The issue of Davy Crockett's death

Michael Lind explains (51) that the impulse to investigate the accounts of Crockett's goal in depth came close when he composed a poem about the revolution of the people of Texas against Mexico, which until the 1830s controlled that territory and which by and bywards a period of national independence from Mexico became a actuate of the United States. His first draft, he says, followed the line that Crockett had survived the battle and had been punish afterward. He attributes this account of Crockett's closing to recent historical scholarship, notably a 1974 translation of a memoir by integrity Jose Enrique de la Pena, a Mexican officer at the Alamo: "As I researched the subject further, however, I concluded that the floor of Crockett's functioning, give care the equally well-known story of the line Travis [military commander of the Alamo] displace in the dust at the Alamo, was folklore" (51). In otherwise words, the favorite imagination had overtaken judicious review of evidence in a way that had the effect of promoting a spurious version of the truth.

The culture-wars boldness of Pena's memoir, says Lind, surfaced because it was translated into English in 1974, in the wake of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, which had polarized the U.S. politically. According to Lind, the view that Crockett was executed was favored by historians who entangle that that mod

Lind's article is all about historical sources and evidence, about his analysis of various accounts of the battle of the Alamo, the noncontroversial fact that several prisoners were indeed executed by Santa Anna after the battle was over, and the disputed fact that Crockett was one of those executed. He characterizes hostile theories of Crockett's execution (52) as support (i.e., favoring the execution story), or defilement (i.e., rejecting the story as rumor and apocrypha).

Corroboration adherents point to memoirs and theme accounts written weeks, months, and years after the battle to support the execution thesis. Letters, military dispatches, diaries and official accounts of the battle generated just hours or old age after the battle, together with a critique of the supporting documents of corroboration on one hand and of the way the documents were used to set up the execution story on the other, are the principal resources Lind cites in order to make the case against the corroboration theory.

e of death exposed an ultrapatriotic myth of Crockett's dying heroically in battle. In other words, to accept the execution story was also to conjure that the romantic coonskin-cap image of Davy Crockett was a fraud (52). On the other hand, in 1974 the execution story appears to have been rejected by those who considered the traditional account of Crockett's death in battle to be the correct one. One thing that complicates the project of authenticating either story is something rather practical: The owner of the Pena manuscript has apparently refused to impart physical scientific tests of paper, ink, and so on that might taste at least the date that the manuscript was composed.

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