Revising the Alamo

DRIPPING SPRINGS, TEX. - Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, the self-described "Napoleon of the West," is ready to inspire some shock and awe among the citizenry of San Antonio. Or, at least, an actor playing him is.

Proudly resplendent in gold-braided regalia, the general impassively oversees the advance of his mounted soldiers through the narrow 19th-century streets. Impressed locals spill into a sprawling plaza to noisily cheer the display of military might.

Director John Lee Hancock smiles approvingly. He knows this isn't what really happened on that fateful February morning in 1836. But he also knows he has just gotten the deep-impact movie moment he wants for "The Alamo." The lavishly mounted historical epic - starring Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett, Dennis Quaid as Gen. Sam Houston, Emilio Echevarria as Santa Anna and Jason Patric as Jim Bowie - recently wrapped in the Texas Hill Country. Disney plans to release it this Christmas.

Truth to tell, author Stephen L. Hardin notes while surveying the scene, Santa Anna took the town through skirmishes, not by brazenly riding in and claiming the turf. But Hardin, whose "Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, 1835-36" was required reading on the "Alamo" location, forgives the dramatic flourish.

"There's nothing wrong with a little shock and awe here and there," he says. "Especially when the movie gets so many other things right."

Hardin and other informed observers praise Hancock, who was born in Texas, for attempting the first historically accurate rendering of what "Alamo" production designer Michael Corenblith, another Texan, describes as "the central event in the creation myth of this state."

Throughout the 1820s, Mexico encouraged development of its sparsely populated Texas territory by offering free land to anyone, including U.S. citizens, who would settle there. In the early 1830s, however, Mexico curtailed emigration from the north and instituted other policies that inflamed the "Texians" (i.e., American settlers), who viewed themselves as independent of "foreign" rule.

As full-scale revolution flowered, famous frontier characters such as Crockett and Bowie joined the Texian cause. They were among the nearly 200 Texians killed in 1836 while defending the Alamo, a mission-turned-fortress in San Antonio, against a 13-day siege by 1,400 Mexican soldiers led by Santa Anna. The defeat inspired a popular rallying cry - "Remember the Alamo!" - even before Gen. Sam Houston, the Texas army commander who later became the state's first governor, routed Santa Anna's forces at San Jacinto two months later.

Partly because of Santa Anna's ignominious defeat - according to legend, he was too exhausted after dallying with a frisky femme fatale to be combat-ready - and partly because of his spotty record as 11-time president of Mexico, he remains a controversial figure in his homeland.

"Most people think of him as the devil," says Echevarria. "In the official Mexican history, in the stories that boys and girls learn in school, Santa Anna is bad from the beginning to the end."

In "The Alamo," however, Hancock - who wrote the script with John Sayles, Stephen Gaghan and Leslie Bohem - wants to offer a more balanced portrait of Santa Anna. He also wants to portray the hallowed American heroes of the Alamo as flesh-and-blood humans, not larger-than-life icons.

Quaid, another Texan, eagerly agreed to reunite with Hancock, his director on "The Rookie," to play Houston. He didn't fully appreciate the challenge he faced, however, until he supplemented what he learned from the "Alamo" script with his own research.

Quaid assumes Houston "was bipolar, a manic-depressive. He had a brother who committed suicide and a sister who died in a mental institution. So I think depression is something he battled with all his life. He was an alcoholic, and I think he used alcohol to medicate himself against emotional swings. You know how it is when you're like that: There's the meal, and then there's the check. There's really nothing in between."

Houston first gained prominence in the U.S. Army as a protégé of Andrew Jackson, and later rose to the governorship of Tennessee. He fell from grace at age 34 in 1829 when he married the wealthy, beautiful Eliza Allen, who was in her teens. Less than four months later, Eliza left her husband - during an election year! - and returned to her family. Houston resigned from office in disgrace, then drank himself into near-oblivion.

"And then he wound up coming to Texas," Quaid says. "Just like so many of the other great men that we revere here in Texas, they came here because they were failures elsewhere, and this was the place to start over."

Hancock felt Quaid was "the perfect choice" to play Houston "because Dennis also knows what it's like to have an up-and-down career." (Quaid freely admits that, after undergoing "rehab for cocaine and whatever" during the 1990s, he had "no trouble identifying" with Houston's urge to reinvent himself.)

As Bowie, Patric plays a man who cut a colorful swath through history without leaving much documentation behind. Bowie "was pretty closed off," Hancock says, "and he [didn't] write a lot of letters. He wasn't a guy like a Sam Houston, who'd get his portrait painted all the time." All the better, then, to cast "someone like Jason, who doesn't seek the spotlight.

He does a movie only once every three years, it seems like, because he's very picky, and doesn't care to be a movie star." Two-time Tony Award nominee Patrick Wilson ("The Full Monty," "Oklahoma!") has his first major movie role as Col. William B. Travis, the flamboyant Alamo commanding officer. "Travis seemed to come out of nowhere," Hancock says. "So we get to parallel history by having Wilson, who is a fine actor but is not yet a household name."

In sharp contrast, Davy Crockett is almost too well-known, thanks to folklore, popular literature and several Disney television outings in the '50s. Thornton, who plays him in "The Alamo," admits he faces an uphill battle trying to "portray a character who's been looked at more as a guy you'd see in a cartoon book. But I had to play him as a real guy.

"People have this idea of 'Davy! Davy Crockett! King of the Wild Frontier!' " Thornton continues. "Whereas this guy wasn't strictly a woodsman - he was a congressman. A lot of the stories about him were certainly embellished."

Unfortunately, Thornton adds, "Some folks look at Davy Crockett like he's Paul Bunyan or something. I wouldn't be surprised if there are young people today who think Davy Crockett was a fictional character. That whole coonskin cap thing came from a popular play that was written about Crockett, with an actor done up in frontier garb. Crockett himself might have worn a coonskin cap every now and then, when he was holding court, to live up to the legend.

"He was legendary in his own lifetime. If you met him, it would be like meeting Bob Dylan or somebody like that. He had that kind of stature."

Which is just one of the facts Hancock hopes to dramatize, with a minimum of fictional embellishment, in "The Alamo."

Ever since the earliest flickerings of silent cinema, filmmakers have remembered the Alamo.

Even D.W. Griffith offered his take on the Great Texas Myth: In 1915, he supervised production on "The Martyrs of the Alamo," a shamelessly romanticized drama that suggested the Texas Revolution ignited because Mexican troops lusted after "Texian" women. The movie is credited to director W. Christy Cabanne, but the racially insensitive stereotyping smacks of Griffith's own "Birth of a Nation."

John Wayne did double duty as director and star in 1960's "The Alamo," the infamously overblown epic in which the Duke presented Davy Crockett as an all-American, freedom-loving patriot. For TV viewers of a certain age, however, Texas-born Fess Parker will forever be the only rightful wearer of the coonskin cap, thanks to five episodes of the '50s anthology series "Disneyland." (Disney recycled several of those episodes as a feature-length theatrical movie.)

"Viva Max!" (1969) took a mildly satirical swipe at the Alamo myth, with Peter Ustinov playing a modern-day Mexican general who retakes the San Antonio shrine. Trouble is, the only people who paid the movie much notice were the most easily offended: Members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the organization that operates the Alamo as a tourist mecca.

Many historians credit "The Last Command" (1955) - co-starring Jim Davis, later famous as Jock Ewing in TV's "Dallas," the other Great Texas Myth - as the best and most accurate of all Alamo movies. It remains to be seen whether John Lee Hancock's "The Alamo," slated for December release, can usurp that title.

Goliad.

We need only look at what happened there to get a clear picture of what kind of person Santa Anna (Santana) was.

What happened at Goliad? It's not well known outside of Texas. Not many people lacking an interest or education in Texas history even know what happened. The Alamo battle was a battle the Texians lost. Goliad was simply murder writ large.

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"The Goliad Massacre, the tragic termination of the Goliad Campaign of 1836, is of all the episodes of the Texas Revolutionqv the most infamous. Though not as salient as the battle of the Alamo, the massacre immeasurably garnered support for the cause against Mexico both within Texas and in the United States, thus contributing greatly to the Texan victory at the battle of San Jacintoqv and sustaining the independence of the Republic of Texas. The execution of James W. Fannin, Jr.'s,qv command in the Goliad Massacre was not without precedent, however, and Mexican president and general Antonio López de Santa Anna,qv who ultimately ordered the exterminations, was operating within Mexican law. Therefore, the massacre cannot be considered isolated from the events and legislation preceding it.

As he prepared to subdue the Texas colonists Santa Anna was chiefly concerned with the help they expected from the United States. His solution was tested after November 15, 1835, when Gen. José Antonio Mexíaqv attacked Tampico with three companies enlisted at New Orleans. One company, badly led, broke ranks at the beginning of Mexía's action, and half its number, together with wounded men from other companies, were captured by Santa Anna's forces the next day. Twenty-eight of them were tried as pirates, convicted, and, on December 14, 1835, shot. Four weeks elapsed between their capture and their execution, enabling Santa Anna to gauge in advance the reaction of New Orleans to their fate. It was, on the whole, that in shooting these prisoners, Mexico was acting within its rights. Believing that he had found an effective deterrent to expected American help for Texas, Santa Anna sought and obtained from the Mexican Congress the decree of December 30, 1835, which directed that all foreigners taken in arms against the government should be treated as pirates and shot.

Santa Anna's main army took no prisoners; execution of the murderous decree of December 30, 1835, fell to Gen. José de Urrea,qv commander of Santa Anna's right wing. The first prisoners taken by Urrea were the survivors of Francis W. Johnson'sqv party, captured at and near San Patricio on February 27, 1836. Urrea, according to his contemporary Reuben M. Potter,qv "was not blood thirsty and when not overruled by orders of a superior, or stirred by irritation, was disposed to treat prisoners with lenity." When the Mexican general reported to Santa Anna that he was holding the San Patricio prisoners, Santa Anna ordered Urrea to comply with the decree of December 30. Urrea complied to the extent of issuing an order to shoot his prisoners, along with those captured in the battle of Agua Dulce Creek,qv but he had no stomach for such cold-blooded killing; and when Father Thomas J. Malloy, priest of the Irish colonists, protested the execution, Urrea remitted the prisoners to Matamoros, asking Santa Anna's pardon for having done so and washing his hands of their fate.

At Refugio on March 15, 1836, Urrea was again confronted with the duty of complying with the fatal decree of December 30. Thirty-three Americans were captured in the course of the fighting at Nuestra Señora del Refugio Mission, half of them with Capt. Amon B. King's company, the others "one by one". King and his men had infuriated their enemies by burning local ranchos and shooting eight Mexicans seated around a campfire, and these enemies were clamoring for vengeance. Urrea satisfied his conscience by shooting King and fourteen of his men, while "setting at liberty all who were colonists or Mexicans."

A more difficult situation confronted him on March 20 after James W. Fannin's surrender. Fannin's men had agreed upon and reduced to writing the terms upon which they proposed to capitulate. The gist of these was that Fannin and his men, including his officers and the wounded, should be treated as prisoners of war according to the usages of civilized nations and, as soon as possible, paroled and returned to the United States. In view of Santa Anna's positive orders, Urrea could not, of course, accede to these terms, but refusing them would mean another bloody battle. Fannin's men possessed, besides their rifles, 500 spare muskets and nine brass cannons and, if told that it would mean death to surrender, could sell their lives at fearful cost and might cut their way through Urrea's lines. When the Mexican and Texan commissioners seeking surrender terms failed to agree, Urrea shortened the conference by dealing directly with Fannin and proposing written terms, under which the Texans should give up their arms and become prisoners of war "at the disposal of the Supreme Mexican Government." He assured Fannin that there was no known instance where a prisoner of war who had trusted to the clemency of the Mexican government had lost his life, that he would recommend to General Santa Anna acceptance of the terms proposed by Fannin's men, and that he was confident of obtaining Santa Anna's approval within a period of eight days. Fannin, who could not have done much else-Urrea had received reinforcements and artillery that would have devastated the Texan position in an open prairie on ground lower than the Mexican lines-accepted Urrea's proposals but did not inform his men of the conditional nature of these terms. On the other hand, Maj. Juan José Holsinger,qv one of the Mexican commissioners, lulled their suspicions by entering the Texan lines with the greeting, "Well, gentlemen! In eight days, home and liberty!"

Fannin's men delivered up their arms, and some 230 or 240 uninjured or slightly wounded men were marched back to Goliad and imprisoned in the chapel of Nuestra Señora de Loreto Presidio at La Bahía, the fort they had previously occupied. The wounded Texans, about fifty (some estimates are much higher) including doctors and orderlies, Colonel Fannin among them, were returned to Goliad over the next two days. On March 22 William Ward,qv who with Amon B. King had been defeated in the battle of Refugio, surrendered near Dimitt's Landingqv on the terms accorded Fannin, and he and about eighty of his men of the Georgia Battalionqv were added to the Goliad prisoners on March 25. Urrea, in compliance with his promise, wrote to Santa Anna from Guadalupe Victoria, informing him that Fannin and his men were prisoners of war "at the disposal of the Supreme Mexican Government" and recommending clemency; but he reported nothing in his letter of the terms that Fannin and his men had drafted for their surrender.

Santa Anna replied to Urrea's clemency letter on March 23 by ordering immediate execution of these "perfidious foreigners" and repeated the order in a letter the next day. Meantime, on March 23, evidently doubting Urrea's willingness to serve as executioner, Santa Anna sent a direct order to the "Officer Commanding the Post of Goliad" to execute the prisoners in his hands. This order was received on March 26 by Col. José Nicolás de la Portilla,qv whom Urrea had left at Goliad. Two hours later Portilla received another order, this one from Urrea, "to treat the prisoners with consideration, and especially their leader, Fannin," and to employ them in rebuilding the town. But when he wrote this seemingly humane order, Urrea well knew that Portilla would not be able to comply with it, for on March 25, after receiving Santa Anna's letter, Urrea had ordered reinforcements that would have resulted in too large a diminution of the garrison for the prisoners to be employed on public works.

Portilla suffered an unquiet night weighing these conflicting orders, but he concluded that he was bound to obey Santa Anna's order and directed that the prisoners be shot at dawn. At sunrise on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, the unwounded Texans were formed into three groups under heavy guard commanded by Capt. Pedro (Luis?) Balderas, Capt. Antonio Ramírez, and first adjutant Agustín Alcérrica (a colonel in the Tres Villas Battalion in April 1836). The largest group, including what remained of Ward's Georgia Battalion and Capt. Burr H. Duval'sqv company, was marched toward the upper ford of the San Antonio River on the Bexar road. The San Antonio Greys, Mobile Greys, and others were marched along the Victoria road in the direction of the lower ford. Capt. John Shackelford'sqv Red Roversqv and Ira J. Westover'sqv regulars were marched southwestwardly along the San Patricio road. The guard, which was to serve also as a firing squad, included the battalions of Tres Villas and Yucatán, dismounted cavalry, and pickets from the Cuautla, Tampico, and Durango regiments.

The prisoners held little suspicion of their fate, for they had been told a variety of stories-they were to gather wood, drive cattle, be marched to Matamoros, or proceed to the port of Copano for passage to New Orleans. Only the day before, Fannin himself, with his adjutant general, Joseph M. Chadwick, had returned from Copano, where, accompanied by Holsinger and other Mexican officers, they had tried to charter the vessel on which William P. Miller'sqv Nashville Battalion had arrived earlier (these men had been captured and imprisoned at Goliad, also). Although this was really an attempt by Urrea to commandeer the ship, the vessel had already departed. Still, Fannin became cheerful and reported to his men that the Mexicans were making arrangements for their departure. The troops sang "Home Sweet Home" on the night of March 26.

At selected spots on each of the three roads, from half to three-fourths of a mile from the presidio, the three groups were halted. The guard on the right of the column of prisoners then countermarched and formed with the guard on the left. At a prearranged moment, or upon a given signal, the guards fired upon the prisoners at a range too close to miss. Nearly all were killed at the first fire. Those not killed were pursued and slaughtered by gunfire, bayonet, or lance. Fannin and some forty (Peña estimated eighty or ninety) wounded Texans unable to march were put to death within the presidio under the direction of Capt. Carolino Huerta of the Tres Villas battalion.

From two groups shot on the river roads, those not instantly killed fled to the woods along the stream, and twenty-four managed to escape. The third group, on the San Patricio road, was farther from cover; only four men from it are known to have escaped. A man-by-man study of Fannin's command indicates that 342 were executed at Goliad on March 27. Only twenty-eight escaped the firing squads, and twenty more were spared as physicians, orderlies, interpreters, or mechanics largely because of the entreaties of a "high bred beauty" whom the Texans called the "Angel of Goliad", and the brave and kindly intervention of Col. Francisco Garay. Many of those who eventually escaped were first recaptured and later managed a second escape. Two physicians, Joseph H. Barnardqv and John Shackelford, were taken to San Antonio to treat Mexican wounded from the battle of the Alamo; they later escaped.

Portilla wrote that the total number of his prisoners was 445, exclusive of William P. Miller's eighty men, who had been captured without arms at Copano and were thus to be spared. Texan sources specify the number of prisoners as 407, exclusive of Miller's men. This may have been correct. Some of the prisoners taken at Refugio but not executed with King's men are known to have been at Goliad, where they were again spared because they were serving the Mexican army as blacksmiths, wheelwrights, or other artisans. The exact fate of others captured at Refugio is not known. They may have been added to the prisoners at Goliad and killed with Fannin on March 27. Urrea detained about twenty of Ward's men to build boats at Guadalupe Victoria, and Señora Alavez intervened with her husband, Col. Telesforo Alavez, whom Urrea left in charge of this village, to spare their lives as well; they afterward escaped. About a week after the Goliad killings, Santa Anna ordered the execution of Miller and his men and the others who had been spared at Goliad, but he rescinded the order the next day. The men were marched instead to Matamoros after the battle of San Jacinto. Though some managed to escape en route, most remained there until the Mexican government later released them.

After the executions the bodies were burned, the remains left exposed to weather, vultures, and coyotes, until June 3, 1836, when Gen. Thomas J. Rusk,qv who had established his headquarters at Victoria after San Jacinto and was passing through Goliad in pursuit of Gen. Vicente Filisola'sqv retreating army, gathered the remains and buried them with military honors. Some of the survivors attended the ceremony.

The common grave remained unmarked until about 1858, when a Goliad merchant, George von Dohlen, placed a pile of rocks on what was believed to be the site. In April 1885 a memorial was finally erected, in the city of Goliad rather than on the site, by the Fannin Monument Association, formed by William L. Hunter,qv a massacre survivor. In 1930 some Goliad Boy Scouts found charred bone fragments that had been unearthed over the years by animals, and an excursion to the site by Goliad residents on New Year's Day, 1932, succeeded in attracting an investigation of the site by University of Texas anthropologist J. E. Pearce. The authenticity of the gravesite was further verified by historians Clarence R. Wharton and Harbert Davenport.qqv In 1936, in celebration of the Texas Centennial,qv money was appropriated to build a massive pink granite monument, dedicated on June 4, 1938. Davenport presented the address, which was published as "The Men of Goliad" in the Southwestern Historical Quarterlyqv (1939).

The impact of the Goliad Massacre was crucial. Until this episode Santa Anna's reputation had been that of a cunning and crafty man, rather than a cruel one. When the Goliad prisoners were taken, Texas had no other army in the field (see REVOLUTIONARY ARMY), and the newly constituted ad interim governmentqv seemed incapable of forming one. The Texas cause was dependent on the material aid and sympathy of the United States. Had Fannin's and Miller's men been dumped on the wharves at New Orleans penniless, homesick, humiliated, and distressed, and each with his separate tale of Texas mismanagement and incompetence, Texas prestige in the United States would most likely have fallen, along with sources of help. But Portilla's volleys at Goliad, together with the fall of the Alamo, branded both Santa Anna and the Mexican people with a reputation for cruelty and aroused the fury of the people of Texas, the United States, and even Great Britain and France, thus considerably promoting the success of the Texas Revolution.

Several historians have given similar reports on the "Bloody arm flag of Goliad" said to have been made by Captain Phillip Dimmitt. On December 20 1835 the first declaration of Texas independence was signed at Goliad in the chapel of the Presidio by members of Dimmitt's command then stationed at La Bahia. After signing, the group went into the quadrangle and "amidst rapturous hurrahs, the flag of Texas Independence was hoisted and unfurled to the wintry wind".

The flag was described as being made of white domestic, two yards long and one yard wide. "In the center was a sinewy arm and hand, painted red, grasping a drawn sword of crimson." The flag pole was made from a tall sycamore tree found on the banks of the San Antonio River.

Most of the accounts on this flag ceremony quote as their source of information, the memoirs of John James and Nicholas Fagan.

The Dimmitt flag has now become the accepted flag of Goliad and is frequently displayed by business houses around the Goliad Square.

The Goliad Massacre

On Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, after being held captive for one week, the men were told to gather up their things. They thought that they were going to the port of Copano and then on to New Orleans. They were happy and singing. They knew that Colonel Fannin had returned from the Port of Copano the previous day. What they didn't know was that at 7:00 p.m. the pervious evening, Colonel Portilla had received word directly from Santa Anna to execute the men. About an hour after Portilla received the execution order from Santa Anna, he received another order from General Urrea to "Treat the prisoners with consideration, particularly their leader, Fannin, and to employ them in rebuilding Goliad."

At sunrise the able bodied men were formed in three groups and under very heavy guard taken out of the fort. One group was taken out on the San Antonio road, another on the Victoria road, and the other on the Copano road. The prisoners had little suspicion of their fate because each group had been given a different story as to where they were going. One group told that they were going to gather wood, another to drive up cattle and the they they were going to the port of Copano. At selected spots on each of the three roads from one half to three-fourths of a mile from the fort, the groups were halted. After they halted, the guards on one side stepped through the ranks so that all the guards were on one side, they turned and fired at very close range. Those men where not killed ran and were pursued by the cavalry.

The soldiers then came back to the fort and executed the wounded. There were about forty of them. Colonel Fannin was saved until last. He was taken outside the chapel, blind folded and seated in a chair. He made three requests, not to be shot in the face, his personal possessions sent to his family and that he be given a Christian burial. He was shot in the face, an officer took his personal possessions and his body was burned along with many of the other bodies. Not all bodies were burned, some were left where they died. There were 342 men who died in the Goliad Massacre, which is almost twice the number of men who died at the Alamo and San Jacinto combined. Twenty-eight men did escape from the three massacre sites and seventeen men's lives were spared. It is from the accounts of the men who escaped and were spared that we know what happened at Presidio La Bahia. Francita Alavez, the Angel of Goliad and the wife of General Urrea saved the lives of a number of the men.

http://www.presidiolabahia.org/index.html

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