Alamo Traces (2 page)

The Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library on the Alamo grounds had a few documents that proved useful. Alamo historian and curator Dr. Richard B. Winders has been supportive of my work. Dora Guerra, Martha Utterback, and Rusty Gamez always bent over backwards to help me. Dora was most helpful when she was director of the Special Collections at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She made copies of pages from the Pena manuscripts that later proved to be very helpful after the collection was broken up and sold. The late Bernice Strong was also very helpful in the last few months she worked at the DRT Library.

Ralph Elder and John Wheat at the Center for American History, the former Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, at the University of Texas at Austin helped immensely. Ned Brierley made numerous copies and a number of excellent Spanish translations. Kathryn Kenefick has been extremely helpful in recent days. Her friendly smile and professional attitude are a welcome addition to that operation. Upstairs at the Texas State Historical Association, Ron Tyler and George B. Ward have always welcomed me and have been willing to let me bounce my research and ideas off their reflecting minds.

The staff at Nacogdoches County Courthouse archives and the East Texas Research Center at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches helped me locate what was left of the original Louis Rose land grant documents. Cassey Edward Greene at the Rosenberg Library at Galveston did the same in regard to a James Bowie document.

Special thanks to Brian Huberman and Cynthia Wolf for their support and inclusion in their film work. They have been good company in the long debate over the reality of the Pena memoir.

Fellow members and friends in the Alamo Society include William R. (Bill) Chemerka and Joseph Musso. Chemerka, publisher of
The Alamo Journal
, has always published my work without question. Musso, the expert on James Bowie and Bowie knives, shared research and a passion for the Alamo with me. The friendship of individuals like Chemerka, Musso, Groneman, and other members of the Alamo Society is one of the unexpected rewards of this work. A large thanks to the men and women of the Alamo Society. It is a group probably more like the men and women of the Alamo than any other Alamo organization. Just being a member of this group has been a big encouragement for me.

Many other individuals, members of the Southwest Vaqueros, have been supportive: Dorothy Black, Charlie Eckhardt, Frank W. Jennings, Al and Darlyne Lowman, Wayne Cox, Anne Fox, Sharon Crutchfield, and Wes Williams. At a former job, coworkers Marti Granger, Helen Durrett, and Leon Ashbrook always showed a sincere interest in my research and writing.

In my hometown of Nixon, thanks for the support of Donald and Patricia Hoffman, Richard and Kathleen Faulkner, Nathan and Dixell Wheat, Wendle and Carolyn Scott, Don and Gladyne Finch, Calvin Ray Pullin, Billy Steubing, Phyllis Stone, Sam Nixon, Gary Davis, and historian Sylvan Dunn. Also, Mike and Phyllis Mahan of Dermott, Arkansas.

Thanks to Dianne Stultz, Ginnie Bivona, and the rest of the staff at Republic of Texas Press. Their work made this book a reality.

Many thanks to “little mom” Ethel Sears, Daryl and Fran Pullin, Larry and Cyndi Pullin, Bill and Sue Shelton, and the rest of the Deason clan for their love and support over the years. I would never have gotten here without all of you.

If I forgot anyone, please forgive me. It was not intentional. It has just been a long journey with many, many human encounters.

Any person who takes up this book expecting a work like Lon Tinkle's
13 Days to Glory
, Walter Lord's
A Time To Stand
, Stephen L. Hardin's
Texian Iliad
, or Jeff Long's
Duel of Eagles
will be disappointed. The aforementioned histories are similar in one way. They are highly readable narrative histories.
Alamo Traces
is not a narrative history that presents the Alamo story in a manner that reads like an adventure tale. The work's concept, source material, and purpose dictated a different organizational structure.

This work critically examines selected features from the supposed body of historical truth that reports the story of the Battle of the Alamo, the most famous event in Texas history. As separate pieces, each of the subjects I have tackled would usually be submitted as an article for a scholarly journal devoted to the military history or the history of the southwestern United States. Such expression does offer the opportunity of critical acceptance by the academic community. That acceptance, however, can have a high cost. In my opinion, journal editors often place restrictions on an investigator that are very close to censorship. That is especially true when a subject goes against the grain of prevailing historical trends of the day. Therefore, because this book is different, I traveled a different road.

The book's chapters are linked together in two ways. Each chapter has, as a subject or subjects, a piece or pieces of the evidentiary puzzle that makes up the story of the Alamo. The underlying topic of each chapter is the method that the original historian, writer, or researcher used in researching and writing about the Alamo. My writing style and the book's organizational structure are aimed at one goal—clarity—so that the reader will understand the evidence, the arguments, the speculative interpretations, and the conclusions.

Some readers may see certain elements of this work as ax grinding. For example, many individuals will find the chapter on Sam Houston's role in the fall of the Alamo hard to take. Today, Houston is considered the greatest Texas hero of all time. Military historian Michael Lee
Lanning, in
The Military 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Military Leaders of All Time
, rated Houston as the fifty-seventh best general of all time, ahead of such combat geniuses as Richard I (the Lion-Hearted), Robert E. Lee, Chester W. Nimitz, Bernard L. Montgomery, Erwin Rommel, and George S. Patton.

Clearly, my analysis shows that Houston would make any list of the top one hundred Machiavellian politicians of all time. Historian Jack Jackson, on reading chapter one, told me that I had “stacked the deck” against Houston by using only sources that portray him in a negative light. My answer to Jackson was: Show me some primary sources of the period that support Houston's version of events, and I will use them. I have searched for contemporary sources that speak well of Houston's behavior during the revolution, but in regard to Houston's role in the fall of the Alamo, I found no such sources. Still, I want to make it clear that my intent in writing about Houston was not malicious. In my conclusions, I feel I have only gone to those places of the past where the evidence took me.

Also, as with all the book's chapters, the falsehoods, misconceptions, and misinterpretations investigated in this study have long been entrenched in the various Alamo histories as the truth. I felt they had to be hit hard to get the evidence and my arguments across to the reader.

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

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:

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