NINETEEN: LAST RITES
The epigraph and the other Juan Seguín quotes are from his speech given upon burying the remains of the Alamo defenders; it is reprinted in the Telegraph and Texas Register of April 4, 1837.
Susanna Dickinson’s 1881 return to the Alamo was chronicled in the April 28, 1881, San Antonio Daily Express. Details of her daughter’s tragic life are in the Austin American-Statesman of October 14, 2000.
Details of Joe’s escape are given in the ad taken out by Travis’s executor, John Rice Jones, which ran in the Telegraph and Texas Register from May 26, 1836, through the month of August, 1836; Joe’s alleged sighting in the Austin area is noted in Pittman, “One Did Survive!”
The details of Louis “Moses” Rose’s ordeals, and his later life, are in “Documents from Nacogdoches County Records Relating to Moses (Louis) Rose,” Robert Bruce Blake Collection, BCAH, reprinted in Hansen, pp. 274–82; in Jelinek, Survivor of the Alamo, pp. 201–5; and in phone conversations during September 2011 with historian Raymond Powell of Mansfield, Louisiana, who generously supplied his notes on the subject. Although Jelinek adds some fictional touches to Rose’s story, the basic elements are rooted in fact, as he interviewed descendants of the Ferguson family. See also the Afterword.
The information regarding Gonzales after the Texas Revolution, and the activities of the Kent family, are from Wilkes, “The Andrew Kent Home,” and Bennet, “The Battle of Gonzales.”
The Crocketts’ move to Texas, and details of Elizabeth Crockett’s life and death there, are from Lake, “David Crockett’s Widow.”
AFTERWORD: MOSES ROSE AND THE LINE
The epigraph is from a Frank Johnson note in “Historical Notes—Alamo,” p. 773 (box 2D187, Francis White Johnson Papers, BCAH).
The Walter Lord quote explaining the paucity of primary accounts of the Alamo is in Lord, “Myths and Realities of the Alamo,” p. 18.
The J. Frank Dobie quote about the line is reprinted in Hansen, pp. 286–87.
The William P. Zuber article “An Escape From the Alamo” was first printed in the 1873 Texas Almanac, which is available at the Portal to Texas History website, http://texashistory.unt.edu/.
The July 20, 1876, letter from Rufus Grimes to E. M. Pease is in the AGO File, TSLA.
The cum grano salis comment is in Morphis, History of Texas, p. 187.
The September 1877 Susanna Dickinson Hannig interview with the Texas adjutant general’s office is reprinted in Hansen, p. 48. The September 14, 1877, letter of William P. Zuber to General William Steele commenting on the interview and Almonte’s quote in it is in the AGO File, TSLA.
The interview in the National Police Gazette has not been reprinted since its May 4, 1878, appearance; thanks to Joseph Musso, who supplied it. The May 19, 1881, interview in the San Antonio Daily Express was Mrs. Hannig’s last and most extensive.
As an old man, Enrique Esparza was interviewed several times. The May 19, 1907, San Antonio Daily Express interview by Charles Merritt Barnes was his last and longest; it is reprinted in Matovina, The Alamo Remembered, p. 82.
The account by Esparza in Driggs, Rise of the Lone Star, is reprinted in Hansen, p. 117.
The Robert Bruce Blake information about Rose can be found in the Proceedings of the Board of Land Commissioners, Nacogdoches County Clerk’s Office, which can be found in Blake’s “Documents from Nacogdoches County Records Relating to Moses (Louis) Rose,” Robert Bruce Blake Collection, vol. LXI: pp. 126–40, BCAH, and are also reprinted in Hansen, pp. 273–74, 278.
In his book Alamo Traces, Thomas Ricks Lindley argues that Blake misrepresented his original sources. But the crucial documents cited by Blake that Lindley claims do not exist—specifically, the Proceedings of the Board of Land Commissioners—were found by Todd Hansen in the office of the county clerk in Nacogdoches County. Hansen was allowed to photocopy excerpts from the original proceedings; he subsequently transmitted a copy to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo on June 11, 2005, for their vertical file on Moses Rose, and verified that Blake’s transcript accurately reflects his cited source.
Blake’s “Rose and His Escape from the Alamo” is reprinted in Hansen, pp. 274–82.
More evidence of Rose’s nature is evident in a document I recently found, dated October 31, 1834. It is a petition signed by fifty-two of the town’s citizens, addressed to the Department of Nacogdoches political chief, Henry Rueg, requesting permission for Louis Rose to be allowed to make a living by supplying the town with fresh beef (another citizen had managed to obtain an exclusive license to do the job). The signatories state their wish to see “Louis Rose occupied as usual instead of stalking unemployed about the streets and stores” (Nacogdoches Archives, pp. 244–248, BCAH).
The Davis quote concerning his disbelief in the line is in Three Roads to the Alamo, pp. 731–32.
The first Amelia Williams quote about A. D. Griffith and the line is from her groundbreaking “A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo,” p. 31. The second Williams quote about Griffith (and his sister, Mrs. Susan Sterling) is found in a letter from Williams to Samuel Asbury, dated February 1, 1932 (box 2A138, Samuel Erson Asbury Papers, BCAH). The Williams notes from her interview with Griffith are in folder 6 (Dickinson), box 2N492, Amelia Worthington Williams Papers, BCAH.
The Dobie column about Charles Ramsdell appeared in the Dallas Morning News of March 31, 1940.
The Amelia Williams quote stating that Mrs. Sterling “avowed that it was” when asked about the truth of the line story is in a letter from Williams to Samuel Asbury, dated November 7, 1933 (box 2A138 [the Alamo File], Samuel Erson Asbury Papers, BCAH).
The two letters from W. T. Neblett to Amelia Williams are dated April 4, 1935, and April 26, 1935, and are in the General Correspondence folder for 1935 (box 2N490, Amelia Worthington Williams Papers, BCAH).
The Frank Johnson quote is found in the file entitled “Historical Notes—Alamo,” p. 773 (box 2D187, Francis White Johnson Papers, BCAH).
See chapter 15 endnotes for details and citations regarding the last night in the Alamo.
Dobie’s discussion of the line is reprinted in Hansen, p. 286.
For more on Rose and his foolhardiness in claiming to be a deserter rather than an Alamo scout, see Lon Tinkle’s entertaining but fanciful 13 Days to Glory, pp. 184–85, where he makes this point in a discussion of the Zuber account. A final tantalizing tidbit can be found in the BCAH files, in the Samuel Erson Asbury Papers. Asbury, a leading historian of the Texian revolution, corresponded with many other historians, including Roy F. Hall, author of Collin County: Pioneering in North Texas (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 1975), who lived in McKinney, Texas. At one point, Hall was heavily into research for a book on the battles of Texas, and in a letter to Asbury dated August 26, 1933, he wrote: “By the way, I recently unearthed something which hints that one man from the Alamo made his way through the lines on the 3rd of March, and this was written [in] 1848!” (this letter is in box 2A141, Samuel Erson Asbury Papers, BCAH). When Hall’s manuscript was finished, he sent it to his publisher, who lost it. Apparently it was the only copy. Hall’s papers were burned in a fire in his widow’s house in 2002.
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