Alamo Traces

by Thomas Ricks Lindley

47 Coleman, Houston Displayed, 3. Coleman misrepresented Houston’s attendance at the Convention. Houston did not spend his days totally in the activity of sleeping. According to the “Journals of the Convention,” Jenkins, ed., Papers, IX: 289-314, Houston was in session with the convention from March 1 to March 6, conducting its business.

  48 Houston to Public, March 2, 1836, Washington-on-the-Brazos, Jenkins, ed., Papers, IV: 490-491. The date of March 2, 1836, for this document comes from Henry Stuart Foote, Texas and The Texians; or Advance of The Anglo-Americans to the Southwest (2 vols.; Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co., 1841), II: 265-266. The only other known version of the proclamation is in the form of a broadside that is only dated March 1836. Therefore, there is a possibility that Foote’s date of March 2 is incorrect. A content comparison of the document with Travis’s letter of February 25, 1836, shows that the March 2 declaration does not include any of the data found in Travis’s missive of the twenty-fifth. Most likely the call for assistance was actually issued soon after March 6, the date that Houston departed for Gonzales.

  49 In fact Houston appears to have ordered one company that was organized to relieve the Alamo to go no farther west than Gonzales. In the William G. Hall file, RV 1391, Texas General Land Office, the affidavit of Jackson Hall reports: “I Jackson Hall do hereby certify that William G. Hall did on or about the first day of February 1836 [William G. Hall said March 1], raise a part of a company of volunteers to [go to] Travis’ relief at San Antonio. Said William G. Hall was elected Captain of said company. I have been creditable informed that said William Hall was ordered by General Houston to stop at Gonzales.”

  50 Travis to Houston, February 25, 1836; William Fairfax Gray, From Virginia to Texas, 1835: Diary of Col. Wm. F. Gray, Giving Details of His Journey to Texas and Return in 1835-1836 and Second Journey to Texas in 1837 (1909; reprint, Houston: Fletcher Young Publishing Co., 1965), 124.

  51 “Journals of the Convention,” Jenkins, ed., Papers, IX: 305. It appears that Travis’s famous “I shall never surrender or retreat” letter of February 24, 1836, made little impression on the convention members.

  52 Henderson Yoakum, History of Texas From its First Settlement in 1655 to its Annexation to the United States in 1846 (2 vols.; New York: Redfield, 1855), II: 74-75. Houston probably had another reason for his reappointment. He wanted total control over the Texian military forces, regular and volunteer, so that he would not have to answer to the soldiers as was the norm with a volunteer force. If volunteers did not like the way their commander operated, they elected a new commander. Houston wanted to avoid such a situation as the one he had found at the siege of Bexar and in Goliad in January 1836, with Fannin and Johnson.

  53 “Journals of the Convention,” Jenkins, ed., Papers, IX: 309-310.

  54 Ibid.

  55 Yoakum, History, II: 75. Yoakum wrote that this exchange took place on the “day before General Houston received his final instructions,” which was March 6, 1836, thus the exchange would have occurred on March 5. The convention did not meet on that date, thus the incident could only have occurred on March 4 after the convention reappointed Houston commander-in-chief. James Collinsworth and Richard Ellis to Sam Houston, March 6, 1836, Washington-on-the-Brazos, Jenkins, ed., Papers, V: 6.

  56 Gulick, et al., Lamar Papers, III: 278-295; Webb, Carroll, and Branda, eds., Handbook, I: 256-257. Burton, a former West Point student and Nacogdoches lawyer, commanded a Texas Ranger company in far East Texas in the winter of 1835-1836. He fought as a private in Henry W. Karnes’s cavalry company at San Jacinto. In his account to Lamar, he also implied that Houston, at the convention was more interested in getting resolutions passed in favor of the “Cherokee & 12 other bands of Indians” than he was in reporting to the army at Gonzales.

  57 Lancelot Abbotts to General [William Steele], January 26, 1876, Warwick, England, Adjutant General Correspondence, TSL, said collection hereafter cited as the AJC-TSL; C. B. Stewart affidavit, Lancelot Abbotts file, AMC-TSL; Lancelot Abbotts file, Republic of Texas Pension collection, TSL, said collection is hereafter cited as PC-TSL; Joseph D. Clements affidavit, Joseph D. Clements file, AMC-TSL; Webb, Carroll, and Branda, eds., Handbook, I: 709-710.

  Abbotts served as an assistant secretary to Governor Henry Smith during December 1835. He served as a private in Moseley Baker’s company of San Felipe volunteers from March 1836 to May 1836 and participated in the Battle of San Jacinto.

  William Bull carried Travis’s March 3, 1836 letter from Gonzales to the convention.

  Doctor “Biggs or Briggs” appears to have been Benjamin Briggs Goodrich, a member of the convention from Washington-on-the-Brazos. His younger brother, John Calvin Goodrich, died at the fall of the Alamo.

  58 Ibid.

  59 Holley, Interviews, 20; Baker to Houston, October 1842, MC-TSL. Mrs. Peyton [Eberly was her second husband] was quite an individual. Years later Moseley Baker, who torched San Felipe on orders from Sam Houston, remembered her: “I remained on the western side until Mrs. Peyton, now Mrs. Eberly, whose firmness inspired many a family with confidence and whose spirits had you [Houston] possessed, no Mexican force would have reveled in San Felipe.”

  60 William W. Thompson affidavit, December 1, 1840, Austin, Folder 5, Box 2-9/6, Home Paper, TSL.

  Houston had every reason to consider James W. Fannin Jr. as a political rival. Houston had given Fannin a regular army commission as a colonel (Houston to Fannin, November 13, 1835, Jenkins, Papers, II: 396), then Fannin sided with the General Council against Governor Henry Smith and Houston over the goal of the Matamoros Expedition. Houston had to have considered Fannin’s actions a betrayal.

  Reuben R. Brown, a member of the proposed Matamoros expedition, reported the following about Houston’s feelings toward Fannin. Brown (“Reuben R. Brown’s Account of His Part in the Texas Revolution,” Lamar Papers, V: 368) wrote: “Genl Saml Houston joined us at this place [Goliad] and addicted himself to the most shameful dissipation carousing and drinking continually with the soldiers. He did not at first disapprove of the expedition until he learned that Fannin was the choice of the volunteers to command them – his jealous feelings towards Col. Fannin prompted him to put down the expedition if possible. . . .”

  Travis, however, was not a political threat to Houston. Travis’s only involvement in the revolution was military. Had Travis lived, he would have been a potential rival for Houston.

  Thompson’s confrontation with Houston may have made an impact on the slow moving general. We find, in Hockley Memorandum, March 9, 1836, Burnam’s Crossing, Jenkins, ed., Papers, V: 35, that Houston on that date sent orders to Lt. Colonel James C. Neill at Gonzales, instructing Neill that Fannin had been sent a missive which read: “Colonel Fannin to march immediately with all his effective force (except one hundred and twenty men, to be left for the protection of his post), to co-operate with the command of Colonel Neill, at some point to be designated by him, to the relief to Colonel Travis, now in the Alamo.”

  James L. Haley, Houston’s most recent biographer, attacked the Thompson statement (Haley, Houston, 123) with these words: “The possibility of Houston indulging in either drink or drugs is out of the question; his sobriety on the campaign was admitted by even his worst enemies in attendance. The Thompson affidavit was sworn to an official of Mirabeau Lamar’s State Department at a time when government minions were always looking to swear in somebody to say something defamatory about Houston. Thompson also swore that Houston insisted of the siege of the Alamo, ‘that he believed it to be a damn lie, & that all those reports from Travis and Fannin were lies, for there were no Mexican forces there and that he believed it was only electioneering schemes on [the part of] Travis & Fannin to sustain their own popularity.’ The Thompson affidavit loses its little credibility there. Houston had predicted the arrival of Santa Anna within a week’s accuracy since the first of December, had repeated it many times, and then published a broadside to the people announcing Santa Anna’s arrival on March 2.”

 
There are a number of problems with Haley’s point of view on the Thompson document. First, Thompson made no accusations about Houston being drunk or drinking. Second, the statement was not given to a member of Lamar’s State Department. Thompson testified before J. W. Smith, the Chief Justice of Travis County, who had been elected by the citizens of that county. Also, how about a valid source for the claim that “government minions were always looking to swear in somebody to say something defamatory about Houston.”

  Moreover, Thompson does not appear to have been too anti-Houston. In 1841, as an Austin alderman, he was one of the citizens who greeted Houston’s return with an extremely pro-Houston declaration (Address of Austin Committees to Gen. Houston upon the occasion of his visiting that City to be inaugurated third President of the Republic, November 20, 1841, Washington D. Miller Papers, 1873/3-2, Archives, TSL), of which a part reads: “At this crisis, when our country is encompassed with difficulties and perils and through every range of her internal polity embarrassed and overcast with gloom and despondency, it is [a] matter of joyous graduation that our well tried chieftain and statesman has been again called, by the unbought and overwhelming voice of the people, to preside in the chair of state and give a new and salutary impulse to our destinies.”

  As for Haley’s claim that Houston had, as early as December 1, 1835, predicted Santa Anna’s arrival within a week’s accuracy and had repeated it a number of times, this investigator does not know what to make of the allegation. Haley did not cite any source or sources for the statement. This investigator was not able to locate any source that support Haley’s claim. Haley’s failure to cite a source for what he writes occurs far too often in this pro-Houston work. Historians need to be able to check Haley’s sources to determine if his interpretation is a reasonable one or if it is just fiction to make Houston look good to the reader.

  61 Williams and Barker, eds., Writings, VII: 306-336.

  62 Baker to Houston, October 1842, MC-TSL.

  63 Sam Houston to James Collinsworth, March 7, 1836, Coles Settlement, Jenkins, ed., Papers, V: 17-18.

  64 Ibid.

  65 The Convention, because of the arrival of the Mexican forces, failed to ratify Houston’s treaty with the Indians. After the war, the first Texas Congress rejected the treaty.

  66 Webb, Carroll, and Branda, eds., Handbook, II: 403-404; Louis Wiltz Kemp, The Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence (Houston: Anson Jones Press, 1944), 178; Sam Houston to James Power, December 28, 1835, Jenkins, ed., Papers, III: 350.

  On December 28, 1835, as Houston set the stage for the invasion of Matamoros, he wrote James Power: “Colonel [Peyton S.] Wyatt will relieve Captain [J. M.] Allen [at Copano], who will repair to New Orleans, and return by the first of March. Say to our friends that, by the rise of grass [early March], we will be on the march.” Who the “friends” were remains a mystery.

  Houston, even after learning the fate of the Alamo, continued to advise the government that fortifications should be constructed at Copano. Live Oak Point, the location on Copano Bay where Houston wished to construct the structures, was the site of James Power’s home.

  History will probably never know the exact nature of the Houston and Power relationship, but historian Louis Wiltz Kemp wrote: “At Refugio, someone, probably James Power, influenced the voters to elect Houston a delegate from the thinly populated municipality. Were it not for this, Houston’s subsequent career might have been materially different from the brilliant one now recorded.”

  67 Sam Houston to Anthony Butler, December 25, 1845, Houston, W. W. Fontaine Papers, Box 2D150, CAH. William B. Travis to the Convention, March 6, 1836, Jenkins, ed., Papers, IV: 502-504; Milledge L. Bonham Jr. “James Butler Bonham: A Consistent Rebel,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XXXV: 129. The Houston quotation comes from a letter that was Houston’s answer to a bitter and caustic missive from Butler, in which Butler accused Houston of almost every indiscretion under the sun and the moon.

  Chapter Two

  A Critical Study of a Critical Study:

  “Puzzling Questions”

  As a researcher [Dr. Eugene C.] Barker’s methods were characterized by exactness, although as a practical historian he realized the virtual impossibility of checking all the source material for any given project. Barker adhered, more or less, to the theory that the work of a historian should be a stepping stone on which future generations could expand.

  Thomas B. Brewer1

  Dr. Amelia W. Williams’s doctoral dissertation “A Critical Study of the Siege of The Alamo and of the Personnel of Its Defenders” is probably the most cited secondary source found in articles and books on the Texian Alamo. Since the study’s publication in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in the early 1930s, historians have considered it to be the definitive investigative work on the exalted event. Even before its appearance in the scholarly journal, Dr. Eugene C. Barker, Williams’s committee chairman, declared: “Miss Williams is also an experienced and industrious investigator. . . . In my judgment she has definitively settled many puzzling questions about the number and the identity of the defenders of the Alamo. This is a real contribution to the history of Texas.”2 Indeed, Williams’s study did appear to be a true contribution at that time because it was the first time a systematic approach had been used in attempting to identify all of the men who had died at the Alamo.

  Williams’s research first impacted the world of Texas history during the 1936 centennial celebration of the Texas Revolution. The study determined the names of the Alamo heroes that were carved in stone and cast in bronze in San Antonio and Gonzales in honor of Texas’s 100th birthday as an independent nation and state. L. W. Kemp, chairman of the Advisory Board of Texas Historians, wrote Williams: “The names of the men who fell at the Alamo, as best as can be determined, will be carved on a $50,000 monolith to be erected in San Antonio. The selection of these names has been left up to me but of course I shall be guided solely by your recommendations in the matter.”3

  The Alamo, early twentieth century

  Photo courtesy Library of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas at the Alamo

  Williams was willing to have her Alamo list carved in stone for the centennial. Publication in a local newspaper, however, was another story. In March 1936 Williams became upset when she learned that J. C. Oslin, a writer for the San Antonio Express, had used, without her permission, her defender roster in an article. Williams penned Oslin’s boss an indignant letter that declared: “He took my entire list of Alamo men. The very heart of my book that is on the press. This is what I call a sneak thief trick in the history [of the] writing world. . . . Your Mr. Oslin rearranged the list. I had it alphabetized. He arranged [it] as to the States from which the men came, but he used all my material – every bit. He even says it is my list.”4

  Williams’s complaint seems to be without foundation, given that her list had been published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in 1934. The list was pretty much public record as long as any user cited Williams’s study as the source, which Oslin did. Clearly, Williams was protective of her list and had publication plans for it beyond the Quarterly. Moreover, she was well on the way to becoming the official gatekeeper for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas’s honor roll of Alamo defenders.

  Also that year the Dallas Morning News identified the reason Williams had completed the defender roster: “One of Dr. Williams’s first contributions to Texas history was a reconstruction of the list [Williams’s master thesis] of the men who left Gonzales in a company to fight in the Alamo. . . . This work received the praise of Dr. Eugene C. Barker, university authority on Texas history, and other historians of the State who believed Dr. Williams should go further into this same field of research. With this encouragement, she was prompted to make as complete as possible a study of the personnel of the Texas army at the Alamo when it fell.”5

  Three years later the San Antonio Express Evening News reported that Williams had received many letters claiming that thi
s or that man died at the Alamo but was not on her list. Williams answered the complaint with words that in time would come back to haunt her: “However, for those names on the list, I have not one but several official sources that indicate that each man died at the Alamo [italics added]. . . . I have never found a new name to be added to the roll, although I have found considerable material about some of the men. I have never had to discard but one man, that of John G. King of Gonzales.”6

  Today the Williams study is firmly entrenched as the “Bible” on the Texian Alamo. In 1992 a Texas State Historical Association sales pitch for old issues of the Quarterly described the work as: “Amelia Williams’s classic five-part series on the Alamo.” Alamo historian Bill Groneman used the Williams roll and its biographical data as his main source for Alamo Defenders A Genealogy: The People and Their Words. Also, Groneman was the author of all but a few of the Alamo defender entries for the New Handbook of Texas, a six-volume encyclopedia of Texas history published by the Texas State Historical Association. Thus Williams’s list is reflected in that publication through Groneman’s work. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer used the Williams data in “The Artist’s Alamo: A Reappraisal of Pictorial Evidence, 1836-1850,” the lead article for an Alamo thematic issue of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. The most recent work in which Williams’s study is reflected is Alamo Sourcebook 1836 by Tim J. and Terry S. Todish. More importantly, the official Alamo defender roll for the state of Texas is based on Williams’s Alamo list.7

  Nevertheless, despite the study’s acceptance, cracks have appeared in the work’s facade of authority over the years since its publication. In 1956 Frank H. Wardlaw, director of the University of Texas Press, considered publishing the study but never did so. Perhaps letters like the one he received from Mrs. A. Waldo Jones of Atlanta, Georgia, influenced him. She wrote: “Mrs. R. G. Halter at the Alamo has told me that you are going to publish Dr. Amelia Williams’ thesis, ‘A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo,’ and has suggested that I write you with respect to some errors therein regarding William Irvine Lewis, one of the heroes, so that they may be corrected before it goes to press.”8