My Own Private Alamo
Some days, the icon of Texas independence seems like just another old building. But there’s plenty to celebrate and remember—if you know how to look at it.
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It was here, in the late afternoon of February 23, that an important parley occurred between Major Green B. Jameson, the young engineer who was in charge of the Alamo’s fortifications, and Colonel Juan Almonte, one of Santa Anna’s staff officers. For the Alamo defenders, it was a day of fright, confusion, and uneasy second thoughts. William Barret Travis, the 26-year-old Alabama lawyer who commanded the Béxar garrison in a fragile alliance with Bowie, had promptly responded to Santa Anna’s red banner with a cannon shot. But Bowie himself, already gravely ill from an unknown affliction, was not in quite as impulsive a mood. He wrote a note asking for a parley and sent Jameson out with it under a white flag. According to Almonte, Jameson “manifested a wish that some honorable conditions should be proposed for a surrender.”
After Bowie’s offer was rejected—Santa Anna was only interested in unconditional surrender—Travis sent out his own messenger. Travis had apparently reconsidered his situation and, as Almonte recalled, “stated to me... that if I wished to speak with him he would receive me with much pleasure.” But by then it was too late for diplomacy. Travis’ offer was refused, and the men of the Alamo could no longer pretend that Santa Anna harbored any notion of mercy.
When Jameson returned to the Alamo to report his grim news, he would have walked up Commerce to where a Dillard’s department store now stands and taken a left into Alamo Plaza. From there, it was only fifty yards or so to the GATEHOUSE OF THE ALAMO. Like so much of the Alamo, this important structure is no longer standing. But its location is marked by a grassy area in the middle of the plaza. The building was a long stone gallery with interior rooms and an arched gateway that served as the main entrance to the Alamo. At the time of the siege the gate was guarded by a half-moon artillery battery called a tambour, and there were exterior ditches as well that gave the defenders cover when they sallied forth from the walls. These defenses were put to the test on the third day of the siege, when Santa Anna ordered a probing attack from the south. This initial skirmish turned out to be a rousing victory for the Texians, who drove the attackers back with artillery and small arms fire. In a letter that day to Sam Houston, Travis wrote that his men “conducted themselves with such heroism that it would be injustice to discriminate. The Hon. David Crockett was seen at all points, animating the men to do their duty.”
The southern end of the Alamo compound was a clear strong point, and when Santa Anna made his final assault ten days later he did his best to bypass it, throwing his forces at the far weaker north wall instead. It was probably in one of the rooms of this building that Jim Bowie died, bayoneted on his sickbed.
Beyond the vanished gatehouse stands the ALAMO CHURCH. One of the world’s most recognized structures, it looks quite different than it did in 1836. The famous curved gable—an architectural flourish known as a campanulate—was added fourteen years after the battle, when the U.S. Army renovated the church for use as a warehouse. Until then, the building had been a roofless, crumbling ruin. The lower facade, though, has not changed, and the effect of the whole building is still one of mysterious force.
Just to the right of the churchyard you’ll see a parallel track in the paving stones marking where a wooden PALISADE once bridged a gap between the east edge of the gatehouse and the corner of the church. One of the women who survived the battle, Susanna Dickinson, recalled seeing Crockett’s body lying “dead and mutilated” in this area, with “his peculiar cap lying by his side.”
The issue of Crockett’s death has been a hot topic of debate for decades, with documents of varying credibility—including, most famously, the “diary” of a Mexican lieutenant colonel named José Enrique de la Peña—indicating that Crockett surrendered and was executed. Certainly there seems to have been executions, but the evidence that Crockett was among this group strikes me as unconvincing, and I’m inclined to believe that he died fighting somewhere in this churchyard.
As you stand directly in front of the church and look down, you’ll notice a curious strip of bronze and a plaque explaining that, according to legend, this is where Travis drew his famous LINE IN THE SAND. The key word here is “legend.” This stirring event, in which Travis gave his men the choice to escape over the walls or to stay and die, has been depicted in countless movies and is the keystone of the Alamo myth of deliberate self-sacrifice. Unfortunately, it is almost surely the invention of a man named William P. Zuber, who claimed to have heard the story as a child from his parents, who had heard it from the one man of the garrison who supposedly took Travis up on his offer to escape. Zuber wrote it down in 1871 after what he called “a phenomenol refreshment of my memory” and admitted that he essentially authored Travis’ speech to his men.
Another hallmark of Travis’ grandiloquence is entirely true, and that is the magnificent letter he wrote on the second day of the siege, calling for reinforcements and declaring, “I shall never surrender or retreat.” Travis probably wrote it in one of the rooms of the WEST WALL. Hardly anything on this side of the Alamo has survived, though if you cross the street at Alamo Plaza, just at the point where a stairway leads down to the Hyatt Regency hotel, you’ll see traces of its adobe foundation under a glass viewing panel. The wall, with its interior rooms and houses, ran straight north, about even with the building that now houses a T-shirt shop, Greystone’s American History Store, and a Foot Locker.
If you continue north across Houston Street and walk into the lobby of the Gibbs Building, you’ll be standing at the approximate site of the compound’s northwest corner—one of its deadliest artillery positions. Across Alamo Street from the Gibbs Building is the POST OFFICE (615 E. Houston). Walk up the stairs to the door and turn around. In front of you is the Alamo Cenotaph, a massive memorial built in 1939 that has never been much beloved but, like so many artifacts that clutter up the Alamo grounds, is now far too venerable to remove. Remove it anyway, using your imagination, and you’ll get an idea of the size of the mission courtyard that the Texians had to defend. From this vantage point, you won’t even see the Alamo church, since it is hidden behind the remnants of the old convent building that formed the southern part of the east wall. It would have been even less prominent in 1836, when the convent was two stories high instead of one, and the church itself, with its broken, low-slung roofline, was a good six or eight feet lower.
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