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Gone To Texas

Tennessee-born frontiersman Davy Crockett served as a scout under Andrew Jackson in the Creek Indian War, then went into politics, winning three terms as a U.S. congressman. Crockett's riproaring style delighted his plebeian constituents, and legend, much of it of Davy's own making soon grew up around his deeds (for example, that he once killed 105 bears in eight months). After his death in the heroic defense of the Alamo in 1836, popular Crockett Almanacs built up the legend of Davy as a backwoods superman.

When, in the elections of 1835, his constituents failed to return him for a fourth term as U.S. congressman from Tennessee, Davy Crockett told them they could go to hell and he'd go to Texas. True to his word, he headed southwest across Arkansas. Arriving at Little Rock, he was given a hero's welcome. But when urged by his hosts to stay and hunt bear, Davy declined. He was bound for Texas "to join the patriots of that country in freeing it from the shackles of the Mexican government."

Arkansas was to remain a stronghold of bear hunters and pioneers of the old school. The Ozark woodlands represented a western limit of the Appalachian log-cabin culture - their folklore thus reflected the older background, but its emphasis on the land's poverty gave it a distinct Arkansas ring.

Those who pressed on to Texas were a new breed for whom "back east" meant any part of Texas east of the speaker, or any southern state. Like thousands of contemporaries coming out of Arkansas and East Texas, Davy Crockett found a treeless, waterless plain where his woodslore could not help him and the woodsman's guerrilla tactics were useless against mounted Comanche raiders. It was nevertheless a patriotic duty to proclaim that Texas had the best climate, prettiest, women, and bravest men in the world.

Back east in Arkansas, however, Texas was said to be the destination of every rogue and reprobate that ever had to pick up stakes in the middle of the night. Thus, according to a humorous saying then current, a fugitive's forwarding address was GTT - "Gone To Texas." (It was said that the heroic Alamo commander, William Travis, was a GTT fugitive from Alabama, where he had killed a man for "annoying" his teenage bride.) Settlers in Texas talked as tall as their forebears had and - like them - preferred pungency to poetry. As armed newcomers kept pouring in, it was inevitable that they would clash with local Mexicans and Indians. When they did, a new era was born.

Born in Kentucky in 1796 and reared in Louisiana, James Bowie made his mark in the slave trade when still a young man, dealing with none other than the pirate Jean Lafitte, from whom he bought captive Africans at a dollar a pound for subsequent smuggling and resale. He then became a land speculator and searcher for lost treasure in Texas. Dying a hero's death at the Alamo with the famous knife, which bears his name, in hand, he was a terror to the last. Upon hearing Bowie's life story soon after the event, the hero-worshiping English author Thomas Carlyle exclaimed: "The man was nearly equal to Odin or Thor! The Texans ought to build him an altar."

The fame of James Bowie and his knife was established on September 19, 1827, by an event remembered in legend as the Sandbar Duel. This is how the story goes: For years Bowie had made the Louisiana city of Alexandria, on Red River, his business headquarters. Once when pressed for money, he learned that Norris Wright, sheriff of the parish and director of the bank from which Bowie borrowed, had thwarted a loan of money to him.

There was already bad blood be tween the two over politics. One day when they met on the street, Wright fired a pistol at Bowie, but the bullet was checked by a silver dollar in Bowie's vest pocket. Bowie's pistol snapped and he would have killed Wright with his hands if men had not withheld him. The two parted, expecting to meet another day. Bowie had told his brother, Rezin, of his pistol's snapping, whereupon Rezin gave him a knife: "Here, take old Bowie; she never misses fire."

The day Bowie and Wright met was not long afterward. The place was a sandbar noted as a dueling place on the west bank of the Mississippi across from Natchez. Bowie was one of four seconds, plus a surgeon, on the side of a principal in a duel. There were six men, likewise including a surgeon, on the other side. The duel turned into a general fight in which two men were killed and two badly wounded. Bowie had emptied his pistol and was down, shot in four places and cut in five. Norris Wright had emptied two dueling pistols. Without taking time to reload, he rushed against Bowie with a sword. Bowie, a ball in one hip, rose to standing position and stabbed the knife into his enemy, "twisting it to cut his heartstrings." Bowie declared that he would wear that knife as long as he lived. So he did, and it served him well.

One day in Natchez-Under-the-Hill, Bowie met the youthful son of an esteemed friend named Lattimore. The young man had just sold a large amount of cotton, and now "Bloody" Sturdivant, a notorious gambler and hard case, was cheating him of the money from the sale in a faro game. "Young man," Bowie interposed, "you don't know me but your father does. Let me play your hand for awhile." The young man got up; Bowie sat down and before long exposed the cheater. He won back all the money young Lattimore had lost and gave it to him with the advice never to gamble again. Bloody Sturdivant, ignorant of who the rescuer was, challenged him to a duel, proposing that they lash their left hands together and fight with knives. Bowie accepted, and at the first stroke disabled his right arm and then magnanimously let the scoundrel go.

Arkansas toothpick was actually a humorous term for the bowie knife, traditionally held to have been invented by James Bowie's brother, Rezin, in the early 1820's. Its design was more probably the work of many hands. The blade was 8-15 inches long, curved and double-edged near its point for slashing. Because of its superb balance, the knife could be thrown with accuracy. Popularized by sensational accounts of Jim Bowie's success with it in the Sandbar Duel, the knife became standard equiprnent for frontiersmen in the American West and was used as an all-purpose weapon and tool. It was the main eating implement not only in camps but in many a cabin. It served to skin and dress all kinds of-game, mend saddles, and cut firewood. More than once it was also used to dig a grave on the lone prairie for a fallen comrade. "They all carry knives, generally ,Arkansas toothpicks. When in expectation of a row, they begin picking their teeth with the point," reported Sir Richard Levinge, a British visitor in the early Southwest.

Not A Soul Surrendered

Just before dawn on March 6, 1836, some 2,400 troops led by Mexican dictator Santa Anna mounted a final attack on the 180-odd American defenders of a fortified mission compound called the Alamo (Spanish for "cottonwood'), outside San Antonio. Within 90 minutes the defenders, whose number included Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, were all dead, but their heroic last stand was soon translated into a battlecry, "Remember the Alamo!" Thousands rallied to the cause of Texas independence, and the tables were turned.

Ex-congressman David Crockett had arrived at the Alamo with a group of companions on the eve of the siege. Presenting himself to Travis, he said: "Here I am, colonel; assign me to some place and I and my Tennessee boys will defend it." Offered officer status, Crockett declined, saying he'd rather just be "a high private."

In the days that followed, Davy spent many hours on the walls, picking off Mexicans and shouting gibes at the besiegers, to whom it seemed that the tall man in buckskins with the coonskin cap must bear a charmed life. They called him Kwockey.

As the situation worsened and the men began to give way to despair, Crockett got out his fiddle and performed duets with a Texas Scot volunteer who was a bagpiper. A brave cacophony was produced that did all hands a world of good. But toward the end, Crockett had his own desperate moments. At one point he said: "I think we had better march out and die in the open air. I don't like to be hemmed up."

Soon after he spoke those words, Davy's wish for death in the open air came true. In the fierce hand-to-hand fighting that followed the Mexicans' final assault, he died shooting and defending the area in front of the Alamo chapel. "Won't you come into my bower?" he is said to have sung to the enemy soldiers as he greeted them with his rifle Betsy, four pistols, and a bowie knife. The big knife was still clutched in his hand when the Mexicans identified his body some time later. People were later to say that Crockett had been shot with a silver bullet because none other could kill him. It was also said that when Davy's body was brought along to where the bodies of the slain were heaped up for burning, a Mexican officer said, "So brave a man ought not to be burned like a dog." After a little hesitation, he added, "Never mind, throw him on." (In another version of this incident, the officer was Santa Anna himself and the body was Jim Bowie's.)

For a short while after his arrival at the Alamo, James Bowie had been the men's elected commander, but was forced to resign when his tuberculosis suddenly worsened. When the end came, he lay near death in a cot in a remote room of the mission, but (according to a generally accepted tradition) at the sight of Mexican soldiers coming into the room, he rallied, shot two with pistols left with him by Crockett, and knifed several more before they finally blew his brains out. Thus Bowie kept his old vow to carry the knife bearing his name as long as he lived.

The commander of the Alamo was a young lawyer named William B. Travis, who with a group of friends had occupied the outpost about three months earlier in the belief that it would serve as a strongpoint to resist Santa Anna's planned advance into Texas. Travis was an ancient-history buff (his favorite author was Herodotus) and it seemed to him that the Texans' struggle against the Mexicans and their dictator had many points in common with the war of resistance waged by the Greeks against the Persian invaders. Specifically, Travis thought of himself and his Texans as vanguard fighters, as the Spartans had been in the Persian Wars, and aspired to do at the Alamo what the Spartans had failed to accomplish at Thermopylae - stop the invader. Travis thought the Alamo was the key to Texas and wrote, "I believe this place can be maintained." But even if it could not, Travis said, he would defend it to the death-an action which, like that of Leonidas and his 300 doomed Spartans, would at least serve to inspire his indecisive countrymen to fight.

Such was Travis' state of mind when, a couple of days before the besieged Alamo fell, it became apparent to the defenders that all was lost. Then (says a story first published a half century later) Travis took advantage of the lull before the fighting to address his men. He told them that death was inevitable and that he had detained them thus long in hope of reinforcements. When he had finished speaking, the silence of the grave reigned over all. Drawing his sword, Travis drew a line in front of his men and cried, "Those who wish to die like heroes and patriots come over to me." There was no hesitation. Every man, save one, crossed the line. Jim Bowie was too ill to leave the cot where he lay dying of consumption, but was not to be deterred. "Lads," he said, "I can't get over to you, but won't some of you be kind enough to lift my cot over?" In an instant it was done.

The man who did not cross the line was a Frenchman named Louis Rose, who had been a soldier in Napoleon's army in the retreat from Moscow. He had no more stomach for war horrors. Looking at Rose from his cot, Bowie said, "You seem not to be willing to die with us, Rose!" "No," said Rose, "I am not prepared to die and shall not do so if I can avoid it." Then Crockett also looked at him, saying, "You may as well conclude to die with us, old man, for escape is impossible." But legend has it that Crockett himself later helped Rose over the wall. The Frenchman is then said to have slipped through the Mexican lines and lived to tell the tale of his escape from the Alamo and of the line Travis drew.

Whatever the truth of that story, Texans reacted to the bad news exactly as Travis had foretold, and a proclamation was issued, opening with the words: "Thermopylae is no longer without a parallel!" Weeks later, Santa Anna's army was defeated in a bloody rout.

Readers Digest. . Readers Digest, New York, New York, U.S.A. 1978.

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