Date: 07/19/98
From: Simon Haines (simon5890 aol.com)
I realize that there is not a clear idea of how many [Mexican casualties there were], but I'm wondering about [the] Morales column, since it was only 100+ strong.
It must have suffered terribly from the cannons on the chapel, lunette, Crockett's position and possibly the 18 pounder, also from the rifle and musket fire.
Do we have a rough idea on how many where killed, wounded?. As an aside, they sure were as brave as anyone was on that day.
Simon Haines
Since Duque's column consisted of the cazadore companies of the Activo San Luis, the Permanente Jimenez and the Permanente Matamoros, it is safe to say that the column probably did number around 100 men.
How many killed?Before I discuss this, understand that they were the equivalent to light infantry companies, armed with the British light infantry musket or Baker Rifles. Their job was to work in skirmish order: not as a regular assault column like the columns with the line infantry companies.Despite the film treatments (including Price of Freedom, for which the powers-that-be overruled me) this column did not assault the south side in mass. Rather they kept the south side pinned down while the three columns on the North did their job.I don't think Morales was repealed. I think he skirmished with the positions on the South, and then swung to the ruined buildings outside the southwest corner and then took the 18 pounder by the flank.
It even appears that Morales may have already been inside the Alamo, using the ditches as cover, when his troops linked up with the rest of the columns inside.
I don't think the artillery on the Alamo chapel played a role in Morales' attack: it did in Romero's.All Morales' had to worry about was the one cannon on the lunette and those in the earthwork around the gate.
Now, the unit that took the largest amount of casualties that day was the Activo Toluca, who launched a dead on attack against the north wall. There were three fusilero companies of the Activo San Luis with them. That unit took the third highest (The Permanente Aldama took the second most, being with Cos, as were the other three fusilero companies of the San Luis).Looking at Andrade's casualty report for the battle, you might assume that the cazadore company of the San Luis, fighting with Morales, took most of the battalion hits. Now that we have the San Luis' casualty list, clearlybattalions' losses were the ones with Cos and Duque and not Morales.In short, Morales' cazadore column appears to have taken the least amount of hits (Duque would be first, Cos second, Romero third with Morales fourth).
The Alamo Battlefield Association will publish the translated log book of the Activo San Luis Battalion in the next issue of their Journal.
This log book substantially confirms Andrade's figures, and lists names of the battalion killed and wounded by rank and company.John Lundstrom did an excellent article on Mexican losses at the Alamo in Campaign Magazine (Summer 1973) which was light years ahead of its time.The documentation coming out of the Mexican Defense Archives seems to back up most of John's conclusions.
Kevin R. Young
Subject: In Defense of Groneman
Date: 07/ 21/98
From: John Bryant
Ê
I re-read Bill Groneman's book Defense of a Legend and he makes a pretty good case of taking the de la Peña papers apart. Why have most historians embraced these papers with so little proof and no substantiation as to their authenticity if that is the case as Mr. Groneman asserts. I have never had a particular problem with the idea that Crockett was executed, yet if all is as Mr. Groneman says there does need to be some serious research and investigation into their authenticity.
John Bryant
Bill Groneman did a real service for the study of the Texas Revolution when he called into question some of the facile assumptions that historians had been making about the de la Peña papers for the past three or four decades÷in other words, since their first publication in Mexico in 1955, through Walter Lord's (inadvertently misleading) discussion of them in 1961 and their (incomplete) publication in English in 1975.
However, it would be a mistake to consider Defense of a Legendthe last word on the de la Peña papers÷it certainly is not that. In fact, in his new book, Three Roads to the Alamo, William C. Davis refers his readers to his own article in the Fall 1997 Journal of the Alamo Battlefield Association, in which he says that Groneman's book is so muddled and error- ridden that it deserves no further comment!
For my own part, I have tried to praise Groneman for what's valuable about his work, and to explain with some care why I question many of his methods and disagree with most of his conclusions.
I was asked to review Defense of a Legend by the editors of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in the spring of 1994; to my great surprise, I found enough new evidence in the course of examining Groneman's book that what I wrote instead was an article-length refutation of Groneman's central conclusions. In other words, I came away from this first effort convinced of the de la Peña documents' authenticity, and persuaded that de la Peña's description of Crockett's death by execution had impressive corroboration. I remain today even more strongly convinced of both propositions.
The interested reader should proceed from Groneman's book to my article, "The Little Book That Wasn't There," in the October, 1994, issue of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Next on the reading list should be the exchange between Groneman and myself in the pages of the journal, Military History of the West, in the Fall 1995 (pp. 129-165) and Spring 1996 (pp. 99-106) issues. The first of these contains the address that Bill gave to the March, 1995, meeting of the Texas State Historical Association in San Antonio÷ you should note that already in this talk, Groneman was backing away from his most important accusation against the de la Peña "diary"÷that is, the notion that it contained fatal historical anachronisms, or what Groneman called "premature information."
Next, the vicarious historical detective should consult a series of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals between me and Thomas Ricks Lindley in the pages of The Alamo Journal, issues 96 through 100 (May, 1995, through March, 1996).
In a new introduction to Carmen Perry's translation of de la Peña, I tried to sum up where we stood in our understanding of the "diary" (more accurately, the memoir) and its authenticity in the fall of 1996÷this new edition, which contains a previously undiscovered and untranslated "missing week" of the de la Peña diary itself, was published in the spring of 1997 and is available from the Texas A&M University Press.
Both Tom Lindley, in The Alamo Journal, and William C. Davis, in The Journal of the Alamo Battlefield Association, have over the past year made fresh contributions to the debate. Lindley remains (sorry, Tom) a flat-earth historian, maintaining to this day that the de la Peña manuscripts are forgeries, but arguing skillfully nevertheless that other evidence shows that David Crockett died in combat at the Alamo. Davis, on the other hand, accepts the probable authenticity of the de la Peña papers, but doubts their accuracy, and maintains that we will probably never know for sure how Crockett died.
I disagree with the conclusions of both gentlemen, but I have a few other historical fish to fry before I'm going to be able to return to this particular (and never-ending) debate. To my knowledge, Bill Groneman had added nothing new to the discussion since Defense of a Legend.
The debate recently "went national,' when Michael Lind published an article in the Winter 1998 issue of the Wilson Quarterly, published in Washington, D.C. (Lind published an epic poem, The Alamo, last year). Both Bill Groneman and I responded to Lind's flawed essay with letters to the editor, which were published in the Spring issue, along with a reply by Lind. I found Lind's reply to be as flawed as his original piece, and sent another letter to the WQ, but apparently the editor thought that his readers had had enough of this obscure and arcane debate.
Here, as my final word for the moment, is my previously unpublished second letter to the Wilson Quarterly:
Michael Lind states in his reply to my critique of his recent article on "The Death of David Crockett' " that if he were the prosecutor in a hypothetical trial of General Santa Anna for the alleged execution of Crockett, he would introduce the "Dolson letter" as Exhibit A, and call me to the stand as an expert witness. Yet Lind maintains that if he were in the jury he would nevertheless find Santa Anna not guilty. I must say that if Iwere the prosecutor, Mr. Lind would find himself on the stand as a hostile witness, because nothing sways a jury like self-contradictory testimony.
In evaluating my argument that Crockett was executed with a group of a half-dozen captured Alamo defenders upon Santa Anna's direct orders, Mr. Lind acknowledged that the Dolson letter is "the strongest potential corroborating evidence for the execution theory."Ê Roughly two-thirds of Lind's reply is devoted to an exegesis of this letter, which was written from a Galveston Island camp for Mexican prisoners by a bilingual Texan sergeant, George M. Dolson, who had on the previous day served as the interpreter during the interrogation of a Mexican officer.
According to Lind, this officer, and thus Dolson's "informant," was Colonel Juan N. Almonte. The critical two sentences leading to this conclusion bear repeating: "Colonel Crockett was in the rear, had his arms folded, and appeared bold as the lion as he passed my informant (Almonte.) Santa Anna's interpreter knew Colonel Crockett, and said to my informant, ' the one behind is the famous Crockett.' " Lind goes on to demonstrate the difficulties produced for the execution theory by this scenario. "Who," he asks, "was this interpreter who knew Crockett by sight? " The failure of this man "to inform Santa Anna of Crockett's identity, while furtively spreading the news to others, " says Lind, "would make this mysterious person the most incompetent interpreter in history. "
Lind's flawed reading of the Dolson letter is an object lesson in the dangers of superficial interpretation of evidence taken out of context. The simple fact is that Almonte could not have been Dolson's informant. The reasons are both specific and general. First, Almonte was on the mainland at the time, under house arrest with Santa Anna; he was never held in the POW camp where Dolson was a Spanish translator. Access to such arcane information was unnecessary, however, for Lind to have realized that the interrogated officer was not Almonte. This urbane colonel (educated in the United States and quite familiar with the American political scene) was perfectly fluent in English, as was well known in Texas in the summer of 1836. At the time that Dolson wrote his letter, Almonte was serving as Santa Anna's interpreter.
Lind has, in fact, made the same mistake as the late Thomas Lawrence Connelly, who as a graduate student in 1960 uncovered the Dolson letter in a September 1836 edition of the (Detroit) Democratic Free Press. It is clear that if the Dolson letter is not to collapse into absurdity, we must recognize that the newspaper's typesetter has apparently dropped an interlineated explanation by Dolson of the interpreter's identity onto the wrong side of the period between these two sentences. The "mysterious " interpreter, in other words, is Colonel Almonte himself, who understandably chose not to interfere as General Santa Anna lambasted General Manuel Castrillón for failing to carry out the "no prisoners " order of the day.
If I were sitting on that jury, I would find Santa Anna guilty as charged.
For Alamo de Parras,
James E. Crisp, Department of History
North Carolina State University
See Also:Ê The Death of David Crockett, by Michael Lind
Subject: 18 Pounder's Deployment
Date: 07/31/98
From: Simon Haines simon5890@aol.com
Did the 18 pounder [cannon] have any great effect in the battle or would it have been better employed at, say, the north wall?
Simon Haines
Who's to say? Certainly, it didn't have a big role in the final battle; in fact, it may have even been out of ammunition. Remember that it was probably deployed at the southwest corner where it could easily command the town.
If you have ever tried to move a 19th century artillery piece(I have), it's not an easy task(especially up and down ramps and across two football fields).The 18 pounder simply remained whereever it was when the Mexicans attacked on March 6.
Kevin R. Young
