But tension inevitably developed between two such different leaders, the forty-year-old, hard-drinking, fearlessly independent, but eminently practical and experienced Bowie, and the twenty-six-year-old troubled and vainglorious Travis, who had left wife and fortune in Alabama to seek fame and adventure on the Texian frontier. (Mexico had encouraged settlement of the Texian wilderness by all who would work the land and swear allegiance to the liberal constitution of 1824, but the growing Anglo majority had risen in revolt, spurred by the usual contradictory motives of lust for control and love of freedom, as expressed in anger at Santa Anna’s gradual abrogation of constitutional guarantees.)
Bowie commanded the volunteers, while Travis led the “official” army troops. A vote among the volunteers overwhelmingly favored Bowie’s continued leadership, so the two men agreed upon an uneasy sharing of authority, with all orders to be signed by both. This arrangement became irrelevant, and Travis assumed full command, when Bowie fell ill with clearly terminal pneumonia and a slew of other ailments just after the siege began on February 23. In fact, Charlie Croker’s painting notwithstanding, Bowie may have been comatose, or even already dead, when Mexican forces broke through on March 6. He may have made his legendary last “stand” (in supine position), propped up in his bed with pistols in hand, but he could not have mounted more than a symbolic final defense, and his legendary knife could not have reached past the Mexican bayonets in any case.
The canonical story of valor at the Alamo features two incidents, both centered upon Travis, with one admitted as legendary by all serious historians, and the other based upon a stirring letter, committed to memory by nearly all Texas schoolchildren ever since. As for the legend, when Travis realized that no reinforcements would arrive, and that all his men would surely die if they defended the Alamo by force of arms (for Santa Anna had clearly stated his terms of no mercy or sparing of life without unconditional surrender), he called a meeting, drew a line in the sand, and then invited all willing defenders of the Alamo to cross the line to his side, while permitting cowards and doubters to scale the wall and make their inglorious exit (as one man did). In this stirring legend, Jim Bowie, now too weak to stand, asks his men to carry his bed across the line.
Well, Travis may have made a speech at the relevant time, but no witness and survivor (several women and one slave) ever reported the story. (The tale apparently originated about forty years later, supposedly told by the single man who had accepted Travis’s option to escape.)
As for the familiar letter, few can read Travis’s missive with a dry eye, while even the most skeptical of Alamo historians heaps honor upon this document of February 24, carried by a courier (who broke through the Mexican lines) to potential reinforcements, but addressed to “The People of Texas and All Americans in the World.” (For example, Ben H. Proctor describes Travis as “egotistical, proud, vain, with strong feelings about his own destiny, about glory and personal mission. . . trouble in every sense of the word,” but judges this missive as “one of the truly remarkable letters of history, treasured by lovers of liberty everywhere.” (See Proctor’s pamphlet, The Battle of the Alamo [Texas State Historical Association, 1986].)
I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna—I have sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours and have not lost a man—The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken—I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls—I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch—The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country—VICTORY OR DEATH.
Although a small group of thirty men did arrive to reinforce the Alamo, their heroic presence as cannon and bayonet fodder could not alter the course of events, while a genuine force that could have made a difference, several hundred men stationed at nearby Goliad, never came to Travis’s aid, for complex reasons still under intense historical debate. Every Texian fighter died in Santa Anna’s attack on March 6. According to the usual legend, all the men fell in action. But substantial, if inconclusive, evidence indicates that six men may have surrendered at the hopeless end, only to be summarily executed by Santa Anna’s direct order. The probable presence of Davy Crockett among this group accounts for the disturbing effect and emotional weight of this persistent tale.
As something of an Alamo buff, and a frequent visitor to the site in San Antonio, I have long been bothered and intrigued by a crucial document, a letter by the Alamo’s other leader, Jim Bowie, that seems to provide quite a different perspective upon the siege, but doesn’t fit within the canonical legend and hardly receives a mention in any official account at the shrine itself. Bowie’s letter thus remains “hidden in plain sight”—sitting in its own prominent glass case, right in the main hall of the on-site exhibition. This curious feature of “prominently displayed but utterly passed over” has fascinated me for twenty years. I have, in three visits to the Alamo, bought every popular account of the battle for sale at the extensive gift shop. I have read these obsessively and can assert that Bowie’s letter, while usually acknowledged, receives short shrift in most conventional descriptions.
Let us return to a phrase in Travis’s celebrated letter and fill in some surrounding events: “the enemy has demanded a surrender . . . I have answered the demand with a cannon shot.” The basic outline has not been disputed: When Santa Anna entered town with his army and began his siege on February 23, he unfurled a blood-red flag—the traditional demand for immediate surrender, with extermination as the consequence of refusal—from the tower of the Church of San Fernando. Travis, without consulting his co-commander, fired the Alamo’s largest cannon, an eighteen-pounder, in defiant response—just as he boasted in his famous letter, written the next day.
The complexities that threaten the canonical story now intrude. Although Santa Anna had issued his uncompromising and blustering demand in a public display, many accounts, filled with different details but all pointing in the same credible direction, indicate that he also proposed a parley for negotiation with the Alamo defenders. (Even if Santa Anna didn’t issue this call, the canonical story takes its strong hit just from the undisputed fact that Bowie, for whatever reason, thought the Mexicans had suggested a parley. Among the various versions, Santa Anna’s forces also raised a white flag—the equally traditional signal for a parley—either accidentally or purposefully, and either before or after Travis’s cannon shot; or else that a Mexican soldier sounded the standard bugle call for an official invitation to negotiations.)
In any case, Bowie, who by most accounts was furious at Travis for the impetuous bravado and clearly counterproductive nature of his purely symbolic cannon shot, grabbed a piece of paper and wrote, in Spanish signed with a faltering hand (for Bowie was already ill, but not yet prostrate and still capable of leadership), the “invisible” letter that just won’t mesh with the canonical story, and therefore remains hidden on prominent display at the Alamo (I cite the full text of Bowie’s letter, in the translation given in C. Hopewell’s biography, James Bowie [Eakin Press, 1994]):
Because a shot was fired from a cannon of this fort at the time a red flag was raised over the tower, and soon afterward having been informed that your forces would parley, the same not having been understood before the mentioned discharge of cannon, I wish to know if, in effect, you have called for a parley, and with this object dispatch my second aide, Benito James, under the protection of a white flag, which I trust will be respected by you and your forces. God and Texas.
I don’t want to exaggerate the meaning of this letter. I cannot assert a high probability f
or a different outcome if Bowie had remained strong enough to lead, and if Santa Anna had agreed to negotiations. Some facts dim the force of any speculation about a happier outcome that would have avoided a strategically senseless slaughter with an inevitable military result, and would thus have spared the lives of 180 Texians (and probably twice as many Mexicans). For example, Bowie did not display optimal diplomacy in his note, if only because he had originally written “God and the Mexican Federation” in his signatory phrase (indicating his support for the constitution of 1824, and his continued loyalty to this earlier Mexican government), but, in a gesture that can only be termed defiant, crossed out “The Mexican Federation” and wrote “Texas” above.
More important, Santa Anna officially refused the offer of Bowie’s courier, and sent back a formal response promising extermination without mercy unless the Texians surrendered unconditionally. Moreover, we cannot be confident that Texian lives would have been spared even if the Alamo’s defenders had surrendered without a fight. After all, less than a month after the fall of the Alamo, Santa Anna executed several hundred prisoners—the very men who might have come to Travis’s aid—after their surrender at Goliad.
In the confusion and recrimination between the two commands, Travis then sent out his own courier and received the same response, but, according to some sources, with the crucial addition of an “informal” statement that if the Texians laid down their arms within an hour, their lives and property would be spared, even though the surrender must be technically and officially “unconditional.” Such, after all, has always been the way of war, as good officers balance the need for inspirational manifestos with their even more important moral and strategic responsibility to avoid a “glory trap” of certain death. Competent leaders have always understood the crucial difference between public proclamations and private bargains.
Thus, I strongly suspect that if Bowie had not become too ill to lead, some honorable solution would eventually have emerged through private negotiations, if only because Santa Anna and Bowie, as seasoned veterans, maintained high mutual regard beneath their strong personal dislike—whereas I can only imagine what Santa Anna thought of the upstart and self-aggrandizing Travis. In this alternate and unrealized scenario, most of the brothers would have remained both valiant and alive. What resolution fits best with our common sensibilities of morality and human decency: more than four hundred men slaughtered in a battle with an inevitable result, thus providing an American prototype for a claptrap canonical story about empty valor over honorable living; or an utterly nonheroic, tough-minded, and practical solution that would have erased a great story from our books, but restored hundreds of young men to the possibilities of a full life, complete with war stories told directly to grandchildren?
Finally, one prominent Alamo fact, though rarely mentioned in this context, provides strong support for the supposition that wise military leaders usually reach private agreements to avoid senseless slaughter. Just three months earlier, in December 1835, General Cos had made his last stand against Texian forces at exactly the same site—within the Alamo! But Cos, as a professional soldier, raised a white flag and agreed to terms with the Texian conquerors: he would surrender, disarm, withdraw his men, retreat southwestward over the Rio Grande, and not fight again. Cos obeyed the terms of his bargain, but when he had crossed the Rio Grande to safety, Santa Anna demanded his return to active duty. Thus, the same General Cos—alive, kicking, and fighting—led one of the companies that recaptured the Alamo on March 6. Travis would have cut such a dashing figure at San Jacinto!
Bill Buckner’s Legs
How the canonical story of “but for this” has driven facts that we can all easily recall into a false version dictated by the needs of narrative.
Any fan of the Boston Red Sox can recite chapter and verse of a woeful tale, a canonical story in the land of the bean and the cod, called “the curse of the Bambino.” The Sox established one of Major League Baseball’s most successful franchises of the early twentieth century. But the Sox won their last World Series way back in 1918. A particular feature of all subsequent losses has convinced Boston fans that their team labors under an infamous curse, initiated in January 1920, when Boston owner Harry Frazee simply and cynically sold the team’s greatest player—the best left-handed pitcher in baseball, but soon to make his truly indelible mark on the opposite path of power hitting—for straight cash needed to finance a flutter on a Broadway show, and not for any advantages or compensation in traded players. Moreover, Frazee sold Boston’s hero to the hated enemy, the New York Yankees. This man, of course, soon acquired the title of Sultan of Swat, the Bambino, George Herman (“Babe”) Ruth.
The Red Sox have played in four World Series (1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986) and several playoff series since then, and they have always lost in the most heartbreaking manner—by coming within an inch of the finish line and then self-destructing. Enos Slaughter of the rival St. Louis Cardinals scored from first on a single in the decisive game of the 1946 World Series. In 1975, the Sox lost Game Seven after a miraculous victory in Game Six, capped by Bernie Carbo’s three-run homer to tie the score and won, in extra innings, by Carlton Fisk, when he managed to overcome the laws of physics by body English, and cause a ball that he had clearly hit out of bounds to curve into the left-field foul pole for a home run (as the Fenway Park organist blasted out the “Hallelujah Chorus,” well after midnight).
And so the litany goes. But all fans will tell you that the worst moment of utter incredibility—the defeat that defies any tale of natural causality, and must therefore record the operation of a true curse—terminated Game Six in the 1986 World Series. (Look, I’m not even a Sox fan, but I still don’t allow anyone to mention this event in my presence; the pain remains too great!) The Sox, leading the Series three games to two and requiring only this victory for their first Ring since 1918, entered the last inning with a comfortable two-run lead. Their pitcher quickly got the first two outs. The Sox staff had peeled the foil off the champagne bottles (but, remembering the curse, had not yet popped the corks). The Mets management had already, and graciously, flashed “congratulations Red Sox” in neon on their scoreboard. But the faithful multitude of fans, known as “Red Sox Nation,” remained glued to their television sets in exquisite fear and trembling.
And the curse unfolded, with an intensity and cruelty heretofore not even imagined. In a series of scratch hits, bad pitches, and terrible judgments, the Mets managed to score a run. (I mean, even a batting-practice pitcher, even you or I, could have gotten someone out for the final victory!) Reliever Bob Stanley, a good man dogged by bad luck, came in and threw a wild pitch to bring the tying run home. (Some, including yours truly, would have scored the pitch as a passed ball, but let’s leave such contentious irrelevancies aside for the moment.) And now, with two outs, a man on second and the score tied, Mookie Wilson steps to the plate.
Bill Buckner, the Sox’s gallant first baseman, and a veteran with a long and truly distinguished career, should not even have been playing in the field. For weeks, manager John McNamara had been benching Buckner for defensive purposes during the last few innings of games with substantial Red Sox leads—for, after a long and hard season, Buckner’s legs were shot, and his stride gimpy. In fact, he could hardly bend down. But the sentimental McNamara wanted his regular players on the field when the great, and seemingly inevitable, moment arrived—so Buckner stood at first base.
I shudder as I describe the outcome that every baseball fan knows so well. Stanley, a great sinker-ball pitcher, did exactly what he had been brought in to accomplish. He threw a wicked sinker that Wilson could only tap on the ground toward first base for an easy out to cap the damage and end the inning with the score still tied, thus granting the Sox hitters an opportunity to achieve a comeback and victory. But the ball bounced right through Buckner’s legs into the outfield as Ray Knight hurried home with the winning run. Not to the side of his legs, and not under his lunging glove as he dived to the ri
ght or left for a difficult chance—but right through his legs! The seventh and concluding game hardly mattered. Despite brave rhetoric, no fan expected the Sox to win (hopes against hope to be sure, but no real thoughts of victory). They lost.
This narration may drip with my feelings, but I have presented the straight facts. The narrative may be good and poignant enough in this accurate version, but such a factual tale cannot satisfy the lust of the relevant canonical story for an evident reason. The canonical story of Buckner’s travail must follow a scenario that might be called “but for this.” In numerous versions of “but for this,” a large and hugely desired result fails to materialize—and the absolutely opposite resolution, both factually and morally, unfolds instead—because one tiny and apparently inconsequential piece of the story fails to fall into place, usually by human error or malfeasance. “But for this” can brook no nuancing, no complexity, no departure from the central meaning and poignant tragedy that an entire baleful outcome flows absolutely and entirely from one tiny accident of history.
I tremble as I write the caption for this most painful moment in the history of baseball—as Mookie Wilson’s easy grounder bounces between Bill Buckner’s legs.
“But for this” must therefore drive the tale of Bill Buckner’s legs into the only version that can validate the canonical story. In short, poor Bill must become the one and only cause and focus of ultimate defeat or victory. That is, if Buckner fields the ball properly, the Sox win their first World Series since 1918 and eradicate the Curse of the Bambino. But if Buckner bobbles the ball, the Mets win the Series instead, and the curse continues in an even more intense and painful way. For Buckner’s miscue marks the unkindest bounce of all, the most improbable, trivial little error sustained by a good and admired man. What hath God wrought?