Alamo Traces (9 page)
Authors: Thomas Ricks Lindley
Williams's research first impacted the world of Texas history during the 1936 centennial celebration of the Texas Revolution. The study determined the names of the Alamo heroes that were carved in stone and cast in bronze in San Antonio and Gonzales in honor of Texas's 100th birthday as an independent nation and state. L. W. Kemp, chairman of the
Advisory Board of Texas Historians, wrote Williams: “The names of the men who fell at the Alamo, as best as can be determined, will be carved on a $50,000 monolith to be erected in San Antonio. The selection of these names has been left up to me but of course I shall be guided solely by your recommendations in the matter.”
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The Alamo, early twentieth century
Photo courtesy Library of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas at the Alamo
Williams was willing to have her Alamo list carved in stone for the centennial. Publication in a local newspaper, however, was another story. In March 1936 Williams became upset when she learned that J. C. Oslin, a writer for the
San Antonio Express
, had used, without her permission, her defender roster in an article. Williams penned Oslin's boss an indignant letter that declared: “He took my
entire list
of Alamo men. The very heart of my book that is on the press. This is what I call a sneak thief trick in the history [of the] writing world. . . . Your Mr. Oslin rearranged the list. I had it alphabetized. He arranged [it] as to the States from which the men came, but he used all my material â every bit. He even says it is my list.”
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Williams's complaint seems to be without foundation, given that her list had been published in the
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
in 1934. The list was pretty much public record as long as any user cited
Williams's study as the source, which Oslin did. Clearly, Williams was protective of her list and had publication plans for it beyond the
Quarterly
. Moreover, she was well on the way to becoming the official gatekeeper for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas's honor roll of Alamo defenders.
Also that year the
Dallas Morning News
identified the reason Williams had completed the defender roster: “One of Dr. Williams's first contributions to Texas history was a reconstruction of the list [Williams's master thesis] of the men who left Gonzales in a company to fight in the Alamo. . . . This work received the praise of Dr. Eugene C. Barker, university authority on Texas history, and other historians of the State who believed Dr. Williams should go further into this same field of research. With this encouragement, she was prompted to make as complete as possible a study of the personnel of the Texas army at the Alamo when it fell.”
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Three years later the
San Antonio Express Evening News
reported that Williams had received many letters claiming that this or that man died at the Alamo but was not on her list. Williams answered the complaint with words that in time would come back to haunt her: “However, for those names on the list,
I have not one but several official sources that indicate that each man died at the Alamo
[italics added]. . . . I have never found a new name to be added to the roll, although I have found considerable material about some of the men. I have never had to discard but one man, that of John G. King of Gonzales.”
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Today the Williams study is firmly entrenched as the “Bible” on the Texian Alamo. In 1992 a Texas State Historical Association sales pitch for old issues of the
Quarterly
described the work as: “Amelia Williams's classic five-part series on the Alamo.” Alamo historian Bill Groneman used the Williams roll and its biographical data as his main source for
Alamo Defenders A Genealogy: The People and Their Words
. Also, Groneman was the author of all but a few of the Alamo defender entries for the
New Handbook of Texas
, a six-volume encyclopedia of Texas history published by the Texas State Historical Association. Thus Williams's list is reflected in that publication through Groneman's work. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer used the Williams data in “The Artist's Alamo: A Reappraisal of Pictorial Evidence, 1836-1850,” the lead article for an Alamo thematic issue of the
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
. The most recent work in which Williams's study is reflected is
Alamo
Sourcebook 1836
by Tim J. and Terry S. Todish. More importantly, the official Alamo defender roll for the state of Texas is based on Williams's Alamo list.
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Nevertheless, despite the study's acceptance, cracks have appeared in the work's facade of authority over the years since its publication. In 1956 Frank H. Wardlaw, director of the University of Texas Press, considered publishing the study but never did so. Perhaps letters like the one he received from Mrs. A. Waldo Jones of Atlanta, Georgia, influenced him. She wrote: “Mrs. R. G. Halter at the Alamo has told me that you are going to publish Dr. Amelia Williams' thesis, âA Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo,' and has suggested that I write you with respect to some errors therein regarding William Irvine Lewis, one of the heroes, so that they may be corrected before it goes to press.”
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Then, Wardlaw may have had other reasons for rejecting Williams's study. According to Miss Jane Smoot, Williams's niece: “After her [Williams's] death I myself (one of her closest relatives) took her contract with him [Wardlaw] to [a] personal appointment in his office to ask him to carry on with their signed agreement. Mr. Wardlaw said that the public pulse had changed and that the University of Texas could no longer make as much money by printing scholarly works as it could profit from entertaining material, so he did not wish to honor his own contract.” One would think that if Wardlaw did not want to publish Williams's work because of serious scholarship problems, it is doubtful he would have expressed that opinion to Smoot, a grieving relative. Also, it was and is the goal of a university press to publish scholarly works; even some that fail to make a profit, provided the work is important and the research is sound.
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A few years later writer Walter Lord encountered the Williams study while researching the Alamo for
A Time To Stand
. From that experience he wrote:
The most widely known academic work is Amelia Williams' Ph.D. thesis. . . . it has been the leading authority for dozens of subsequent articles and books. Miss Williams did indeed amass a mountain of material, but in a way her thesis has been the worst thing that ever happened to the history of the Alamo. Not because she did so little work, but because she did so much. The sheer bulk of her research has discouraged later students from checking up
on her and has led them all too often to take her statements at face value.
This is dangerous. As evidence supporting a Bonham-Travis friendship, for instance, she quotes from an alleged letter written by Travis urging Bonham to come to Texas. Actually her quotation is a paraphrase of a reminiscence by Bonham's nephew, recounting the family tradition.
Sometimes Miss Williams relies on pure trash. For example, she uses Frank Templeton's trivial novel
Margaret Ballentine or The Fall of the Alamo
as her source for making defender Hiram J. Williamson a West Point man, when any check of the Point's
Register of Graduates and Former Cadets
would show he never attended.
Most curious is her personal aversion to Travis, which has much to do with the rather priggish picture of him that exists today and which was especially evident in Laurence Harvey's portrayal in the recent John Wayne film. Miss Williams could get quite upset about Travis, as evinced by a letter she wrote her professor Samuel Asbury in 1933. From Travis's failure to mention Bowie in his desperate appeals for help, she declared she detected what she considered a mean streak, “a cruel, vindictive nature.”
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Thomas Lloyd Miller was the next researcher to discover problems with Williams's scholarship. Miller observed: “Her list contains the names of eight Mexican-Texians; but more recent scholarship reveals that two of the eight names of Spanish-Texans, as well as the names of three Anglo-Texans should be stricken from the Alamo roll.”
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Richard G. Santos is another historian who had a problem with Williams's defender list. In a footnote in
Santa Anna's Campaign Against Texas 1835-1836
, he observed: “This author has chosen to review and analyze only those figures given by people in San Antonio during or immediately after the siege and fall of the Alamo. For other figures not necessarily based on reliable sources but seemingly accepted in some circles, see Amelia Williams' âCritical Study of the Siege of the Alamo. . . .' ”
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Miller's discovery and Santos's opinion would not have surprised historian Harbart Davenport, who appraised the dissertation for Williams before its submission to Dr. Barker's committee. His first criticism was:
“In preparing her corrected roster of those who fell at the Alamo, Miss Williams incorrectly estimated the weight of the evidence contained in the bounty, donation and headright [Texas land grant documents] files in the [Texas General] Land office, as compared with the copies of the muster rolls preserved in the same archive.” As will be explained later, this error had a telling effect on the accurateness of Williams's Alamo list.
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Dr. Paul Hutton, an acclaimed historian at the University of New Mexico, was the first academic scholar to publicly condemn Williams's scholarship. He wrote:
The line between the Alamo of fact and the Alamo of popular fancy is often blurred. While there has been an amazingly large body of historical and popular literature generated on the battle, there has never been an adequate serious study of it by a professional academic historian. Thus competent popular historians such as Walter Lord, who has written the best book on the battle, have not had the usual body of solid secondary materials to draw upon when writing. The academic work usually cited as the best study of the battle and its heroes, Amelia Williams's doctoral dissertation, is of stunningly poor quality. Academic historians have thus deserted the field, leaving the battle to the popularizers and propagandists.
Those who have written on the battle, for the most part, have simply repeated false stories told before in books, articles, and newspaper accounts. The written historical record is a sad one.
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Hutton's critical bullet is on target, but he failed to cut the bull's eye. The “stunningly poor quality” of Williams's study involves much more than sloppy research. Time and space does not allow for a litany of every error, probable fabrication, and unfounded conclusion thus far discovered by this writer. The following examples, however, should adequately illustrate the unreliability of the Williams study and the reasons for it.
Travis's death has not generated controversy and debate equal to that of David Crockett's last minutes. There are, however, several versions of the Alamo commander's death. In 1928, previous to the completion of
her dissertation, Williams accepted the version that is in vogue today. She wrote: “Concerning the death of the celebrated Travis, Crockett, Bowie, [and] Bonham, my conclusions backed by documentary evidence are: Travis fell while manning a cannon at [the] north west wall of [the] large area.”
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In the following years, Williams, apparently without benefit of new evidence, changed her mind and validated the suicide version of Travis's death. She claimed: “Both Anselmo Borgarra (also found Bogarra), the messenger from the Mexicans at San Antonio to [Juan N.] Seguin at Gonzales, and Antonio Perez, their messenger to [Jose Antonio] Navarro and [Jose Francisco] Ruiz at San Felipe, reported that Travis shot himself when he saw the Mexicans pouring over the walls of the Alamo and realized all hope of saving his men was gone.” Thus Williams concluded: “The fact that Travis's only wound was a pistol shot through the forehead, together with all attending circumstances, makes the reports carried by Borgarra and Perez seem very plausible.”
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A review of the sources shows that Perez made no Alamo report at Gonzales, at least none that has survived. He was on a mission to inform Tejanos about Santa Anna's offer of pardons to all who would pledge allegiance to the centralist government. Perez found Bergara (the correct spelling) at the Jose Flores ranch. Bergara was there to escort Andres Barcena to safety at Beeson's on the Colorado River. Barcena was the man who entered Gonzales with Bergara. Perez arrived at Gonzales later and reported the pardon offer to Sam Houston. In regard to Travis's death, Bergara, who had obtained most of his information from Perez, only said: “Travis killed himself.” The source reports no claim of Travis having shot himself in the forehead because enemy soldiers were “pouring over the walls of the Alamo and . . . all hope of saving his men was gone.” That allegation appears to have come from Williams, not the source material.
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