Others, however, expressed skepticism. In 1877, the adjutant general of Texas, William Steele, wrote Zuber inquiring about the story’s veracity. Zuber replied in a series of letters, often stretching the truth and going to great lengths to defend and explain his clearly embroidered original account. Around the turn of the century, he penned several articles for the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association in which he continued to defend it. In one, he admitted that his main purpose in writing it was to preserve for posterity Travis’s speech, and he had done so by compiling and rewriting his mother’s recollections of Rose’s “disconnected recitals,” as Zuber put it, and combining those with his feel for Travis’s style from his dispatches. Zuber also insisted that only one paragraph in the speech was his invention. He never revealed, at least publicly (or privately, in any known correspondence), which paragraph that was—or discussed the line at all. He wrote some good history—his posthumously published autobiography, My Eighty Years in Texas, is well regarded, and his unpublished, 1,500-page collection of Texan profiles is consulted frequently by historians researching the period. But he damaged his reputation by these labored explanations and by two other fanciful accounts of the Alamo that he passed on in published articles. One claimed to be an account of Bowie’s death furnished by a young Mexican army fifer, which is absurd on the face of it: when the bedridden Bowie is brought before Santa Anna, he insults the general, who then orders his tongue cut out. The other concerned Crockett’s death, and was even wilder and more unbelievable, though Zuber himself explained his contempt for the story, claiming he had only repeated it as an example of the absurd rumors spreading about the Alamo. Nevertheless, since the time of his death in 1913—the last surviving veteran of the Army of San Jacinto—he has been frequently labeled a teller of tall tales, and his story of Rose and the line has been labeled a legend at best.
Without corroborating evidence, historians were increasingly wary even of the existence of Moses Rose. His name was not on either of the two lists of the Alamo garrison—the January 15, 1836, muster roll or the February 1, 1836, election certificate—although other men known to have died in the Alamo were also not listed. (The garrison roster was somewhat fluid in the months between the battle of Béxar and the arrival of the Mexican army on February 23, with volunteers coming and going rather freely.) But the March 24, 1836, Telegraph and Texas Register had run a list of the fallen derived from couriers John W. Smith and Gerald Navan that included the entry “Rose, of Nacogdoches.” And Susanna Dickinson Hannig had mentioned the line more than once—first, in an interview conducted in September 1877 with someone from the Texas adjutant general’s office in which she had related the following:
On the evening previous to the massacre, Col. Travis asked the command that if any desired to escape, now was the time, to let it be Known, & to step out of the ranks. But one stepped out. His name to the best of my recollection was Ross. The next morning he was missing—During the final engagement one Milton, jumped over the ramparts & was killed—
Col. Almonte (Mexican) told me that the man who had deserted the evening before had also been Killed & that if I wished to satisfy myself of the fact that I could see the body, still lying there, which I declined.
There was no known Ross in the garrison, and it was pointed out that “Ross” could easily have been “Rose” to the illiterate woman, who surely could not have known the name of every man in the Alamo much less recall them after forty-one years. And as Zuber himself later observed, Almonte “would have made the same remark of any other man in the Alamo.”
Mrs. Hannig related the story of the line at least two other times. Less than a year after the 1877 interview, a correspondent for the National Police Gazette visited her in Austin. His article ran in the May 4, 1878, edition of the paper, and included the following account:
The chivalrous Travis coolly drew a line, requesting all who would stand by him to step over, a request all but one, without hesitation, complied with. He was permitted to take his departure, but was shot by the enemy in so doing.
She gave only one more newspaper interview. Three years later, in an April 28, 1881, story in the San Antonio Daily Express, a newspaperman described his walk through the Alamo with Mrs. Hannig upon her first return to San Antonio since the fall of the garrison there. He related her description of this particular scene:
But about one hundred and sixty sound persons were in the Alamo, and when the enemy appeared, overwhelmingly, upon the environs of the city to the west, and about where the International depot now stands, the Noble Travis called up his men, drew a line with his sword and said: “My soldiers, I am going to meet the fate that becomes me. Those who will stand by me, let them remain, but those who desire to go, let them go—and who crosses the line that I have drawn, shall go!” The scene is represented by Mrs. Hannig to have been grand—in that its location was above the results and influences of ordinary sentiment and patriotism, and bore the plain tige of that divinity of principle which characterizes the acts of the truly noble and the brave.
True, Mrs. Hannig—or the reporter—got the meaning of the line reversed: in this version, only those men who wished to leave crossed the line. And there is no mention of Rose. But in this account and the previous two, she had remembered that Travis had called the men together, addressed them, and offered each man the choice of staying or going—and included the fact that he drew a line to separate the groups.
Doubters pointed out that she had not mentioned the line, or Rose’s escape, before the appearance of the Zuber story in the 1873 Texas Almanac. But the fact is that she gave no interviews on the subject before 1873, at least that we know of. Besides a few published lines here and there from people who had talked to her, and a few short depositions concerning land claims for the heirs of three Alamo defenders, there was no extensive interview with or account from her when she died in 1883.
The story of the line, and Susanna’s testimony regarding it, was supported by the 1901 publication of The Life and Writings of Rufus C. Burleson, a collection of writings by and about an early Texas churchman who arrived in Houston in the late 1840s and later became the second president of Baylor University. In a floridly written (and clearly embellished) sketch of Susanna, he related how he first heard her story in 1849, when she came to hear him preach, and many times after that:
She has often told me of the solemn hour when the heroic Travis drew a long line with his sword and said, “Now soldiers, every man that is resolved never to surrender, but need be to die fighting, let him cross over this line,” and the 182 heroes leaped over the line at once. But the heroic Bowie, lying on his pallet or straw emaciated with consumption, could not stand up, but cried aloud, “Boys, do take me over that line, for I intend to die fighting,” and his companions carried him over amid the wildest shouts of applause.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the story of another Alamo survivor was featured several times in local newspapers. Enrique Esparza was eleven years old (or thereabouts, since reporters claimed a different age in some accounts) when he, his mother, and his siblings endured the siege and battle. In 1907, in his longest interview, a septuagenarian Enrique Esparza told San Antonio Daily Express reporter Charles Merritt Barnes his story, including the following:
Rose left after this armistice had expired and after the others had been sent for succor. Rose went out after Travis drew the line with his sword. He was the only man who did not cross the line. Up to then he had fought as bravely as anyone there. He had stood by the cannon.
Rose went out during the night. They opened a window for him and let him go.
Barnes interviewed several aging San Antonians about their Alamo experiences, and it is clear that he embroidered some of their accounts, adding details, supplying an elegant formality to their phrasing, and maybe prompting these senior citizens to remember events more than six decades removed. But did he insert the story of Rose and the line? Perhaps. Still, Esparza’s father, Gregori
o, was an artilleryman, so Enrique would likely have been familiar with most of the other gunners, particularly since the families were quartered in the church, almost directly below his father’s battery. Esparza also mentioned the line in another account, included in Rise of the Lone Star (1936), though it was related to the book’s author by her mother, who claimed to have heard it from Esparza:
When he [Travis] felt that they must fight it out alone, he gave his men a chance to say whether they would stay by him to the end. I saw him draw the line with his sword, and heard him say, “All who are willing to die cross this line.” I think all jumped across. Señor Bowie said, “Boys, lift my cot across that line.”
The Daily Express also ran an article written by another old-timer on June 16, 1912, entitled “Davy Crockett as I Knew Him,” by William Alexander Ridgway. In it, the author described his knowledge of the backwoodsman. He also wrote: “In 1880 I travelled in Texas and stopped one day with a man named Smith. He was a very old man…. He also told me of seeing one man many times who, in leaving the fort and making his way through the prickly pear, had suffered terrible torture, all the skin and flesh had come off the forepart of his legs and the bone was naked.” Yes, this is secondhand testimony, but if it’s authentic, it sounds very much like Rose on his way east.
Ridgway’s article was the last known mention of Rose for a while. Zuber’s story was edging into mythic territory. In 1908, it was deleted from the Pennybacker history, and when her textbook was replaced by another one in 1913, and that one was supplanted by a newer text in 1932, neither included any reference to Rose or the line. In 1914, there was no mention of it in Frank Johnson’s A History of Texas and Texans (more about this book later), nor was it mentioned in 1922’s The Republic of Texas by Clarence Wharton. It appeared that Rose and the line had made the complete transition to myth.
That was how matters stood until the 1930s, when a diligent east Texas researcher and Nacogdoches county clerk named Robert Bruce Blake took it upon himself to transcribe and sometimes translate a massive number of documents from the Nacogdoches and Béxar archives and from various collections—letters, financial records, censuses, muster rolls, family papers, proclamations, and virtually any kind of legal document imaginable. When he finished, the result was ninety-seven large volumes of typewritten transcriptions. He found quite a bit of information on Rose—enough, it appeared, to support the fact of Rose’s existence and involvement in some of the events of the Texas Revolution. Intrigued, Blake investigated further, even interviewing older residents of the area whose parents had passed down memories of Rose. Though much of Blake’s evidence was secondhand and thirdhand, or circumstantial, it appeared that Louis “Moses” Rose had indeed existed—and had actually escaped from the Alamo before the final assault, if Rose’s testimony in a half dozen legal cases involving the lands and heirs of Alamo defenders was any indication:
BLAIR: “Left him in the Alamo 3 March 1836”
CLARKE: “States he saw him a few days before fall of the Alamo—a single Man”
DAY: “Died with Travis in the Alamo”
HASKELL: “Knew him four years, supposes him killed in the Alamo”
SEWELL: “Knew him in the Alamo and left him there 3 days before it fell”
WILSON: “Knew him before the 2nd of May, 1835, was in the Alamo when taken”
It was clear, at least, that the judges in those cases (actually, the three men who sat on the Nacogdoches County Board of Land Commissioners, all distinguished citizens—Adolphus Sterne, later a Texas state congressman and senator; Dr. James Harper Starr, the future Texas state treasurer; and William Hart, the second chief justice of the county) believed Rose’s story and testimony to be true: though they rejected dozens of other claims, not one of these claims or the ten others in which Rose was deposed was disapproved. These depositions appear to validate the Zuber account of Rose’s escape—perhaps not in every detail but in terms of the larger picture. Blake found many other documents that testified to Rose’s existence and activities in Nacogdoches before October 24, 1835, when he sold some land and his household and personal effects to a neighbor. There is a gap after that until May 10, 1836, when an account in his name appears on the general ledger of a Nacogdoches merchant—silent testimony to (and circumstantial evidence of) his service in Béxar. Soon after his return, Rose opened a butcher shop, and court records and testimony present a picture of a man who kept to himself and maintained a surly temperament that sometimes rubbed people the wrong way—including the Mexican who tried to kill him with a knife and whom Rose then disarmed and injured with the same blade. Another man, a customer, complained about the tough meat Rose sold him: in response, Rose grabbed a Bowie knife and threatened to cut the unhappy customer in two if he ever complained again. When another man made the same complaint, Rose turned around to get a loaded shotgun he kept on a rack. The terrified man ran out the door, jumped a fence, and disappeared.
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.
AMELIA WILLIAMS, 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 conce
rning 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.
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