The actual Alamo was an eighteenth-century Spanish colonial mission located in San Antonio, Texas. The present building is only a one-floor replica of the original fort, but it is one of the most sacred landmarks in Texas, attracting countless tourists every year. The story of the Alamo, popularized in contemporary folklore, is much exaggerated from the actual historical events. In 1835, residents of Texas declared their independence from Mexico, citing President General Santa Anna’s abrogation of the Mexican Constitution of 1824 and greater centralized control over the province, including the abolition of slavery. In the early days of the Texas Revolution, a provisional government had been established to organize resistance against the Mexicans, and Sam Houston was named the commander of the Texan Army. Santa Anna led an army in 1836 into Texas to regain control over the rebellious province. Although General Sam Houston urged Texans to abandon the Alamo, a fort established in 1793 at a former Franciscan mission, the Texas government dispatched Lieutenant Colonel William Barrett Travis and James Bowie to defend the fortress. After a siege of approximately two weeks, Santa Anna’s army of 3,000 to 4,000 men stormed the Alamo on March 6, 1836.
Santa Anna ordered his force to quickly surround the Alamo. He then began a round-the-clock bombardment to which the defenders were barely able to respond. They had cannon but gunpowder was in painfully short supply. Travis, who assumed command when Bowie became ill, sent three riders out to fetch aid. In answer to his appeals, thirty-two men rode in from Gonzales and forced their way at night through the incomplete investment. Thus, the defense numbered about 187 men (the exact count varies). It was an impossibly small force to defend a perimeter encompassing the church and two sets of barracks around a very large open courtyard. The walls were originally built to keep out the Comanche, but they were not sufficiently stout to withstand artillery fire for any great length of time.
On the night of March 5, the bombardment ceased. The Mexicans had the Texans so outnumbered that the conclusion was foregone. Reports have it that Travis died early in the battle, while Bowie fought from his sickbed for a short time. The men inside the church building held out the longest but did not have the firepower to survive. Mexican sources state that many of the defenders, possibly as many as half, fled to the southeast but were ridden down by Mexican cavalry waiting for such a move. By 8:00 the next morning, it was all over.
The siege of the Alamo in 1836 spawned countless legends of courage and self-sacrifice after the War of Texas Independence. Americans held out for 13 days before March 6, when Mexican troops stormed the building and killed all but a few dozen of the Texas rebels. Alamo legends, like the story of Davy Crockett, became mixed with other frontier legends and westernthemed tales to make an important contribution to the American folklore tradition. (Library of Congress)
All 187 defenders of the Alamo perished, including former Whig congressman David Crockett and a group of Tennessee volunteers, while Mexican losses were numbered at 600 men. The victorious Mexicans spared some twenty women, children, and African American slaves. Various estimates put the number of Mexican Army casualties at anywhere from 600 to 2,000.
At the time of the battle, newspapers reported accounts of the battle from both sides, often from the actual combatants. Before he prepared to attack the Texan garrison, Santa Anna’s brother-in-law, General Martin Perfecto de Cos, sent a letter to Stephen F. Austin, whom Cos considered the rebel leader, demanding complete surrender of the garrison and the end of the revolution. The letter was reprinted in the Telegraph and Texas Register (Houston), March 5, 1836. The same issue of the Telegraph printed a letter from Travis, the garrison commander, in which he pleaded for reinforcements. The letter allegedly inspired the Texan Army and helped bring support for Texas independence.
After the Alamo massacre, newspapers throughout the United States reported it, with varying degrees of accuracy; for example, the Louisiana Advertiser (New Orleans) of March 28, 1836, based its report on news given by travelers from Texas. Contemporary accounts usually referred to the name of the town, San Antonio Bexar, rather than the name of the Catholic mission where the battle happened, the Alamo.
Since 1836, myths and historical misconceptions have sprung up around the actual events at the Alamo so that they took on the aura of fact with no attempt to check, or interest in checking, the historical record. Widely accepted “facts” include the following:
• The Battle of the Alamo bought time for Sam Houston to build his army.
• The men at the Alamo died not knowing that Texas had declared its independence.
• The only Texans who rallied to the aid of the Alamo were thirty-two men from Gonzales.
• The men of the Alamo could have left at any time because they were volunteers.
• The Battle of the Alamo could have been avoided had Sam Houston’s orders to blow up the Alamo been followed.
One of the enduring myths is that there were no survivors of the Battle of the Alamo. This is a finely nuanced claim as it is true that nearly all of the Texans under arms inside the fort were killed in the attack. However, nearly twenty women and children, who were present during the long days of siege leading to the final assault, were spared and allowed to return to their homes. One survivor was Joe, Travis’s slave. In the 1970s, a diary reputedly kept by Enrique de la Peña, one of Santa Anna’s staff officers, was discovered but its accuracy has been challenged. It describes the final moments of the battle in a way that brought the traditional accounts into question. Since 1836, the generally accepted view was that all the defenders died in battle, but de la Peña’s diary states that a handful were taken prisoner, including Crockett.
Davy Crockett remains one of the enduring legends of the Alamo. He was the subject of much favorable newspaper coverage before he went to the Alamo, and his death only enhanced his reputation, not just throughout the United States but in other countries as well. In the Chronicle and Gazette (Kingston, Ontario, Canada) of April 30, 1836, Crockett is described as “a brave and daring man, rich in those qualifications which fit out to be a pioneer in a new country.”
The fall of the Alamo became a rallying cry for those fighting to secure Texas’s independence. “Who would not be rather one of the Alamo heroes, than of the living of its merciless victors?” a Texas newspaper remarked after receiving news of the Alamo massacre. The refrain “Remember the Alamo” would also be used by Texas volunteers fighting in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Even during World War II, the Alamo was remembered in a popular song entitled “We’re Going to Remember Pearl Harbor Just Like We Remembered the Alamo.” In addition, the slogan “remember the Alamo” was kept alive through numerous Hollywood film interpretations of the siege at the Alamo.
Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de (1794–1876)
Best remembered in the popular American imagination as a flamboyant and merciless tyrant who slaughtered the courageous Texan rebels at the Alamo, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna is also a major figure in the history of Mexico, a self-styled “Napoleon of the West” who ruled off and on nearly a dozen separate times in the five decades following Mexico’s independence from France in 1821. Remarkably, Santa Anna lived for a time in exile in New York City. The myths and legends swirling about the figure of Santa Anna at times pale in comparison to the truth, as, for example, when he lost a leg, buried it, and later exhumed it for a state funeral. His fake leg was once captured, as well. Santa Anna was also instrumental in the introduction of that most American of confections, chewing gum.
C. Fee
The Alamo’s story has been retold hundreds of times, with various levels of historical accuracy, in books, poems, songs, and movies. One of the first books was Reuben M. Potter’s Hymn of the Alamo (Columbus, Texas, 1836); he also wrote The Fall of the Alamo: A Reminiscence of the Revolution of Texas (Herald Steam Press, 1860). A recent addition to the Alamo literature was Michael Lind’s The Alamo: An Epic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), a novel in verse by a sixth-generation Texan who is steeped in the lore and myth of the epic battle that was the forerunner of the Mexican War and a symbol of American resolve to fight to the death for independence.
The first screen version was The Immortal Alamo, filmed in Texas (Star 1911) by the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. In the 1950s, there were two attempts to tell the tale. In The Man from the Alamo (Sweden 1953), with Glenn Ford and Chill Wills, one man leaves the Alamo before the defeat but is branded a coward for his failure to accomplish his mission. Two years later, in The Last Command, with Sterling Hayden, Jim Bowie leads rebellious Texicans and Davy Crockett in a last-ditch stand against his old friend, Santa Anna.
Probably the best known retelling of the Alamo story was John Wayne’s flag-waving, but highly inaccurate, epic movie (1960) that was filmed in a fairly faithful reproduction of the original fort built on Highway 674 near Brackettville, Texas. This film also featured a popular theme song, “Ballad of the Alamo,” written by Paul Francis Webster and Dimitri Tiomkin, and recorded by Marty Robbins. It gained instant popularity as both a popular and country-western hit, and joined the parade of best-sellers in 1960. Other media renditions include The Road to Fort Alamo (1964); The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (1987—TV); The Battle of the Alamo (1996—TV); Alamo: The Price of Freedom (1988), a documentary; The Alamo (2004); and Chupacabra vs. the Alamo (2013—TV).
Today, families who are able to trace their roots back to the Texas Revolution, and especially to a man who died at the Alamo, are almost venerated within their communities. Many often achieve special standing, much like descendants of settlers who arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower in Massachusetts Bay or ancestors of colonists who fought and died in the American Revolution.
Martin J. Manning
See also Crockett, Davy
Further Reading
Brear, Holly B. 1995. Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Graham, Don. 1985. “Remembering the Alamo: The Story of the Texas Revolution in Popular Culture.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89 (1): 35–66.
Hansen, Todd, ed. 2003. The Alamo Reader: A Study in History. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.
Hatch, Thom. 1999. Encyclopedia of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Holsinger, M. Paul, ed. 1999. War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Johnson, James R. 2005. The Alamo: Heroes and Myths. Evanston, IL: J. G. Burke.
Roberts, Randy, and James S. Olson. 2001. A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory. New York: Free Press.
Schoelwer, Susan P., with Tom W. Glaser. 1985. Alamo Images: Changing Perceptions of a Texas Experience. Dallas: DeGolyer Library and Southern Methodist University Press.
Thompson, Frank T. 1991. Alamo Movies. 2nd ed. Plano, TX: Wordware.
Zaboly, Gary S. 2011. An Altar for Their Sons: The Alamo and the Texas Revolution in Contemporary Newspaper Accounts. Buffalo Gap, TX: State House Press.