The work contains many long quotations that are out of fashion with historians. I presented the data in such an extended manner so that it would be almost impossible for a reader to misunderstand the evidence’s context or misunderstand the information’s relationship to my arguments, interpretations, and conclusions.
My training and investigative philosophy comes from my experience as a U.S. Army military policeman and criminal investigator. It might not be obvious to a professional historian, but if one views a historian’s job as a search for the truth, then a detective or criminal investigator is a historian in the truest sense. Granted, crimes have generally taken place in the very recent past and the scope of the subject is limited. Nevertheless, the crime investigator, like any competent historian, must determine the objective and unbiased truth of the “who, what, when, where, how, and why” of the criminal incident under investigation. In other words, the policeman’s truth must be the one that is supported by definitive and creditable evidence because the consequences for the accused are severe. Thus, a police detective must always be concerned with the authenticity of the evidence used to build a case against a suspect. Such was the nature of the “historical truth” in the real world in which I learned my investigative skills. Does that make me a good historian? That is for others to decide.
Also, I do not take the sociological values of today and apply them to the people of Mexico, Texas, and the United States who lived in the first third of the nineteenth century, and then judge those long dead people as morally deficient because the two sets of values are in conflict over how people should have treated each other. As best-selling author Louis L’Amour said in Education of a Wandering Man: “A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men and women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”
Thus, Alamo Traces is a “nuts and bolts” study aimed at readers who have a serious interest in the Battle of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution. At times, I had to speculate in order to tie certain pieces of evidence together in a way that made sense. I attempted to make such interpretations reasonable so that they are not essentially fiction, a common characteristic of some narrative histories.
If I have learned one thing from the experience of researching and writing this book, it is a lesson that serves as a conclusion for this work. The historical Alamo must be reassembled almost from scratch. A lot of what we believe about the Texian Alamo today appears to be true, but a great deal of what is currently believed to be the truth about the event appears to be wrong. In the end, the new “truth” as I have presented it may not be totally correct (of course, it never can be) or politically correct, but perhaps the new evidence, arguments, interpretations, and conclusions in this book will bring us closer to the real thing—that is knowledge based on valid sources and reasonable interpretation.
Thomas Ricks Lindley
Nixon, Texas
Chapter One
Sam Houston and the Alamo:
“Drawing Truthful Deductions”
No man is more completely master of the art of appropriating to himself the merit of others’ good acts, and shifting on to others the odium of his bad ones, than Gen. Houston.
Dr. Anson Jones1
In 1990 the Book-of-the-Month Club of New York issued a fine press reprint of The Raven, Marquis James’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Sam Houston.2 Robert M. Utley, former chief historian and assistant director of the National Park Service, wrote the introduction for the reprint. He observed:
Like some great giant of fable, Sam Houston bestrode America’s historical landscape for nearly half a century. In physique and character he was a giant, and on the stage of American history he played the part of a giant combining all the ingredients of gripping fiction—a dramatic, adventurous, suspenseful life and a powerful, complex, enigmatic personality—he seems more the subject for a creative novelist than a historian. . . .
Even though scholars still debate his true significance, Sam Houston has always been popularly regarded as the George Washington of Texas. As Henry Steele Commager observed in introducing an earlier edition of The Raven, Houston served Texas as Charlemagne, Alfred the Great, and other nation builders served their realms—as inspirational folk hero as well as shaper of great events. “In a sense,” wrote Commager, “if he had not existed we should have had to create him.”3
The Imperial Sam Houston, ca. 1850
Photo courtesy Texas State Library & Archives Commission
Clearly, there is no question about Houston’s personal bravery and skill as a politician and statesman. While historians, in off-handed ways, have acknowledged that Houston was not perfect, they have ignored a great deal of evidence that indicates that the Sam Houston of “giant character” and military genius belongs to the realm of folklore, rather than in the evidence-driven pages of a history book. Although modern Texans will find it hard to accept that Houston was not a great general, the men who fought beside him at San Jacinto did not see him as the Washington of their blood-won republic.4
In early 1837 the first published attack on Houston’s military role in the Texas revolution appeared in the form of an unofficial account of the San Jacinto campaign, a pamphlet titled Houston Displayed Or, Who Won the Battle of San Jacinto? By a Farmer in the Army. The “Farmer” was Robert M. Coleman, an aide-de-camp to Houston during the campaign, who had also participated in the Battle of Gonzales and the siege of Bexar in 1835. Coleman had been a member of the Consultation of 1835 and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. After the revolution he served his country as a Texas Ranger colonel.5
John H. Jenkins, Texas historian and rare book dealer, described the Coleman account with these words:
The volume was issued, without doubt, as a political maneuver, but it must be remembered that Sam Houston himself seldom wrote a word that was not [political]. Scurrilous and biased as it is, there is truth to at least some of the accusations, and it was undoubtedly believed to be literal truth by scores of veterans of the campaign. Many of its accusations were substantiated by some of Texas’s most highly revered heroes of that era. One finds, in fact, that a considerable majority of the officers in Houston’s army were severely critical of Houston’s actions in the campaign. These men sincerely felt that his laurels were too easily won and too lightly granted by thousands of post-revolution immigrants who, fed by a pro-Houston press in the United States, came to Texas thinking of Houston as Texas’s savior. General Edward Burleson, second in command, despised Houston till the day he died because of the campaign, as did Col. Sidney Sherman, third in command. David G. Burnet, President of Texas, was even more fanatical than Coleman in his denunciation of Houston’s part. Gen. Thomas J. Rusk, Adj. Gen. John A. Wharton, Lt. Col. J. C. Neill, Lt. Col. Mirabeau B. Lamar, Lt. Col. John Forbes, Maj. J. H. Perry, Maj. James Collinsworth, Maj. Lysander Wells, Captains Turner, Moreland, Billingsley, Baker, Calder, Heard, Kuykendall, Ben Smith, Karnes, Fisher, Gillespie, and Surgeons Anson Jones and William Labadie all criticized some of Houston’s actions in the campaign. Only three officers—Henry Millard, Alexander Somervell, and J. L. Bennett—appear to have unceasingly supported Houston.6
Texas historians and Houston biographers are familiar with the debate over Houston’s command competency during the San Jacinto campaign. However, Houston’s role in the rebellion previous to the 1836 retreat and the April victory, especially the Alamo, is another question. No historian has ever objectively examined Houston’s activities in regard to the defense of that frontier outpost. The possibility that blame, big or small, for the fall of the Alamo can be placed on Houston’s shoulders may seem implausible. Still, there is ample evidence to show that Houston was not an innocent bystander when the Alamo garrison fell to defeat. Also, the record shows that Houston was well aware of his culpability and thereafter misrepresented his Alamo-related activities to protect his reputation.
The story st
arted on the afternoon of March 11, 1836, at about 4:00 p.m., when Houston, commander of the Texian military forces, arrived at Gonzales to take control of the troops at that location and to reinforce the Alamo. What Houston did not know at that time was that the Alamo had fallen five days earlier. When Houston finally realized that William B. Travis, David Crockett, James Bowie, and the other Alamo defenders were all dead and that the Mexican victory could seriously damage him politically, he began a campaign to separate himself from any blame for the tragic event.7
Houston commenced his defensive offense a week after the Mexican victory in a missive to James Collinsworth, chairman of the government’s military committee. Houston wrote: “The enclosed order to Colonel Fannin will indicate to you my convictions, that, with our small, unorganized force, we can not maintain sieges in fortresses, in the country of the enemy. Troops pent up in forts are rendered useless; nor is it possible that we can ever maintain our cause by such a policy. . . . I am informed that Colonel Fannin had about seven hundred men under his command; and, at one time, had taken up the line of march for the Alamo, but the breaking down of a wagon induced him to fall back, and abandon the idea of marching to the relief of our last hope in Bexar. . . . The projected expedition to Matamoros, under the agency of the council has already cost us over two hundred and thirty-seven lives; and where the effects are to end, none can foresee.” The spin that Houston put on the fall of the Alamo was subtle, but the message was clear. Colonel James W. Fannin Jr. was to blame for the Alamo defeat.8
The same day Houston dispatched a letter to Henry Raguet, a close friend at Nacogdoches. This time Houston was direct: “Colonel Fannin should have relieved our Brave men in the Alamo. He had 430 men with artillery under his command, and had taken up the line of march with a full knowledge of the situation of those in the Alamo, and owing to the breaking down of a wagon abandoned the march, returning to Goliad and left our Spartans to their fate!”9
On March 15 Houston reported to Collinsworth: “Our forces must not be shut up in forts, where they can neither be supplied with men nor provisions. Long aware of this fact, I directed, on the 16th of January last, that the artillery should be removed, and the Alamo blown up; but it was prevented by the expedition upon Matamoros, the author of all our misfortunes.”10
By 1859 Houston had added Alamo commander William B. Travis to his scapegoat recipe and boiled the story down to a single dish of disobedience. In a speech to the United States Senate, Houston claimed his political life was at an end and declared: “How that service has been performed I leave it to posterity to determine. My only desire is, that truth shall be vindicated, and that I may stand upon that foundation, so far as posterity may be concerned with my action, that they may have an opportunity of drawing truthful deductions.”11
Houston then continued with a speech defending his military leadership in the revolution. Speaking to the Alamo, Houston detailed how he had ordered Lt. Colonel James C. Neill, the Alamo commander, to blow up the fortress and fall back to the Guadalupe River to establish a new defensive position.12 He said that the enemy would advance no farther than Gonzales and continued: “That order was secretly superseded by the council; and Colonel Travis, having relieved Colonel Neill, did not blow up the Alamo, and retreat with such articles as were necessary for the defense of the country; but remained in possession from the 17th of January until the last of February, when the Alamo was invested by the force of Santa Anna. Surrounded there, and cut off from all succor, the victims to the ruthless feelings of Santa Anna, by the contrivance of the council, and in violation of the plans of the Major-General for the defense of the country.”13
The construction took many years, but Houston had set a solid foundation for the story he wanted historians to write. If there was to be any blame for the fall of the Alamo, his story went, it should fall on the provisional government and the victims because of insubordination by the Alamo commanders, Neill, Bowie, and Travis.
Today that false impression persists. In November 1993, at a rededication of Fort Sam Houston in honor of Houston’s bicentennial birthday, Madge Roberts, Houston’s great-great granddaughter, claimed that the Alamo defenders failed to follow Houston’s instructions to destroy the Alamo. She said, “He [Houston] knew that [defense of the Alamo] was a hopeless cause. He knew that the Texians could not defend the Alamo against a siege.”14
Marshall De Bruhl, author of Sword of San Jacinto: A Life of Sam Houston, expressed the same sentiment this way: “Travis and Bowie’s disobedience of Houston’s direct orders to abandon and then blow up the Alamo not only cost them their lives. Another 187 brave men were lost with them. But the gallant band’s defense against the superior Mexican force that besieged them for thirteen days has become America’s greatest example of military bravado. It was rash and foolish, yes, but it was grandly heroic.”15
In August 1994 De Bruhl stated his position with more precision when he complained: “There are two transcendent moments in the war for Texas independence, at Washington on the Brazos, on March 2, 1836, and the Battle of San Jacinto, at Buffalo Bayou on April 21, 1836, which guaranteed that independence. . . . It is these two events attending the birth of the republic that should be celebrated—not the bitter defeats of the Alamo and Goliad. Those baleful failures were caused by the rash acts of disobedient men and resulted in the unnecessary loss of half the manpower and much of the weaponry available to fight the invader.”16
Elizabeth Crook, in her work of fiction Promised Lands, wrote: “Eccentric and verbose but surefooted as a marching band, Sam Houston spoke with a drumbeat. He had told the volunteers not to go to Matamoros: those who had ignored him were now dead. He had told them to blow up the Alamo and abandon San Antonio de Bexar: those who had disobeyed were now trapped like a nest of rabbits with the hole plugged up.”17
Jeff Long, in his novel of the Texas Revolution Empire of Bones (promoted as historically accurate), contributed this: “If they [Travis and Bowie] had survived their battle at the Alamo and he could ever get his hands on them, Houston thought it might be most fitting to just shoot them out of hand. Goddamn them for not blowing up their pile of mud and falling back. Bowie and the young maniac Travis had deliberately disobeyed his orders. They had stayed in their forts showboating with their own command. As a direct consequence of their hubris they had sailed off the edge of the world with some hundred and eighty men in that worthless mission corral.”18
Most recently, James L. Haley, an independent scholar and Houston apologist, wrote: “. . . so now Houston sent Jim Bowie with orders to the commander there [San Antonio] to remove the artillery from the Alamo, blow the fortress up and retire to Gonzales.”19
Such is the historical record today: a resoundingly pro-Houston slant in both history and fiction that has been accepted by historians and writers without a single challenge to the tale’s veracity. There are, however, other documents that speak to the defense of the Alamo—evidence that gives objective readers the “opportunity of drawing truthful deductions” about Houston’s alleged order to destroy the Alamo and abandon Bexar. However, before an examination of the other documents is presented, a detailed analysis of the one document that seems to support Houston’s version of the events is necessary.20
In mid-January 1836 Houston was in Goliad, attempting to bring the various factions of the Texian military machine together for an invasion of Matamoros. While at that location, he received a missive from Lt. Colonel James C. Neill, the commander at San Antonio. Neill wrote: “There are at Laredo now 3,000 men under the command of General Ramirez [y Sesma], and two other generals, and, as it appears from a letter received here last night, 1,000 of them are destined for this place, and two thousand for Matamoros. We are in a torpid, defenseless condition, and have not and cannot get from the citizens here horses enough to send out a patrol or spy company. . . . I hope we will be reinforced in eight days, or we will be overrun by the enemy.”21
Neill also wrote Governor Henry Smith and the Council
about the situation at San Antonio, stressing that he needed horses and men to form a spy unit to scout the area between Bexar and the Rio Grande. Neill believed the enemy was nearer to his command than the rumors indicated, and he did not want to be caught unaware of their approach.22
The exact nature of Houston’s response to Neill’s call for help is ambiguous because we have no copy of the orders that Houston sent to Neill. A letter to Governor Smith, however, details some of Houston’s actions in response to the anticipated attack on San Antonio. This is the document that is often cited as proof that Houston ordered the Alamo destroyed and the garrison abandoned.23 The letter reads:
Sir: I have the honor to enclose for your information a communication from Lt. Col. J. C. Neill, under the date of [January] the 14th inst. Colonel Bowie will leave here in a few hours for Bexar with a detachment of from thirty to fifty men. Capt. [William H.] Patton’s [Columbia] Company, it is believed, are now there. I have ordered the fortifications in the town of Bexar to be demolished, and, if you should think well of it, I will remove all the cannon and other munitions of war to Gonzales and Copano, blow up the Alamo and abandon the place, as it will be impossible to keep up the Station with volunteers, the sooner I can be authorized the better it will be for the Country [italics added]. In an hour I will take up the line of march for Refugio Mission with about 209 efficient men, where I will await orders from your Excellency, believing that the army should not advance with a small force upon Matamoros with the hope or belief that the Mexicans will cooperate with us. I have no confidence in them and the disaster at Tampico should teach us a lesson to be noted in future operations. I have learned that Colonel Gonzales is somewhere on the Nueces with one hundred and seventy men, but accounts vary as to the actual number. They are to cooperate in the eastern Confederacy, I am told.
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