Being that this year marks the 175 anniversary of the Texas War for Independence – the Come and Take it Fight, the seige of the Alamo, the Goliad Massacre and the Battle of San Jacinto and all that – the San Antonio Living History Association and other reenactor organisations are making a special effort this year. I love going to reenactor events, just to get an ideas to build my own visualization of the 19th century. So – here are some pictures I took this weekend at Alamo Plaza.

Do not cross the 1836 time-line. No idea what the punishment would be – whacked  with a sonic screwdriver, I guess.

This gentleman volunteer had come all the way from Illinois to take part – as did the member of the Alamo garrison that he portrayed. The cannon is a replica 18-pounder, and was constructed for the 2004 movie.

Close-up of wooden canteen, tin drinking cup and haversack – made from canvas waterproofed with green paint.

Another volunteer – this man wearing a hunting coat of fringed leather. Hunting coats were very popular at this time – a loose A-line coat with a kind of cape collar; often without  front buttons, just loosly wrapped and secured by a belt or a sash. They were very often made of hevy canvas and trimmed with fabric fringe.

Bullet-pouch, powder-horn, bedroll  and top-hat! All ready to go. Texian volunteers  who didn’t have boots wore shoes or moccasins and leather leggings.

These were the Tejano element – yes, there were Mexican volunteers among the Alamo garrison. The gentleman to the left is portraying Juan Seguin, scout and cavalryman … alas, they are a titch older than their historical counterparts would have been. But still – quite dashing.

The march of the Texian volunteers – kind of a mixed bag, sartorially-speaking. And yes, there was a bag-piper among them, historically. A Mr. John McGregor from Nacogdoches, who occasionally competed with Davy Crockett as to who could make the most noise – bagpipe or fiddle.

Cannon with gear and supplies. My guess is a ten or 12 pounder. When fired with black powder, it makes a heck of a noise.

Ok, then – the tools of the trade … if your trade was as a surgeon. Note that a chloroform mask, or syringes do not feature among them. They hadn’t been invented yet. The only medical-surgical accessory not shown here is the large and strong orderly needed to hold the patient down.

Seriously, on this one, the Mexicans had the corner on sartorial splendor. Which is another war to chalk up to the Sukhomlinov Effect…

There seemed to just about as many Mexican soldier reenactors as there were Texians. Really, reenactor events like this  must be one of the last places around where straight guys can really let their their primal urge to make a fashion statement out for a romp.

I am hoping the tall guy with the apron and slight case of Dunlops is portraying a Mexican Army cook. That, or he’s really got to do some some serious crunches and sit-ups.

Yep, the Mexican Army had an edge when it came to  numbers, discipline and in actually looking like what people then imagined an army to be. But sometimes guts and crazy-brave will carry the day. Or at least, hold out for 13 of them, against overwhelming odds.

And not to forget the ladies … yes, there were women in the Alamo, aside from Susannah Dickinson and her daughter. Juana Navarro Alsbury and her baby, her sister Gertrudis (who were cousins to James Bowie’s dead wife), Mrs. Gregorio Esparza and her children  were there, although Madam Candalario probably wasn’t. There were others – Juana Melton, the wife of the garrison’s quartermaster, and her mother or sister, possibly a woman with the surname de Salina and her daughters … but amazingly, no one took very much time to search out and question these women during their lifetimes. Even Susannah Dickinson never got quite the rigerous cross-questioning that historians of today would like to have administered. They told their stories long afterwards, and some of them were children at the time anyway, and didn’t see much during those last horrific hours in the shelter of the sacristy of the old church.

A lady of certain years by the time she became moderately famous, Angelina Belle Peyton was born in the last years of the 18th century in Sumner County, Tennessee. For a decade or so Tennessee would be the far western frontier, but by the time she was twenty and newly married to her first cousin, John Peyton, the frontier had moved west. Texas beckoned like a siren – and eventually, the Peytons settled in San Felipe-on-the-Brazos, the de facto capitol of the American settlements in Texas. They would open an inn, and raise three children, before John died in 1834. She would continue running the inn in San Felipe on her own for another two years, until history intervened.

By 1835, times were changing for the Anglo-American settlers in Texas, who began to refer to themselves as Texians. Having been invited specifically to come and settle in the most distant and dangerous of Mexican territories, the authorities were at first generous and tolerant. Newly freed from the rule of Spain, Mexico had organized into a federation of states, and adopted a Constitution patterned after the U.S. Constitution. Liberal and forward-thinking Mexicans, as well as the Texian settlers confidently expected that Mexico would eventually become a nation very much resembling the United States. Unfortunately, Mexico became torn between two factions – the Centralists, top-down authoritarians, strictly conservative in the old European sense who believed in a strong central authority, ruling from Mexico City – and the Federalists, who were more classically liberal in the early 19th century sense, democratically inclined and backing a Mexico as a loose federation of states. In the mid 1830’s Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, a leading Federalist hero, suddenly reversed course upon becoming president, essentially declaring himself dictator, and voided the Constitution. Rebellion against a suddenly-Centralist authority flared up across Mexico’s northern states and territories.

The Texian settlers, who had been accustomed to minding their own affairs, also went up in flames – overnight, and as it turned out, literally. Lopez de Santa Anna, at the head of a large and professionally officered army, methodically crushed those rebels within other Mexican states and turned his attention towards Texas in the spring of 1836. After the siege and fall of certain strong-points held by Texians and eager volunteers from the United States, Sam Houston, the one man who kept his head while all around him were becoming progressively more unglued, ordered that all the Anglo-Texian settlements be abandoned. All structures should be burnt and supplies that could not be carried along be destroyed, in order to deny them to Santa Anna’s advancing army. Houston commanded a relatively tiny force; for him, safety lay in movement rather than forting up, and in luring Santa Anna’s companies farther and farther into East Texas. This was done, with savage efficiency: as Houston gathered more volunteers to his armies, families evacuated their hard-won homes. Those established towns which were the heart of Anglo Texas were burned. For a little more than a month, the civilian refugees straggled east, towards the border with the United States, and some illusory safety. It was a miserable, rainy spring. San Felipe burned, either at Houston’s order, or by pursuing Mexicans; Angelina Peyton was now a homeless widow, trudging east with her family. Just when everything turned dark and hopeless, when it seemed sure that Sam Houston would never turn and fight, that the Lone Star had gone out for good; a miracle happened. Sam Houston’s ragged, ill-trained army did turn won a smashing victory – and better yet, they captured Lopez de Santa Anna. In return for his parole, he ceded Texas to the rebels. (Lopez de Santa Anna went back on that promise, but that’s another story.)

In the aftermath of the war, Angelina Peyton took her family to Columbia on the Brazos, which would for a time be the capitol of Texas. Late in 1836, she married again, to a widower named Jacob Eberly. Within three years, she and Jacob had moved to what was supposed to be the grand new capitol of Texas – Austin, on the banks of the Colorado River, on the western edge of the line of Anglo-Texas settlement, but square in the middle of the territory claimed by the new Republic of Texas. The place had been chosen by the new President of the Republic, Mirabeau Lamar. It was a beautiful, beautiful place, set on wooded hills above the river. Angelina and Jacob opened a boarding house – the Eberly House, catering to members of the new Legislature, and to those officers of Lamar’s administration. Everyone agreed that Austin had a fine and prosperous future: within the first year of being laid out, the population had gone from a handful of families to nearly 1,000. And the Eberly House was considered very fine: even Sam Houston, upon being elected President after Lamar, preferred living there, rather than the drafty and hastily-constructed presidential mansion. Angelina, now in her early forties, seemed tireless in her devotion to her business – and her community.

But still, disaster waited around every corner over the next years: Jacob died in 1841. In the following year, war with Mexico threatened again, and Sam Houston decreed that the legislature should meet  . . . in Washington-on-the-Brazos. Not in Austin. It was too dangerous, and Houston had never been as enthusiastic about Austin as Lamar had been. Panic emptied Austin, as the population fell to around 200 souls. Government and private buildings stood empty, with leaves blowing in through empty rooms. A handful of die-hard residents carried on, hoping that when things calmed down, the Legislature would return, and meet there again. After all – the archives of the State of Texas were stored there, safely tucked up in the General Land Office Building. A committee of vigilance formed, to ensure that the records remained, after President Houston politely requested their removal to safety  . . .  in East Texas.

In the dead of night on December 29th, 1842, a party of men acting under Houston’s direction arrived, with orders to remove the archives – in secret and without shedding any blood. Unfortunately, they were rather noisy about loading the wagons. Angelina Eberly woke, looked out of a window and immediately realized what was going on. She ran outside, and fired off the six-pound cannon that the residents kept loaded with grapeshot in case of an Indian attack. The shot alerted the vigilance committee – and supposedly punched a hole in the side of the General Land Office Building. The men fled with three wagons full of documents, pursued within hours by the volunteers of the vigilance committee, who caught up with them the next day. The archives were returned – Sam Houston had specified no bloodshed; the following year, he was admonished by the Legislature for trying to relocate the capitol.

The Legislature would return to Austin in 1845 and after annexation by the United States, the state capitol would remain there. Angelina Eberly – who had fired the shot that ensured it would do so – moved her hotel business to the coast; to Indianola, the Queen City of the Gulf. She did not marry again, and ran a profitable and well-frequented hotel, until her death in 1860.

(Angelina Eberly will feature as a minor character in one of my upcoming books – and has served as a model for the character of Margaret Becker, in my soon-to-be-released novel “Daughter of Texas” – which is due out on April 21, 2011. This is the 175 anniversary of San Jacinto Day. Anyone who purchases a set of the “Adelsverein Trilogy” through my book website, or at a personal appearance in December will have their name put into a drawing for a free advance copy of “Daughter of Texas”. I’ll hold the drawing on New Years’ Day.)

That is just what it was, when the building which is the premier landmark in San Antonio – and perhaps all of the rest of Texas – first achieved fame immortal, in the short and bloody space of an hour and a half, just before sunrise on a chill spring morning in 1836. People who come to visit today, with an image in their mind from the movies about it – from John Wayne’s version, and the more recent 2004 movie, or from sketch-maps in books about the desperate, fourteen-day siege are usually taken back to discover that it is so small. So I know, because I thought so the first time I visited it as an AF trainee on town-pass in 1978. And it is small – one of those Spanish colonial era buildings, in limestone weathered to the color of old ivory.

That chapel is only a remnant of a sprawling complex of buildings. Itself and the so-called ‘Long Barracks’ are the only things remaining of what was once called the Mission San Antonio de Valero, given it’s better known appellation by a company of Spanish cavalry stationed there in the early 19th century – they called it after the cottonwood trees around their previous station of Alamo de Parras, in Coahuila. It was the northernmost of a linked chain of five mission complexes, threaded like baroque pearls on a green ribbon, and originally established to tend to the spiritual needs and the protection of local Christianized Indian tribes. The missions were secularized at the end of the 18th century, the lands around distributed to the people who had lived there. Their chapels became local parish churches – while the oldest of them all became a garrison.

There is in existence a birds-eye view map of San Antonio in 1873, a quarter century after the last stand of Travis and Bowie’s company that shows a grove of trees in rows behind the apse of the old chapel building. In the year that the map was made, the chapel and the remaining buildings were still a garrison of sorts – an Army supply depot, and the plaza in front of it a marshalling yard. One wonders if any of the supply sergeants of that time or any of the laborers unloading the wagons bringing military supplies up from the coast and designated for the garrisons of the Western frontier forts gave a thought to the building they worked in. Did they think the place was haunted, perhaps? Did they hear whispers and groans in the dark, think anything of odd stains on the floors and walls, of regular depressions in the floor where defensive trenches had been dug at the last? What did they think, piling up crates, barrels and boxes, in the place where the final handful of survivors had made their last stand, against the tide of Santa Anna’s soldiers flooding over the crumbling walls?

Probably not much– whitewash covers a lot. And a useful, sturdy building is just that – useful. By the 1870s, those Regular Army NCOs working in there were veterans of the Civil War, and perhaps haunted enough by their own war, just lately over. The growing city had spread beyond those limits that William Travis, David Crocket and James Bowie would have seen, looking down from those very same walls.

In 1836 that cluster of buildings, and the old church with it’s ornate niches and columns twisted like lengths of barley sugar sat a little distance from the outskirts of the best established provincial town in that part of Spanish and Mexican Texas, out in the meadows by a loop of clear, narrow river fringed by rushes and willows. San Antonio de Bexar, mostly shortened then to simply “Bexar”, was then just a close clustered huddle of adobe brick buildings around two plazas and the stumpy spire of the church of San Fernando. It is a challenge to picture it, in the minds eye, to take away the tall glass buildings all around, the lawns and carefully tended flowering shrubs, to ignore the sounds of traffic, the SATrans busses belching exhaust, and see it as it might have appeared, a hundred and sixty years ago. I imagine that there that those cottonwood trees would have been very close by. Thirsty trees, they plant themselves across the west, wherever there is water in plenty, their leaves trembling incessantly in the slightest breeze.

There might have also have been some fruit orchards planted nearby – the 1873 map certainly shows them. But otherwise, it would have been open country, rolling meadows star-scattered with trees, and striped across by two roads; the Camino Real, the King’s road, towards Nacogdoches in the east, and the road towards the south, towards the Rio Grande. In the distance to the north, a long blue-green rise of hills marks the edge of what today is called the Balcones Escarpment. It is the demarcation between a mostly flat and fertile plain which stretches to the Gulf Coast, and the high and windswept plains of the Llano, haunted by fierce and war-loving Indians.

That most northern, fractious and rebelliously-inclined of those northern provinces of the nation of Mexico was in ferment in the 1830s, some of which might be chalked up to the presence of settlers who had come to Texas from the various United States looking for land. Texas had plenty of it to go around, and a distinct paucity of permanent residents. Entrepreneurs, such as Stephen Austin’s father were allotted a tract of land, based upon how many people they might induce to come and settle on it, to build houses and towns, businesses and roads. All they need to do was to swear to a new allegiance – initially to the King of Spain, later to the Mexican government, which was making tentative and eventually unsuccessful efforts to model itself after the United States’ experience in democracy. Oh, and convert to Catholicism, at least on paper, although most American settlers were assured that they would be left alone thereafter, as afar as matters religious.

Texas was thinly settled, and a long, long way from the seat of authority in Mexico City anyway. So, Americans trickled in over two decades; undoubtedly many like Stephen Austin were honestly grateful for the free land and consideration from the Mexican authorities, and initially had no thought of trafficking in rebellion. Probably equal numbers of Americans did have an eye on the main chance in coming to Texas, as the initially small and poor United States spilled over the Appalachians, purchased a great tract of the continent from the French, and began to think it was their unique destiny to reach from sea to shining sea.

But the land drew them – and it was a beautiful, beautiful place, that part of Texas that forms the coastal plain. Wooded in the east, in the manner that the American settlers were accustomed to, crossed and watered by shallow rivers, a country of gently rolling meadows and hills, fairly temperate, especially in comparison to more northerly climes. Winters were mild – there was not the snow and brutal cold that forced a three or four month long halt to all agricultural and herding pursuits. The sky seemed endless, a pure clear blue, with great drifts of clouds sailing through it.

This is the place where three very different men came to, in that fateful year that the Texians rebelled against the rule of the dictatorship of what the knowledgeable settlers of Texas called the “Centralistas” – the dictatorship of the central government in Mexico City. Three men of different backgrounds and experience, and all of them looking for a second chance after various personal, political and business screw-ups. One more thing had they in common – they all died on a dark March morning in a single place, within the space of an hour or so.

James Bowie was the one who came first; a hot-tempered roughneck with a series of distinctly shady business dealings in his immediate past – which included slave-smuggling and real-estate fraud. He was famous for the wicked-long hunting knife which he always carried, after a particularly bloody brawl in which he had been armed with a clasp knife, which he opened with his teeth (losing one in the process) while gripping his opponent one-handed. A charismatic scoundrel, a bad-hat, a violent man, occasionally given to moments of chivalry; he does not come across as someone whose company would have been totally pleasant. It might aptly be said of him, as it was of Lord Byron, he was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.

William Barrett Travis was the second; almost a generation younger, but driven by similar impulses, grandiose ambitions, and with an ego almost as big as Texas itself. He would also not have been very good company, laboring as he did under the conviction that he was meant to do great things. Moody and impulsive, somewhat hot-tempered, he had come to Texas alone, abandoning a wife and two children and set up a law practice in Anahuac, the official port of entry for Texas. He drifted into a faction opposed to the Mexican rule of Texas, and in contention with the local Mexican authorities.

Davy Crockett – who rather preferred to be known as David Crockett, as a gentleman, rather than as a simple, blunt-spoken frontiersman — was in his lifetime the most famous of the three, and also a latecomer to Texas. A politician and a personality, he was a restless spirit, never quite entirely content with where he was, or what he was doing for long. One senses that he would have been the most congenial of the three: relatively soft-spoken, adept with words – a skilled politician. He played the fiddle, and probably did not wear a coonskin cap or a fringed leather jacket; he looks quite the polished, genteel and well-dressed gentleman in the best-known portrait of him, in high collar and cravat, and well-tailored coat.

By different paths, they came to the Alamo, a sprawling and tumbledown mission compound, much too large to be defended by the relative handful of men and artillery pieces they had with them. They stayed to defend it, for reasons that they perhaps didn’t articulate very well to themselves, save for in Travis’s immortal letters. Bowie was deathly ill as the siege began, Crockett was new-come to the country, in search of adventure more than glory. None of them perfect heroes by any standard, then or now… but of such rough clay are legends made.

(None of these events or personalities actually appear in my “Adelsverein Trilogy“, although they are referred to  in passing, and a secondary character, Porfirio Menchaca,  visits the Alamo ruins nearly a quarter century later to burn a candle and leave flowers on the anniversary of his father’s death there, as one of the Tejano gunners.)