The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (48 page)

Northcross, James

Nowlan, James

Pagan, George

Parker, Christopher Adam

Parks, William

Perry, Richardson

Pollard, Amos

Reynolds, John Purdy

Roberts, Thomas H.

Robertson, James Waters

Robinson, Isaac

Rose, James M.

Rusk, Jackson J.

Rutherford, Joseph

Ryan, Isaac

Scurlock, Mial

Sewell, Marcus L.

Shied, Manson

Simmons, Cleveland Kinlock

Smith, Andrew H.

Smith, Charles S.

Smith, Joshua G.

Smith, William H.

Starr, Richard

Stewart, James E.

Stockton, Richard L.

Summerlin, A. Spain

Summers, William E.

Sutherland, William DePriest

Taylor, Edward

Taylor, George

Taylor, James

Taylor, William

Thomas, B. Archer M.

Thomas, Henry

Thompson, Jesse G.

Thomson, John W.

Thruston (Thurston), John M.

Trammel, Burke

Travis, William Barret

Tumlinson, George W.

Tylee, James

Walker, Asa

Walker, Jacob

Ward, William B.

Warnell, Henry

Washington, Joseph G.

Waters, Thomas

Wells, William

White, Isaac

White, Robert

Williamson, Hiram James

Wills, William

Wilson, David L.

Wilson, John

Wolf, Anthony

Wright, Claiborne

Zanco (Lanco), Charles

John ________

Additions and Deletions

After two decades of intensive investigation into probate records and archives throughout the United States and Mexico, longtime researcher Lee Spencer White (herself a direct descendant of Alamo defender Gordon C. Jennings and the founder of the Alamo Defenders Descendants Association, as well as the author, with Ron Jackson, of the book
Alamo Survivors
) has determined the following names as those of likely Alamo defenders:

Edwards, Nathaniel

Edwards, Samuel

Gordon, Pelitiah

Kedison, ________

McClelland, Ross

Another Alamo historian, Thomas Ricks Lindley, states in his exhaustively researched book
Alamo Traces,
and in the article “Alamo Sources,” that the following men are also worthy of inclusion on the list:

Anderson, A.

Andrews, George

Dickson, James

Edwards, Samuel

Eigenhauer, Conrad

Gordon, Pelitiah

Harrison, I. L. K.

Holloway, James

Hutchinson, Thomas P.

Kedison, ________

McClelland, Ross

Morgan (aka Washington), James

Morman, John

Roth, Jacob

Spratt, John

In addition, Lindley came to the conclusion that the following men on the official Daughters of the Texas Revolution list were probably not at the Alamo at the time of the battle:

Bowman, Jesse B.

Brown, George

Brown, James

Clark, Charles Henry

Day, Jerry C.

Guerrero, José María

Hannum, James

Kellogg, John Benjamin

Robertson, James Waters

Robinson, Isaac

Thompson, Jesse G.

NOTES

The following abbreviations are used in the notes; these and other sources are listed in the bibliography:

P
ROLOGUE

The account of courier James L. Allen’s ride from the Alamo is based on an article by Robert H. Davis entitled “Bob Davis Uncovers an Untold Story About the Alamo,” published in the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
on February 28, 1932, in which he recounts an interview with attorney F. C. Proctor, who as a boy heard the story of Allen’s ride from Allen himself. Allen’s ride is corroborated by the following sources, whose information was chiefly gleaned from Allen descendants:
Memorial and Genealogical Record of Southwest Texas,
pp. 402–3; Wright,
San Antonio de Béxar,
p. 56; and a letter from Viva Crain Schleicher to Samuel Asbury dated December 16, 1934 (box 2, file 52, Samuel Erson Asbury Papers, Cushing Library, Texas A&M University), in which the writer states: “Many years ago I heard an old gentleman, Mr. Jim Allen, tell how as a boy of seventeen, he carried a message from Travis in the Alamo to Fannin at Goliad.” A May 6, 1938, affidavit by Thomas M. Stell, one-time treasurer of DeWitt County, also corroborates Allen’s account. In it, Stell writes: “I first knew Judge Jas. L. Allen in 1868 when I was 12 yrs. old. Some 2 yrs. later I heard his story from his own lips of his connection with the Alamo. As I remember it now, his state[ment] was substantially the same as related by F. C. Proctor [the source for the Davis story cited above]. He said the reason his name had never appeared in history was on account of his own negligence in not taking steps to verify the fact that he delivered Travis’ message to Fannin and remained there one day. When he became convinced Fannin was not going to Travis’ relief he concluded to go to Gonzales and fall in with Houston’s men and he went into the west side of the Guadalupe River, stopping here and there with the settlers to acquaint them [with] the desperate situation at San Antonio…. Judge Allen died in 1901 at the age of 86 yrs., a grave and dignified gentleman not given to boasting…. Judge Allen lived and died believing he was Travis’ last messenger and I believe likewise” (affidavit courtesy of Mildred Duhon, great-granddaughter of James L. Allen; punctuation added).

O
NE
: T
HE
H
OTSPUR

The epigraph is from J. H. Kuykendall’s “Sketches of Early Texians,” p. 6, box 3F82, Jonathan Hampton Kuykendall Papers, BCAH.

Sources for this biography of Travis include McDonald,
Travis;
Kuykendall, “Sketches of Early Texians”; Mixon, “William Barret Travis, His Life and Letters”; Davis,
Three Roads to the Alamo;
and Travis’s own diary, edited by Robert E. Davis and published as
The Diary of William Barret Travis
.

Travis’s January 28, 1836, letter is reprinted in Chariton,
100 Days in Texas,
p. 176, as is the January 29, 1836, letter, pp. 179–80. The quote from his diary can be found in Davis,
The Diary of William Barret Travis,
March 9, 1834.

According to Travis’s nephew, Mark Travis, almost all the Stallworths, who were relations on his mother’s side, were redheaded (Mark Travis to Samuel Asbury, October 14, 1924, box 2J83, William Barret Travis Papers, BCAH). As for his height, he was slightly above the average height of the period—most likely approximately 5 feet 10 inches: “tall and manly in appearance” (Amanda Dorsett Scull, quoted in Sowell,
Early Settlers,
p. 836) ; “Colonel Travis was a fine-looking young man of more than ordinary height” (Rodríguez,
Memories of Early Texas,
p. 7); “In person Col. Travis was rather above the average height” (Kuykendall, “Sketches of Early Texans,” p. 7); “a tall well-formed handsome man” (Guy M. Bryan to W. W. Fontaine, June 10, 1890, correspondence 1879–1916, box 2D151, W. W. Fontaine Papers, BCAH).

The quote from Travis’s autobiography, any copy of which no longer exists, appears in Kuykendall, “Sketches of Early Texians” (he claimed to have read it). Though Travis would claim later that there were problems in his marriage, there is little or no evidence that it was in trouble at the time he left Claiborne: “His assurances to me, that he would return to his family or send for them as soon as he could obtain the means to make them comfortable. He continued to write me affectionately and to repeat his assurances of unchanging attachment until my brother Wm [William] took exceptions to his conduct towards me believing as he did that his intention was to abandon me altogether and inspire me with the hope that he would return to us [or] send for me until he could no longer conceal his real designs of abandoning me altogether” (Rosanna Travis to James Dellet, September 6, 1834, box 2R207, William Barret Travis Papers, BCAH). There are many myths and untruths surrounding Travis’s departure for Texas. For an excellently researched, in-depth discussion of the most prominent of these, see Davis,
Three Roads to the Alamo,
p. 635, n. 80.

Bradburn’s promised promotion is mentioned in Henson,
Juan Davis Bradburn,
p. 50. The author’s objective (and more sympathetic) reappraisal of the much-maligned Bradburn brings into question his long-standing reputation as an arrogant, even brutish tyrant.

The quote about the Texas colonists and their pocket constitutions is in Jackson,
Texas by Terán,
p. 100. The description of the Anahuac prisoners threatened with death is from Davis,
Three Roads to the Alamo,
pp. 38–39; this account of the 1832 Anahuac disturbance also derives from N. D. Labadie, “Narrative of the Anahuac, or Opening Campaign of the Texas Revolution,” in
The Texas Almanac
for 1859; F. W. Johnson, “Further Account by Col. F. W. Johnson of the First Breaking Out of Hostilities,” in
The Texas Almanac
for 1859; Looscan, “The Old Fort at Anahuac”; and Henson,
Juan Davis Bradburn
.

Details of the steamboat enterprise that Travis was involved in can be found in box 2D157 [papers 1828–29], Benjamin Cromwell Franklin Papers, BCAH.

There is little solid knowledge about Travis’s slave Joe. Author Ron Jackson graciously told me that Joe was from Kentucky, a fact he unearthed researching his unpublished biography of Joe. A letter from Travis to David G. Burnet, dated February 6, 1835, is quoted in W. A. Philpott, “Unpriced Inventory of Texana” (1969), where the letter is (in part) summarized as follows: “Travis writes, also, that he recently ‘sold My Woman, Matilda’ for $700 in Brazoria. He writes ‘I hired Joe for a year,’ but that he did not know whether or not he ‘will sell him’ ” (box AR507, file 3, Philpott Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections). The description of Joe is taken from an ad offering a reward for Joe after he ran away in April 1837, which ran in the
Telegraph and Texas Register
from May 26 through August 1837.

William Fairfax Gray’s
Diary,
p. 114, notes that Cummings’s Mill Creek place was run by “a woman about thirty” and mentions the “warm fire, good supper and comfortable lodging.”

The “Victory or Death” countersign is noted in “John W. Moore’s The Capture of Anahuac,” box 2B120, Eugene Campbell Barker Papers, BCAH.

The August 1835 letter is quoted in Davis,
Three Roads to the Alamo,
p. 458.

Information about Travis’s ancestors can be found in
The Alamo Heroes and Their Revolutionary Ancestors,
p. 77.

The “Huzzah for Texas!” quote is in a letter from Travis to J. W. Moore, reprinted in Looscan, “Harris County, 1822–1845,” pp. 268–69.

John Forsyth discusses how he has spent all his money on the cavalry company in a letter to the General Council on January 13, 1835, reprinted in PTR 3, p. 504.

T
WO
: “O! H
E
H
AS
G
ONE TO
T
EXAS
”

The epigraph is from James Hatch’s unpublished manuscript “Lest We Forget the Heroes of the Alamo,” James Hatch Papers, BCAH.

The May 1820 letter from Jefferson to Monroe is quoted in Walraven,
The Magnificent Barbarians,
p. 25.

Washington Davis describes the “fine rich land” of Texas in a March 12, 1831, letter to his wife, Rebecca, in
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
44, no. 4 (April 1961), p. 508. The letter discussing “every poor man” was written on August 14, 1836, and found in Court of Claims file 1281, GLO. “A vast howling wilderness” is part of the Hatch quotation that begins this chapter.