Three Roads to the Alamo
Page 75
12 Daniel J. Sutton Report, January 1, 1821, Report of Register North of Red River, La., 1821-1890, Entry 293, Record Group 49, NA (the Sutton report, minus some important notations, is published in American State Papers, Public Lands, vol. 3, 599-602); Bill of sale, November 3, 1823, John Bowie to Hugh Johnson, Bowie Family Papers, Natchez Trace Collection, UT. Stephen Bowie acquired some Bayou Boeuf claims that had been confirmed in an even earlier report in 1816, but since the name of the grantee actually appears in the 1820 Louisiana census, and since there is no evidence that the land office ever suspected his claim of being forged, it was probably legitimate. Still, with the Bowies what one brother did, they often all did, so it is at least possible that some other Spanish grants that Stephen put forward for confirmation may have been bogus, but never exposed (Old Index of Private Land claims in Louisiana 1800-1880, Entry 273, Record Group 49, NA).
13 The texts of the deeds of transfer of the forged grants are entered in several parishes in Louisiana, but their earliest surviving record is in Avoyelles, where they were entered in February 23, 1826 (Conveyance Book E, 410-28). Bowie probably registered them even earlier in Rapides, but all those records were destroyed by fire in 1864. While there is not question of the fraudulence of the Bowie grants, it is worth mentioning as confirmatory that the Archivo General de Indias, Cuban Papers, at Louisiana State University, and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., fail to mention even one of the named grantees, and neither do the Pintado Papers at LSU.
14 Conveyance Book E, 413-22, Avoyelles Parish Courthouse.
15 Samuel H. Harper Report, January 6, 1821, American State Papers, Public Lands Series, vol. 5, 437.
16 Ibid., vol. 3, 599-602; vol. 5, 437.
17 Levin Wailes to John Millikin, January 1, 1821, American State Papers, Public Lands Series, vol. 3, 608-9.
18 Ibid., vol. 5, Edward Jones to Harper, February 7, 1824, 436, Harper to Crawford, March 9, 1821, 436, Harper to George Graham, Mary 24, 1827, 436-37, August 29, 1827, 437-38.
19 Testimony of Antonio Menchaca, March 1879, 127, testimony of Angus McNeil, 141, Veramendi v. Hutchins et al., Documents Pertaining to James Bowie, UT.
20 Conveyance Book D, 194, Avoyelles Parish Courthouse.
21 John Sibley to Josiah S. Johnson, June 26, October 5, November 1, 1821, Johnson Papers, HSP. There is a story, most recently published in Mims, Trail, 36-38, of Bowie at this time risking his life to save a runaway slave from two bounty hunters and then thrashing the offenders. Given that slaves in general were property to Bowie, and that this one in particular could have meant profit, it is inconceivable that he would act to help the runaway. IF anything it would have been more in character for him to thrash the bounty hunters and then turn in the slave for the reward himself, but given the nature of the source, it is safe to conclude that the episode is purely apocryphal.
22 Angus McNeil testimony, March 1879, Veramendi v. Hutchins, 141, Documents Pertaining to James Bowie, UT.
23 John Johnston to Josiah S. Johnston, May 25, 1821, H. A. Bullard to Josiah S. Johnston, November 13, 1821, John Brownson to Josiah S. Johnston, December 20, 1821, Johnston papers, HSP.
24 John Johnston to Josiah S. Johnston, May 25, 1821, ibid.
25 R. H. Sibley to Johnston, January 18, 1822, H. A. Bullard to Johnston, February 2, 1822, ibid.
26 Bowie was in Alexandria on May 2, 1822, for instance, and the burned Rapides Parish records would likely have revealed many more visits (Conveyance Book D, 345, Avoyelles Parish Courthouse).
27 Tregle, “Louisiana,” 162; William B. Chilton, com, “The Brent Family,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 20 (October 1912): 434; John Sibley to Johnston, March 8, 1822, Johnston Papers, HSP.
28 Tregle, “Louisiana,” 236-37; John Johnston to Josiah S. Johnston, November 29, December 27, 1822, Isaac Baker to Johnston, March 11, June 23, November 11, 1822, Johnston Papers, HSP.
29 Conveyance Record C, 247, Catahoula Parish Courthouse.
30 John Sibley to Johnston, June 26, August 14, December 24, 1821, Johnston Papers, HSP.
31 John Sibley to Johnston, February 26, March 8, 1822, ibid.
32 Flint, Recollections, 235.
33 Isaac Baker to Johnston, March 5, 1824, Johnston Papers, HSP. While no contemporary source puts Bowie in New Orleans during any of these winter, John Bowie, “The Bowies,” 381, states that James always spent the winters in the 1820s in the city, and we may safely assume that being there at Mardi Gras time, he would not ignore the festivity.
34 Lawrence Estavan, ed., “Edwin Forrest,” San Francisco Theatre Research Monograph 23 (San Francisco, March 1940): 25-26; William R. Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian (Philadelphia, 1877), 118-19. A lot of nonsense has been written about Bowie and Forrest, most of it generated by Forrest himself in the Alger book, which is really an autobiography. Forrest would claim in the book and afterward that he and Bowie became devoted friends until they fell out over a woman, and that Bowie so loved Forrest that he gave him his celebrated knife, “used by him awfully in many an awful fray.” It was pure fiction, from an actor who also invented much of his life history.
35 [J. Madison Wells], “James Bowie. Something of His Romantic Life and Tragic Death,” n.d., but post 1912, James Bowie Biographical File, DRT; Davis, Way Through the Wilderness, 245-46.
36 [Wells], “James Bowie. Something of his Romantic Life and Tragic Death,” James Bowie Biographical File, DRT. Internal evidence establishes J. Madison Wells as the probable author of this brief article, and sometime after 1912 as its date of publication, though it was certainly written several decades earlier. As the younger brother of Bowie's good Alexandria friends Samuel and Montfort Wells, Madison Wells was in a position to know much about Bowie. In this article he gives details of a romantic involvement with a Miss Gibson of Natchez that would have taken place at about this time, when Bowie did not own a home of his own. Supposedly her father opposed her interest in Bowie because of his wildness, and at the same time the son of another wealthy local planter named Parker sued for her affections. It led to a fight between Bowie and Parker and his brother, in which Bowie killed them both, was tried for the killings, and acquitted, while Miss Gibson soon died of yellow fever. No Parker appears in the Natchez area in the 1820 or 1830 censuses for Mississippi of Louisiana, nor is there any hint in the Natchez press of such killings or a trial. Since Wells was writing probably half a century, if not more, after the fact, the whole episode must be considered too garbed and encrusted with myth and embroidery to be able to sift any substantial truth from the nonsense, other than to conclude that Bowie did have dimly remembered romantic affairs and that they were no successful.
37 Rezin's 1823 trip to Havana is confirmed by the registration of the property he bought while there, and entered in conveyance Book D, 54, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse, Houma, Louisiana. The Baltimore commercial Transcript, June 11, 1838 says that Rezin went to Cuba “many years since,” even asserting that he engaged in a knife fight while there, though this is obvious hearsay, and probably an amalgamation of the association of both James and Rezin with the eponymous knife, and a confusion with James's growing mythical reputation as a fighter. That James went with him is almost wholly conjectural, though it would have been typically in character for the two to make the trip together. There are family stories that James went to Cuba, copied the Pintado papers, and used them to acquire his large Louisiana grant holdings. Of course, later members of the Bowie family knew nothing of James's forgeries, and naturally assumed that he got his land through energy and ingenuity. In later years the tricks of hearsay and memory may simply have amalgamated recollections of his land dealings with other memories of Rezin's quite genuine trip and involvement with the papers. In any event, as in so many other instances, family recollections and traditions about James Bowie and Cuba are wholly inaccurate. Lucy Bowie in 1955 even asserted that James copied the Pintado papers, and that the copies in his handwriting were now in Luisiana's archives (Lu
cy Leigh Bowie to Mr. Palmer, March 9, 1955, Lucy Leigh Bowie Papers, DRT). In fact, it is the original Pintado Papers that are now housed at LSU, and as a result of Rezin's later purchase of them, which is dealt with in a subsequent chapter.
38 James Whitcomb to J. A. Bynum, February 11, 1839, Letters Sent, vol. 5, Entry 200, Record Group 49, NA.
39 Isaac Thomas to Johnston, November 25, 1822, Johnston Papers, HSP.
40 George Mason Graham, “The Autobiography of George Mason Graham,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 20 (January 1937): 43, 46.
41 George Davis to George Graham, October 29, 1824, Entry 404, Record Group 49, NA.
42 Ibid.
43 Conveyance Book C, 246-47, 275, Catahoula Parish Courthouse; Conveyance Book F, 286, 287, 307, Ouachita Parish Courthouse.
44 George Davis to Graham, October 1824, Statement of Hiram Burch, Statement of Hugh white, December 5, 1823, Extracts of Letters and Other Documents Relating to Fraudulent Land Claims in Louisiana, 1823-1832, M1385, Record Group 49, NA; Conveyance Record F, 286, 287, 307, Ouachita Parish Courthouse.
45 McCrummon to Johnston, February 1, 1824, Johnston Papers, HSP.
46 Graham to John Wilson, April 15, 1824, American State Papers, Public Lands Series, vol. 4, 35.
47 Davis to Edmund Wailes, October 16, 1824, ibid., 35.
48 Davis to McCrummon, October 17, 1824, McCrummon to Davis, October 18, 1824, Entry 404, Record Group 49, NA; Davis to Graham, October 23, 1824, American State Papers, Public Lands Series, vol. 4, 37.
49 Davis to Graham, October 29, 1824, Entry 404, Record Group 49, NA. The date on this document is smudged, and could possibly be October 9 or 19, but the twenty-ninth appears to be the most likely.
50 Davis to Graham, November 1, 1824, American State Papers, Public Lands Series, vol. 4, 37-38.
51 Wailes to Graham, October 28, 1824, Entry 404, Record Group 49, NA.
52 John Hughes to Graham, March 25, 1825, American State Papers, Public Lands Series, vol. 5, 438.
53 John Johnston to Josiah S. Johnston, October 11, 1822, May 20, 1824, Johnston Papers, HSP.
54 Conveyance Book E, 262, Avoyelles Parish Courthouse.
Chapter 5 Crockett 1824-1829
1 Indenture, April 14, 1824, American Book Prices Current 1991, 97 (Washington, Conn., 1991): 46.
2 Turner, “David Crockett,” 387.
3 Shackford, Crockett, 74, 301n. Shackford tried to locate a copy of this circular, whose existence is confirmed, but without success. We know only that it was dated in 1824, nothing more.
4 Crockett, Narrative, 172. Shackford, Crockett, 73, says without any apparent source that Crockett had intended to seek reelection to the legislature but gave it up in favor of the congressional race. This is certainly possible, since campaigns for both offices would have been concurrent, and he could not run for both.
5 Crockett, Narrative, 173.
6 Jackson Gazette, June 18, 1825; J. M. Keating, History of the City of Memphis and Shelly County, Tennessee, vol. 1 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1880), 169.
7 Jackson Gazette, July 16, 23, 30, August 6, September 17, 1825.
8 Crockett, Narrative, 173.
9 Ibid., 174-94.
10 Arpad, “Crockett,” 146.
11 Crockett, Narrative, 195-99; Keating, Memphis, vol. 1, 181; James D. Davis, History of the City of Memphis (Memphis, 1873), 146-49. Keating, likely just reiterating Davis, misdates this episode to 1823. Davis, while probably to some degree influenced by Crockett's Narrative, clearly appears to have had access to firsthand recollections of the event from Memphians of the time.
12 Crockett, Narrative, 201-2.
13 Arpad, “Crockett,” 133; Folmsbee, “West Tennessee,” 11.
14 Arpad, “Crockett,” 163; Chapman in the Galveston Daily News, January 27, 1895.
15 Crockett, Narrative, 205.
16 David Mitchell Saunders to William A. Graham September 15, 1827, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, ed., The Papers of William Alexander Graham, vol. 1 (Raleigh, N.C. 1957), 159.
17 Historians have conventionally dated the term “loco,” when applied to a radical Democrat, to an 1835 convention in New York, when conservatives turned off the gas in the meeting hall to break up a gathering, but the participants continued by striking so-called locofoco matches, thus becoming known as “Locofocos.” There is some indication that the term saw earlier use applied to Jackson supporters. Crockett's use of the term “loco” is clearly related in context, but predates the supposed origin of the usage by fully eight years. The only other known usage of the slang word means “crazy,” and is a late-nineteenth-century derivation of “loco weed,” much too late and the wrong context to apply here. He must have been referring to the match in some fashion and for some unknown reason, and certainly the usage did not seem to baffle his audience or Graham's correspondent in 1827, but the term apparently slipped from usage until resurrected in 1835.
18 Saunders to Graham, September 15, 1827, Hamilton, Papers of William Alexander Graham, vol. 1, 159.
19 Folmsbee, “West Tennessee,” 9. Folmsbee questions the contemporary newspaper reports that have Crockett using these expressions, but the letter to Graham cited in note 16 above makes it clear from an eyewitness that he amalgamated the river boasts into his stump presentations. The Nashville Republican of March 18, 1828, indicates that Crockett made this boast when in the first session of Congress, but it is far more likely that the journalist was juxtaposing expressions commonly associated with Crockett in Tennessee with his conduct in Washington.
20 Christian Schultz recorded essentially these same boasts among flatboatmen in his Travels on an Inland Voyage, vol. 1 (New York, 1810), 145-46.
21 Crockett, Narrative, 203-4.
22 John W. Crockett to Charles Dunlap, March 6, 1827, in Shackford, “The Autobiography of David Crockett: An Annotated Edition” (Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1948), 554-55.
23 Folmsbee, “West Tennessee,” 9n.
24 Swisher, Swisher Memoirs, 19-20.
25 James Erwin to Clay, August 12, 1827, Mary W. M. Hargreaves and James F. Hopkins, eds., The Papers of Henry clay, vol. 6, Secretary of State (Lexington, Ky., 1981), 892.
26 Erwin to Clay, September 30, 1827, ibid., 1098.
27 Crockett to James Blackburn, July 5, 1828, Crockett Letters, Correspondence by Author, TSL.
28 Shackford, Crockett, 84-86.
29 Lewis Williams to Clay, November 15, 1827, Hargreaves and Hopkins, Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 6, 1269.
30 Crockett to Blackburn, July 5, 1828, Correspondence by Author, Crockett, TSL.
31 Williams to Clay, November 15, 1827, Hargreaves and Hopkins, Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 6, 1269.
32 Crockett to James Balckburn, February 5, 1828, Crockett Letters, Correspondence by Author, TSL.
33 Undated notes in Calvin Jones Papers, SHC, UNC.
34 Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol. 7 (Philadelphia, 1877), 361, November 27, 1827.
35 Arpad, “Crockett,” 188.
36 Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol, 7, 361, November 27, 1827.
37 Polk to Alfred Flournoy, December 6, 1827, Weaver and Bergeron, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 1, 101.
38 Crockett to Blackburn, February 5, 1828, Crockett Letters, Correspondence by Author, TSL.
39 Tennessee delegation to Clay, December 7, 1827, Weaver and Bergeron, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 1, 103-4.
40 Crockett to James L. Totten, December 17, 1827, Shackford, “Crockett,” 415.
41 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Mayer edition, 497-98.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Crockett to Totten, February 11, 1828, Special Collections, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
45 Chapman in Galveston, Daily News, January 27, 1895.
46 Walter Blair, Davy Crockett: Legendary Frontier Hero (Springfield, Ill., 1986), 110-11. This statement is quite possibly Blair's invention.
47 Chapman in Galvest
on Daily News, January 27, 1895.
48 Crockett to Totten, February 11, 1828, Special collections, University of Tennessee; Crockett to Mr. Seal, March 11, 1828, Crockett Papers, UT.
49 Crockett to Seal, March 11, 1828, Crockett Papers, UT.
50 Crockett to Blackburn, July 5, 1828, Miscellaneous Collection, Tennessee Historical Society, TSL.
51 William Henry to Polk, February 20, 1828, 151-52, N. Steele to Polk, March 2, 1828, 158, Weaver and Bergeron, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 1.
52 Alexander to Polk, January 26, 1828, Weaver and Bergeron, Correspondence of James K. Polk, vol. 1, 135-36.
53 Stanley J. Folmsbee and Anna Grace Catron, “David Crockett: Congressman,” East Tennessee Historical Society Publications 24 (1957): 48.