The Alamo Myth: What Really Happened in 1836

New Maybelline Hyaluronic acid and the colour. Serum lipstick. Some crimes are so shocking, they don't just make heavy. They forever change our society. I'm Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes. Each week I take on one of the most notorious criminal cases. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, released every Tuesday through Thursday.

From the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came out or didn't. Listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

If you're not from Texas, you may know next to nothing about the Alamo. Perhaps you've heard the expression, remember the Alamo, but you're not sure why it needs to be remembered. Maybe you visited San Antonio once and after a stroll on the river walk you walked the Alamos grounds and admired the chapel's distinctive limestone facade without actually going inside and learning what happened there.

This pretty well captures my own experience of the Alamo. My distant impression was that it was just another fortress where a battle once took place. People fought and died there, and Texans were proud of those people. But if you look more closely, you'll find that the Alamo has a very complex and controversial history, and that Texans have been engaged in a 190-year battle over the Alamo narrative.

That battle entered a new phase a few years ago when a book with a provocative title hit the shelves. It was called Forget the Episode. According to Brian Burrow, one of Forget the Alamo's three Texas based authors, Alamo enthusiasts fall into two schools. The traditionalists and the revisionists. As strange as it sounds, these two sides are personified by two British rock stars, with Ozzie Osborne representing the revisionists.

One of the great stories of modern Texas lore has been that Ozzie Osborne peed on the Alamo and was thrown out of the state. And it turns out the the actual story is pretty close. He didn't pee on the Alamo. He peed on the Cenotaph, which is a statue just outside the Alamo, but it has the names of all the people who died, so it's still pretty holy in the Texas canon.

And it's never been exactly clear why he did it. We know he was in a dress, we know he was deeply drunk, and either he just got lost and peed on something, or he was trying to get out a little publicity for his show. Ever since then, Ozzy has kind of been for me a symbol of those who might pee on the Alamo legend, if you will.

On the other side, you have Phil Collins, the former drummer for the band Genesis, who, as a solo singer, has sold millions of albums. Phil, it turns out, is a classic Alamo traditionalist. He grew up reading the stories. As an adult, he began visiting the Alamo regularly, sometimes for weeks at a time, and he got to know everybody on the site. And he ultimately began collecting Alamo memorabilia weapons, anything associated with the battle.

and is very much personification of those who want to believe the classic legend, which, needless to say, doesn't really stand up. The story of the Alamo is in many ways the story of these two competing narratives. The facts of history on one side, the legend on the other. It's also a story about who controls that narrative and the ways in which generations of Americans have used the Alamo legend to serve different purposes. Everything from inspiring Texas soldiers.

to combating the threat posed by communism and John F. Kennedy. But to understand why the Alamos still divides Texans and why it matters far beyond Texas, you have to go back to where it all began. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South.

As I said, the story of the Alamo is complicated. The battle took place in 1836, but the story of how it came about begins more than 20 years earlier, in 1812. At the time, Texas was still part of Mexico. There were only three towns, San Antonio, Goliad, and Nacadoches, and not many people lived there.

States in the American South, meanwhile, were prospering, thanks to the creation of cotton plantations. It was the biggest business in the Western Hemisphere, and it depended entirely on the labor of enslaved people. But as the land in southern states was leased and bought up, people across the South began looking to Texas, wondering, what if we moved there?

Well, President Monroe kind of thought the same thing. And long story short, mounted this kind of bay of pigs like semi-deniable invasion of Texas. In which a couple of hundred individuals, not soldiers, not American soldiers, went across the Texas border from Louisiana. Long story short, they invaded, they took it over, it wasn't very difficult. There were, you know, maybe a hundred soldiers, everybody ran, and they suddenly are in control of Texas.

The victory was short-lived. Mexicans re-invaded, killing the majority of male civilians involved in the conflict. By 1820, the Texas province had lost most of its white settlers. Those who remained lived in deadly fear of the Comanche and their allies. Allies. And this was not nice warfare. This was rape the women, scalp the men, kill everybody type of warfare. It was scary stuff.

So by 1820, 1821, Mexico had a problem. They needed some people in this province, right? To keep it safe, to keep it viable, to keep it inhabitable. Nobody from Mexico wanted to go up there, so what did they do? They invited in their first American. You know, the Mexican experiment with inviting Americans in was a real success.

A young Missouri man named Stephen F. Austin, now known as the father of Texas, arranged for some land and got like three, four hundred families from around the south, brought him in, everybody settled down, down by the coast, down by where Houston is now, so pretty far away from Native Americans. And began, you know, assembling and making cotton plantations. And you know, by 1830, they'd been there eight, nine years. It was a massive success.

After a while, though, the Mexican government in far-off Mexico City had a sobering realization. There were barely any Mexicans in Texas, and next to no government presence. The American colonists, known as Texians, were treating it like part of the US. When Mexican authorities reacted by installing tax collectors and some troops, the Texians pushed back.

But the real argument, the one Mexico and the Texians had been having for years, wasn't about taxes. It was about slavery. Specifically, the Texians' dependence on enslaved people to work their cotton fields. Slavery was what was necessary for the Texas economy. Stephen F. Austin once wrote in his private correspondence, Money is all that is needed, and Negroes are necessary to make it.

Unfortunately, the Mexican government which had just revolted ten years earlier against the Spanish government and was now free, you have to remember most Mexicans are people of color. they did not look kindly on white people owning them or other people of color. So The Mexican government from the beginning had been ardently anti slavery.

But they allowed for the most part the Texans to go ahead with their slaves for several years because, yeah, well, it really wasn't bothering us and they're making a lot of money, yada yada, yada. But then, in the early 1830s, the price of cotton exploded. It triggered a flood of illegal immigrants from the American South across the Texas border. In just four years, from 1831 to 1835, Texas's population doubled.

These newcomers had no respect for Mexican law. Many of them were running from something. Mostly arrest warrants or debts. As one historian put it, for any man to go to Texas in those days, Meant his moral, mental, or financial dilapidation. One of these newcomers was Jim Bowie, who would later die at the Alamo. Before arriving in Texas, Bowie earned a living through real estate fraud and illegally smuggling African slaves from Cuba.

He'd become famous for killing a man in a knife fight, an incident that gave us the buoy knife. Mexico responded to these new arrivals by raising taxes and installing more troops and forts. Some of the newcomers took offense. So, long story short, this one group, sometimes called the War Party, it wasn't literally a party, and it's not even clear that it was more than fifty guys. Some historians think it was like twenty guys.

Began bitching in the newspapers, in letters, in speeches. They began bitching about Mexico. Why are we part of Mexico? This is ridiculous. And finally, this one keen troublemaker, William Travis. decided to capture a little government outpost there on Galveston Bay, and he did. And he thought, wow, this is the first step toward rebellion. Everybody in the state is gonna rise in armed and fight Mexico with me. And then Mike dropped.

People around the state were like, he did what? He wants us to what? And everybody was like, this guy is nuts. So Travis is like suddenly in the newspaper saying, well, well, you know, I I kind of thought maybe this was a mistake. Sorry, won't do it again. But Travis did it again. A string of uprisings followed.

Mexico became convinced that the Texas province was slipping into rebellion. Mexican President and General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana decided it was time to deal with the problem. In the Alamo legend, Santa Anna is often portrayed as a bloodthirsty tyrant. In truth, he was, by most reports, a standard military leader of his time, charged with defending Mexico's legal territory. A territory that had accommodated American settlers for years.

And I love how generations of Texans have always talked about that they were revolting for their freedom. that they were oppressed. Oh my God, the Texans not only were free citizens of Mexico, they had more rights than regular Mexicans. They were favored. And so, when a small group of them, led by Travis, dared to kind of revolt, Santa Anna's reaction was he was kind of pissed. I mean, this isn't some territory. This is a state.

Of Mexico. Santa Anna felt about these ungrateful Texans, the way you and I would feel if twenty thousand Canadians had been allowed to settle in Montana. And then one morning they woke up, shot the governor, and decided to take over Montana for themselves. Well, how do you think Washington would feel? How would you feel? That's how Santa Ana feels.

So, in february eighteen thirty six, Santa Ana organized an army and marched north to crush the revolt and arrest its leaders. His first line of resistance would be the Alamo. It is not hard to destroy a college. It was so chaotic. As soon as I got over there, like a lot of the police cars have started arriving. And it is very hard to build something new. I believe her exact quote was that I could have gone to jail for the shit this school was. doing.

Brought you thirty-five stories from American colleges. Stolen body parts. Colts and more. And now can't For another season, at a time when universities are all over the news. There's a guy screaming into his phone. He's like, uh, you know, I just saw Charlie Kirk get assassinated right in front of me. They were recruited from Cambridge University by the Soviet Union. Stories you've never heard of.

Had to have posture pictures and of course they were all nude photos. And stories you're itching to know more about. Story recruitment is a game, and if you want to play, you've got to play. Listen to and follow campus files, available now for free on the Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.

The Alamo is one of the most famous battle sites in America. But what is it exactly? Basically, it was a former Spanish settlement or mission that priests used to convert and settle indigenous peoples. It consisted of a chapel and a handful of buildings behind a low wall. It was not designed for war.

When the Texans learned that Santa Ana's army was approaching, a group of volunteers, about 200 men, converted it into a makeshift fort. They piled sandbags, hauled cannons to the walls, and posted guards while couriers rode for help. Chief among the volunteers were William Travis, the hot-headed young lawyer from Alabama, and Jim Bowie, who'd come to Texas after the feds got wind of his fraudulent land deals.

They were joined by a man named Davy Crockett. Yes, the Davy Crockett. Crockett was a former congressman from Tennessee who'd come to Texas to start over. He had been voted out of office and didn't have a clue what to do with himself. He was kind of a a national figure because he had been celebrated in a book. and a play he was kind of a folk he wrote, anyway, in an effort to reinvent himself.

He too came to Texas where he was said, sure, you can have those sixty free acres of land, but you need to serve in the Army for a few months first. And as luck would have it, he was assigned to the Alamo. So those three men, Travis, Bowie, and Crockett, We in Texas refer to as the Holy Trinity. They are our three main characters of the Alamo story.

As Brian points out, holding up inside the Alamo didn't really make sense. It was not a military outpost, and it wasn't built to endure a siege. But for reasons unknown, Travis, Bowie, Crockett, and the rest decided to stay. And as the months wore on, they began to get these reports that Santa Ana's coming, that Santa Ana's cavalry has crossed the Rio Grande, that they could be here any day. And these guys never leave. But they did ask for help.

As the Texians held their position at the Alamo, an ad hoc government took shape and declared independence from Mexico. The president of this brand new republic was a former congressman and governor from Tennessee named Sam Houston.

Travis just starts firing off these letters to the new president, Sam Houston, saying, Hey, Sam, think the Mexicans could be on the way. You want to send us some guys? And he keeps asking. And he keeps asking. And it's one of the dirty little secrets of this great Texas revolt that no one can. Twenty-two guys from a town called Gonzalez show up. Nobody else. The fact is most Texans don't want to be fighting this. They want to be on their plantations making money. They just want it to go away.

It doesn't go away. The Mexican forces entered San Antonio in late February and laid siege to the Alamo for two weeks. Finally, on March 6th, they stormed it. What happened next is shrouded in mystery because almost everyone died. Historians would later construct the events from Mexican reports, officers' diaries, and a few survivors who escaped.

These sources agree that Travis died fighting, and that Bowie, who'd fallen ill, was likely killed in his sickbed. Crockett's final moments remain disputed, though a Mexican officer claimed he surrendered and was shot on Santa Ana's orders. From Brian's point of view, the whole thing was a fiasco that could easily have been avoided.

And so from that point, the Alamos defenders have always been extolled for this incredible bravery. How they decided to draw this line in the sand and fight when no one else would. And it's all just not true. In reality, Brian says, there was no grand decision to make a last stand. Most of the men at the Alamo didn't think Santa Ana's army would arrive so soon, and by the time they realized it, they were surrounded.

There was a bunch of guys who didn't believe the Mexicans were coming who got trapped. They were unable to get away. They waited too late. And I'm sorry, after that, once the battle comes and the Mexicans storm and kill everyone, how you can say these guys are the essence of bravery? I'm sorry, they fought to the death. Because they had no other choice, they couldn't get away.

The battle may have been a pointless massacre, but the moment it ended, the Mexican and Texian leaders began spinning the story. Santa Ana spread the message that this is what happens when you dare to challenge Mexico. Sam Houston, the Texians' new commander in chief, extolled the heroism of the Alamos defenders, giving his soldiers a purpose and a cause.

The Texas media helped. The Telegraph and Texas Register, a reliable source of Texian propaganda, called the battle, quote, an event so lamentable and yet so glorious to Texas that we will never cease to celebrate it. Based on this narrative, Houston was able to raise a small army. A month later, they fought Santa Ana's invading army at the Battle of San Jacinto. It was here that Houston supposedly told his troops, Remember the Alamo, using the famous phrase for the first time.

Against all odds, the Texians won. Brian calls it among the unlikeliest battles ever fought on North American soil. you know, a Mexican army that should have dominated this scrappy little group of Americans. The Americans basically in the middle of a siesta in the middle of an afternoon charge across an open field.

And Santa Ana's guys are, you know, kind of drinking and being with women, and they look up and you know, like the attackers are ten yards away and they're like, oh God, I should put my beer down. The Texians slaughtered the Mexican army at San Jacinto and captured Santa Ana, Mexico's president and top military general. A month later, they signed the Treaties of Velasco, which ended the hostilities and sent the Mexican troops south.

The Texians had already declared their independence from Mexico during the siege at the Alamo. Texas would exist as an independent nation for the next ten years before joining the United States in eighteen forty five. As Brian puts it, people may have forgotten the Alamo entirely, had Sam Houston not used it as a rallying cry before the Texians defeated Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto. If you look at it, there is no reason on its face that anyone should remember the album.

It's you know a couple hundred guys who shouldn't have been there who just got rolled over. This happens all the time in wars going back to prehistory and most of those stories you've never heard of.

The only reason you've ever heard of the Alamo is that the Texans went on to win in San Jacinto, and many of them yelled, Remember the Alamo while they were attacking the Mexicans, at which point the cry of Remember the Alamo And the story of what actually happened there became deeply embedded in the Texas identity. I'm Texan, I can say this with love and a smile on my face, but Texas identity is a much deeper thing.

Let me tell you, then Ohio identity or Connecticut identity, Texans, it is the idea that we were an independent country that overcame this incredible oppression. by Santa Ana and these dads to leave Mexicans, is taught some version of it, to every child who's ever grown up in the state. We all internalize it. The Alamo entered history at the Battle of San Jacinto. The winners would now sit down to write it.

The phrase Remember the Alamo may have first appeared during the Battle of San Jacinto, but for decades after, few people actually remembered it. Texans were busy with bigger things, like becoming the twenty eighth state and fighting the Mexican American War, and fighting with the Confederacy during the Civil War. You know, we have to remember this was a time before the modern academic pursuit of history. There were no professional people running around saying, we need to know more about that.

And also there were almost no American survivors, so there weren't a lot of people who even knew what the story was. To this day, we don't have nearly as much information about the battle as you want. So for 30 years until after the Civil War, nobody remembered the Alamo. The first semi academic account of the battle was written by a balding former clerk from New Jersey named Reuben Marmaduke Potter.

Potter had managed a warehouse in Matamoros during the Texas Revolt, and he'd picked up a lot of stories from Mexican and Texian soldiers. Potter got a lot of details right, but he also embraced the legend and later admitted to making stuff up. In his version, for instance, Davy Crockett charged into a line of Mexican troops and died fighting. In truth,

His death is disputed. A Mexican officer claimed he was captured and shot. Regardless, Potter's book became what Brian calls a veritable petri dish of Alamo folklore. For years, pulp writers and amateur historians used it to concoct their own fanciful accounts of what happened at the Alamo. You know, a lot of it was essentially just nicely dressed anti-Mexican propaganda, how dastardly the Mexicans were. And it was during this period that the single greatest component of the myth came up.

And that is a guy came forward in East Texas who said, I escaped the LMO. I was there. And he said, and it was more heroic than we have any memory of, because William Travis came forward and with his sword drew a line on the sand and said, If you will fight with me, step across this line. And if you don't, stay on the other side and you may escape. And that has been the centerpiece of the Alamo legend for 120, 130 years, even though from the moment he said it, we knew it wasn't true.

There is no evidence whatsoever that this gentleman was ever at the Alamo or even near the Alamo. But it's a great story and Texans really loved it and really hugged on to it. It was these amateur historians and some invented accounts that created the foundation of what Brian calls the heroic Anglo-narrative of Texas history. As one of them put it, the Anglo Saxon American race are destined to be forever the proprietors of this land of promise and fulfillment.

This narrative held sway for much of the 20th century, thanks to the Texas government. You know, if you look at what happened to the legend after the 19th century, it's easy to say, oh, Texans just promulgated this myth because they all loved it and they all just told the story and it lived on. In fact, it was a much more top-down and structured event. Texas government a hundred years ago as now it was run by intense conservatives.

And they made very clear, with written instructions, that the teaching of history would adhere to the legend of the Alamo and to the lost cause myth of the Old South. And a series of academics who challenged that over the first half of the twentieth century were kind of disappeared or led to know that, no, young man, we will be teaching our version of the Alamo and our version of Texas history.

So, you know, this myth was a state-sponsored myth for the longest time. Even so, for the first half of the 20th century, the Alamo legend was mostly a regional thing. People outside Texas didn't know much about it. In nineteen forty seven, if you lived in Vermont, you probably had not even heard Remember the Alamo. It really wasn't a thing beyond Texas.

And then suddenly during the fifties, at a time of rising fears of global communism, that a number of people, including people in the military, generals from Texas, began to use the Alamo as a metaphor. for fighting back against the brown skin tides of communism, if you will. And so the Alamo began to be a popular meme, if you will, on the right side of the political spectrum. And where you see that most vividly is in John Wayne's famous 1960 movie Call the Alamo.

The Alamo was billed as a Disney entertainment. In fact, John Wayne designed it to be a political statement about the evils of communism, liberalism, and John F. Kennedy, who was running against Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign. As Wayne wrote in a press release, he made the movie to remind the freedom-loving people of the world that not too long ago there were men and women in America who had the guts to stand up and fight for the things they believed in.

Wayne's version of the Alamo deviated wildly from the truth. I haven't seen it, but by most accounts, it's a bad movie. Time magazine called its first three hours as flat as Texas. The critic for The New Yorker called it a model of distortion and vulgarization. And yet, the movie endures as perhaps the most popular narrative around the Alamo.

It also symbolized what Brian calls the high watermark of Texas's Anglocentric creation myth. Not long after its release, a chorus of new voices began calling that myth into question. It was then after that that the 1960s came. And with that, the rise of all sorts of voices that had not been heard before that. In our case, what matters the most is the rise of the first Latino scholars and academics of note.

Among their first takes was: hey, how about we start telling the accurate story of the Alamo? And so this whole idea of Alamo revisionism. as personified early on by Ozzy Osbourne, we can really trace to academic ways of thought that arose first in the 19th century. These scholars popularized the revisionist narrative.

But in truth, this more nuanced view of the Alamo, one that didn't demonize Mexicans and captured the contributions of Latinos living in Texas at the time, had lived in oral histories in Texas Latino families for decades. And they only began finding the light of the day when the first Latino scholars began tackling this stuff in the sixties, especially the nineteen seventies.

The 1970s saw the first public revisionist controversy when someone published a book claiming that Davy Crockett didn't go down fighting. The idea that he didn't go down swinging old Betsy, covered by the corpses of Mexican soldiers, I mean that was sacrilege. But it did feed the appetite of people who thought, maybe there's a little more here. And so we we saw the first serious academic study of the Alamo in the seventies and eighties.

And then came this book. It's called Duel of Eagles in nineteen ninety, written by a guy named Jeff Long. Who's nobody from nowhere? Just a guy. who got very angry about the Alamo and all the things that he found in the archive. Jeff Long's Duel of Eagles portrays the Alamo and the Texas Revolt As less a revolution than a secessionist revolt intended to defend Texas's slave based economy.

He leaned heavily on Mexican accounts and took aim at the Alamos' supposed heroes. He calls Davy Crockett an arrogant mercenary. And Jim Bowie, a thug fleeing a lifetime of frauds and hoaxes. Duel of Eagles was not received well in Texas. Long got death threats. A Houston newspaper half jokingly wondered why his house was still standing.

Brian calls Duel of Eagles the Big Bang of Alamo revisionism. A rush of revisionist works followed, making the 90s what he calls the golden age of Alamo reassessment. Elements of revisionism crept into Texas textbooks for the first time.

And then as luck would have it, conservatives retook control of the state government and for about the last 25 years have really been very resolute about you not only will remember the LMO, you will remember the way we tell you to. And uh, you know, Texas politicians can get really touchy about the Alamo creation myth.

And you know, when we started this book, I wrote this book with two buddies. I had been gone from Texas for years and had only been back five years. They both worked here and they said, we're gonna stir up our Hornets down. I was like, oh, be serious. Come on. People don't really still take this shit seriously. And they were like, just you wait. Their book, Forget the Alamo, The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, came out in twenty twenty one.

Bryan and his two co authors thought the only way it'd get attention was if a conservative Texas politician came after them. Brian didn't think it would happen. Then it did. Tonight, a new controversy about Texas history and free speech, all centering around a new book about the history of the Battle of the Alamo. Now the book is called

And ultimately it happened. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, came after the book. Our biggest publicity event was at the State History Museum and he canceled us. And it became this big controversy, and of course it vaulted us into the top ten New York Times bestseller. According to Brian, it found a large Latino readership in Texas, who began to say, This isn't the story I learned about in seventh grade history.

I can't tell you how much this book meant to many Latino people who would come up to his advance in tears saying, finally someone is telling the story that we've told each other for years. I mean, I have written my share of books over the years. I've never had one where people acted so emotionally to it. I first came across Brian's book while researching the story of Buford Pusser, the famous Tennessee sheriff whose wife was allegedly ambushed by a local crime syndicate in 1967.

Buford became a folk hero in the South after a series of hit movies depicted him as a righteous crime fighter who avenges his wife's death. But last summer, Tennessee investigators and the local DA announced that, based on a review of the evidence, the ambush probably never happened. They concluded that Buford shot his wife that night.

The evidence was strong and backed up by a case file 2,000 pages thick. But many people in Buford's hometown, who'd been raised on the Buford Pusser legend, refused to believe it. Brian had followed the Pusser story too. He saw direct parallels with the Alamo and other Southern myths. You know, I hear you about Pussard, and I certainly have lived the myth around this. Why is it that these type of local and regional myths seem so much stronger? They pull so much harder in the American South.

Like, do you go to Vermont and find people there who really wanna are just so thrilled about, I don't know, the guy who first discovered maple syrup? In Ohio? Do they have festivals for Johnny Appeseed and talk about I'm a Johnny Appeseed Ohio? I just don't think so. And in every southern state, they have these heroes and these prized myths and legends. I make the argument that none are stronger than in Texas. Well maybe others are. I don't know.

But I do find myself wondering if part of this is the fact that everyone who grew up in the South And I was born in Memphis in 1961 and we had black servants from the outset throughout my childhood that I had no problem with because no one in my family told me I should have a problem with it. And I've always wondered if part of the reason for the tenacity of the Southern Myths has been somehow wanting to obscure all that came before.

If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone South team, please email us at gone southpodcast at gmail.com. That's gone southpodcast at gmail.com. For bonus content, you can follow us on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at GoneSouthPodcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on Substack at Gone South with Jed Lipinski. Gone South is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created

And narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leah Reese Dennis, Matty Sprung Kaiser, and Lloyd Lockridge. Our story editor is Gay. Gone South is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to. analyst, certified financial planner, and the host of

Jill on Money Podcast. With the new year upon us, there's no better time to take control of your financial life, and the Jill on Money Podcast is here to help. And I hope entertaining insights on your money, and more importantly, on your life. Follow and listen to Jill on Money wherever you get your podcast.