Legacy of The Battle of The Alamo - Literature

Literature

Many of the Mexican officers who participated in the battle left memoirs, although some were not written until decades after the battle. Among those who provided written accounts of the battle were Antonio López de Santa Anna, Vicente Filisola, José Enrique de la Peña, José Juan Sánchez Navarro, Juan N. Almonte, and Francisco Becerra. Texians Juan Seguín and John Sutherland also left memoirs, although some historians believe Sutherland was not at the Alamo and wrote his memoirs from hearsay. Of the Texian survivors, more weight was given to the account of Susannah Dickinson, the only American adult to live. The other survivors, including former slaves and several Tejanos, were not lauded as much as Dickinson.

The first report of the names of the Texian victims of the battle came in the March 24, 1836 issue of the Telegraph and Texas Register. The 115 names on the list came from John Smith and Gerald Navan, who had left as couriers. In 1843 former Texas Ranger and amateur historian John Henry Brown wrote and published the first history of the battle, a pamphlet called The Fall of the Alamo. He followed this in 1853 with a second pamphlet called Facts of the Alamo, Last Days of Crockett and Other Sketches of Texas. No copies of the pamphlets have survived. The next major treatment of the battle was Reuben Potter's The Fall of the Alamo, published in The Magazine of American History in 1878. Potter based his work on interviews with many of the survivors of the Battle of the Alamo. One of the most used secondary sources about the Alamo is Amelia W. Williams's doctoral dissertation, "Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo and of the Personnel of Its Defenders". Completed in 1931, it attempted to positively identify all of the Texians who died during the battle. Her list was used to choose the names carved into the cenotaph memorial in 1936. Several historians, including Thomas Ricks Lindley, Thomas Lloyd Miller, and Richard G. Santos, believe her list included men who had not died at the Alamo. Despite the errors in some of her work, Williams collected a large amount of information and her work serves as a starting point for many historians. The first full-length, non-fiction book covering the battle was not published until 1948, when John Myers Myers' The Alamo was released.

As the 19th century progressed, the battle began to appear as a plot device in many novels. In 1869, novelists Jeremiah Clemens and Bernard Lile wrote fictionalized accounts of the battle. Novelist Amelia Barr produced her own fictional version, Remember the Alamo, in 1888. In her book, Alamo Images, Susan Pendergrast Schoelwer noted that in these early novels "the Alamo passages seem almost incidental to the main plot, included perhaps as a means of attracting interest and encouraging sales".