Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  18. Day and Ullom, Autobiography of Sam Houston, 119; Charles E. Lester, The Life of Sam Houston (New York, 1855), 82, 85.

  19. Holley, Notes, Holley Papers, UT.

  20. Lindley, “Truthful Deduction,” 19-21, 25. Lindley's is the best interpretation of Houston's noninvolvement in the Alamo story.

  21. Henry Austin to Mary Austin Holley, March 29, 1836, Holley Papers, UT.

  22. These figures are derived from the newly discovered Mariano Arroyo Report from the Military Hospital at Béxar, August 1, 1836, Expediente XI/481.3/1151, Archivo Historico Mexicano Militar, Mexico City. The document actually lists a total of 456 men in the Mexican hospital from March 6 to August 1, but that included the remaining wounded who had been left by Cós when he evacuated the previous December. Arroyo made no statement of their number, but others like Susanna Dickenson estimated them at about 60, so a battle wounded from the March 6 fight of 400 seems reasonable. It is possible that a few of the 75 reported as dying of their wounds were also some of Cós's men, but it seems most likely that men with wounds that would cause complications leading to death would already have died in the three months between Có's departure and the fall of the Alamo. This figure of 400 wounded in the Fight also agrees with what the surgeon told Dr. J. H. Bernard on April 21, 1836, as stated in J. J. Bernard, Dr. J. H. Bernard's Journal (Goliad, Tex., 1965), 29-30.

  23. Santa Anna Report, March 6, 1836, Santa Anna Papers, UT.

  24. Bernard, Bernard's Journal, 29-30.

  25. Potter, “Fall of the Alamo,” 17, 19; José Garcia to the Secretary of War, June 21. 1836, Expediente XI/481.3/1150, Archivo Historico Mexicano Militar, Mexico City.

  26. Asbury, “Almonte Journal,” 23, March 10, 1836; Bernard's Journal, 35.

  27. Seguín to Albert Sidney Johnston, March 13, 1837, Mason Barret Collection of Albert Sidney and William Preston Johnston Papers, Tulane University, New Orleans; Columbia, Tex., Old Capitol, May 5, 1838, clipping in Asbury Papers, UT; Marilyn McAdams Sibley. “The Burial Place of the Alamo Heroes,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 48 (October 1964): 272-73.

  28. Nat G. Smith to Amelia Smith, March 1836, Jenkins, PTR, vol. 5, 268-69.

  29. Robert Crockett to Rudd, December 30, 1879, Rudd Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  30. Caption Wheeler to Zephaniah Kittredge, May 24, 1836, “Documents of the Texian Revolution.” Alamo Journal 99 (December 1995): 17; Mortimer Wiggington to Col. Lewis, n.d., Jenkins, PTR, vol. 6, 21, Bridges to ?, July 21, 1836, vol. 7, 511; Shackford, Crockett, 239.

  31. Thomas Green to Rezin Bowie, April 9, 1836, Jenkins, PTR, vol. 5, 402; Rezin Bowie to Green, April 9, 1836, Thomas J. Green Papers, SHC, UNC.

  32. Green to Burnet, April 13, 1836. Green Papers, SHC, UNC; Notice, April 28, 1836, Jenkins, PTR, vol. 6, 111, Edward Conrad to Houston, April 30, 1836, 126; Natchez Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette, April 1, 29, 1836.

  33. John Quitman to Eliza Quitman, April 29, 1836, Quitman to Henry Quitman, July 31, 1836, Quitman Papers, UNC, SHC; Anonymous, May 1, 1836, Jenkins, PTR, vol. 6, 147; Stuart Perry to William Harris, May 16, 1836, Benjamin C. Franklin Papers, UT; Suggsville, Ala., Clarke County Post, May 9, 1836.

  34. Green to Thomas J. Rusk, August 1, 1836, Jenkins, PTR, vol. 8, 94.

  35. A Dimmit to John Johnston, February 17, 1837, Johnston Papers, HSP.

  36. Petition of Administrators of James Bowie, Memorial No. 451, TXSL.

  37. Affidavit of Horatio Alsbury, November 7, 1836, ibid.; Sears, “Low Down,” 198; Veramendi v. Hutchens papers in Documents Pertaining to James Bowie, UT.

  38. Probate records, Béxar County, July 10, 1837, copies in Crockett Biographical File, DRT; Treasury Warrant to Robert Crockett, August 22, 1837, Gary Hendershott Sale 87, item 2; Army Service Warrant, February 6, 1837, Jenkins, Texas Revolution Catalog 206; Robert Crockett to Rudd, December 30, 1879, Rudd Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

  39. Claims filed against the estate of Wm B. Travis, March 26, 1838, John R. Jones Account Book, Estate of William B. Travis, Travis Biographical File, DRT; Receipt of November 7, 1837, on estate of F. J Starr, T. W. Nibbs to Mrs. Starr, March 18, 1836, Account of sale personal estate of Franklin J. Starr, James H. Starr Collection, UT; Inventory of Estate of William B. Travis, transcript dated January 20, 1930, Mixon Papers, UT; San Felipe Telegraph and Texas Register, March 12, 1836 Columbia Telegraph, March 21, 1837.

  40. Reuben Potter, “Hymn of the Alamo,” October 1836, Dienst Collection, UT.

  41. Hollon and Butler, Bollaert's Texas, 222, 224.

  42. Ford Memoir, UT; Austin Statesman, April 7, 1877.

  43. Swisher, Swisher Memoirs, 20; Robert Crockett to Rudd, June 15, 1880, Rudd Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  44. Quitman to Eliza Quitman, January 16, 1836, Quitman Papers, SHC, UNC.

  45. Suggsville, Ala., Clarke County Post, June 13, 1836.

  46. Nashville Republican, April 11, 1836.

  47. New York Sunday Morning News, May 1, 1836.

  48. Brazoria Brazos Courier, March 31, 1840.

  49. Port Gibson, Miss., Correspondent, April 23, 1836.

  50. Harris to Mary Jane Harris, March 28, 1836, Adele Looscan Collection, San Jacinto Monument, San Jacinto, Tex.; Matagorda, Tex, Bulletin, October 11, 1837.

  51. Thomas Turner, “Living in the Shadow of the Alamo,” Baylor University Report 3 (March 1983): 20-21.

  52. M. J. DeCaussey to William B. Travis Chapter, January 31, 1895, DeCaussey to Rebecca Fisher, February 4, 1895, Asbury Papers, UT.

  53. L. W. Price to City Manager of San Antonio, August 4, 1939, Travis Biographical File, DRT.

  54. Bowie, The Bowies, 262.

  55. Ham, Recollections, UT.

  56. Sparks in Ellis, Crockett, 225.

  57. Bowie's death is also reported as February 17, 1841.

  58. H. D. Gilpin to Levi Woodbury, February 10, 1838, Ethan Brown to Woodbury, September 29, 1836, Correspondence Relating to Efforts to Acquire the “Pintado Papers,” 1836-1883, Unbound Records of the General Land Office Relating to Private Claims in Louisiana 1805-1896, M1385, James Shield to James H. Moore, May 31, 1845, vol. 10, 366-67, Letters Sent, Entry 200, NA; Works Project Administration of Louisiana, Pintado Papers, 1941, Stanley J. Arthur, “A History of the Pintado Papers,” iii-xvi. Rezin's partner White was the father of future Chief Justice of the United States, Edward H. White.

  59. Miller, Public Lands, 27-28.

  60. Hayward to Jackson, January 16, 1832, Entry 404, James Whitcomb to T. J. Williams, May 2, 1838, Entry 200, vol. 4, 208-9, Whitcomb to John Rothrock, May 3, 1838, 210-11, James Shield to John Moore, August 1, 1842, vol. 7, 487-89, William Armstrong to R. C. Nicholas, January 23, 1839, Memoranda of letters relating to claims in Sutton's Reports, Records Relating to the Private Land Claim of Antonio Vaca to Land in Louisiana, 1881-1882, M1385, NA; James D. B. DeBow, “Public Lands acquired by Treaty, etc.,” Commercial Review 5 (February 1848): 117-18.

  61. Natchez Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette, April 8, 1836.

  62. Porter, Reminiscences, 42.

  63. Houston, Telegraph and Texas Register, July 28, 1838.

  64. Philadelphia Pennsylvanian, July 19, 1838; James Rees, The Life of Edwin Forrest: With Reminiscences and Personal Recollections (Philadelphia, 1874), 451; “The Bowie-Knife and its Inventor,” American Notes and Queries 1 (June 2, 1888): 49-50.

  65. The fate of James Bowie's actual knife remains a subject of hot debate, and is of no real importance to this study. Family sources—that may be misinformed—maintained that Rezin's grandson lost the knife, it obviously having been given back to Rezin prior to the Alamo. Other sources claim that James lost the original, and had a copy—perhaps with some of his own refinements—made. Of course, no knife found at the Alamo by the Mexicans would have been likely to find its way back to the hands of Cushman, nor is there any solid evidence of Bowie giving anything to Forrest. Like any man who lived ou
tdoors and traveled extensively, Bowie probably had several such knives in his life. Currently there are at least two claimants for being knives that belonged to him, neither worthy of being taken seriously. One owner even engaged the services of the discredited “psychic” Peter Hurkos to support his belief, though Hurkos revealed his obvious prompting or prior research by reportedly “reading” as he held the knife a number of tales that are only part of the Bowie myth, for instance the story that Bowie was injured in a fall from a gun platform in the Alamo. See Joseph Musso, “A Bowie Knife,” Alamo Journal 84 (December 1992): n.p.

  66. Sparks in Ellis, Crockett, 221.

  67. Houston, Telegraph and Texas Register, June 20, 1850. The Carlyle statement is almost certainly pure fiction. Nothing in Carlyle's papers or biographies gives any indication that he ever even heard of Bowie.

  68. No attempt will be made here to list every known story of a Bowie fight or duel, but an examination of the more prevalent ones demonstrates the nature of them all. Moreover, as will be seen, all but one are exaggerations or embellishments based very loosely on only two original stories, both first appearing long after Bowie's death, and all highly questionable.

  The earliest known written or published account of a Bowie duel other than the Sandbar fight, was published by Nicholas D. Maillard in his The History of the Republic of Texas (London, 1842)102-4. The book is a viciously anti-Texian work condemned by most historians, and clearly attempted to portray Texians as drunken, violent, dishonest, and brutish. Maillard confuses James with Rezin Bowie, calls him “a reckless drunkard” who came to Texas as a fugitive from a duel, and even states that “Razin” (James) Bowie fought a duel in the Alamo a few nights before its fall. His first duel, we are told, was in Natchez in 1834, when, in a dispute over gambling, Bowie and a man named Black drew their knives and fought each other for twenty minutes while seated at a table, each being badly cut up before Bowie rose and killed the other in a rage.

  Though written just six years after James Bowie's death, and only fifteen years after the Sandbar, the Maillard account has clearly garbled several stories that he heard while in Texas, and embellished them with his own imagination. He has James and not Rezin inventing the first knife, then has Rezin being the duelist who dies in the Alamo. The first duel at Natchez—the Sandbar—took place in 1827, not 1834, involved no one named Black, and of course did not take place at a card table. It is faintly possible that the reference to Black is a very garbled echo of the stories just reaching print the year before about James Black of Arkansas being the maker of a knife for Bowie. As for Bowie fighting a duel a few nights before March 6, he was too ill to walk, and so would hardly be getting into fights with fellow defenders. The business of the knife fight while seated at a gaming table is almost certainly as exaggerated variant of stories common about riverboat gamblers who whipped out knives and cut off the fingers of men caught cheating. Maillard also may have incorporated stories he could have heard of a bloody game sometimes played by boatmen in Natchez called “snick-a-snack,” in which men sat around a table and on a signal started hitting each other on heads, shoulders, and hands with their knives, and kept at it until the first one cried to stop (David, A Way Through the Wilderness, 124-25, 249). There is no evidence that Bowie ever played such a game.

  The Maillard account may reflect a commonly garbled version of the Sandbar fight circulating in Texas in the early 1840s, for William Bollaert in October 1843 heard an account that made Rezin, not James, a participant, and that has him killing Norris Wright with “a small couteau de chasse or Bowie Knife made for him by one of his brothers” (Hollon and Butler, Bollaert's Texas, 246n). Bollaert's informant, apparently an unidentified Dr. Wooster, confused James with Rezin just as did Maillard's sources, though without the character sleights. If anything, these confused versions of the Sandbar affair so soon after Bowie's death show how little real factual information of his early life was known in his adopted home, a situation ideal for the creation of myth of fill the vacuum.

  The next story to surface, and the one with the most variations, appeared first in the Houston Democratic Telegraph and Texas Register, June 20, 1850. It states that on June 4, 1835, Bowie was on the steamboat Rob Roy going from St. Louis to New Orleans, where he saw a large gambler entice a young Natchez merchant into a game in which the card sharp cheated the innocent of everything he had, while the victim's wife watched, weeping. When it was finished, Bowie challenged the gambler to another game, identifying him as John Laffite, the son of the pirate and smuggler. In the play Laffite cheated again, but Bowie still beat him, after which he and Laffite fought a duel on the deck and Laffite fell dead. This same article is also the origin of the legend that Thomas Carlyle expressed some kind of admiration for Bowie's exploits, as it happens, a story that in all probability is equally spurious.

  Three years later the Marshall Texan Republican, June 18, 1853, repeated the story, now calling Bowie “the Napoleon of Duelists,” and attiring him in a red calico shirt and buckskins ornamented with tassels and beads. Thereafter the embellishments continued. Thirty-one years later Ben C. Truman, the Field of Honor (New York, 1884), 290-96, has the affair take place in June 1832, and this time on the steamboat Orleans near Vicksburg. Sometime around 1900 or later Martha Bowie Burns, daughter of John Bowie and niece of James, referred to this story in an article titled “Eventful Lives of the Bowies,” in an unidentified newspaper (James Bowie Biographical File, DRT), and said that her father, John, told her about it and was an actual witness, and that it happened on the Orleans in 1831 or 1832. She does not name Laffite. After another decade or more A. J. Sowell, in the San Antonio Light, May 4, 1917, placed the Laffite fight in 1830, did not name the steamboat, but identified the victim as Harry Richardson and his newlywed wife as Milly Musgrove, both of Natchez, and said the money lost was five hundred dollars they were taking to New Oreleans to get merchandise for starting a store in Natchez.

  Some time after the appearance of the Martha Burns article, another appeared by an anonymous writer in an unidentified issue of a newspaper called the Illustrated American (clipping in Bowie Biographical File, DRT). It borrows from the Burns article in several places, including the erroneous statement that the Bowies built the first steam sugar mill in Louisiana. It then gives a further embellished version of the encounter on the steamboat Orleans, this time placing it in 1832, and now having the victim be a young Natchez newlywed who had collected a load of debts in New York due to Natchez merchants while on his honeymoon. He is fleeced by a gambling syndicate on the boat, but Bowie gets in the game, the stakes rise to a hundred thousand dollars, and Bowie wins. In the fight that follows he kills the lead gambler and returns the money to the victim. This account also borrows obviously from the February 28, 1881, San Francisco Chronicle article dealt with below, since it reiterates the nonsense that in the Sandbar fight six men were killed and fifteen wounded.

  The original form of the story is riddled with problems, and none of the subsequent changes and elaborations make it any more plausible. For a start, in June 1835 Bowie was in Monclova, Mexico, not on the Mississippi or anywhere near a steamboat. While the smuggler Laffite did have a son, he was named Pierre, not John, and he was born in 1816, making him only nineteen in 1835, when the story would have him being an accomplished gambler and dangerous duelist. The Truman version, happening in 1832 on the Orleans, would make the Laffite son a mere sixteen, while the Sowell version placing the event in 1830 faces the problem that Laffite would now be just fourteen, and the Orleans was not built until 1831! Martha Burns's article is full of inaccuracies and stories she picked up from other sources (recall that she was apparently unaware of her father's abandonment by Nancy Scroggins, and thought he had been widowed, and knew nothing at all about his having a second wife prior to marrying her mother). Internal evidence dates it sometime after 1896, when she would have been at least sixty-three, and probably older and possibly approaching senility, for the mistakes the names of two of her three marri
es sister's husbands, and anything told her by her father would have been about a forty-year-old recollection, since he died in 1859.

  The next duel story known to have appeared reportedly saw print sometime prior to 1861 in the New York Spirit of the Times, the nation's leading repository of humor and folklore, and the source of a great deal of the early Crockett legend. The actual issue has not been found, but the article was reprinted in the Jacksboro, Tex., Echo, May 25, 1877, and cited in Rohrbaugh's thesis “James Bowie and the Bowie Knife,” 44-45. In it Bowie fights with a Spanish planter, using rifles, each standing back to back and then marching a certain number of paces before being given the word to turn and fire. Bowie is the faster and kills his opponent. Rohrbaugh regards the story as only a legend, and suggests that it is an early variant of a story to appear in the June 2, 1888, issue of American Notes and Queries 2, 49-50. In that an unidentified writer cites Charles Durand's “History of the Philadelphia Stage” for a story about a Spanish neighbor of Bowie in Terrebonne goading him into issuing a challenge. The Spaniard named knives and specified that they were to fight facing each other seated astride a trestle. Bowie easily killed his adversary, and later gave the knife to the actor Edwin Forrest. William F. Pope in his 1895 Early Days in Arkansas, 46, says that a year or two before publishing his book he met a descendant of one of Bowie's (of course there were none, so he must have meant a descendant of one of Bowie's brothers) who told him of a duel James fought with a Mexican, sitting on a log, nailed to it by their leather pants so that neither could get away. The descendant was probably Martha Bowie Burns, who retells this episode in her “Eventful Lives of the Bowies” (DRT) post 1896, starting with a nearly vebatim lifting from the American Notes and Queries article, which was obviously her source, but to it she adds the variation of the leather breeches, and the men being nailed by them to the log. Presumably she did not invent this, but no doubt head it somewhere and added it to the story. The idea of nailing a pair of duelists to a log by their pants while they fought to the death with knives was an old frontier cliché, as stated earlier in this work, and may never have actually happened.