Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  In fact, just as Crockett died in March 1836, an infant Samuel Clemens lay in his crib fat to the northeast. When he grew to manhood he would use his pen to continue and expand the evolution of a distinctive brand of American literary humor that had its roots in Crockett. Huckleberry Finn would be but the young David Crockett, still on the road, still having adventures, and still amusing and charming generations. Americans were reluctant to let him die. In February 1840 when a letter came from Camargo with a report that Crockett survived the battle and now worked as a slave in a Guadalajaran mine, the public quickly felt renewed hope before the story proved to be spurious.48

  Travis, by contrast, was a disembodied name to the nation outside Texas. No one had heard of him before the Alamo, and thus his inclusion in the listing of the heroes' names failed to resonate. He never became a folk hero, for he did not fit the mold of the time. He was educated, moved with no air of violence about him as did Bowie, nor had any of Crockett's legendary frontier exploits and eccentricities. As time went on, many outside Texas simply forgot him, never having known him in the first place, and only Crockett and Bowie would stick in the memories of the people at large. Yet those who knew Travis remembered “a man of transcendent talents,” as one Texian said a few weeks after his death.49 His old friend DeWitt Clinton Harris thought him “brave and Gallant,” and another Texas editor concluded that he was “a man who was endowed with talents scarcely inferior to the bravery which has placed his name next to that of Leonidas on the List of heroes.”50 But there would be no growth of legend around his exploits as with Crockett. His memory did become entangled with its share of myths, but perverse ones that made him a murderer or a fool in Alabama, and a man with a death wish at the Alamo. Nearly a century after his demise a few men began a rumor that he left Claiborne to escape retribution for killing a man who had cuckolded him with Rosanna, and somehow Alabamians preferred to believe that rather than have a man now a hero be remembered as a fugitive from debt. Decades after the Alamo, a second- or thirdhand claim emerged that a survivor said shortly before the final attack that Travis told his men they were all destined to die, and drew a line in the dirt with his sword, asking those who would stay to cross and stand with him. It, too, was entirely imaginary, but this legend caught the imagination of the nation, and with it Travis reemerged as a national hero, not just a Texian icon.

  Sadly that did little to help his family. Cato took Charles back to his mother and her new husband, Samuel Cloud, who raised him until they both died in a fever epidemic in 1848. Young Travis went back to Texas and actually won a seat in the legislature at age twenty-two, showing some of his father's precocity. But he also had that irresponsible streak, would not stay with something when he started it, and in 1856, as a lieutenant in the Second U.S. Cavalry, then commanded by that same Albert Sidney Johnston who had buried his father's ashes, he was cashiered for dishonesty. He went on to get a bachelor's degree in law at Baylor University in 1859, but died the next year, barely thirty.51 He left no children, but his sister Susan married and had a daughter. Alas Travis's granddaughter fared no better in life than had his son. She married a man named DeCaussey, but by 1895, almost sixty years after her grandfather's death, they were all but destitute, and selling family mementos like Travis's Bible and his famous February 24, 1836, letter to the State of Texas just to live. In desperation, they appealed to the William Barret Travis chapter of the patriotic descendants' organization, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, who by then owned and operated the remains of the fort as a historic site. They wanted the Daughters to hire DeCaussey as a janitor at the Alamo.52 As if that was not irony enough, many years later, in August 1939, an old and financially strapped Mark A. Travis, nephew of the hero, tried to secure the same job.53

  Bowie fared somewhere in between Crockett and Travis in memory. His celebrity prior to the Alamo extended only to western Louisiana and Arkansas, Natchez, and of course Texas. Moreover, when men spoke of him at all, it was not in exaggerated myths and frontier stories, but all-too-factual discussions of his land dealings. His name appeared only twice in the eastern press, the first time in relation to the Sandbar brawl, and the second time in the publication of Rezin's account of the San Saba fight. There was no Bowie mythology before March 6, 1836. The reality of his immediate legacy was uncertainty in some quarters in Texas as to his real motivation in espousing the cause, and an overpowering sadness among his family in Louisiana. His mother took the news bravely, and supposedly only commented that she doubted any wounds would be found in his back. Of course, given the circumstances of his death, there was no question either of heroism or cowardice on his part, but she would never know that. 54 Caiaphas Ham was in Louisiana when the news came. It “almost crushed many hearts in that sunny land where Col. Bowie was best known and most appreciated,” he remembered years later, though he may have been overstating the case a bit, considering that many chiefly knew and appreciated Bowie for his land frauds.55

  Yet there is no room for doubt about how Rezin took the news. His involvement in raising volunteers for Texas did not at all relieve him of his anger and anguish. His friend William Sparks watched as, for the next five years, Rezin brooded over James's death. It sapped him of his vitality, and he lost all zest for the adventures and enterprises of yore. He sold out and moved to Iberville Parish, but the move affected no change, and the physician attending him in his melancholy told Sparks that “the death of James Bowie was killing Rezin.”56 Never before contentious, he now began to guard his brother's reputation, and especially against a growing number of fictitious stories placing James in duels and fights, generally in defense of the innocent. He wrote for publication in 1838 a denunciation of all such stories, emphasizing that James had only ever been in one fight, and that at the Sandbar. Revealing his hurt and his anger at seeing his beloved brother's memory beginning to fall into the hands of mythmakers, he even threatened to challenge to a duel himself those who created falsehoods about James. By January 18, 1841, he could fight his poor health and his sorrow no longer. He died in New Orleans, leaving John, the eldest, the only survivor of all the Bowie brothers.57

  Before he went, Rezin had been at work on one more Bowie land deal, and one that no doubt would have appealed to James. Indeed, only months after his brother's death, Rezin made another trip to Cuba, to see the widow of Vicente Pintado. She had all of those land survey plat books from his days as principal surveyor before the Louisiana Purchase. For some time before his death he made a little money by providing certificates of the surveys to grant holders and purchasers. These grants, of course, were all quite genuine, and in the continuing confusion over titles in the state, his documents were vital. If Rezin ever had any notion of copying James's claim techniques, knowing all the details and actual location of genuine grants would be an enormous advantage in any fraudulent scheme. If James had had access to Pintado's papers, he might never have made the errors that resulted in his being discovered. But Rezin was no fraud. With two other partners, John wilson of Missouri and Judge Edward White of Louisiana, he bought the papers from Pintado for more than five thousand dollars, probably intending to do a fair business in continuing to provide certificates of survey, and nothing more. But when he died he had done nothing with them as yet, and efforts to sell them to the General Land Office failed. His brother would have found some much more imaginative use for the Pintado papers if he had gotten them.58

  James Bowie's imagination in land dealings did continue to manifest itself long after his death. In Texas one of the first acts of the new constitution was the invalidation of most of the eleven-league grants he had held.59 Far more important and far reaching, however, were his Louisiana frauds. Even before his death, their extensive number actually delayed the proper survey and sale of public domain property in Louisiana, to the injury of the U.S Treasury. By 1838, two years after his death, the term “Bowie claims” became a euphemism in Washington for fraudulent titles. As the surveying of the state progressed, time and time a
gain a genuine survey was found to conflict with a title already issued on the basis of one Bowie's false grants, with the government forced to provide the innocent claimant property elsewhere at no benefit to the Treasury. Sutton's 1821 report achieved a remarkable notoriety by the late 1830s, most of it being Bowie's forgeries. By 1848 the popular press in Louisiana, discussing the decades-old problem of bogus grants, paid him a backhanded compliment when James B. D. DeBow declared in his influential Commercial Review that “none of these secured for themselves a greater notoriety as holders of fraudulent land claims than James Bowie, a man of courage and daring.” The problems continued until March 13, 1844, when Senate Bill 110 passed Congress, attempting to clear up the confusion caused by Bowie's activities. Even then the difficulties did not end. In 1882, nearly half a century after Bowie's death, his Antonio Vaca forged grant was still sending litigants to court to decide the ownership of the land. His schemes may not have succeeded entirely, but Bowie managed to leave the state of Louisiana and the U.S. government a legacy of fifty years or more of confusion.60

  Perhaps it was fitting, then that the imagination of others went to work quickly on Bowie himself. A month after his death his old friends in Natchez would read of “Gen'l Bowie” in their papers, as if he had somehow been promoted from the colonelcy he never really held.61 Before long states in which he never once set foot began to claim him. Some said he had been born in Georgia, South Carolina, or Tennessee, and by the 1850s citizens in Travis's old Alabama home thought they recalled Bowie living in a double log house on the road from Claiborne to Burnt Corn, giving Monroe County claim to two Alamo heroes.62 People began confusion James with Rezin just two years after his death, in 1838 speaking of “Col Bowie, the inventer of the celebrated knife that bears his name,” and how he left behind two daughters who were excellent marksmen.63 In July 1838 the noted actress Charlotte Cushman claimed to have James Bowie's actual knife, taken from his baggage left in the Alamo, and some years later Edwin Forrest made claims that he had the famous eponymous blade, a gift from James himself.64 Both were obvious lies, but just as some found they could cash in on Crockett's fame, so too did a few people attempt to make capital from Bowie.65

  Rezin at least tried to correct the record on the knife and its uses. In 1838 he published a letter in the press detailing exactly how he made the first one, the one that James carried and used at the Sandbar fight, and then forthrightly pointed out that his original differed considerably from the extensive variations of the 1830s as the rage for large knives took over. He would take no credit for what he had not done himself. So solicitous was Rezin of his beloved brother's memory that if James actually had invented the design of the great blade then sweeping the frontier imagination, surely he would have promoted rather than discouraged such a claim. Similarly, he also denied the growing body of legend that put James and himself in a number of duels and “medleys” in the Mississippi Valley. Neither was ever in a duel, he said, and James only took part in one, admittedly legendary, frontier brawl, and only ever used the knife in personal combat that one time, and then only after he had fired his pistols.

  No one wanted to listen. By the 1850s the same craze for invention that created a mythical Davy Crockett alongside the real one took over James Bowie. His old friend Sparks saw it happen, commenting on how Bowie's undoubted notoriety as a violent man gave rise to “many an imaginary and ridiculous story of doubtful morality.”66 In time the real man was completely forgotten, not an altogether unfortunate circumstance in some respects, since forgotten, too, were his land frauds, the slave smuggling, the intimidation, and more. Instead, legend makers quickly engrafted onto his unquestioned bravery and spirit of adventure a host of new escapades. Yet, in and evolution from the frontier legend of Crockett of the 1830s, by the 1850s and later, the eccentricity and out-landish feats and boast were gone—ironic, since boasting was one unquestioned trait of the real Bowie. In their place this newer frontier society substituted increasing violence. The great majority of the Bowie stories that emerged involved him in fatal duels, often acting as the heroic protector of some victim or underdog, and even borrowing from old—and probably never used—dueling idioms like the participants being nailed by their trousers to a log, to ensure that they fought until one died. In these legendary fights Bowie killed the son of his old fried Jean Laffite, turned out unscrupulous gamblers in Natchez like Jack Sturdivant—who perhaps never lived—and more. After Rezin died in 1841 and was no longer able to refute them, they took over completely. Bowie was the Good Samaritan, helping a minister battle distruptive rowdies. He was the gentleman, defending ladies against ungentlemanly conduct. He was the invincible gambler, winning back small fortunes for dupes unwittingly cheated at cards. According to the growing legend, great men as far away as England, such as Thomas Carlyle, extolled Bowie's bravery and prowess.67 Like Crockett, he was the Trickster at times, and yet at the root of all of the Bowie legend lay at least the hint of violence—and more often the fact. Whatever he did and wherever he went, there was always that knife. So completely did the legend take hold that after just two generations, Rezin's own grandchildren knew almost nothing of the reality of James's life, and firmly believed the legends instead, becoming themselves an influential source of misinformation.68

  It was in that several inches of sharpened steel that lay the ultimate irony of Bowie to posterity. Innumerable legends made him, not Rezin, its designer, and the attachment of the family name to a weapon that caught public imagination ensured that the two would be inseparable. A big knife was practical, no mystery in that, and as more and more men came across the Mississippi to challenge the frontier, they needed one, more as a tool than a weapon. In 1834 a British visitor noted the growing craze for such knives—Rezin always said that others designed and made this new variety—and commented that they “got their name of Bowie knives from a conspicuous person of this fiery climate.”69 The next year they were being made in Boston and Cincinnati and elsewhere, and by 1841 James Black claimed to have made them in Arkansas. The year after Bowie's death, the Alabama legislature passed legislation decreeing that anyone carrying a Bowie knife who subsequently killed a person in a fight would be charged with premeditated murder. Mississippi prohibited it as a dueling weapon, and in 1838 Tennessee tried to ban its sale. By 1839 the name caught the imagination sufficiently that the Grenada, Mississippi, Bulletin changed its name to the Bowie-knife.70 No one could ever say for certain just how the knife got its name, whether for Rezin who made the early prototype and apparently made others as gifts for friends, or for James, who only used it once in action. If James does deserve the credit, it is probably because after 1827 he was so often seen wearing the large knife at his belt, and that identified the blade with him.

  That distinctive type of American frontier character was evolving from bumpkin and prankster, like Crockett and Mike Fink, toward a more sinister stereotype, surrounded by the ever-present danger and violence of the less civilized new West. At the same time a terrible weapon like a big knife seemed to symbolize the cold determination and occasional savage brutality of the new American, who in this generation would create aphorisms like “war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt”. He was a far cry from Nimrod Wildfire, and unlike Crockett, there was no living man for the new icon's image to ride. The dead Bowie was perfect for this new folk hero, however. He was brave, he could be brutal, and he once killed a man with the big knife. That was enough. Ironically, he became ultimately the blade's most famous victim, for the rising legend attached to the knife and the mythology that put it repeatedly in James's hand in duel after duel all but killed the memory of the historical James Bowie.

  As the craze for the knives spread, his fame and growing legend spread with them, until both were suddenly superseded a generation later by a newer and vastly more deadly weapon, the repeating pistol. When the “six-gun” came, it created a whole new dimension for the frontier hero, and the knife went back to being a utilitarian instrument, and the Bowie le
gend stopped growing. Yet he lived on in a way, for behind the new revolvers there was still the essential man of violence—fearless, quick to fight, yet a defender of the weak. American mythology simply took the Bowie of the knife myth and put a gun in his hand. And still beneath the myths and fables lay something fundamental. They all turned on an undeniable truth. This was James Bowie of the Sandbar and the San Saba and more. Even if he had not done all those legendary deeds, few doubted that he could have done them. Unsaid in every bit of the Bowie lore was the implicit feeling that if only he had not been confined to his cot by cruel fate and illness that March morning, then Santa Anna and his army might still be trying to get into the Alamo.