first people's president, and Travis saying much the same. Bowie added his mote to the praise of Jackson, then turned his words toward Texas. They were going to have to fight the Mexicans for possession of the new country, he warned. They might even have to die in defense of Texan and American liberty. If so, they were ready, and legions would follow them to glory.

  They were last together on February 25, 1837. A carpenter, his name lost to history, labored over a small coffin that morning. No ordinary casket, this box was to hold remains more symbolic than real, its burden not the body of a single man but a smattering of the ashes of two hundred or more. It was just nine days short of a year since they had died, their battered corpses immolated in one huge funeral pyre and two smaller ones. In the intervening twelve months the piles of ashes and charred bones just sat out in the open, blown by the prairie winds, picked over by foraging rodents, scattered by the passage of men and animals. The men those ashes once had been became truly a part of the soil they had died for. Still, more remained than the small casket could hold, and so only ashes from the two smaller piles went into the box. On the inside of its lid the carpenter carved three names—“Travis”—“Bowie”—“Crockett”—three to stand for them all, and now to rest forever together in this casket, united in eternity as they had been united in their deaths.

  And yet it is all illusion: On the one hand fiction become fact, and on the other misconception turned into history. Not one of them, not Crockett or Bowie or Travis (or Austin, for that matter) attended the Jackson dinner. There were no speeches of Texas and dying for liberty. The whole story is an invention.1 As for their burial together nine years later, it is quite possible—even probable—that not an atom of the onetime bodies of any of the three found its way into the coffin that bore their names.2

  They would become accustomed to not being where posterity supposed them to be. Near Morristown, Tennessee, there stands a Crockett Tavern, a twentieth-century building in which he never set foot, that may or may not be on the actual site of his boyhood home. In Opelousas, Louisiana, visitors tour the Jim Bowie House, a building he never owned or lived in and that has nothing whatever to do with him. At Perdue Hill, Alabama, restoration continues on the William Barret Travis House, for which not a scrap of evidence exists to establish it as his onetime home. No one is trying to fool anyone here. The Travis House sponsors admit that only local tradition associates him with the cottage. Opelousas forthrightly declares that the Bowie House is merely named after a famous former resident. The Crockett Tavern managers openly confess that their reconstruction and siting are conjectural. Certainly all three dwellings represent what these men could have lived in at some moment in their lives.

  And that in itself is significant, for in the eight score years since their deaths, their stories have been usurped by what they might have done, where they could have been, and even how they might have died. Such a vacuum of information dominates the major portions of their histories that supposition, fabrication, and myth have filled the empty spaces and are so oft-repeated that falsehood and legend stand side by side with fact in the canon of their biographies. The single instance of that famous January 1828 dinner in New Orleans shows how far from the truth their admirers have strayed. Demonstrably Crockett was at that moment a thousand miles to the east in Washington; Travis was an unknown eighteen-year-old student in rural Alabama who would hardly be invited to share a dais with anyone, let alone the next president; and Bowie, though the only one who might have been in New Orleans at the time, was by all associations opposed to Jackson. Whereas the story says that he was invited to speak in honor of his prominent role in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, in fact he was nowhere near the battle and saw no action at all in the War of 1812. This first meeting of the three whose names would be forever linked by their deaths at the Alamo simply never happened.

  Ignorance has been the curse of their posterity, and it still flourishes. Even while this book was being written Sen. J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina boasted of his fellow Carolinian Travis as the man who commanded the Alamo “with 3,000 Russians threatening to attack.”3 (Perhaps the aged Cold Warrior was simply confused, but then, he is almost old enough to have been at the Alamo.) More dangerous than carelessness or senility, both of which have affected the record of Travis and the others, has been willful ignorance. Anyone could have looked into the 1828 dinner story and easily discovered the impossibility of any of the three attending, much less making prophetic speeches about Texas. Anyone could have found the myriad contradictions and impossibilities that disprove all but one of the fabled Bowie duels and fights. Anyone could have disproved the myth and found the real reason why young Travis fled Alabama, abandoning wife and child. Anyone could have discerned the weaknesses that call into question, if not negate, the several supposed accounts of Crockett's death.

  Yet no one did, and in most instances those limning these lives have not looked. Like Americans in general, perhaps they were too enamored of the myth to want to supplant it with a reality that might be prosaic rather than lurid o
r heroic. We all part reluctantly with our myths, and the more so when by removing the fable, we leave a hole in the story that we cannot fill with fact, for in proving that something did not happen, we do not automatically establish what did. The biographies of all three of these men have been slim in the past. Remove everything founded in legend and hearsay and falsehood, and those lives would have been thinner yet. The biographers, just as much as their readers, have needed the myths to give some flesh to these dimly seen and still scarcely fathomed icons.

  James Bowie is an exaggerated example that speaks for all three. Much of what we might have known of the personal side of the man supposedly disappeared when two trunks of family papers were destroyed through carelessness. Perhaps it happened, perhaps not. Many a family has a cherished fable about the trunk filled with “old papers” that sat ignored in an attic, prey to mice and prowling children. Real or not—and it may not matter, since in any case Bowie does not seem to have been much of a correspondent—the absence of any such cache of family archives left the field almost entirely to the creators of folklore. “There have been many, many anecdotes published of the prowess of the Bowies,” said his brother Rezin's grandson John Seyborne Moore in 1875, “some of which have a little truth, but the most of which are fiction, out and out.”4 He was right, but having said that, Moore himself and other Bowie family members contributed their own full share to the growing corpus of fiction about their ancestor, producing in the main the most unreliable single body of information available on him. James Bowie left no direct descendants, and not one of Rezin's grandchildren who wrote about him ever met him, much less knew him firsthand, or ever really knew their own grandfather, who would have been their best source.

  Instead, in the late 1800s and early 1900s they produced as “family stories” amalgamations of what they read in the press, heard from friends, and dim thirdhand recollections. They became defensive, as family understandably will, when anything unflattering was said of Bowie, and actually dismissed as a fabrication the most accurate and authentic single personal source on him, his brother John's 1852 family memoir, chiefly because it connected him with the slave trade. They accepted the fictitious 1828 Jackson dinner fable, and 140 years and more after his death were still defending him against any critical comment, now basing their case on grossly fictionalized twentieth-century biographies that are little more than compendiums of mythology. One of the most prolific defenders of all was not even a member of the family, but the sister of Moore's wife, who not only never knew or met James Bowie or his brother but never knew anyone who did. Yet she produced letters and newspaper interviews that added immeasurable confusion to the Bowie saga.5

  It did not stop there. So great are the holes in Bowie's life that students have gone to extraordinary lengths to fill them. One tried the highly questionable technique of handwriting analysis to attempt to get some idea of his personality and state of mind, while another even engaged a widely known—and thoroughly discredited—self-proclaimed psychic, the late Peter Hurkos, to try to establish the ownership of a certain knife that he hoped had been Bowie's. Needless to say, Hurkos provided a wealth of information as he held and “read” the knife, and told the owner everything he wanted to hear, including episodes known by everyone but Hurkos to be fictional and drawn from published accounts that he had obviously researched beforehand.6

  It is almost as bad for Travis and Crockett. In 1834 the Monroe County, Alabama, courthouse burned to the ground, destroying almost all the records that could have told much of his life in Alabama prior to his departure for Texas. Moreover, when he left, in 1831, his remaining siblings were for the most part too young to have known him well, and they never saw him again. More than sixty years later, when they started producing statements about his life, they were writing about a man who to them was all but a stranger, making them just as susceptible to incorporating myths into their “recollections” as the Bowie family. Crockett, of course, became legendary while yet alive, meaning that his Biography was clouded by fabrication and myth even before his death.

  But for their dramatic ends on March 6, 1836, at the Alamo, perhaps only Crockett of the three would have attracted enough attention either for the creation or the dispelling of myth, since he was already a celebrity. It is their deaths that made their lives matters of interest; and, more fascinating still, in looking at their days prior to that chilly March dawn, they emerge as metaphors for their entire generation. This book was never conceived as an “Alamo book,” though inevitably that epochal event figures largely at the close, and looms over the whole with an ever-darkening shadow. Rather, this is a representative look at the three distinctive kinds of men who were responsible for pushing white American civilization west of the Mississippi, and at the same time of those sorts who ever appeared at the forefront of the move across the continent. Their involvement in Texas settlement and revolution, and their apotheosis at the Alamo, only magnified them as exaggerated portraits of hundreds of thousands of others. They were all products of the Scots-Irish migration; they were all the kind of men the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville had in mind when he wrote in the 1830s of the American penchant for “improvisations of fortune.” Crockett stood for the thousands who were always on the edge of the wilderness—the men for whom no home was ever permanent, not itinerants so much as seekers, their gaze always cast westward. Bowie epitomized those who invariably followed the Crocketts, the entrepreneurs and exploiters—the men who came and profited, often outside the law, and moved on to the next potential bonanza, their addresses almost as temporary as Crockett's. And then arrived Travis, the man of community and society, the lawgiver, town builder, even founder of a state or nation—one of the millions who came and stayed to create.

  They were, in their way, the new Elizabethans, and Tocqueville did not fail to observe that “the present-day American republics are like companies of merchants formed to exploit the empty lands of the New World, and prosperous commerce is their occupation.”7 Confronted with a seemingly limitless new frontier of inexhaustible resources, they saw in it the remaking of themselves, as each left the life in which he had failed east of the Mississippi and the Sabine, just as those earlier adventurers crossed the Atlantic to rebuild their fortunes. They came as rapacious consumers of land and wildlife, and with limited regard for those who already inhabited the new world they coveted. Yet they made something of what they took. Despite the mess their generation usually left behind, they were builders as well as destroyers. The lives and fortunes of Crockett, Bowie, and Travis reveal the full complexity of a people who were at once plunderers and patriots, and offer a stark repudiation to any who would see them or their era in a single dimension.

  “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest,” said Henry David Thoreau. “One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life.”8 That is where Crockett, Bowie, and Travis wanted to be—in that “new country”—where the wilderness gave them the freedom to make their fortunes out of the raw material around them. And that is what drew their generation with them. For those three the road west stopped at the Alamo. For those who followed, the horizon had no limit.

  1

  CROCKETT

  1786-1815

  I never had six months education in my life I was raised in obs[c]urity without either wealth or education I have made myself to every station in life that I ever filled through my own exertions…

  DAVID CROCKETT, AUGUST 18, 1831

  When he wrote his autobiography in the winter of 1833-34, David Crockett insisted that it should run at least 200 pages. That, to him, was a real book. As he wrote he studied other books, counted the words on their pages, and compared the tally with his own growing manuscript. As a result, when published his narrative spanned 211 pages, and he was content. By that time in his life he had been a state legislator, t
hree times elected to Congress, the subject of a book, the thinly disguised hero of an acclaimed play, a popular phenomenon in the eastern press, and touted for the presidency. Yet he devoted more than one-fourth of his own work to his youth: a time when his “own exertions” availed him nothing. He remembered youthful pranks, a few adventures, and vicissitudes that should have made him wise but only left him gullible. Repeatedly he returned to three things he remembered from his first eighteen years: that the father whom he loved was a stern disciplinarian and could be violent; that he wept easily as a child and as a young man; and that he was poor. Certainly it took no stretch of memory to recall the last in particular. For David Crockett poverty was never yesterday.

  His was the story of a whole population of the poor who started moving from the British Isles in the 1700s and simply never stopped. Despite the misnomer “Scots-Irish,” they were almost all Scots, as surely were Crockett's ancestors.1 Like so many who grew up ignorant and illiterate on the fringes of young America, he knew little of his forebears, and some of what he believed was erroneous. Indeed, that father whom he loved yet feared knew little himself, or else chose not to speak of it. Perhaps the child David did not listen or kept his distance, especially when John Crockett had been at the drink and felt ill-tempered and prone to reach for the birch.