Bear Grease - Ep. 122: David Crockett - The Alamo (Part 4)

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

On this week’s episode of Bear Grease, the final episode in our series on David Crockett, Clay Newcomb takes us on a deep dive into Davy’s death at the Alamo. He’ll look not just at the pop culture versions from John Wayne and Walt Disney, but also history’s best understanding of what really transpired. We’ll learn that it was far more important in US history than you might think. Clay talks with Wade Dillon, James Crisp, and of course, New York Times best-selling author, Robert Morgan about what led Crockett to Texas and what really happened at the Alamo. Did Crockett die fighting or was he executed…and why do we care? We really doubt you’re going to want to miss this one… Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. They're wearing themselves out, trying to receive reinforcements, receive supplies, and they can't. They can't. On February 23rd, Santa Ana and the Mexican Army arrive. The final episodes of these series are always somber for me.

I think we all know what's about to happen to our boy David Crockett. I'm interested in the best information that we have about the Alamo, not the narrative we've heard from the likes of John Wayne and Walt Disney. Or maybe their narratives were right. Sometimes nationalistic narratives have to be sorted through because I'm mainly interested in not that, but the inner workings and character and fabric of the man David Crockett. I'm also interested in why people from Texas are so crazed about the Alamo

and passionate about how Crockett died. We'll learn that it was far more important in U.S. history than you might think. Halley's comet soared over North America in 1835 and 36 and was blamed for some of the time's ill fate. Andrew Jackson sarcastically commissioned Crockett to catch it by the tail before it hit the United States destroying the country.

He didn't catch it, but he did help change the course of this nation by his death. And we're going to learn, did Crockett die fighting or was he executed? And why do we care? I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. Most people who think they know history don't know how they know what they think they know. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast,

where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to. to the land. Presented by FHF gear, American made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear

that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Over 20 buckskin-clad horsemen are riding through the dry plains of Texas. One sure looks a lot like John Wayne and he's wearing a coonskin hat. I think that's Davey Crockett. Well, there she be, Colonel.

After 20 days of hard riding, We're going to have to learn the lingo they use down here, Davy? Where do we go, Davy? To the town or to the fort? There's an old fort. It's an old mission. You better take a better look. A lot of people moving in there. Them guns don't give it an old mission look to me. Colonel, what do C-A-N-T-I-N-A spell? Cantina. Do it mean what I think it do?

It do. It means out of these dearskins and into our food-ver-rod. This was near the opening scene of John Wayne's 1960 movie titled The Alamo. It's rife with historical inaccuracies, but this scene depicting these guys entering into San Antonio as more relaxed than they should have been is probably accurate. On February 8, 1836, the real David Crockett, our gentleman from the cane, America's first celebrity, voluntarily rode in. to a Mexican war zone. His one month in San Antonio would be the most scrutinized studied and mythologized portions of his storied life.

Because on the morning of March 6, 1836, he and 1888 other men would die at the hands of the Mexican army, making this one of the most infamous days in Texas and American history. The mystery of this day, because of the lack of survivors, would set many American. on a lifelong journey to understand what happened, including John Wayne, whose passion project was this Alamo movie, which he directed and funded. But it wasn't just the Duke who was passionate about the Alamo and Crockett. Yeah, Crockett's bigger than Disney and John Wayne. Even John Wayne couldn't play Davy Crockett. John Wayne played John Wayne playing Davy Crockett. So before my move to Texas. My dad had renovated his childhood home in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, with the bell-shaped

parapet of the Alamo. So here we were 10 minutes from the Atlantic Ocean, and we had neighbors asking why we were building a taco bell in the middle of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, my dad was eventually hit with foreclosure. We knew we were going to lose the house. And so I was about 20 at the time. I'm 34 now. I realized I had to leave the nest. So I moved to San Antonio in 2010. And within four months of living in San Antonio, I was working at the Alamo.

Passion comes in many shapes, but it's the special breed that are passionate about the Alamo. That was the voice of David Crockett fanatic and historical illustrator, Wade Dillard. He worked for eight years at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, which, to many people's surprise, despite John Wayne's movie, is still standing. Well, most of it. In John Wayne's movie, it got blown up. The real battle of the Alamo is a central feature in the Texas Revolution that eventually led Texas to independence and statehood. And though Texas is now part of these United States, many would say that that statehood didn't remove that Texas independence. The most debated question of the Alamo, though, is how did David Crockett die?

This has become a really important question. John Wayne's version showed that he died the iconic death of a hero in the midst of battle. However, there is another version of his death that many aren't happy about. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the editor asked me if I would review a new book that a New York City fireman by the name of Bill Groneman, who's an amateur historian, had written, it was called Defense of a Legend, David Crockett and the Delapena Diary.

And to make a long story short, Delapeno was a junior officer in the Mexican Army who wrote a diary, later rewrote it as a memoir, but it's almost always called his diary, and he witnessed the capture and execution of a handful of men after the Battle of the Alamo. They were captured right at the end, executed within a few minutes,

and he identifies one of them as being David Crockett. Wait a minute, did our ears just partake of an account of pure heresy? Everybody who knows our Crockett, the King of the Wild Frontier, who knows no fear, they would know that Crockett would never surrender to anyone. You can't just capture a Bob Catt. grinning whirlwind brothers. That was Dr. James E. Crisp, Professor Emeritus at North Carolina State University

in Texas native. He is from Texas. He's a national expert on the last five minutes of David Crockett's life, and his whole career has been involved in this debate. He wrote a book called Sleuthing the Alamo, and another titled, How Did David Die, and Why Do We Care So Much? The Lapina Diary. is big news, but there's more. Here's way.

Now, this is where the controversy comes into play. The De La Pena Diary shows up after the big crockett craze of the 1950s. Right. So like 125 years later, this diary shows up, which is kind of convenient. Well, the thing about the diary is a great deal of the diary is legitimate, is authentic. But what is debiliped. is the section that specifically talks about the execution of David Crockett, the pages of that section of the diary are different sizes. And they're quite possibly forged.

Wait a minute. The whole diary is legit, but just the section about Crockett's death is a fraud? I'm no detective, but that sounds sketchy. But it also sounds sketchy that it appeared in 1955, conveniently right when Walt Disney resurrected Crockett's legacy with the trilogy of films. Weren't there security cameras or military body cams that we can review to see how our boy Crockett died? Within weeks after the fall of the Alamo, two stories had reached New Orleans and was printed in the New Orleans papers. One was that Crockett had died fighting like a tiger and fell in combat, and the other

that he was among those handful of men who were captured and executed. Both stories were there from the very beginning. There's an artist from Texas who painted two pictures of Crockett and the Alamo. One was him fighting and one was him captive. That was in the 1930s. Right.

So the stories were always there. But by the time they started making the John Wayne movie and the Fess Parker Disneyland version of Crockett, they went with the alternate stories. In Fess Parker, he dies, you know, swinging his rifle, although they never show him die. And in John Wayne, I believe he gets blown up in the powder magazine after getting stabbed through the chest.

We're living in a age right now where there's so much falsehood put out as conclusions that people don't look at how the conclusions were arrived at. What you have to do as a professional historian or someone who reads professional historians is look at the evidence. And what I've done is describe the evidence. There are no eyewitnesses to Crockett dying in combat. Zero. This man speaks with conviction. By the end of this episode, you're going to have a gut feeling of what happened to Crockett.

But that's all it will be. Just a feeling. There are multiple firsthand accounts of seeing Crocket's dead body with his coonskin hat by his side. No joke. There are zero accounts of anyone actually seeing him die fighting. And there are three accounts from soldiers in the Mexican army of him being executed, but none of them seemed to be rock solid. But before we can answer those questions, we need to understand why our Tennessee boy was in Texas. In episode three of our Crockett series, we left him in 1835 when he'd been defeated in a race for Congress by Adam Huntsman.

The defeat chapped him bad. He said he was rascled out of the election. And then he finalized a plan that he'd likely had for some time. Crockett had been in Congress and he lost an election. He was defeated by a guy with a wooden leg. and he told his constituents, if you're going to vote for that timber toe instead of me, you can all go to hell and I'm going to Texas.

Now, the question is, why would he choose Texas? Well, Texas was a wide, open place for American immigration to where they could get good land very cheap. And Crockett needed that because he was not a wealthy man. In fact, Crockett had lost his life savings more than once in his life. Crocket is 49 years old and in the words of Bono, he still hasn't found what he's looking for, which was primarily land in a stable life. Crocket had vowed that if Martin Van Buren was elected president, he'd leave the country.

And he famously said, you can all go to H.E. Double Hockey sticks and all go to Texas. And he did just that. Matilda, Crocett's daughter, wrote that when her father left their home in Rutherford, Tennessee, he was, quote, dressed in his hunting shirt, wearing a coonskin cap, and carried a fine rifle presented to him by his friends in Philadelphia. He seemed very confident the morning he went away that he would soon have us all join him in Texas. End of quote.

Crocket would cross the Mississippi River, and he arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas on November the 12th, where it's recorded that he killed a deer and skinned it behind the Jeffreys Hotel, It was entertained by a puppet show at a local tavern. That's no joke. It was reported that hundreds of people gathered and held a banquet for Crockett at a hotel. And the newspaper quoted Crockett as saying, I kid you not.

He said, quote, if I could rest anywhere, it would be in Arkansas where the men are real half horse, half alligator breeds such as grow nowhere else on the face of the universal earth, but just around the backbone of North America. I am literally blushing with pride. I didn't make that up. But Crockett did leave the creation state and went to Texas. The editor of an Arkansas newspaper would write, quote, We shall die contented.

We have seen the Honorable David Crockett, who arrived in this place this evening on his way to Texas, where he contemplates ending his days. It's not entirely known what this editor meant by this cryptic statement, but the prophetic utterance was accurate. Crockett leaves for Texas, November of 1835. He's traveling in each major town that he's crossing through. He's receiving updates as to the politics of Texas.

They're in the middle of a war. So the northern federal estates of Mexico rebel. That includes Texas. Now, of course, at this time, Texas is filled. with American and European immigrants who have brought their ideologies and practices with them. Mexican Representative Miri Tehran, when he took a tour of Texas, stated that the American immigrants carried their constitutions in their pockets. These people were energized by the new ideals of America. The handwriting was on the wall that this place was about to be its own country and it would likely be a lot more like America than Mexico.

But why was Crockett there? Crockett comes down to Texas, volunteering for six months. Because he realizes during wartime, land offices are likely closed. And the quickest way for him to acquire land at this point upon arrival is by volunteering. All these guys were always looking for land. Crocket said he'd been promised over 4,000 acres of land for his military service. That's a pretty good deal if you don't die. Other accounts said he was only guaranteed 640 acres.

But Crockett had more on his mind than land. Remember, this guy has national fame and was a potential candidate for U.S. president, and now he believes that he can be a significant player in Texas politics, maybe even president of Texas. Here is Crockett's last correspondence with his family that he wrote to his daughter, Margaret. This is the first time I've had the operative. to write you with convenience. I am now blessed with excellent health and am in high spirits, although I've had many difficulties to encounter and have got through safe and have been

received by everybody with the open arm of friendship. I am hailed with a hearty welcome to this country. A dinner and a party of ladies have honored me with an invitation to participate with them, both in Nacadocious. In this place, the cannon was fired here on my arrival. I must say as to what I have seen of Texas. It is the garden spot of the world. The best land and the best prospect for health I have ever saw is here. I do believe it's a fortune to any man to come here. There is a world of country to settle, and it's not required here to pay down for your league of land. Every man is entitled to his head right of 4,428 acres. They might have the money to pay it off the land. This is just how this letter reads, so this grammar is kind of wild.

I expect in all probability to settle on the Bodark or the Choctaw Bayou, the Red River, that I have found no doubt the richest country in the world. Good land, plenty of timber, and the best springs and good mill streams, good range, clear water, and every appearance of good health and game plenty. It is in the past where the buffalo passes from north to south, back twice a year, and bees and honey plenty. I have a great hope of getting the agency to settle that country, and I would be glad to see every friend I have settled there.

It would be a fortune to them all. I have taken the oath of the government and have enrolled my name as a volunteer for six months and will set out for the Rio Grande in a few days with the volunteers from the United States. All volunteers is entitled to a vote for a member of the convention or to be voted for, and I have but little doubt of being elected a member

to form a constitution for this province. I am rejoiced at my fate and had rather be in my present situation than to be elected to a seat in Congress for life. I am in hopes of making a fortune for myself and family as bad as have been my prospects. I have not wrote to William but have requested John to direct him what to do.

I hope you will show this letter to him and also your brother John as it is not convenient at this time for me to write them. I hope you will do the best you can and I will do the same. Do not be uneasy about me, for I am with friends. I must close with great respects. Your affectionate father, farewell.

Signed, David Crockett, January 9, 1836. This letter leaves little speculation of the intentions of Crockett in Texas. He encountered many people during his time there, one of which was the Swisher family. They would later write about their time with Crockett. what they said, quote, he conversed about himself in the most unaffected manner without the slightest attempt to display any genius or smartness. He told us many great anecdotes, many of which were commonplace and amounted to nothing within themselves, but his inimitable way of telling

them would convulse us in laughter. End of quote. This reminds me of John Gadsby Chapman, the portrait painter's recollections of Crockett. Sounds like it would have been hard not to like him. This land deal was good for most folks, but there were some groups who didn't get a good deal at all. This is interesting. Crockett was going to where lots of Americans were going. The population had gone up to close to 30,000 people from the United States, including

two or three thousand slaves that they had brought in. And slavery was a touchy subject in Mexico because good many people in Mexico would to get rid of it. By the time of the Texas Revolution, they had gotten rid of it in virtually all of Mexico except for Texas. Texas had been accepted, had been allowed to keep slavery legal. You weren't supposed to bring slaves in, but they got around that by signing 99-year indentures with their slaves. I've seen a copy of one of those. You know, I, the slave, in order to learn the art and science of agriculture, hereby pledged 99 years of labor to this guy who's taking me in.

Crockett had crossed into Texas near Clarksville on the Red River in late December 1835, traveling with his nephew and two neighbors from Tennessee. It takes him about a month and we're not sure why, but he ends up in San Antonio. There in San Antonio de Behar, he arrives around February 9, 1836. He arrives outside of town near the old Camposanto. the Old Town Cemetery. And he's greeted with a kind of grisly scene. I kind of see it as foreshadowing in regards to Crockett,

but he arrives at this cemetery. That's an acre of land surrounded by an eight-foot wall, and in the center of the cemetery is a large cross. And at the base of this cross are human skulls. And then throughout the cemetery are just bones promiscuously scattered throughout. A soldier would later write about this cemetery describing the poorly buried human remains on the surface of the ground. In 2017, the Children's Hospital of San Antonio found the remains of 70 people when they discovered this spot, the Campo Santo Cemetery, the same one that likely greeted Crockett when he arrived.

Just FYI, if you haven't been to what remains of the Alamo, it's literally in downtown San Antonio. Shortly after Crockett gets there, things escalate quickly. There are two divisions of the Texas military that Wade talks about, the Beharth and the Goliad garrisons. Meanwhile, the Behar garrison, as well as the men down in Goliad, are receiving reports that the Mexican Army is marching north. They have crossed through the Presidio de Rio Grande, and they're heading into Texas.

And there's a lot of disbelief because it's winter. They don't think the Mexican Army is going to come up until the spring because all their pack animals, they don't have grass to feed. What they don't realize is that the Mexican Army has marched through two blizzards to put down this rebellion. You're going to have a division of the Mexican army under General Jose Urea head towards Goliad. Santa Ana will head towards Behar.

So, Crocett, yeah. He is in the thick of it. San Antonio was the key to Texas. That's why they needed to defend it and why Santa Ana wanted to take it. The Bayhard Garrison has two guys struggling for the leadership of the group, James Bowie and William Travis. Both of these guys were wild dudes. Here's an excerpt from Michael Wallace's biography of Crockett titled David Crockett.

And again, if you're looking for a crockett biography, this is the one I would suggest. Here's what he said about Bowie and Travis. Beside making a fortune as a dealer in human cargo and subverting the ban on the slave trade, Bowie, like Stephen Austin, also became a land speculator. He sold fraudulent claims in Arkansas territory, masterminded a series of property swindles in Louisiana, and speculated in Texas land. Bowie saw that there was an immense profit to be made in Texas real estate. He learned Spanish, joined the Catholic Church, and became a Mexican citizen, and married into one of San Antonio's prominent Tejano families.

When his wife and two children died during a cholera epidemic, Bowie went into an alcoholic depression that lasted until his death in his sickbed at the Alamo, where he served as commander of volunteer soldiers. William Barrett Travis, commander of the regular army troops defending the old mission fortress, was an attorney by trade. He knew Bowie from San Felipe, where he served as the Knife Fighters Council. A South Carolinian native Travis, like many others, came to Texas to escape bad debts and avoid going to prison.

After abandoning his pregnant wife and young son in Alabama, he entered Texas illegally and immediately became involved in the slave trade. He settled in San Felipe, Austin in 1831, obtained some land from Stephen Austin, and established his new practice. He enjoyed the company of women, was known to devour Sir Walter Scott Novels, and divorced his wife in 1836 when she showed up to save their marriage. Although he neglected to pay off the debts left behind in Alabama, Travis soon began acquiring land and slaves, including a young black man known only as Joe. he would stay with his white master all the way to the end of the Alamo

where his life was spared because he was a slave. I realize that's just two paragraphs about these guys, but sounds like they were pretty wild. And now these two are struggling to see who's gonna lead. Eventually these two men

put together an olive branch. They come together, they realize they need to stick together to defend the town in the best interest of the defense of Texas. And so for the next few days, I imagine that they're really trying to assess the situation. How can they, with their meager force of maybe 150 volunteers at this time, how can they defend the town? They realize they really can't if they were to be attacked now based on the reports.

But they can continue fortifying the Alamo. The Alamo is an old Spanish mission. It has been converted into a fortress and used as a military outpost ever since. the mission was desecularized in 1793. So there it is the Alamo, four and a half acre compound, fortified with 18 pieces of artillery. They realize if the Mexican army were to arrive, they would have to retreat into the Alamo.

Now, every single day, Travis and Bowie, I mean, they're just, they're wearing themselves out, trying to receive reinforcements, receive supplies, try and get some sort of response out of this, forming government within Texas. And they can't. They can't. On February 23rd,

Santa Ana and the Mexican Army arrive. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments. and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person.

He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. The people in San Antonio were very surprised at Santa Ana's early arrival. As Santa Ana is attached to the vanguard, they number roughly three. 1500 Travis, Bowie Crockett, they realize, again, they cannot defend the town so they withdraw

into the Alamo. Slowly but surely, the Mexican army arrive without resistance. They take the town, they mount a blood red banner from the top of the bell tower of the San Fernando Church, that blood red banner meaning death to all traitors, death to all pirates. It is Santa Ana's symbol to the Behar Garrison or the Alamo Garrison at this point that he is there to carry out the Tornell Decree, which by Mexican law states, if you rebel against the Mexican government under an unrecognized flag, you are labeled a pirate and put to the sword. So Santa Ana is going to follow that to the tea. Death to all pirates. Turns out pirates don't need water. The word pirate means a person who appropriated. or reproduces the work of another without permission.

So Santa Ana has taken the city, and the Texas soldiers and the people of the town have retreated into this old Spanish fort, the Alamo. The second day of the siege, Bowie becomes deathly ill and turns over full command to Travis. Travis wrote a famous letter on that day pleading for reinforcements, and he signed it, victory or death. In Billy Bob Thornton's 2004 movie on Crockett, it shows Crockett on the wall of the Alamo playing the fiddle for the Mexican army to hear. Crocket playing the fiddle at the Alamo is likely a myth because it didn't show up in the literature until almost 50 years after the battle. And we're not even entirely sure that he knew how to play the fiddle. This is important stuff. The very next day, February 25th, third day of the siege,

the Mexican army is already starting to surround the Alamo fort with artillery batteries and bombard the fort. It's this same day that Santa Ana decides to test the defenses on the southern end of the fort. And the Mexican army begins to attack on the south side. And for two and a half hours, the Alamo garrison is holding their own. Crockett, in a letter written by Travis, is seen at all points animating the men to do their duty. So Crockett, having been in battles, been in conflict, his natural leadership skills are coming through. And at the age of 49, you know, I'm sure Crockett's, you know, firing the rifle himself, but he is out there, despite being a private, acting like Colonel Crockett. I think this is an important part of the story.

if we're trying to know who Crockett was. This isn't myth, but was recorded in an official letter from the commanding officer that Crockett is out there leading and fighting, which seems entirely consistent with the Crockett we've seen. The siege lasts for 13 days, and a great deal of that time is spent by these men, endearing an artillery bombardment, living off of rations. The Mexican Army eventually cuts off their access. to water, and so the slaves within the fortress are likely assigned to dig a new well inside of the fort. Morale is just going down. They're waiting and waiting for reinforcements,

thinking that any day now, Fannin is going to arrive. Fanon is the leader of the closest garrison of Texas troops, and they've been communicating with him, but he just can't get there in time. There's some debate as to whether towards the end of the siege, Travis requests a parley. There's some debate as to whether or not Travis is trying to save the lives of his men. But eventually the answer is very clear that they're not going to march out of that for a life. So the end of the siege, Travis gathers his men and has a talk. Now, there's one rendition of this story that comes to us from William P. Zuber that Travis drew a line in the sand, asking his men to stay and fight with him. But whether that happened or not, the Alamo Garrison, that they stay.

Crockett stays. The heartbreak for me personally, when I try and get into the minds of these men, is what was their headspace like? you know, Crockett, Crockett came all of this way. For 49 years he had been trying. He's come all this way to now get stuck inside of a fort in a foreign country. I'm sure he's dealing with some reluctance. All of these men are scared.

But come Sunday, March the 6th, 5.30 in the morning, 1,600 Centralist Mexican soldiers attack the fort from all sides. So it's a very possible. that Crockett is somewhere along the west wall, or even north wall during the battle. The Mexican army spills into the compound, and all of this action is taking place so quickly that the Alamo defenders are unable to spike or disable their artillery. So as the Alamo defenders retreat into the long barrack, into the old convent of the Spanish mission, the Mexican army turn the cannons inward, aim them through the doors and fire across the plaza. The Mexican

army now congregating in the heart of the fort inside of the plaza, now race across, and they begin sweeping through each individual rooms of the long barrack where we would see the last stand at the Battle of the Alamo. This is the deadliest, grisliest, hand-to-hand fighting taking place. I hesitated to use these cliche sounds of battle with the corny, dramatic music. These were real humans, real fear, real blood, real pain. In the moment these men weren't thinking about being immortalized heroes on TV or in books, they were trying not to die and be swallowed by fear. And by 7 o'clock in the morning, the Battle of the Alamo is over.

The moment the Battle of the Alamo is over, that's when you can really begin to track the myth of the death. of David Crockett. How did Crockett die? To me, it doesn't matter how Crockett died because he fought and died at the Alamo. But after the battle, Survivor Susanna Dickinson, who was the only English-speaking female survivor, the rest were Tejana, they spoke Spanish. As she has escorted out of the church, holding her 15-month-old daughter Angelina, and also nursing a wounded ankle she had been shot, she states in her account, which was, dictated later in life. She states, I saw Colonel Crockett lying dead between the church and the two-story barrack building mutilated with his peculiar cap lying by his side. That peculiar hat was most likely a coon skin hat for real, because there are two different accounts of Crockett wearing it when he was

leaving Tennessee, one from his daughter and another from a guy named John Davis who saw him wearing a coonskin hat when he left Memphis. This is one place I like Crockett better than Boone. The man's got to have a touch of pizzazz, and a coon skin hat delivers that. It was said that Daniel Boone wore a beaver felt hat. And now that's pretty classy, and that's why I actually wear both. Not at the same time. In case you're wondering, Josh Landbridge Spillmaker makes my coonskin hats,

and Sing Hat Company made me my 100% Beaver. felt hat that I wear a lot. Now, this is Crockett's body being identified. Of course, we don't know how Crockett died. Most accounts state that Crockett went down fighting, but of course those accounts, for the most part, are not from reliable sources. And then we have the account of Lieutenant Colonel Jose

Enrique de la Pena, who states that Crockett identifies himself as an naturalist, one of seven amongst a group of survivors. Shortly after the battle, they are brought before Santa Ana, where Santa Ana, he's going to carry out the Tornell decree, death to all pirates, and these men are executed. They are beaten to death by swords. Here's Dr. Crisp. We're going to learn that he 100% believes in the accuracy of the De La Pina diaries. But I want to ask him a pointed question. Why do you think it's so important for the legacy of Texas for Crockett to have died fighting rather than just being taken to captive?

Why is that so important do you think to people? Well, you can get some clues from the paintings. I'm looking at the cover of my book, Sleuthing the Alamo. And there's a painting done around 191, 192, It's the last moments of Crockett's life when he's fighting there at the Alamo. And this figure of Crockett is actually copied from a figure of George Armstrong Custer, which was at the time the most famous painting and lithograph in America. It's the same pose.

And what Custer is doing is he's fighting the Indians, and he's about to die. And the way I try to interpret this is that people were saying, there are certain enemies that you never surrender to. I can understand how this idea could be important to a state's identity. Dr. Chris believes that it's rooted in ideas of racial supremacy. And when you hear him out, it makes a compelling point. But was that the true motivation of this painting and the whole reason that these people are passionate about Crockett dying in battle?

Why were people angry at me and writing things? mail to me when I said, look, the Mexicans executed Crocket, and they were accusing me of being pro-Mexican. They just couldn't take the idea that Crockett had allowed himself to be captured. I never used the S word, that is surrender. Crocket was captured when his weapons were no longer useful, when he was out of ammunition, when these half-dozen men were taken. And Santa Ana got very angry. He said, I told you no prisoners today. And so he immediately ordered the men around him to execute the prisoners. He gave the order to the Zapadores.

But instead of firing their guns, the sappers didn't fire their guns. And Santa Ana's own retinue, his own junior officers stepped forth and killed the men with swords and bayonets. They weren't executed firing squad style. They were executed with bayonets and swords. And what Delapena said, and it was mistranslated in English. but what he said into the Spanish is that they died moaning but they did not humiliate themselves.

That's what he said about the men who were killed. There's a mindset that anyone who says something like this about Crockett, you know, that Crockett was killed after the battle, is somehow tearing down the Texan myth, the Texan personality, the Texan attitude, everything that makes Texans, Texans. I'm a historian. I have to look at the evidence,

and the evidence is overwhelming that Crockett was executed. Big if true, big if true. Here's his thoughts on the Dalapina Diaries. The Delapena Diaries, since I worked on it, has been subjected to forensic analysis, paper, water damage, insect damage, ink. It passed every test, every test.

and those are by experts at the University of Texas. So I don't have any doubt about the authenticity, and I don't have much doubt at all about the accuracy. I know it's authentic. I believe because they're corroborating witnesses that it was accurate. You know, history is not religion. You don't learn it on your mother's knee and just know it's true.

You need to take a look at how you know. know what you know. A lot of people don't ever want to do that. They tell me what they believe. I say, how do you know? And most of them don't have a good answer for that. When I first started talking to high school students after I got into this controversy, one of the students said, listen, you can't change history, as if it all got written down by somebody, and now we have to take everything that was written down as true, no matter what the documents say, no matter what other eyewitnesses say. But most people who think they know history don't know how they know what they think they know. Dr. Chris believes the Dalapina diary to be accurate. Here's what our boy Wade thinks.

I don't think Crockett was executed. I think Crockett died in battle, whether he was shot crossing the plaza, or he went down fighting, swinging his rifle, as depicted in popular culture. The reason I don't believe Crockett was executed is, well, I have a hard time buying that the most famous American at the time is brought face to face to Santa Ana. He's identified and executed, whereas if Santa Ana realized who Crockett was, Santa Ana would have used. Santa Ana would have used him as leverage of American intervention in this war. I see that if Santa Ana truly realized who Crockett was, that Santa Ana may have spared him, sent him back down to Mexico to show of a foreign involvement. Instead, Santa Ana after the battle sends down to Mexico the flag of the

New Orleans graze, showing American involvement. And he writes in a letter stating that he had seen the bodies of the leader Travis, the Braggart buoy, and some man named Crockett. So that would mean that he didn't execute Crockett? He just saw the body of Crockett. Yes, I think that's what happened. I think Travis's slave Joe is identifying the bodies of the leaders. And of course, Joe has the task of trying to find the bodies in the midst of this chaos. and Joe says in his account that Crockett was surrounded by friend and foe. So like he died fighting? Quite possibly.

Now, of course, if Crockett was involved in an execution scenario, that could have occurred anywhere inside of the fort. And of course, there's bodies strewn throughout. I just think the likelihood of that happening is it sounds too good to be true, really. It sounds like, well, Hollywood. would. Yeah, I think Crockett went down in battle. Hmm, interesting. I love the passion of both of these positions. Are you starting to develop a gut feeling? Here's Dr. Crisp. So, you know, you believe what you want to believe very often. It becomes a matter of ideology and a matter of self-definition, a self-image. Dan Kilgore, who first

published the little book, How Did Davy Die? And who looked at the evidence and decided that Delapena was correct, he was called a communist. People told him he ought to wash his mouth out with soap. They called him a smut peddler, because they didn't want to hear his conclusion. And at one time, Dan Kilgore said, well, I wouldn't mind so much if they had just read the book. But they didn't read it. They just saw the conclusion, and they knew they didn't like it.

And so then they attacked him personally. You know, there's a lot of that going on today still. I've experienced some of it myself, although I have, in fact, made friends of some people who originally wanted to, as one woman said, gut me with a buoy knife because hanging is too good for me. I met her in front of the Alamo. That's when she said that.

And I said, have you read the article? She said, no, I'm just a Crockett loyalist. She later became a good friend and decided I wasn't a bad guy after all. Yeah. We get wed to these ideas of our heroes. And then when they're torn down, we think that that idea is false.

Well, let's be careful about using the term toned down. People accused me at the very beginning when I first published this stuff of saying that Crockett was a coward. And I said, wait just a minute. Were the guys at Batan and Corrigador cowards? Right. These were guys who held out until they just couldn't hold out anymore. Are these cowards? Right, right.

They're absolutely. Yeah. And so by saying that someone was kept, it's like John McCain. Is John McCain some kind of coward, some kind of, you know, awful guy because he allowed himself to be captured? Right. No. Crockett was a good guy. I like David Crockett a lot more than I like Andrew Jackson.

You know, Crockett was a very admirable person. He was a popular figure in America and deservedly so. I asked Wade why he thought the way David Crockett died was such an important question. I think it has everything to do with closure. Everybody needs closure in their lives. Everybody needs answers, especially to big questions. And unfortunately, a lot of the big questions in our lives, will go unanswered.

And in regards to in regards to Crockett, we'll likely never know for sure. Wade is such a Crockett Alamo diehard that he's working on a fully illustrated book about Crockett. Basically, it's a really cool, detailed comic book

that will be a couple hundred pages long when it's finished. I wanted to ask him why the Alamo was so special to him. It's a story of so few against so many. It's an underdog story. You have this congregation of all of these very colorful characters at this one spot. It's almost too good to be true, but it happens. I wanted to ask Wade why Crockett was so important to him. With David Crockett, My appeal to him has always been he's the common man.

And he's the common man who is always hit with these obstacles in his life. Death in the family, loss of his businesses. But he always finds the strength to keep going to, as he would say, go ahead. Yeah. Crocket lost a lot. And that connected with me and my father because we lost a lot. My mother, my dad's wife, passed away in 1998. We lost the house to foreclosure, lost Uncle Jamie to cancer.

So, you know, when putting all of that together, trying to make sense of things and just, you know, realizing that other people have been through the same thing you have. And in, you know, the context, Crockett, he took that pain. He took those struggles and, you know, he pushed forward. Do we love Crockett because of his failure? Most American heroes we love because of how successful they were. But in almost every area of Crockett's life, he seemed to fail. Even at the very end of his life, they lost.

The Alamo movie was John Wayne's passion project. He made several promotional and inspirational videos about his movie. I want us to hear from the Duke what he thinks about the Alamo. Crocket, Travis and Dickinson, and the others who died in the Alamo. An army for 13 days, and it's hard to believe that they ever existed. They'd become legends before the smoke over the battle has blown away. What kind of men were they? Well, we know that they died and that they were heroes.

But nobody wants to die, and nobody just disliked. decided to be a hero, has to be forced on you. That's what happened to them. I was forced on him because they were stuck with ideas like freedom and rights of the individual, hatred of dictators. Crockett, for instance, refused to sign the oath of allegiance to the government of Texas until they changed it to the Republican government of Texas. Living free meant a lot more to them than cowering insecurity. Another thing about Crockett.

When he left for the Alamo, he sent his children this message. I hope you'll do the best you can. I'll do the same. Don't be uneasy about me. I'm with my friends. Worked out just about that way. He stayed with his friends, and he did the best he could. I really don't think the motivations of those at the Alamo were as clarified as John Wayne

is proposing in his movie promotion. Time has a way of honing the narrative of people's motivations, sometimes shaping them into things that are far more noble than they were. But sometimes it's the opposite, and it makes their motivations way worse than they actually were. The only thing we know for sure is that those men fought and died for a cause that would deeply affect the trajectory of America. Here's our old friend Robert Morgan with an overview of how Crockett affected America.

Well, there's several ways that Crockett is very important to the history and the culture of this country. I think the first is he created the model of the backwoods politician with all the jokes and the backward language and humor, which culminates in Abraham Lincoln, as a matter of fact. I mean, there are many parallels between them, their behavior in Washington. He has a huge impact on American literature, showing how you can create literature in the voice of the ordinary people in his autobiography and his speeches that probably culminates in Huckleberry Finn, which has got to be one of the two or three greatest novels in American literature. he had a huge impact on oratory of bringing backwards preaching.

It's really preaching. That the greatest speaker in American history is almost certainly Tikamsay, who could move people to do whatever he told them to do. Never, they wrote down. They'd been so impressive, white people. They'd never seen anybody who could speak that way. And Crockett had some of that.

He was from that world, and talking the big talk was a very important thing. Also, by dying at the Alamo, he was so famous that he influenced the sympathy of the whole country for Texas independence. Because of Texas independence, it was, ten years later, annexed as a state. Because it was annexed as a state, Polk was able to create the Mexican war by sending soldiers down there who were at, attacked on the Rio Grande by the Mexican Army. This is an excuse for fighting Mexico. Because of the Mexican war, Polk was able to claim paying $15 million for the whole West, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California.

The Texas Revolution would become a critical component of American expansion, and the social popularity of supporting that revolution. Revolution was dramatically influenced by Crockett's popularity and death at the Alamo. Just hours after the Alamo fell, the Texas Declaration of Independence was proposed and passed, and that would eventually form the Republic of Texas, which stayed an independent nation from 1836 until December 29, 1845, when it was admitted into the Union of the United States as the 28th state. The bodies of the dead at the Alamo were burned by the Mexican army and their ashes are now incorporated into the soil lying beneath the Alamo.

After the report of Crockett's death, many claimed to have seen him alive. Crockett's son John Wesley ended up going to Texas to investigate his father's death for himself. In the mid-1850s, Crockett's widow, Elizabeth, and their two sons would receive three. 320 acres of land for David's military service and moved to Texas, where Elizabeth would live until her death at the age of 72 on January 31, 1860 in Hood County, Texas. I can't thank you guys enough for listening to Bear Greece. I hope you'll share our podcast with a friend, and I look forward to talking with everybody on the render. about Crockets, death at the Alamo next week. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over.

They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a head. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. indications were he should be right there.

But he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person.

He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows. something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.