| Title | : | The Alamo |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0803257791 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780803257795 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1948 |
The Alamo Reviews
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The Alamo looms large in the American mind, particularly in the State of Texas. Upon seeing the original Alamo mission building in downtown San Antonio, many first-time visitors are surprised, finding it to be “smaller” than they had expected. Yet to visit the Alamo is to be reminded of the important historical drama that unfolded there – a story that John Myers Myers tells well in his 1948 book The Alamo.
John Myers Myers – cool double last name and all – was originally a New Yorker from Long Island; but he spent much of his life in the American Southwest, studying at the University of New Mexico, writing for the San Antonio Evening News, and eventually retiring to Tempe, Arizona. He wrote extensively about American West-related topics, including a biography of Doc Holliday and a look at Tombstone’s Early Years, and his study of the Alamo siege and battle certainly fits with Myers’s lifelong interest in the history of the Southwest.
Myers provides a fairly traditional account of the Alamo saga; his lean and stripped-down approach, with strong focus on character and action, may reflect his training as a journalist. There is not as much in Myers’s The Alamo as some later writers might include regarding the region’s often tangled political, cultural, and social history; but Myers grabs the reader’s attention and holds it throughout.
As Myers tells it, the Texas Revolution has its genesis in history unfolding ten years earlier, when centralists in the Mexican government sought to deprive the “Texians,” the Anglo colonists residing in Mexican Texas, of rights the Texians thought were theirs under Mexico’s earlier and more liberal constitution.
The local Texian empresario’s brother Ben Edwards, “a man of hot blood and imagination”, issued “excited appeals, containing more high-flown rhetoric than Burke and Paine could muster between them,” and then “raised the red and white banner of Fredonia to the startled view of the few near enough to behold it. He likewise published a declaration of independence which let the world know that Fredonians weren’t to be trifled with while a just God reigned in heaven” (p. 51). The Fredonian Rebellion only lasted a month, from December 1826 to January 1827; but it hinted at a later, larger, and more successful bid for independence that would take place a decade later.
Any history of the Alamo must engage the three central figures on the Texian side: James Bowie, the hard-fighting frontiersman who gave his name to the long-bladed sheath knife he wielded so proficiently in hand-to-hand combat; William Barret Travis, the young officer who seems to have lacked “people skills,” but was possessed of a weird, quirky integrity and an absolute, to-the-death devotion to any cause he might espouse; and David (“Davy”) Crockett, the semi-legendary pioneer-turned-congressman who responded to being voted out of his Tennessee seat in Congress by telling his erstwhile constituents, “You all can go to Hell. I’m going to Texas.”
Myers sketches the characters of these leaders in sparse, just-the-facts prose. The not-to-be-trifled-with Bowie ���once went to hear a sermon and found that the preacher was being heckled so loudly and persistently that he could hardly make himself heard. At length James rose and observed that if there was any further misconduct he’d take care of it by cutting off the wind of the offender. ‘I’m Jim Bowie,’ he concluded; and thereafter the minister had a model congregation” (p. 100).
The proud, touchy, honor-obsessed William Barret Travis meanwhile “was ardent and ambitious of winning distinction, feeling the weight of his thwarted capacities” – “an honest man, albeit riled and redheaded” (pp. 127-28). As prone to quarrel with fellow Texians like Bowie as he was to do battle against the hostile forces of Santa Anna, Travis seems to have been the original rebel without a cause – until he found his cause in the Texas Revolution and the defense of the Alamo.
And then there is David Crockett. I liked the way in which John Lee Hancock’s 2004 film The Alamo depicted Crockett (played by Billy Bob Thornton) as a world-weary man carrying his almost mythic status as a burden – and Myers’s account of Crockett’s arrival at the Alamo with his company of twelve Tennessee Mounted Volunteers partakes of that quality: “The garrison members, who had been much cheered when Bowie arrived, were greatly gratified at the presence of the other…chief legendary figure of the old Southwest. To satisfy the popular demand, Crockett made a speech, complete with some of his famous anecdotes. By [Dr. John] Sutherland’s account it went over big, and at its conclusion Davy was among friends” (p. 150).
Please note that, even when arriving with much-needed reinforcements, to assist a besieged and outnumbered garrison, Davy Crockett couldn't get away without telling some of his "tall tales" of the frontier. No man was ever more truly a prisoner of a famous name.
The heroism on the Texas side during the defense of the Alamo was not restricted to Anglo Texians, of course; Tejanos who spoke Spanish and were of Mexican cultural background, but opposed Santa Anna’s dictatorial ways and supported the cause of Texas independence, also distinguished themselves during the 13-day defense of the Alamo. Captain Juan Seguín, who wanted to stay and fight beside his friends, both anglophone and hispanophone, nonetheless obeyed an order to seek help, and made a daring ride through the Mexican lines in search of help for the besieged Texan defenders:
Seguín and his companion slipped into no-man’s land and rode leisurely eastward. A clear night eventually revealed them to a roving cavalry patrol, whose leader ordered them to approach. To this Seguín agreed, his accent allaying suspicion. The troopers didn’t know they had hailed any but a couple of wandering vaqueros until, when he was just about abreast of them, the Captain dug in his spurs. Both he and the other courier were well mounted, and they had the bulge on the enemy. The pistols missed them in the night, and they were soon lost to pursuit in a patch of woods. (p. 200)
Seguín was not able to return and join in the defense of the Alamo, as he had so wanted to do; for that reason, he survived the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836, and the killing of all of the garrison’s Texan defenders. Seguín, joining Sam Houston’s command, continued to fight for the Texas cause, and contributed to the Texans’ decisive victory over Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, and the beginning of the Republic of Texas’s nine-year life as an internationally recognized nation.
Any San Antonian can tell you that the Alamo had a rough time of it in the decades after Texas joined the United States of America as the 28th state; among other things, it served as a used-car lot for a time, before the Daughters of the Republic of Texas purchased it and rededicated it as “the Shrine of Texas Liberty.” Writing back in 1948, when historical preservation was not as cherished a cause as it is now, Myers wrote that “About all that is left [of the Alamo] is the ruined chapel” and added that “That, too, may collapse; but the Alamo will remain. The Alamo isn’t a structure now; it is a symbol of valor in the minds of men. It can never fall again” (p. 235).
Myers’s 1948 book was republished in 1973 by Bison Books, a Western-regional imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, and it is that copy of The Alamo that you are likely to find if you browse through the books in the Alamo’s well-appointed museum shop. Concisely written, with a tough and taut prose style that may remind some readers of the work of Ernest Hemingway, John Myers Myers’s The Alamo offers a skillful, if relatively traditional, rendering of this epic American story. -
The Alamo story most of us know is more myth than history. Part of this is because it has always been more important as myth than as history. Frankly, the history we actually know of the Alamo is a major inconvenience to the myth. John Myers Myers did very little to disturb the prevailing mythology in his book. He writes, "The Alamo isn't a structure now; it is a symbol of valor in the minds of men. It can never fall again." That’s a pretty clear signal that Myers has focused on the prevailing myth rather than digging deep into the facts of what actually went down and why. Still, Myers attempted to explain his method, explaining in some detail how he decided the veracity of the various surviving source materials — letters, journals, official orders of the Mexican officers, and interviews of survivors. He then launches into the tale.
To his credit, Myers tells a stirring tale. He was a folk historian, always incorporating the importance of myth into his history, which made him ideal for an examination of the Alamo. His book is divided into three sections. The first third is devoted to the history of the structure of the Alamo, from mission to military outpost, and to the history of the roots of the conflict between the Texians and Mexico. He set the stage for what happened at Bexar during those fateful twelve days in 1836. This section is one of the books stronger points (though it lacks most details about the importance of the slavery issue to the Texan rebellion).
In the second third of the book, Myers introduces the principal players who history associates with the Alamo - Bowie, Travis, Crockett, and Santa Anna. A chapter is devoted to each of them, and Myers does an admirable job of placing each within the context of their own personal histories. He notes that while Bowie and Crockett were already legends in their own time, that Travis' fame is tied exclusively to his participation in the Texian revolution. He solidly establishes who they were as flesh and blood men, rather than the demigods of myth that they became, though he doesn’t spend too much time focusing on their more negative traits and motivations. He also paints a balanced portrait of Santa Anna rather than simply demonizing him.
In the book's final section, Myers writes skillfully of the siege and storming of the Alamo. It is a tale that comes with its own in-built drama, which requires only a decent storyteller to assure its success, and Myers is indeed an outstanding storyteller. He had an idiosyncratic style of writing that lends itself perfectly to the telling of this particular tale. Throughout, he is generally faithful to the more traditional interpretations of what happened at Bexar, but does acknowledge some of the elements that smack more of legend than of historical fact (such as Travis' saber-drawn line in the sand).
This is a history that will ruffle no feathers. Though it humanizes the famous participants, it does nothing to detract from the primacy of the Alamo story as American myth. If you are familiar with the traditional story, this book won’t teach you much of anything new, or give challenging interpretations or information that would anger those who revere the myth as filmed by John Wayne. But it is a stirring story well told. -
For such a short, concise work, John Myers Myers' account of the siege of the Alamo is surprisingly wide-ranging, but I suppose this must needs be the case, as the actual siege only lasted ten days and the climactic battle--the actual storming of the mission--was over in about five hours. And indeed, the actual battle only comprises one section--the final one--in a three-section book.
The first section chronicles the history of Spanish, Mexican, and North American involvement in Texas. This doesn't just flesh out what would otherwise be a rather thin book, but provides necessary context--the how, who, and why--of the convoluted struggle for political identity of the area.
The second section provides biographies of the four most important participants of the battle for the Alamo--Jim Bowie, William Travis, David Crockett, and Santa Ana. In detailing the lives of four men who have become larger than life, Myers succeeds in showing why they indeed have all become legendary, while still showing them as actual flesh-and-blood human beings.
The third section gives a meticulously researched--and breathtakingly exciting--account of the siege and final climactic battle. Myers makes it all feel absolutely blood, sweat, and dust real, and demonstrates the reasons this American Thermopylae has become elevated to American mythology are true and fitting and valid. -
What a great history book! I say that, totally biased as I am, toward historians that tell stories, such as John Myers does. He tells the story of all the major figures: Sam Houston, Travis, James Bowie, Davy Crockett and Santa Anna. Furthermore, he gives you enough of the history of the US and Mexico to understand their respective positions and why they did what they did.
It's not merely that Mr. Myers gives you an entertaining historical context to this famous battle, he provides great historic insights. I didn't know Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson were at loggerheads, and Jackson prevented Crockett's re-election to Congress, triggering his migration to Texas to fight for their freedom. I didn't know Santa Anna outnumbered the defenders of the Alamo 30-1 or that he lost a quarter of his army to the battle. That's only counting the dead, not the wounded, who may have been twice as numerous.
Finally, Mr. Myers gives all his sources at the very beginning of his book: letters and diaries from Santa Anna, Alamo survivors, and messengers which have survived to this day. He cross references them and double checks their statements with each other.
If you love history and military battles, you must read this book. I rated it 5 stars, because it was published in 1948 and 71 years later it's as compelling and read-worthy as it was the day it was published. -
This book shows its age (using words such as "redskins"), but it's a compelling, reasonably-detailed telling of the backstory, players, and history of the Alamo. I appreciated the deeper historical context, including the back-and-forth of the "Texians" with regard to whether they were pursuing independence or simply better treatment as a Mexican state. The background chapters on the main characters were detailed and interesting. Regardless of their role in colonialist ventures, those in the Alamo clearly demonstrated courage, staying despite the overwhelming odds, when they could have pretty easily escaped.
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This is quite well-written and presents the context and immediate history of the siege of the Alamo very well. That section is followed by biographical chapters on Travis, Bowie, Crockett, and Santa Anna followed by a description of the siege and battle itself. Overall, the history is well-organized and coherent. There is too much credence given to the Louis Rose story, but this fills only a couple of pages and can be forgiven.
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An astounding tale of real valor by real men that knowingly faced their certain destruction for a cause. Meticulously researched and well described this is a story that should be told to our children and grandchildren. What an incredible story!
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A well concise and written account of the day the Alamo fell. John Myers Myers recounts the day in bloody detail, but also dedicates chapters to the names of the people who are just as famous as the landmark they fought at.
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One of the better stories of the Alamo and a look at history.
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This was okay but it is way outdated, having been published in the 1940s. It is short and would be a good introductory book to anyone not already familiar with the Alamo story.
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Eminently readable & thoroughly interesting this page-turning, yet rather detailed account, of the Alamo and what led up to the battle is definitely recommended!
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This book convinced me that the screwiness of Texas politics is nothing new. From the very beginning Texas was confused about whether it was part of the US via the Louisiana Purchase, or if it wanted to be its own independent republic, or if it wanted to stay part of Mexico.
It was surprising to me, having lived in Bexar county most of my life, just how many battles actually occurred here. I was also never aware of how Sam Houston, purportedly, wanted to blow the Alamo up. Then there's the fact that Houston dallied as long as he did at the convention. I suspect he allowed the Alamo to fall in order to unite the volunteers. Like Churchill allowing the Lusitania to get sunk, or Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, or Bush and 9/11. Too far?
Travis's letters go from: "I thought I saw a couple scouts from the Mexican army today. Victory or death!" to "Uh guys, there's like, a lot of them out there. Little help?" Who can blame him right?
Anyway, I thought it was time I learned a little more about our most famous landmark. I think I'll go a little deeper. -
Very informative historical account of the famous siege of The Alamo and the events leading up to the confrontation that changed the course of history for the Lone Star State and the United States. Central casitng could not have come up with a more colorful and compelling cast of characters than Jim Bowie, William Travis, Santa Anna, and Davy Crockett. Learned a lot!
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A very decent history of the Alamo. Myers gives enough of the backstory to make it interesting. It is a conventional rendering but with good scholarship. He dose discuss Bowie's slave smuggling, over all gives very short shrift to an issue which did play a bigger part in the factors that led to the war with the Mexicans.
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Nice detail and history but a little on the dry side. I was hoping for a little more excitement from this book about the Alamo. We are talking about Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and 183 against Santa Anna and his army of 5,500.
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Read this as a kid for a 5th grade history project. Since then, I've been hooked on the story of the Alamo. Once every 4-7 years or so, I often find myself picking this up and reading it again.
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short but sweet history of the Alamo. A truly must read!
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