Dr. Gregg Cantrell, Lowe Chair of Texas History

"Remembering and Re-remembering the Alamo,orWould Someone Please Pass Me My Coonskin Cap?"

The impending release of the much-hyped new movie The Alamo is likely to signal the return of a strange and recurring phenomenon in American culture: Alamo-mania. Already, film critics and historians who have seen copies of a preliminary script are weighing in on the merits or shortcomings of the film that will star Dennis Quaid as Sam Houston, Patrick Wilson as William Barret Travis, Jason Patric as James Bowie,and-last but not least-Billy BobThornton as Davy Crockett. Some have criticized it as yet another episode in romantic hero-worship. Others complain that in presenting the Mexican side of the battle the movie will cave in to "political correctness" and downplay the brutality of Mexican president-general Antonio López de Santa Anna. But since Disney Studios recently announced that the release date has been moved back four months to April 2004-reportedly because it needed significant revision after early test-audiences gave it the thumbs-down-it is likely that nobody really knows what the final product will look like. Whatever happens, Alamo-buffs and the general movie-going public will await this film with an intensity rarely felt in the world of historical movies. And that's because the 1836 siege is not just another long-ago battle. It holds a special and unique place in the imagination of Texans, Americans, and people the world over.The old Spanish mission chapel in downtown San Antonio remains the most recognizable landmark in Texas and the most visited tourist attraction in the state. Ask a hundred random foreigners what they know about Texas, and it's likely that a majority of them will mention the Alamo first, even before oil, the Dallas Cowboys, or George W. Bush. It's worth asking why this is. Why does this battle, which historians agree was strategically a rather unimportant episode in a small, nine-month-long separatist movement in an obscure Mexican frontier province, continue to capture the world's imagination? Why is it that more than one hundred films and many hundreds of books have been devoted to it-especially when (from the American perspective, at least) the good guys lost? Why is it that we feel so compelled to "Remember the Alamo," and indeed, to remember it over and over? The answer, of course, is that the Alamo is more than a battle; it is a symbol: a symbol of freedom's struggle against tyranny, of heroism against staggering odds, of personal sacrifice for a noble cause. And therein lies the problem for the historian who might wish to study the Alamo or for the filmmaker who might want to depict the battle in a more historically accurate light. Historians, alas, are bound by facts and evidence, and woe be to the historian whose conclusions might contradict a cherished tradition or myth. Which brings me to the real subject of this essay: the controversy over the final moments of the battle and its immediate aftermath .Almost everybody knows how the battle ended, right? As hordes of Mexican soldiers breached the walls of the old mission compound at daylight on the morning of March 6, 1836, the valiant band of Texan defenders continued the hand-to-hand fighting until the last man fell. Travis was among the first to die, hit in the head by a Mexican musket ball. Jim Bowie, sick and bedridden, emptied his pistols into the onrushing soldiers and perhaps introduced one last attacker to his famous knife before being run though by a Mexican bayonet. And among the last to fall was the 59-year-old frontier legend and former Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett, who goes down swinging his long rifle "Old Betsey" before being overwhelmed and killed by Santa Anna's troops. The only survivors were a handful of women and children and Travis's slave, Joe, who were spared to inform the rest of Texas's settlers of the futility of further resistance .Although we've grown accustomed to this telling of the events, conflicting reports about the battle's final moments actually appeared in the weeks following the battle. Some told the basic version given above, including the description of Crockett "fighting like a tiger" to the bitter end. But others reported that a handful of Texans, among them Crockett, were taken prisoner, hauled before Santa Anna, and summarily executed at el presidente's command. Both versions made their way into the public record; indeed, as late as the 1940s the Biographical Directory of the American Congress featured the Crockett-execution version. For decades nobody seemed to think that it made much difference. One could believe whichever version one preferred. After all, the outcome was the same: All of the defenders were dead, Santa Anna had sustained heavy losses, and the Texan army under Sam Houston went on to win a smashing victory six weeks later at San Jacinto. So things stood until the 1950s. Then, along came Walt Disney. In early 1955 Disney aired a three-party television version of Crockett's life, with a coonskin-capped Fess Parker in the starring role. By the time the third installment ended with Davy going down swinging Old Betsey, the series had ignited an astonishing Crockett craze. Millions of schoolchildren could be seen sporting toy Betseys and fake coonskin caps. Sales of Crockett-themed comic books, lunch boxes, and countless other items became a huge industry. The fad lasted for years. Today there are serious collectors who fanatically accumulate this Crockett memorabilia. Coincidentally, a mere three weeks following Fess Parker's last stand on national TV, a small book was published in Mexico City entitled La Rebelión de Texas, a book that purported to be the diary of one José Enrique de la Peña, an officer in Santa Anna's army. The de la Peña diary, in a very brief passage, told the alternative version of the battle's end, namely, that Crockett was among a handful of defenders who were taken prisoner and subsequently executed. The diary, published in Spanish, attracted little attention at the time. Far more influential was John Wayne's 1960 epic, The Alamo, which, in a slightly different twist on the Davy's-Death issue, had Crockett blowing up the Alamo's powder magazine, killing himself along with numerous Mexican soldiers.Fast-forward a quarter of a century. In 1975 a librarian at the University of Texas named Carmen Perry translated and published the de la Peña diary in English. Perry and her press, Texas A&M, took some heat from those who viewed the Disney version as gospel, but this was nothing compared to the controversy that erupted just three years later. In 1978 the president of the Texas State Historical Association, a mild-mannered accountant from Corpus Christi named Dan Kilgore, published a slim volume entitled How Did Davy Die? In it, Kilgore laid out the evidence for Crockett's execution, including, but not limited to, the de la Peña diary. Kilgore concluded that de la Peña's version was almost certainly accurate. Kilgore's book ignited a firestorm. Newspapers across Texas and from as far away as Great Britain accused Kilgore of being a traitor, or worse, a communist. He received death threats. The controversy gradually died down, only to flare up again in 1994. That year a New York City arson detective and amateur historian named Bill Groneman published a new book, Defense of a Legend: Crockett and the de la Peña Diary, arguing that the de la Peña diary was a twentieth-century forgery and that all of the evidence of Crockett's being taken alive is unreliable. Meanwhile, an academic historian was about to throw himself into the fray. James Crisp, a North Carolina State history professor with a doctorate from Yale, carefully studied the original manuscript of the de la Peña diary at the U.T.-San Antonio archives and evaluated the several other documents that corroborated its story. Then he addressed Groneman's case for the diary being a fake, publishing his findings in the October 1994 Southwestern Historical Quarterly. In this article, and in a subsequent exhaustive debate published in the pages of the Alamo Journal, Crisp presented devastatingly convincing arguments in favor of the de la Peña diary's authenticity and reliability as a source. While Crisp's arguments are far too complex and extensive to be treated here, he established beyond any reasonable doubt de la Peña's authorship of the diary (which is more accurately described as a memoir than an actual diary), and he built convincing cases for the reliability of two additional contemporary documents that tell essentially the same story. Finally, in 2000, following the acquisition of the diary by the University of Texas, a team of experts led by U.T. archivist David B. Gracy II submitted the original de la Peña manuscript to state-of-the-art forensic tests, concluding that it was almost certainly authentic. Groneman and other doubting-Thomases remain unconvinced to this day. Some of them are willing to concede the possibility of Alamo defenders being taken alive, but convincing them that Crockett was among the executed is a more difficult task. The true believers continue to invent elaborate theories suggesting that the multiple documents naming Crockett as one of the executed defenders are all hoaxes. Watch for the two sides in this controversy to renew their bitter battle if the new movie suggests anything less than Davy fighting to the death. Of course, we cannot know that absolute truth about what happened on that bloodstained battleground in the dawning hours of March 6, 1836. None of us was there to witness the final moments of Davy Crockett. A certain viewpoint, sometimes called "postmodernism," suggests that since we can't actually know the truth, all history is ultimately fiction. In this view, if we wish to believe the Fess Parker or John Wayne versions, then we're free to do so. It is worth noting, though, that both of these versions appeared during the height of the Cold War, when America badly needed symbols of heroic American resistance to foreign tyranny. Similarly, the Carmen Perry edition of the de la Peña diary and Dan Kilgore's How Did Davy Die? appeared in the mid-1970s, when the twin disasters of Vietnam and Watergate had shaken Americans' confidence in our nation's innocence and invincibility. Perhaps our understanding of history is inevitably subjective.But allow me to dissent from this view. While I certainly acknowledge that historians' approaches and viewpoints are shaped by the times in which they live, it is not the historian's job to sustain views of history that are contradicted by the documentary evidence. The critics who simply refuse to admit the possibility that Davy was taken alive have reached their conclusion ahead of time, and then they bend and distort the evidence to support that conclusion. This often requires elaborate conspiracy theories that defy logic and common sense. When they argue that we cannot prove that Crockett was taken alive (and that therefore we must dismiss all evidence to the contrary), they cease to be historians. It becomes something more like religion, which is built on faith rather than evidence. Ultimately historians, like juries in court cases, are bound by the evidence. If a preponderance of the evidence suggests a certain interpretation, as it does in this case, it is the responsibility of the historian to base his conclusions on that evidence. To employ an analogy, we "know" that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln because we have a lot of reliable evidence (including eyewitnesses) supporting the contention. Is it possible that the assassin was a brilliantly disguised impostor and that all of the other evidence implicating him was somehow forged or staged? Sure. But the evidence that Booth was indeed the perpetrator is so strong that it is generally accepted as fact. Likewise, in the Crockett case, the three documents (including the de la Peña manuscript) that originated with Mexican soldiers who were at the Alamo and that independently report Crockett's execution are sufficiently convincing to most reputable historians to be considered "factual." In other words, we "know" that Crockett was taken alive and executed about as well as we "know" most other historical "facts."

Which brings us back to the new Alamo movie. If it ends with Davy dying in combat, faithfully swinging Old Betsey to the final moment, then we will be justified in saying that director Lee Hancock did not make a historically "accurate" movie. Fortunately, it's just a movie and its scriptwriters and director can take whatever liberties with history that they choose. All the more reason, though, for we historians to have our facts straight, so we can we can educate those who think that the movie theater is a good place to learn history.