At the conclusion of the Civil War, the canonical poet Walt Whitman said that the “real war will never get in the books.” It’s an observation especially apropos for the thirteen-day siege of the Alamo. It was fought on a frontier outpost, the garrison was slaughtered, and it would be years before most of the primary sources were tracked down.
Although everyone understood the foundational importance of the Alamo in giving birth to Texas, little attention was paid to assembling the facts of what really happened. Life in the 1830’s was harsh and documenting history was a civilizational luxury that the wild frontier did not afford. Walter Lord, one of the most revered chroniclers of this saga, lamented, “who had a pencil to write anything down”.
Truth is indeed the first casualty of war, and this has fueled the now age-old controversy over the circumstances surrounding the death of David Crockett, the Alamo’s most famous defender. Did he perish in battle or was he alongside several other defenders summarily executed in its immediate aftermath by the order of Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna? A new and balanced account by Phil Guarnieri and Richard Range, David Crockett Went Down Fighting: How We Know It, is probably as close as we’re going to get to the truth.
After the Alamo was taken by storm there were many questions and few answers. The fog of war is more than a poetic inference or a catchy aphorism. The battle was a death fight, no quarter given, and fought in the twilight’s dim shadows. In a frenzy of disorder and seething chaos individual deeds were forever lost in a tangle of ambiguity.
Unreliable information percolated everywhere and what was often remembered over dense billows of black smoke, bloody corpses, and the pitiful cries of the grievously wounded and dying may well be colored more by imagination than fact. Within weeks rumors circulated that Crockett was executed. But there were also other early Texan accounts stating that Crockett had fallen in battle— “fighting like a tiger” in Andrew Briscoe’s ringing words.
And there the matter peacefully slept, not causing much of a stir either way with the popular culture and media readily championing Davy’s fight to the death. However, with the release of an English translation of what is ostensibly the eyewitness account of a Mexican officer reporting that Crockett was taken captive and executed by Mexican forces, a storm of controversy erupted. Baby boomers still captivated by the afterglow of Walt Disney’s “King of the Wild Frontier” dying on the ramparts swinging Old Betsy were traumatized by the new revisionism.
Conversely, scholars, academicians, and biographers of David Crockett warmly and wholeheartedly embraced what was a searing and literary account of his execution. This interpretation prevailed as Texas schoolbooks and curricula treated the Mexican officer’s account as incontrovertibly true. But with history no one has the last word. Recently some weighty scholars such as William Davis, James Donovan, and Michael Lind joined early dissenters like author Bill Groneman in questioning and chipping away at the execution narrative as being pure, unadulterated fact.
But David Crockett Went Down Fighting fatefully takes the argument one step further and may prove the coup de grâce of the Crockett execution scenario. Borrowing a theme from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” that truth is often hidden in plain sight, the authors do a deep dive into the sources introducing a heretofore unprecedented critical point of evidence in the timing sequence of events showing that Crockett was identified by eyewitnesses who personally knew him as being “dead and mutilated” before Santa Anna ever entered the Alamo. The Mexican general couldn’t have ordered Crockett’s execution. Crockett was already dead.
These authors argue convincingly that the Tennessee backwoodsman, hunter, marksman, humorist, tall-tale teller, and three-term congressman likely lived up to his legend. No matter what your perspective, this work casts the reader in the role of detective by forensically presenting a freshly conceived narrative with multiple clues to consider in what remains an absorbing historical drama.
