William C. Davis - Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis

We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole history of man is new. The great extent of our republic is new .

THOMAS JEFFERSON , 1801

What is the American, this new man? He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.

MICHEL-GUILLAUME-JEAN DE CRVECOEUR

( J. HECTOR ST. JOHN )

Letters from an American Farmer

Millions of men are all marching together toward the same point on the horizon; their languages, religions, and mores are different, but they have one common aim. They have been told that fortune is to be found somewhere toward the west, and they hasten to seek it .

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE , Democracy in America

Stranger! should in some distant day ,

By chance your wandering footsteps stray

To where those heroes fought and fell ,

And some old garrulous crone should tell

The story of a nation's birth ,

Of human ashes mixed with earth

The bodies of the bold and free ,

Who bled and died for liberty

FALL OF THE ALAMO , The Knickerbocker , SEPTEMBER 1836

The three first met at the American Theater in New Orleans on January 10, 1828. Andrew Jackson, his eyes set on the presidency, came to the Crescent City to be honored by a grand ball on the anniversary of his defeat of the British in 1815. Every political and social light in the region was there to shine, with Stephen Austin, the great colonizer of Texas, presiding as host. Sitting at Austin's side was an honored veteran of the Battle of New Orleans, James Bowie of Louisiana, while others on the dais were Congressman David Crockett of Tennessee and young William Barret Travis of Alabama.

What each thought of the others at this first meeting, no one can say, though Bowie was already well known in the region as a man of audacious bravery, Travis was a youthful lawyer and political writer of note, and Crockett had a national reputation as a daring hunter and larger-than-life folk character. They came as a committee to go to Texas in advance of a host of future colonists, to spread American civilization and what would become Jacksonian democracy to the new Southwest. All three made speeches, Crockett extolling the transcendent virtues of Old Hickory, the man who would be the first people's president, and Travis saying much the same. Bowie added his mote to the praise of Jackson, then turned his words toward Texas. They were going to have to fight the Mexicans for possession of the new country, he warned. They might even have to die in defense of Texan and American liberty. If so, they were ready, and legions would follow them to glory.

They were last together on February 25, 1837. A carpenter, his name lost to history, labored over a small coffin that morning. No ordinary casket, this box was to hold remains more symbolic than real, its burden not the body of a single man but a smattering of the ashes of two hundred or more. It was just nine days short of a year since they had died, their battered corpses immolated in one huge funeral pyre and two smaller ones. In the intervening twelve months the piles of ashes and charred bones just sat out in the open, blown by the prairie winds, picked over by foraging rodents, scattered by the passage of men and animals. The men those ashes once had been became truly a part of the soil they had died for. Still, more remained than the small casket could hold, and so only ashes from the two smaller piles went into the box. On the inside of its lid the carpenter carved three namesTravisBowieCrockettthree to stand for them all, and now to rest forever together in this casket, united in eternity as they had been united in their deaths.