"The first shot of the Texas revolution was on Oct. 2, 1835, and took place near Gonzales."
Posted on 03/19/2002 3:09:55 PM PST by chance33_98
Ron Howard Planning Alamo Movie
The battle of the Alamo may be coming to the silver screen. Director Ron Howard says there's a very real possibility it could be filmed in the Austin area. Howard outlined his plans at the Governor's Mansion Tuesday afternoon. "We're considering making a film about the Texas Revolution and the Alamo. And it was suggested to me by Russell Crowe that I go and pick the governor's brain," director Ron Howard said. Then masses of media get their chance to pick his brain regarding his plans. "While we're still in early stages of developing the Alamo, it's not too soon to start being serious about some practical matters involved," Howard said. Like where to film it. "We have our eye on Texas. It wouldn't quite make sense to make the movie anywhere else," Howard said, "And I've never had a chance to shoot in Austin but every time I get here it's always a great visit." If Howard's crews do choose Austin our local economy could be looking at a boost and local talent could be looking at new jobs. "Our intention would be to work with as many people as possible I had very good experiences working that way when I was making television movies here," Howard said, "I'm not giving away the story." Howard says when he does bring the battle to the silver screen it'll be different from anything you've seen before. "Whether that's going to be satisfactory to everyone. I doubt it. Whether it's going to be fresh and original and more authentic than anything done before. If it isn't, I wouldn't do it," Howard said. Howard says he has no timeline for the movie right now and expects the movie's production will draw its share of controversy. In the past year alone more than 41 movie and television productions have pumped more than $274 million into the Texas economy.
Related Links
Here is a list of links:
• Ron Howard & The Alamo
• Ron Howard Bio
Yes, the truth does matter, so I guess I'd better police up your pack of lies and innuendo.
1. The "hicks" (superfluous abuse noted, for handling later) in Texas were on Spanish soil, with any number of mercedes, labores, and leguas, also called sitios, granted by the Spanish crown. The persons responsible for issuing the mercedes were in the first place the King of Spain, then Viceroy Apodaca in Mexico City, to whom answered General Joaquin de Arredondo, Commandant of the Interior. Governor Antonio Martinez of Texas reported to Arredondo, and Commissioners Juan de Veramendi and Erasmo Seguin reported to him. The commissioners dealt directly, and Martinez by correspondence from San Antonio de Bexar, with the empresarios Moses and Stephen F. Austin and Felipe Neri, Baron de Bastrop, who served as Austin's land commissioner. Other empresarios active in Texas in the first four or five years included Green DeWitt, another Missourian and former Spanish subject (as both Austins and Bastrop had been), who was commissioned by the governor of Coahuila, and Martin de Leon, who was commissioned in San Antonio. There were others, who were mostly failures and latecomers. Both the Spanish and Mexican governments permitted immigration from the United States until 1830, when there was a four-year hiatus.
Now that the picture is starting to clarify, are you beginning to back up any?
The settlers were required to swear and sign an oath of fealty to the Spanish Crown in return for the right to settle. The oath that they swore, changed only very slightly after Mexican independence in 1823, was as this example virtually word for word:
"In the name of God, Amen. In the Town of Nacogdoches before me, Don Jose' Maria Guadiana, appeared Don Samuel Davenport and Don William Barr, residents of this place, and took a solemn oath of fidelity to our Sovereign, and to reside forever in his Royal Dominions; and to manifest this more fully, put their right hands upon the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, to be faithful vassals of His Most Catholic Majesty, to act in obedience to all laws of Spain and the Indies, henceforth adjuring [sic] all other allegiance to any other Prince or Potentate, and to hold no correspondence with any other foreign power without permission from a lawful magistrate, and to inform against such as may do so, or use seditious language unbecoming a good subject of Spain."
Backing up yet?
Furthermore, Stephen F. Austin's own commission from Governor Martinez had a special codicil, written by Martinez himself, which read as follows:
" I shall also expect from the prudence which your actions demonstrate, and for your own peace and prosperity, that all the families you introduce shall be honest and industrious, in order that idleness and vice may not pervert the good and meritorious who are worthy of Spanish esteem and the protection of this government, which will be extended to them in proportion to the moral virtue displayed by them." [Emphasis added]
Stephen F. Austin responded by excluding mountain men, frontiersmen, "leatherstockings", gamblers, professional hunters, and drunkards. He drove out a number of families which didn't measure up, and even had some men publicly flogged before expulsion. Only four persons out of Austin's original Old Three Hundred were functionally illiterate. Persons who showed substance, or brought capital or livestock to the colony, were extended additionial sitios.
They refused to accept Mexican authority and started the war in 1835.
Totally, irresponsibly false. The war began in April, 1834, when President Santa Anna took over the Mexican government, denounced liberalism, voided the liberal laws that had been passed under the Constitution of 1824, and sent his brother-in-law, General Martin Perfecto de Cos, to crush the 5000 constitutionalist militia which refused to stand down in Zacatecas. General Cos crushed the militia, took no prisoners, and then allowed his army to plunder and rape the state capital.
Stephen F. Austin was in jail and so was unavailable to act as a lubricant while the central government voided the liberal laws of the legislature of Coahuila at Saltillo, to which Texas answered, and sent General Cos north to suppress the recalcitrant liberals there. Texans really noticed when a bloodstained Mexican army arrived on the Rio Grande and started stepping on people. They noticed just a whole lot when General Cos finally said the magic word, that maybe it was time to clean out Texas. Wrong word.
If you want to read the entire story of the war for Texas independence, and how matters went from 1833, when Col. Juan Almonte, on a special presidential mission to Texas to measure treasonous sentiment, found none, but instead a lot of goodwill, President Gomez Farias having restored the liberal constitution and laws, to open blows in 1835, then I suggest the standard manual of Texas history, T. R. Fehrenbach's Lone Star, A History of Texas and the Texans. Read it, and you won't embarrass yourself like that in public any more.
Their great contribution to geopolitical history, apart from the fact that John Wayne was one of them, seems to have been an unremitting insistence on the perpetuation of slavery. Which Mexico didn't practice, BTW.
1. Cortes himself took slaves from the moment he landed in Mexico -- what's the matter with you, don't you read? He branded them, too, with the letter "c", for "captive". Just to mark them, mind you.
Later on, the Indians groaned under their native caciques and, under the encomienda system, the corregidores, in labor levies that were not chattel slavery but rather like the labor corvees of ancient Egypt. The difference won't have mattered much to Indians who died in the silver mines.
In 1835, Texas contained about 30,000 American and perhaps 4,000 Spanish colonists (colonists had stopped coming from Mexico and Spain before Moses Austin made his pitch to Governor Martinez -- it was the reason for suggesting American colonists -- and so the number of "Mexican" colonists in Texas was nil; they had all been Spanish, Irish, and Canary Islanders). Of the American population, perhaps 10% were black slaves. Moses Austin, a Connecticut Yankee, had brought a couple of slaves with him when he originally migrated to Spanish Missouri in 1796, to open a lead mine and smelter.
2. But if Opie wants to tell the true story of these Texans (i.e., that they weren't fighting for any particularly just cause, or that they weren't even Americans) cut him some slack. I always prefer real history to the John Wayne version.
He won't "tell the true story" by listening to people who've been poisoned by Texas-hating Hollywood moviemakers (Tombstone was a classic of hate propaganda) and Marxist-revisionist theories about the "real" history of Texas.
You are too kind. I'm a victim of the public skrewl system but had kin at the Alamo and wanted to know more about them, their sacrifice, and their lives.
"The first shot of the Texas revolution was on Oct. 2, 1835, and took place near Gonzales."
Kerrville ... HMMPPH! All I need to do is recruit at the Dixie Chicken on any Saturday night in College Station, and I'll have enough legions of drunken Aggies to take over the world!
(This does not apply on Chicken Fried Steak night, of course).
Rosie can't play the Alamo. The Alamo has no basement and she's got nothing upstairs.
Revisionist Texas history and fabricated stories about our heritage will never stand. And I hope Ron Howard realizes we won't put up with anything but the truth about the Alamo and the history of our beloved Republic of Texas.
Strela, thank you also for setting the record straight earlier.
BTW, here are two good links to bookmark:
University of Texas -- Historical Maps of Texas
Leading States of Origin of the Old Stock Anglo-American Population (293K)
I think Santa Anna's earlier successes had been achieved by Generals Cos and Urrea, usually against militia, whether in Zacatecas or near Goliad. I don't know about his earlier military career in the Spanish army.
Well, of course the Wayne movie was extremely inaccurate.
The attack took place at dawn. Houston told Travis NOT NOT NOT to hold the Alamo. There were no personal tensions of the type displayed between Bowie and Travis. Bowie wasn't wounded, he was very ill, it goes on and on.
Walt
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