The storybooks tell they was all cut low
but the truth of it is, it just ain't so.
Their spirits'll live and their legends grow,
As long as we remember the Alamo.
The Siege and fall of the Alamo, thirteen grim days in February and March, 1836, was, in the words of the conquering Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, "a small affair." An old fortified mission, the Alamo was held by less than two hundred Americans, Mexicans, and Europeans against Santa Anna's force of five thousand Mexican troops. After a nerve-racking but comparatively bloodless bombardment of less than two weeks, the Mexicans attacked in the freezing predawn of March 6. About an hour later, every defender of Alamo was dead. Their bodies were burned, and Santa Anna marched confidently away, ready to crush rebellion everywhere in Texas as handily as he had crushed it behind the stone and adobe walls of the Alamo.
Creating a Myth
Santa Anna had made short work of the physical Alamo, but the legendary Alamo would prove more formidable. Only a few weeks later, Sam Houston's revolutionary force defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto. With their cry, "Remember the Alamo!" Houston's army created a myth and used the power of the myth to transform defeat into victory. The battle at the Alamo bought Houston a little time to build his army and cost a few hundred lives. The legendary Alamo would help free Texas from Mexico and, a decade later, bring the vast territory into the United States.
The Alamo myth is strong today, and growing; it retains its hold on the imaginations and hearts of generations of Americans. Today, the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas, is not simply an historic landmark like Fort Sumter or Ford's Theatre but a shrine: Texas' most sacred ground.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Alamo inspired countless poems, songs, and plays-works that frequently compared the 1836 battle to the massacre of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae. William Barret Travis, James Bowie, and David Crockett-the Alamo's Holy Trinity-were likened to the heroes of old. But it was left to that unique twentieth century art form-the cinema-to complete their ascent into pure myth.
The movies have enormous impact on the significance that we attach to any historic figure. Before Walt Disney's landmark television trilogy on Davy Crockett in 1954-55, America's leading pioneer hero was Daniel Boone. Crockett, a middling congressman, was known through the popular "Crockett Almanacs" of the nineteenth century as a wild, rather common character, a frontier con man with a penchant for spinning yarns, given to violent, sometimes superhuman acts.
But the powerful image of Fess Parker as a decent, honorable Crockett became the catalyst for a full-scale national craze that had virtually every American child wearing coonskin caps, singing "Daveeee, Davy Crockett!", and dying heroically at backyard Alamo across the nation.
Crockett's mythic stock rose so rapidly that when columnist John Fisher wrote a debunking article in Harper's magazine, the
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