Alamo Traces (58 page)

Soon after the University of Texas at Austin library officials obtained the Jose Enrique de la Pena manuscripts, they selected Dr. David Gracy, the Governor Bill Daniel Professor in the university's Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, to defend their belief that the Pena documents were not forgeries. Gracy, who is not a certified document examiner, ruled that the handwriting similarities he found in the questioned documents (the Pena memoir manuscript and its prologue letter) and the one known authentic Pena document (Adrian Woll/Pena report, dated June 27, 1836) were sufficient to declare the alleged Pena documents and their Pena signature authentic.
²⁶
Dr. Gracy, however, ignored the fact that if a forger had created the Pena memoir manuscript and its prologue letter, there were bound to be handwriting similarities between the authentic handwriting and the alleged handwriting. After all, a forger would have been attempting to replicate the authentic handwriting of Pena. Therefore, it is reasonable that the alleged Pena documents can share handwriting characteristics with Pena's bona fide handwriting (the Woll/Pena report, dated June 27, 1836, and the Campaign Diary) and still be a forgery.
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In examining the alleged Pena handwriting and signature, Gracy should have not only looked at the similarities that the authentic document and the alleged documents share, but he should have looked at the differences between the authentic Pena handwriting and signature and the alleged Pena handwriting and signature to determine the truth about the alleged Pena documents. He did not do this. He did, however, admit that such an examination was the best approach to proving the authenticity of the alleged Pena documents. Gracy wrote: “. . . the better strategy for demonstrating falsity is to establish the differences between the suspect document and genuine writing of the purported author of the suspect document.” Therefore, let us look at some of the differences found in the authentic document and the alleged Pena documents.
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First, let us examine the authentic writing of Jose Enrique de la Pena found in the three samples in appendix number eight, the report of an interview conducted by General Adrian Woll on June 27, 1836, at Matamoros. Pena served as Woll's secretary in recording the interview and is so identified in the document. The spacing of the words in Pena's writing is constricted, with a jammed up appearance. A
few
words end with loops below the sentence lines and a
few other
words end with
flourishes or swirls above the lines. These loops, swirls, and flourishes, however, do not visually dominate the writing. This description of the authentic Pena handwriting is also true of the three handwriting samples (appendix nine) from Pena's 109-page Campaign Diary.

Whereas, in the alleged Pena memoir sample pages and the alleged Pena signature page (appendix ten), the word spacing is more spread out and does not appear constricted. Second, the actual length of the words appear to be longer than in the authentic sample and the campaign diary samples. Third, the vertical spacing between the sentences is also greater than in the authentic samples and in the campaign diary samples. Fourth, the loops, swirls, and flourishes that appear below and above the sentence lines dominate the alleged Pena writing. Visually, these writing characteristics practically jump up from the page.

These observations are supported by the number of words that appear on the page samples. The three pages from Pena's Campaign Diary average 258 and 2/3 words per page. Whereas, the three pages taken from Pena's alleged memoir average 165 and 1/3 words per page. Despite the page size being the same in both manuscripts, the authentic Pena averages 93 and 1/3 more words to the page. This comparison appears to hold true for all the pages of the Campaign Diary and the memoir manuscript.
²⁹

Ironically, the constricted handwriting found in the authentic Pena documents is more characteristic of handwriting that is forged. Forgery expert Joe Nickell observed: “The forger often unconsciously shrinks the writing of his subject; according to [Charles] Hamilton this is ‘probably because of a psychological desire to conceal his fraud by making it less easy to read.' ”
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When this situation was pointed out to Dr. James Crisp, the most vocal of the Pena authenticity supporters, he stated that Pena was probably stressed out when he wrote the documents that contain the Woll interview report and the Campaign Diary manuscript. Thus, also suggesting that Pena was not under any stress when he wrote the memoir manuscript. Such a case seems unlikely as Crisp and other Pena supporters believe Pena wrote the memoir manuscript while he was in prison. Whereas, he wrote the diary manuscript while the Mexican army and he were at rest in Matamoros in the summer of 1836.
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Pena, who joined a federalist rebellion in support of the Mexican constitution of 1824, was captured in May 1838 by centralist forces after he
surrendered his force at Mazatlan, Mexico. Seeing that he and his men were in an Alamo situation, he decided he was not
that
committed to Mexican federalism. He was first imprisoned at Guadalajara on May 27, 1838. From that confinement he had a fellow prisoner write a letter for him. Pena's reason for not writing himself was: “I consider how much our friends must have felt the event at Mazatlan – I am unable to give you even an idea of it, because so much thinking has affected my nervous system, my brain is not well, and I must rely on a friend to write. . . .”
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In regard to the conditions under which he was imprisoned, he wrote: “. . . they treat me with such care that soldiers look after my existence even when I must tend to my most pressing needs. The air reaches me only at times and the sun never. . . . You, my good friend, know my sensibility and can guess what my soul is suffering seeing myself slandered, in a prison, without friends, without relations, after having lost everything that a man and a soldier can lose. My implacable fate, not content with what it had made me suffer, willed that a servant who had given me many evidences of his faithfulness should leave me the day after I arrived here, leaving me almost naked and without the few monetary resources I had with me, and among other things he took a small box with a few mementos, the picture of my beautiful one, that of a good friend, and that of Malibran that you might have seen on my chest sometimes, the loss of which I will not be consoled of in a long time.”
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Clearly, Pena was up the proverbial creek without a paddle, which undoubtedly was plenty stressful.