Alamo Traces by Thomas Ricks Lindley Page A

Ibid.
    13 Ibid. This Houston statement contains several errors. Travis was not sent to Bexar to relieve Neill, but rather to reinforce him and furnish cavalry to scout the roads west of San Antonio. Travis arrived on February 5 and assumed temporary command on February 11, 1836. The Mexican army entered Bexar on February 23, not the “last of February.”
    In “A Lecture on Trials and Dangers of Frontier Life, January 28, 1851,” in Williams and Barker, eds.,
Writings
, V: 272, Houston claimed: “The commander-in-chief had expressly ordered the Alamo to be blown up, and everything that could be, brought off forty days before the enemy besieged it. . . .” Santa Anna commenced the investment of the Alamo on February 23, thus “forty days before” would have been January 15, 1836, two days before Houston received Neill’s letter that requested assistance.
    Houston’s blaming of Travis for not destroying the Alamo and abandoning San Antonio appears to be the foundation for the twentieth-century view of Travis as an insane young man who was consumed with ambition to command at the Alamo, regardless of the human cost. That interpretation of Travis and the Alamo, however, is false. For a more accurate picture of Travis see William C. Davis’s
Three Roads to the Alamo
.
    14 James Coburn, “Houston descendant to attend rededication of Fort Sam,”
San Antonio Express-News
, November 12, 1993.
    15 Marshall De Bruhl,
Sword of San Jacinto: A Life of Sam Houston
(New York: Random House, 1993), 186.
    16 Marshall De Bruhl, “Letters to the Editor,”
Austin-American Statesman
, August 21, 1994.
    17 Elizabeth Crook,
Promised Lands: A Novel of the Texas Rebellion
(New York: Doubleday, 1994), 143.
    18 Jeff Long,
Empire of Bones
(New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993), 54. Long, in his work of nonfiction,
Duel of Eagles
(New York:William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990), 119-121, does not claim that Houston ordered the Alamo destroyed and the city abandoned. Instead, he wrote: “Bowie’s mission was to prepare the destruction of the Alamo.”
    Then, Long continues that Bowie, after talking with Lt. Colonel James C. Neill, decided: “And so, rather than ready the Alamo for demolition, Bowie added his voice to Neill’s in calling for reinforcements, money, and food. One thing Bowie was not candid about was how a remote command, like the Alamo, meant both prestige and autonomy. Above all, the Alamo command meant limelight, for it positioned upon the bowhead of the Anglo-American warship. It stood clean and separate from the hurly-burly.”
    There is no evidence that suggests Bowie recommended that Bexar be defended because he wanted a “remote command” away from the “hurly-burly.” Long’s pen does not serve history but rather his thesis that United States imperialism was behind the Texas Revolution.
    19 James L. Haley,
Sam Houston
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 119.
    20 Sam Houston to Henry Smith, January 17, 1836, Goliad, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, IV: 46-47.
    21 Sam Houston to Henry Smith, December 6, 1836, San Felipe, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, III: 101; Henry Smith to Sam Houston, December 17, 1835, San Felipe, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, III: 239; Sam Houston to James Bowie, December 17, 1836, San Felipe, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, III: 222; James C. Neill to Sam Houston, January 6, 1836, Bexar, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, III: 425; Sam Houston to Henry Smith, January 6, Washington-on-the-Brazos, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, III: 426; Henry Smith to William Ward, January 6, 1836, San Felipe, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, III: 428; James C. Neill to Sam Houston, January 14, 1836, Bexar, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, IV: 14; Sam Houston to D. C. Barrett, December 15, 1835, San Felipe, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, III: 201-202; Sam Houston to James C. Neill, December 21, 1835, Jenkins, ed.,
Papers
, III: 278-279. On December 15 Houston wrote Barrett, a member