Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth

by Phillip Thomas Tucker

  The Republic of Texas was followed by statehood; its legacy provided my generation, born in the 1950s, with both a national and a cultural identity, a road map that leads us through life in Texas today. We were taught that Anglo Texans were heroes and nation builders; but our Mexican ancestors were no less capable as nation builders when in 1840 they founded the Republic of Rio Grande, carved out of the three northeastern-most Mexican states. The cultural and historical realities of Texans and Mexicans have underpinnings on both sides of the Rio Grande. So who are we: Texans, Mexicans, Americans, MexicanAmericans, or simply Tejanos?

  Raised by a mother from California, I took years to feel comfortable in my cultural skin, to understand and come to terms with my mixed and confused identity. My father’s parents heralded from prominent Spanish land grant families that traced their heritage across the Spanish province of Coahuila y Tejas long before there was a State of Texas. Even today, the family stretches out along the Camino Real from Saltillo, the capital of Coahuila, to Ciudad Mier on the Rio Grande, northward through the brush country to San Antonio de Bejar and southward to Matamoros on the Gulf Coast. As a kid of “mixed blood,” I was at the same time neither Mexican nor American. Torn between historical realities, I made a conscious decision to embrace both as compatible, and Texas-Mexican history supported this decision.

  As I was growing up in the 1950s, my hometown of Brownsville was widely divided along racial and ethnic lines that had to be carefully navigated. Coming from a well-known family was good, but not speaking Spanish was bad. We grew to become Texans molded by the stereotypes and misrepresentations of a one-sided historical drama in which there were only two clear sides, winners and losers. As a schoolboy I learned that the Alamo was important and my father took me to see it. We were descended from the side that carried the field of battle in 1836, but had lost in almost every way since then. I had family who served in the Matamoros Battalion at the Alamo, but I was told I shouldn’t talk about it because people wouldn’t understand. Santa Anna was a family friend of my ancestors, but I was told I shouldn’t be proud of that either.

  Dr. Tucker’s work helps to explain something my grandfather once told me: Diles quien eres—tell them who you are. It took forty years for me to truly understand what he meant. His advice was an essential requirement in his day, but was it still so in mine? It was. People have long been identified by their lineage. Do you come from people who ride horses, a caballero, or are you a person who walks, a peon? Your status and the opportunities that life can bring are often determined by personal history.

  This is why Dr. Tucker’s book is so important. An entire generation of young Texans is searching for meaning in their lives, just as I did. They are looking for their cultural and historical roots. They want to know where they fit. The sensible choice is to recognize and honor both Mexican and Texas history as “the history of Texas.” Throughout my life, and for reasons I do not totally understand, I have revered history with all its intrigue and failings. I comprehend how things that happened in the past affect people’s lives in the present. History must be constantly called into question and it must be constantly corrected. Dr. Tucker corrects history, and that is serious business in Texas.

  This is all the more true because the books used in Texas classrooms continue to limit the contributions of our Hispanic and AfricanAmerican heroes. When I first learned about the Battle of the Alamo, I believed the account that I read to be true. I was taught that the cowardly Mexican army slaughtered the heroic Texans. But from my perspective, I asked, what had the Mexican army and their leader done wrong in protecting their nation? The response was always the same: the Mexicans were responsible for the deaths of Texas heroes. Must the Texas Hispanic population of the twenty-first century still be held responsible for the deaths of Texas heroes in the nineteenth?

  Simply stated, I don’t want children today to experience the conflict that I experienced. While I do not believe that racism and classism are now actively taught and practiced in Texas classrooms, the icon of the Alamo nevertheless continues as our most important symbol of modern Texas. Its very definition divides us into good and bad, Anglos and Mexicans. Texas mythology is in fact the present and future of Texas. Texans of Mexican descent continue to be stereotyped as treacherous, as cheaters, and as back stabbers, while the heroes of the Alamo are revered as exemplars. What message does this send to our youth?

  Early Texas historians spun their historical narrative of the events of March 1836 for purposes of the past that have no place in the future. We are taught that the evil despot Santa Anna with a huge professional army marched across south Texas, arriving in San Antonio to stage a bloody siege of the old Spanish mission and its defenders. It was there that the valiant and righteous Texans made their last stand in defense of the rights of Texas and its citizens. Bowie, Travis, and the gentleman from Tennessee, Congressman Crockett, defended the Alamo to the death for the glory of Texas. Cry, “Remember the Alamo.”

  But what exactly are we supposed to remember? What really happened? The new information validated and analyzed in Dr. Tucker’s work means we can no longer “remember” or believe what we were told by earlier generations. I exonerate early Texas historians from any mistakes in their original descriptions of the siege and the deaths of the defenders. These early chronicles served the important purpose of building symbols for modern Texas and Texans’ identity. But Exodus from the Alamo breaks new ground and supports a new history of Texas that began to emerge decades ago, and remarkably includes the contributions of Latinos, African-Americans, Native Americans, and others.

  Dr. Tucker examines the real story behind the premier symbol of Texas, a symbol that defines who we are and who we are not, providing us with new information and a fresh way of interpreting the Battle of the Alamo. Additional information most certainly will continue to emerge, the merits of which we must closely examine if we are to continue the task of correcting the historical record for the benefit of future generations. As courageous as it is insightful, Exodus from the Alamo is a major contribution to the goal of teaching us about the value of inclusion, as opposed to the divisions of exclusion.

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  Introduction:

  From Fact to Fantasy

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  The defenders’ ghastly deaths at the Alamo were anything but glorious. Yet the events that took place at that rundown Spanish mission have evolved into an heroic legend, becoming an enduring feature of the American imagination and national memory quite unlike any other historical event. Even though America always loves a winner, the Alamo is a rare example of an American love affair with a loser, an affair that is largely based on the romantic appeal of the mythical last stand.

  The Western world has long embraced the ancient Battle of Thermopylae as one of its primary example of heroism, honoring the small band of free men who stood up to Persian hordes who possessed no democratic political tradition. So, too, Americans have long viewed the Alamo as a great symbolic showdown between liberty and slavery, freedom-loving men versus a tyrant, and republicanism versus dictatorship. But what if such traditional interpretations of the Alamo were in fact false, making a mockery of the Spartan heroes of Thermopylae?

  The Spartans’ last stand served as the model for the Alamo legend, transforming an instance of relatively weak resistance and massacre into a classic New World myth of an epic battle that represented the epitome of self-sacrifice. Not long after the fighting on March 6, 1836 concluded, the nickname “The Thermopylae of Texas” was bestowed upon the Alamo by those who knew relatively little, or nothing, of the actual facts of the struggle. From their readings in ancient history, enthusiastic mythmakers actually understood far more about the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. than they knew about what transpired at the Alamo. Americans, then and today, have identified with the heroism of King Leonidas’ band of 300 Spartans, who fought to the bitter end against Xerxes’ Persian warriors, defending the key Pass of Thermopylae armed with iron discipline, bron
ze shields, light armor, and long spears. Here, the king’s forces, including Leonidas himself, died to the last man in a legitimate, heroic stand against the odds in the hope of saving Greece. All perished beside their comrades in the Spartan sacrificial tradition—an ancient cultural value not shared, or even imaginable, by the ragtag members of the Alamo garrison.

  How did the last stand myth begin in the first place? On the one hand, it sprung from the overactive imaginations of a good many journalists across the United States. On the other, it grew in large part out of a popular work, published almost immediately after the fall of the Alamo, which quickly reached all corners of the country: Colonel Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas by Richard Penn Smith. This well-received book was supposedly based on David Crockett’s “authentic diary,” which a Mexican officer was said to have taken after Crockett’s death. Needless to say, Crockett had nothing whatsoever to do with its authorship.

  The first book to recount the story of the Alamo, this immensely popular work appeared only eight weeks after the fort fell; most recently, it was republished in 2003 to capitalize on the release of the Disney Company’s major film, “The Alamo.”

  The spring 1836 publication of Crockett’s Exploits was calculated to sensationalize the Alamo tragedy that had just occurred. The book was an entirely bogus account, written as Smith sat comfortably in his Philadelphia home more than 1,000 miles northeast of San Antonio. One of the most important fictions of Smith’s hyperbolic efforts is the claim that Lt. Col. William Barret Travis exhorted the Alamo garrison that “in case the enemy should carry the fort,” they should “fight to the last gasp, and render their victory even more serious to them than to us.” Travis’ words as imagined by Smith provided an early, though completely unsubstantiated, foundation for the last stand legend, despite many contemporary newspaper accounts to the contrary. Unfortunately, Smith’s work of fiction (and a bad one at that) has long been treated as an authentic document, broadening the emotional and psychological appeal of the heroic last stand concept.

  But no one was more responsible for the creation of the myth than early Alamo “historian” William P. Zuber. To counter rumors that some defenders, including Crockett, had surrendered, while others hid instead of fighting to the bitter end, he solidified the central notion that not a single garrison member “escaped or surrendered, or tried to do so; but every man of them died fighting.” Smith’s and Zuber’s unsubstantiated accounts were later picked up and further embellished by Hollywood scriptwriters, distorting reality out of all proportion. More surprisingly, the scholarly and academic community nevertheless still faithfully adheres to the core tenants of the Alamo myth that arose from these early fictionalized renditions.

  By contrast, the account written by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who had a penchant for embellishment second to none when it came to his own military successes, shows he was sorely disappointed by the brief, inconsequential fighting. Fully realizing that the Alamo was strategically unimportant, he desired to reap a victory for political effect, and to sow the seeds of terror into remaining Texas forces while impressing his own public in Mexico City. Instead, according to his own account, his minor victory at the Alamo deprived him of glory.

  This lack of glory also explains why there have never been any paintings or romantic illustrations of the last stand from the Mexican side. Had the Mexicans encountered resistance on an epic scale, they certainly would have celebrated their great victory in dramatic visual form to display their own heroism against such gallant opposition. Instead, and initially like the Texans themselves, the Republic of Mexico and its people, including the soldados who fought there, simply forgot about the Alamo, as if it was an insignificant footnote to history.

  A close look at the sources, both old and newly discovered, and especially the most reliable accounts of Mexican officers and men, reveals a mass exodus by the Alamo garrison. Taken alone, a single Mexican account of an exodus from the Alamo would be highly suspect, but more than half a dozen reliable Mexican accounts exist. Almost all mutually support and reinforce each other, and assert that a large percentage of the Alamo garrison attempted to escape.

  General Vincente Filisola, Santa Anna’s second in command, summarized the pervasive sense of disillusionment among the victors: “In our opinion [the engagement at the Alamo] was useless.” And, while historians have grossly inflated the number of Mexican losses, the Filisola document shows that most of the attackers’ losses were due to fratricide. In truth, the Mexicans lost far fewer men than traditional accounts have claimed: in all, less than three hundred casualties. The large percentage of fraticidal casualties means that the entire Alamo garrison may have killed or wounded barely a hundred of their opponents during Santa Anna’s assault. Nor were there ever three distinct attacks; as Santa Anna lamented to Captain Fernando Urriza, his young, competent aide-de-camp: “It was but a small affair.”

  Most defenders were neither rugged frontiersmen nor seasoned veterans, thus largely incapable of a tenacious defense, especially when caught in their sleep by a surprise attack. Most of them died at the hands of pursuing Mexican cavalry and lancers on the open prairie outside the walls while fleeing the deathtrap. Quite simply, for the young men and boys at the Alamo, there was no glory on the early morning of March 6, 1836. Unfortunately, none were left to tell the tale of their bitter defeat in military reports, diaries, letters, or memoirs.

  Today, A Time to Stand by Walter Lord continues to be considered the best work about the Alamo, even though it was published more than forty years ago. The dismal scholarly track record of Alamo historiography perhaps can be best explained by the continued acceptance of the 1931 doctoral dissertation by Amelia W. Williams, A Critical Study of the Siege of The Alamo and of the Personnel and Its Defenders, written almost a century after the event. Not surprisingly, this dissertation merely reflected the ultra-conservative and traditional rural, cultural, and racial biases prevalent in nineteenth century Texas, and more generally across America. In a bizarre historical paradox, the Alamo’s reputation has been created by the losers, while the victors’ versions—the accounts by eyewitness survivors, including those written shortly after the battle—have remained largely occulted.

  The private journal of Colonel Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, which describes in detail what he witnessed at the Alamo, is another excellent case in point. Almonte was an erudite man educated in the United States, whose journal was discovered after his capture at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. This was then translated and published in the New York Herald the following June. As the Herald’s editors candidly admitted in the introduction of the journal’s fourth installment on June 27, 1836, “Almonte’s account differs very differently from what we received at the time through the Texas papers.” Almonte’s journal states: “The enemy attempted in vain to fly [from the Alamo], but they were overtaken and put to the sword,” by Mexican cavalry positioned outside the walls.

  Almonte personally witnessed only a single flight of Alamo defenders. Other eyewitness accounts testify to the flight of several large groups as well as individuals, whose numbers taken together comprise the majority of the defenders. This exodus of so many soldiers doomed the relatively few men still fighting inside the walls, especially in the Long Barracks, the infirmary, and the church, sealing their fate and hastening the Alamo’s fall. Another excellent source of information is a rare battle report by General Joaquin Ramirez y Sesma, which was discovered in the Secretaria de la Defensa, Archivo Historico, Militar, in Mexico City. Sesma’s report, written on March 11, 1836, only five days after the fall of the Alamo, corroborates other Mexican sources. It describes multiple escape attempts by a large number of defenders, around 120 men in primarily three separate groups.

  In an ironic twist, the mass exodus of so many Alamo defenders now actually places David Crockett’s alleged death by execution on Santa Anna’s orders—the most heated Alamo controversy—in a much more heroic light. If, indeed, the de la Pena ac
count and other sources are correct in this regard, the fact that Crockett was among the minority of soldiers who remained inside the fort speaks for itself.

  The flight of so many Alamo defenders does not disparage their characters or courage, although it does erode the heroic romance of their deaths. The Alamo garrison had little chance to resist in any organized manner during the predawn attack that literally caught them asleep. Mexicans began pouring over the top and through a small gate at the north wall “like sheep” in the early morning darkness. Fleeing the deathtrap was not only the instinctive response of ill-fated soldiers; it was also tactically sound and the only realistic alternative under the circumstances.

  Mostly boys and young men in the prime of life, these citizen-soldiers possessed promising futures and looked forward to claiming thousands of prime Texas acres. The last thing these men—mostly volunteers from the United States—desired was to throw it all away for the largely apathetic Texians who had failed to reinforce the Alamo, or to give their lives for a factionalized Texas government that had abandoned them. Fleeing in an attempt to survive and fight another day under more favorable circumstances was a much more rational choice. And we should also not forget that once the Mexicans had breached the walls, further resistance inside the Alamo could not have been sustained and made no tactical sense.