Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  65 Travis Autobiography, 1833, quoted in Kuykendall, Sketches of Early Texians, Kuykendall Family Papers, UT.

  66 Executions unsettled on the docket 1828 to 1832, Dellet Papers, ADAH.

  67 James Savage to Dellet, January 21, 1831, dellet Papers, ADAH.

  68 Porter, Recollections, Porter collection, Auburn.

  69 Ibid.

  70 Petition, December 1831, Conecuh Trial Cases, March 1831, Dellet Papers, ADAH. Dellet's papers confirm that the session of the Monroe court commenced in March 1831.

  71 Porter, Reminiscences, Porter Collection, Auburn.

  72 Ibid.

  73 Kuykendall, Sketches of Early Texians, Kuykendall Family Papers, UT.

  74 Mixon, “Travis,” 9, argues that Travis was “a respected and responsible citizen” in Claiborne, obviously an erroneous conclusion.

  75 Arrest orders, March 31, 1831, arrest order for William M. Cato, October 10, 1831, Dellet Papers, ADAH; Benjamin F. Porter, The Porters in America, biographical notes, Porter Collection, Auburn.

  76 Monroeville, Ala., Journal December 22, 1966.

  77 A. Mead to Austin, February 15, 1830, Eugene C. Barker, ed. The Austin Papers, Vol. 2, (New York, 1919-26), 332.

  78 Dellet to John Murphy, February 12, 1831, Dellet Papers, ADAH.

  79 Marquis James, The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston (New York, 1929), 180, makes the absurd claim that in late 1830 Travis was in correspondence with Sam Houston in regard to the conquest or purchase of Texas by the United States, the inference being that his had something to do with Travis leaving Alabama. There is, of course, absolutely no authority for such a statement, or for the myth that two years earlier, in January 1828, Travis attended the Jackson dinner in New Orleans and made a speech.

  80 Rosanna Travis to Dellet, September 6, 1834, Dellet Papers, ADAH. It should be pointed out that several writers have perpetuated a myth that Travis was well off when he left for Texas. Williams, “Critical Study, III,” 81, says that “it is generally stated that Travis left Alabama in financial straits, but this is probably not true, since he is known to have left a bank account of a considerable amount for the support of his wife and child. It is true, however, that he left all he had for the support of his family.” To support this she cites a Travis family tradition told her by D. W. Stallworth, a distant Travis cousin, in February 1930. John Myers, the Alamo (New York, 1948), 117, says that Travis “left his very comfortable bank balance,” and Virgil Baugh, Rendezvous at the Alamo (New York, 1960), 143, is even more imaginative. “Clients began to pour in,” he said of Travis' practice. “They established a fine house, made friends, became quite prominent in the social life of the town,” and when Travis left he did so “after making provision to turn over to his wife most of his worldly wealth, including a sizable bank account.” All are complete nonsense. Travis was broke and left Rosanna with nothing but debts that were still on Dellet's docket, unpaid, two years after Travis left.

  81 The tone of Porter's Reminiscences makes it quite clear that he is writing to mitigate an impression left by the manner of Travis's departure from Claiborne, and this combined with Rosanna's comment about her husband's “deficient” integrity to others, adds up to establish that he fled town without telling his creditors that he was leaving. Further, the absence of any listings or summons for Travis in the Dellet papers after June 1831 indicates that by then his creditors had given up on collecting from him, circumstantial evidence that they regarded him as having run out on his bills.

  82 Robert E. Davis, ed., The Diary of William Barret Travis, August 30, 1833-June 26, 1834 (Waco, Tex., 1966), 9 the entry for September 8, 1833, indicates that Travis is arranging for a man to return to Claiborne to “buy my paper for me,” meaning to redeem his notes.

  83 McDonald, Travis, 58, says that Travis left on horseback. While he offers no authority for the statement, it is probably correct. the last document in Claiborne bearing Travis's name is a note in the Dellet papers dated February 5, 1831, for fifty bushels of corn, undoubtedly for his horse, and among the unpaid bills he left behind was a blacksmith's account for shoeing a horse, establishing that he certainly had one such animal. Blacksmith account book, Dellet Papers, ADAH.

  84 The date of Travis's departure is conjectural. No document places him in Claiborne later than February 5, 1831, and he first appears in Texas on May II. Such a trip would not take him three months, however, and since the court did not sit until March, and its arrest orders did not start to go out until March 31, an early April departure is far more likely. As for his route, all is conjecture, but if he went by horse, his most direct route was across the Alabama, on to Fort Stephens, then across Mississippi to Natchez, and so on to Texas. The only roughly contemporary source, Porter in his Recollections, merely says that Travis left “soon after” his embarrassment by Dellet in court, which would again argue for April.

  85 Of all the myths surrounding Travis in Alabama, the majority—and the most ridiculous—relate to the reasons for his leaving. One maintained that he was caught in a land fraud (Clarence R. Wharton to Mixon, April 12, 1929, Mixon Papers, UT). Another suggested that while a resident of Clarke County—which he was not—he objected to moving the courthouse from Clarkesville to Grove Hill, and when he lost the argument, left in a huff. Even more ridiculous is that some prankster clipped his horse's tail, so angering Travis that he refused to live in Alabama any longer (Travis J. Benson to Mixon, March 22, April 6, 1829, Mixon Papers). More accounts state that he left because of the breakup of his marriage, though the evidence of his repeated expressions of his affection and his intent to come back to Rosanna for two years after he left, casts very serious doubt on this (Rosanna Travis to Dellet, September 6, 1834, Dellet Papers, ADAH). Travis himself, in his 1833 “autobiography,” stated that “my wife and I had a feud which resulted in our separation,” though a man as proud as he could hardly be expected to write that he really left to evade debt (Kuykendall, Sketches of Early Texians, Kuykendall Family Papers, UT). His nephew Mark Travis, who never met or knew him, and who got his information from Travis's brother James, who also never knew him, repeatedly said that Travis left because of marital discord (Mark Travis to Samuel Asbury, April 17, 1929, Mark Travis to Rayburn Fisher, March 23, April 4, 1929, Mark Travis to F. J. McGuire, April 20, 1929, Mixon Papers, UT). An undated clipping circa 1920 in the Mixon Papers also quotes Milda Stewart, supposedly a Travis cousin, as saying that he left Alabama “a broken hearted crushed man as a result of trouble in his own family.” Mixon, “Travis,” 10-11, has accepted marital problems as the primary reason for his departure. At the time she wrote, the Dellet papers and the Porter Recollections were not yet available.

  The most ridiculous of the myths concern Travis killing a man who had seduced Rosanna. The stories seem to originate with Dabney White and M. M. Fountain of Alabama, and first appeared in 1928, though White supposedly was telling the story many years earlier. These were expanded upon in 1936 by a Daisy Burnett and collected, first by Ruby Mixon in 1929 for her thesis on Travis, and later by Alabama historian Ed Leigh McMillan. Basically Travis caught a gambler or man about town dallying with his wife and waylaid and shot him. When an innocent man—in one version a black—was charged with the crime, Travis defended him, and when he lost the case and the man was to be hanged, Travis confided to Dellet the real story, and Dellet told Travis that he would keep his secret long enough for Travis to pack and leave for Texas. The man was freed surreptitiously and told to disappear. There are variations in the story, such as that Travis believed that the child Rosanna was pregnant with at the time was not his own, that Dellet was the judge in the case, that Travis was really just a spectator at the trial, and suddenly jumped up and confessed his own guilt to save the accused, and that the accused was white rather than black (M. M. Fountain to Marian B. Owen, December 19, 1928, Daisy Burnett to Ed Leigh McMillan, 1936, Ed Leigh McMillan, Memorandum, May 26, 1940, Memorandum with Regard to William Barret Travis, August 24, 1957, Travis Surname File,
ADAH; Mixon to Asbury, 1929, Samuel E. Miller to Mixon, March 17, 1929, Mixon Papers, UT).

  Interestingly, when these stories were presented to Mark Travis, he maintained that he had never heard anything of them either from growing up in the region, or from his father, James C. Travis. The only explanation circulating in the family for William's departure was marital discord. Historian Samuel Asbury regarded the murder stories as false and hoped to disprove them, but subsequent biographers have been less critical (Asbury to Marie Owen, January 29, 1932, Travis Surname file, ADAH). Mixon, “Travis,” 488 takes no firm position on the question, and Turner, Travis, 7-12, 15, is equivocal, though suggesting that the legends were probably just that. McDonald, Travis, 50-54, suggests that Travis knew Rosanna too well before they were married to trust her afterward, but offers no support for this, nor for the statement that “ample evidence” suggests that Travis suspected her of infidelity. He concludes that Travis suspected that she was pregnant with another man's child, even though in his subsequent will Travis acknowledges Susanna Travis as “my daughter.” In the end he concludes that “what seems indisputable is that Travis killed a man because of his wife's amorous involvement or suspected involvement.” Yet the sources he cites—all listed above—are all third-, fourth-, even fifthhand stories, originating with people who never knew Travis personally and never set down on paper until 100 years after his departure from Claiborne. McDonald reiterates this conclusion in his “Travis: The Legend and the Legend Makers,” Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas 13 (1982): 42, saying that “the truth is he killed a man who was suspected of intimacy with Rosanna and left for Texas to forget the mess.”

  For a start, all the Mark Travis testimony is tainted by derivation from his father, who knew nothing of his brother firsthand. The claims that Travis divorced Rosanna are incorrect; she divorced him, as the laws of Alabama and the surviving record make clear, to be cited subsequently. Moreover, as revealed in her September 6, 1834, letter to Dellet, and in Travis's own diary, no court awarded custody of the children to Travis; Rosanna agreed to give up Charles to him of her own accord long before the divorce proceedings commenced.

  Then there is the murder story, and this, interestingly, may contain a grain of truth, that gossip and fading memory engrafted onto the Travis story. As reported in Travis's own newspaper, the Claiborne Herald, December 5, 1829, William Foster was assassinated at his home in November, and a slave was charged with the crime, tried, and convicted. A year later, but more that four months before Travis left Claiborne, someone slipped the black a key to his cell and he escaped (Dellet to Moore, December 4, 1830, Reward files, Governors' Papers, Gabriel Moore, ADAH). As Travis himself stated in his editorial on the Foster murder, it was particularly shocking since it had been two years since there had been a murder in that vicinity, and the escape of the presumed killer would make it even more memorable.

  The story bears some superficial resemblance to the Travis legends. Putting the two together suggests that the tricks of memory and sanitizing took over in later years. Once Travis became a hero, the people of Claiborne would remember the way he left the community by night, in disgrace, five years earlier, yet no one but Porter ever left a recollection of his reason for leaving, his debt. As time went on, and with the tendency of memory to confuse chronology and to compress time, the four months between the disappearance of the black murderer and the disappearance of Travis—the two most memorable Claiborne happenings of 1830-31—could easily be reduced until the two became virtually simultaneous. If there really were contemporary rumors about Rosanna's fidelity, then this added to the other tow events could produce cause and effect. And what community—or even family, for that matter—would prefer that its most famous son be remembered as leaving it because of escaping debt, versus taking manly action to avenge an insult to the sanctity of his home. In short, the legend actually enhances Travis's reputation as a man of action and honor and spirit, even if hasty. What the legend ignores, of course, is the established fact that in that time and place, if a man killed someone who had cuckolded him, he faced not a trial but the approbation of his fellow citizens. Moreover, it is evident that Travis repeatedly told Rosanna he intended to come back to Claiborne for her, evidence that he felt he had nothing to fear from the law so far as a murder was concerned, and therefore no reason to run away in the first place on that count.

  In short, all of this murder business is an invention, not malicious certainly, and perhaps not even conscious. Even some in Travis's family by 1929 were beginning to accept it, having long since forgotten the matter of debt and desertion. It is worth noting, by the way, that murders were sufficiently uncommon that they gained wide circulation in the press. Reports of Claiborne's last murders, in 1827, appeared in newspapers as far away as Woodville, Mississippi (Republican, October 27, 1827), yet a search of all available Alabama newspapers for the period of Travis' last months in Claiborne, January-May 1831, has failed to reveal a single mention of any Claiborne murder or trial in that period. Sadly, the destruction by fire in 1834 of almost all of Monroe County's records makes it impossible to consult documents that almost certainly would have put the lie to this story once and for all. Asked by Raymond Fisher about the murder story, Mark Travis told him in a letter on April 4, 1929, “I am sure that this is false” (Fisher. “Travis,” 12). He was right.

  Chapter 9 Bowie 1827-1828

  1 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 95.

  2 More nonsense has been written over the last century and a half about James Bowie and the Bowie knife than any other episode in his heavily mythologized life. No attempt will be made in this study to deal with the history of the knife itself, simply because in relation to the life of James Bowie it is of Peripheral importance at best. James Bowie did not design it, nor did he make it. Perhaps the earliest known account of its invention comes from the Little Rock, Arkansas Advocate February 3, 1837, quoting a June 1836 issue of the Alexandria Red River Herald. It says that the knife was made on Charles Mulhollan's plantation on Bayou Boeuf in Rapides around 1820 on instructions from “Big Jim Bowie.” However, there is no verifiable account of him ever using any knife in a fight except once, in the Sandbar brawl, and there is no reason at all to doubt the statement of Rezin Bowie in his August 24, 1838, letter (Nile's Register 55 [September 29, 1838], 70) that he made this first knife himself, that he gave it to James after the Wright shooting, and that it was this knife that James carried several months later on the famed Sandbar. Rezin also states that the later so-called Bowie knife, with a much wider blade, a curved sharp edge along one side, and a concave indentation leading to the tip on the other, was not his design but done by what he termed “experienced cutlers.” Innumerable stories appeared in later years, most of them long after both James and Rezin were dead and could not gainsay them, assigning the design to James and others, and the actual manufacture to a dozen or more different claimants. The literature on this subject is too confused, contradictory, and often amateurish to merit discussion here, and again as relates to James, it is unimportant in any case. James may himself have had another knife or two made subsequent to the one given him by Rezin, but no evidence exists that he ever used them for more than conventional outdoor purposes. Both Mims, Bowie Knife, and Raymond thorp, Bowie Knife (N.P., 1948), are largely devoted to the history of the blade, and can consulted as compendia of most of the several accounts of the knife's origin, though they should not be relied upon for any details on the life of James Bowie himself.

  Among the numerous stories relating the origin of the knife are: J. Madison Wells account in the James Bowie Biographical File, DRT; Sparks in Ellis, Crockett, 217-18, 230-31; Mrs. Eugene Soniat to David F. Boyd, September 14, 1885, David F. Boyd Papers, LSU; San Antonio Daily Express, July 8, 1888; John S. Moore to W. W. Fontaine, April 25, 1890, Fontaine Papers, UT; Philadelphia Pennsylvanian, July 19, 1838; Baltimore Commercial Transcript, June 9, 11, 1838; James L. Goodloe to Lucy L. Bowie, April 23, 1917, Lucy Leigh Bowie Pa
pers, DRT, and Andrew J. Sowell, Rangers and Pioneers of Texas (San Antonio, 1884), 126-27. William B. Worthen, “The Term ‘Bowie Knife,’” Knife World 21 (November 1995): 1, 15-17, is a useful and sensible addition to this history of the blade after Rezin Bowie.

  3 Graham and Johnston discussed the bogus land claim issue frequently, and as far back as December 1824 the commissioner had expressed his anxiety to get the public lands surveyed and on the market. On January 9, 1827, he wrote to Johnston again referring to fraudulent claims, specifically Bowie's Martin and Wilson applications; then elsewhere in the letter Graham addressed another applicant and expressed his desire that this one might be approved. Two months later he enlisted Brent's aid in dealing with surveys, and Johnston, meanwhile, went on the record for a year, now promoting confirmation of claims in another district of the state.

  Bowie himself told potential buyers that positive orders had arrived from Washington to survey his claims, that the surveys were done and in the files of the land office in New Orleans. Samuel Harper, who in May 1827 finally brought to Washington's attention the full details of his lost 1821 letter about Bowie's forgeries, believed conclusively that Bowie lied. Yet in this instance Bowie may have been telling the truth for a change. Somehow a confusion took hold in the local land office—a combination of Bowie's statements, Johnston's and the January 9 letter from Graham to Johnston. The result was that George Davis, about to resign, came under the impression that Graham wanted Bowie's claims surveyed and certificates of survey issued, virtually confirming his possession of the property. Early in 1827 he allowed the claims o be surveyed at Bowie's expense