Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (53 page)

Adina De Zavala was born on November 18, 1861, in the same house where her grandfather had died, and she had grown up hearing stories about the Alamo, San Jacinto, and the Texas revolution. After studying history at Sam Houston Normal Institute, she accepted a teaching post in San Antonio and was dismayed, upon arriving in the city, to find the Alamo crumbling and vandalized. Graffiti marred the church’s walls, statues of saints had been smashed, and the floors were slick with bat guano. A mercantile company, Hugo & Schmeltzer, had converted what remained of the long barracks into a grocery-and-supplies store.

In 1893, De Zavala founded the De Zavala Chapter—named after her grandfather, not herself—of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), a group formed one year earlier to protect historic sites throughout the state. De Zavala’s primary mission was to save the Alamo, and she was especially concerned that Hugo & Schmeltzer would sell the long barracks building, leaving its fate vulnerable to the whims of the next title holder. She secured a promise from Gustav Schmeltzer himself to give her organization first dibs on the property before another business or developer acquired it. Schmeltzer alerted De Zavala in 1903 that a prospective buyer had approached him about tearing down the structure and erecting an upscale hotel in its place, but he offered the DRT a preemptive bid of $75,000.

That was an astronomical price for the tiny all-volunteer group, so De Zavala marched over to the Menger Hotel, right beside the Alamo, hoping to convince the owners to purchase the neighboring property for both patriotic and self-interested business reasons.

The owners were away, but De Zavala was introduced to a guest named Clara Driscoll, the twenty-two-year-old heiress to the Driscoll family oil and real estate fortune and a staunch preservationist in her own right. Two years earlier, after touring cathedrals and holy sites overseas, Driscoll castigated her fellow Texans in the
San Antonio Express
for all but abandoning the Alamo, a sacred shrine in itself, she believed. “There does not stand in the world today a building or monument which can recall such a deed of heroism and bravery, such sacrifice and courage, as that of the brave men who fought and fell inside those historic walls,” she wrote. Like De Zavala, Driscoll came from noble Texas lineage (both of her grandfathers had fought at San Jacinto), and the two women hit it off instantly. Together they plotted to rescue the Alamo and headquartered their efforts in the Menger Hotel.

Founded in 1859 by a stocky five-foot-tall German brewer and tavern owner named William Menger, the inn began as a modest rooming house built next to Menger’s saloon so that drunken cowboys had a place to sleep off his notoriously potent ale. Today it’s a five-story, 316-room hotel that takes up the entire block. (Not coincidentally, this is where I’m staying.)

Hugo & Schmeltzer held firm to their $75,000 asking price but agreed to let the DRT pay incrementally. Driscoll and De Zavala launched an aggressive fund-raising campaign, confident that once Texans became aware of the Alamo’s precarious condition, they would flock to its aid. “Today its grim old walls, scarred and battered in that heroic struggle of liberty, stand threatened by vandalism and menaced by the hand of commercialism,” they proclaimed in a letter to potential contributors. “So [we] ask you one and all to join us in rallying around the Lone Star flag as it floats over the Alamo.”

The financial cavalry never arrived. Donations were paltry, and with hours to go before their option with Hugo & Schmeltzer expired on April 17, 1903, Driscoll dipped into her personal savings and covered the initial down payment of $5,000.

They now had until April 1904 to come up with $20,000, followed by five yearly installments of $10,000 each. In early May 1903, De Zavala and Driscoll persuaded the Texas legislature to allot $5,000 to the cause, but Governor Samuel Lanham vetoed the bill, claiming that the funds were not a “justifiable expenditure of the taxpayers’ money.”

By February 1904 the DRT had drummed up less than $6,000. With time running out, Clara Driscoll agreed to pay not only the
$14,000 but the five annual installments totaling $50,000. Driscoll’s extraordinary act of charity earned her wide praise, and De Zavala was able to shame the state legislature into reimbursing her generous friend. This time the governor signed the bill, and, in return for recouping her money, Driscoll agreed to transfer the Alamo’s title to the DRT, which would serve as the property’s official custodian. At long last the Alamo was in safe hands, and De Zavala was elated.

Her joy, however, was short-lived; within months, a powerful new group formed solely to thwart her vision of seeing the long barracks resurrected to its former glory. Naming themselves the Alamo Mission Chapter, they demanded that what remained of the long barracks be destroyed entirely, leaving only the small church to represent the battle, even though many of the defenders had died inside or around the long barracks. De Zavala assumed the issue had been resolved, but the real showdown—which would become known as “the second battle for the Alamo”—was only just beginning.

“Is there a specific part of the hotel where Adina De Zavala worked or stayed?” I ask Ernesto Malacara, who was employed by the Menger for thirty years and is now the hotel’s in-house historian. “I know she lived here in the early 1900s.”

“The hotel has changed a lot since Miss De Zavala’s time, so it’s hard to say. This lobby is the same one built in 1859, but the rest of the hotel has gone through major renovations.”

“And there’s no mention of De Zavala anywhere in the hotel?” I ask.

“No,” Ernesto says, “but I’m going to talk with the manager, because there should be.”

Clara Driscoll deserves recognition, too, but a joint De Zavala–Driscoll tribute would probably send both women whirling in their graves. Sadly, despite their fast friendship in 1903 and combined efforts to rescue the Alamo from developers in 1905, by 1906 tensions between the women were escalating and within a year’s time they were outright enemies.

Clara Driscoll had never liked the Hugo & Schmeltzer building
and bought it, she later conceded, only to raze the “eyesore” completely and create a spacious plaza that focused attention on the church. De Zavala insisted that the long barracks’ foundations needed to be maintained and that a museum and library should be added to educate visitors about the Alamo’s history. As both women dug in their heels, Driscoll and her supporters seceded from the De Zavala Chapter of the DRT and created the Alamo Mission Chapter. De Zavala fired back, excoriating Driscoll for “pandering to the rabid desires of the money-getters, who for business reasons only, want to tear down ‘unsightly walls.’ ” Each side claimed to be the Alamo’s true protector, and the clash spilled into the courts.

With the legal situation in limbo, pro-Driscoll members inside the DRT recommended leasing out the Hugo & Schmeltzer building commercially. If they weren’t allowed to knock it down anytime soon, they figured, why not profit from it in the interim?

Upon hearing that the new renters might be vaudeville performers, an outraged De Zavala hired several men to guard the building around the clock. Sheriff’s deputies shooed them away but then realized that they had a larger problem on their hands: De Zavala was already hunkered down inside. “The [deputies] threw my men out bodily, expecting to take possession,” she recalled.

Sheriff Dan Tobin was within his powers to remove De Zavala by force, but spectators and reporters had started to gather, and Tobin decided against smashing open the Alamo doors and dragging De Zavala outside kicking and screaming. She’d made it quite clear that she wouldn’t go quietly.

Tobin did, however, order his men to prevent anyone from bringing De Zavala food or drink. He also shut off the interior electricity. A sleepless night in a dark, frigid building crawling with rodents and spiders would, he assumed, bring De Zavala to her senses.

He guessed wrong. De Zavala only became more obstinate, and media accounts were transforming her into a national hero. (She communicated with journalists mostly by speaking through keyholes and cracks in the walls.) Public sympathy forced Sheriff Tobin to relax his quarantine, and De Zavala was given a single glass of water and two oranges.

Her recalcitrance was a growing source of unease in the Texas capital, and the new governor Thomas Campbell finally announced that the Alamo would be put back under state control and the demolition of any buildings postponed indefinitely. That was good enough for De Zavala, and she ended her protest. Again, newspapers far and wide gushed about her actions. The
Denver Post
declared that she had “risk[ed] her life to hold [the] Alamo,” the
Cincinnati Post
determined that “red-blooded Americans” would have agreed with her stance, and the
Baltimore American
referred to her as a “Joan of Arc in these modern commonplace times, ready to serve through patriotism and full of the spirit of her fighting sires.” She was proof, the editors wrote, that “all the romance and heroism of the world is not dead yet.”

San Antonio developers fumed. Tearing down the long barracks, they argued, would have created an open vista appealing to high-end hotel companies. Some implied that the entire Alamo compound could be done away with. “We do not want to appear sacrilegious,” remarked one prominent businessman, “but we realize that the time has come to stop mentioning the Alamo in the same breath with San Antonio.… By doing it we are advertising San Antonio not as a modern and enterprising city … but are associating her with a name that carries with it the idea that San Antonio is still a Mexican village.”

After leaving the Menger Hotel, I stroll over to explore the place myself. William Travis’s famous letter is transcribed on a bronze plaque
in front of the church. I’ve read it numerous times now, and it never loses its kick. Personally, I find Albert Martin’s bravery even more impressive; after smuggling Travis’s message out of the Alamo, he slipped back in, knowing full well he probably wouldn’t survive the forthcoming attack. And he didn’t.

Next to the church is the restored long barracks, which has been expanded into a museum—just as Adina De Zavala had envisioned. Her fight with Clara Driscoll and the DRT continued for years after the February 1908 standoff, and there’s no indication that the two women had reconciled when Driscoll died in July 1945. De Zavala passed away almost ten years later on March 1, 1955, the eve of Texas Independence Day. She was ninety-three.

In stark contrast to the apathy De Zavala and Driscoll faced, Texans are now fanatical about historical preservation (which, being a fellow fanatic, I say respectfully) and have instituted the most prolific state-marker program in America. This, too, is thanks partly to De Zavala; in 1912 she established the Texas Historical and Landmarks Association, and she pushed to name local public schools after Texas revolutionaries.

Before checking out of the Menger Hotel, I ask Ernesto Malacara his theory as to why the Alamo had been neglected for so long.

“I’ve never thought about that,” he says. “I guess for all those years people just took it for granted. When you pass by something every day, you stop noticing it.”

Ernesto also points out that the Alamo hadn’t sat idle after Santa Anna’s victory. Five different armies had used (and sometimes abused) the fort between 1836 and 1865 alone. Santa Anna’s men occupied it until his surrender at San Jacinto, and during their withdrawal they set the entire compound on fire. Texas militia took it over and then lost it briefly in 1842 when Mexican troops invaded San Antonio. The federal government assumed control at the outset of the Mexican-American War and held on to it until 1861, when David Twiggs, the Georgia-born general who commanded all U.S. Army soldiers in Texas, switched his allegiances to the South and handed the Alamo over to
the Confederacy. The United States regained it after the Civil War and garrisoned soldiers there until Fort Sam Houston was built in 1876.

Any reluctance to commemorate the Alamo during the late 1800s and early 1900s might also have had something to do with the fact that the site did represent a defeat, and military victories, not unreasonably, tend to be celebrated before losses. Texans placed their first historical marker at San Jacinto in 1856, followed by a towering memorial modeled after the Washington Monument. (Texans, God bless them, made theirs fifteen feet higher and crowned it with a 220-ton concrete star. It’s the tallest stone-column memorial in the world.) Both San Jacinto and the Alamo firmly established themselves as emblems of Texas sovereignty in 1936, the state’s centennial, and eventually the Alamo’s fame eclipsed San Jacinto’s as the old fortress increasingly became a national symbol and rallying spot for embattled causes.

Skirmishes over how the Alamo itself should be remembered are still being waged. Some Mexican American organizations have lobbied for the Tejano martyrs to receive better recognition, while others insist that the whole site is a tribute to Anglo aggression and should be bulldozed. Critics also contend that Texians were fighting not for “freedom” but for the right to enslave others after Santa Anna had attempted to end slavery throughout Texas.
Their
critics counterargue that many Texians didn’t own slaves, and abolition was only one grievance among many; Santa Anna had deprived Texians of numerous civil liberties, including religious freedom and trial by jury.

If she were alive today, Adina De Zavala would be squarely aligned with the “they died for independence” crowd, and regardless of the feuds and controversies that persist around her beloved site, overall she’d have to be pleased by the Alamo’s popularity. It is the most visited historic landmark in Texas and one of the top tourist destinations in America. Two and a half million people stream through here each year, which is more than twice the number of visitors who see the Charters of Freedom at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.