Moses Rose - Lieutenant Louis Roze, The Yellow "Roze" of Texas?

Lieutenant Louis Roze, The Yellow "Roze" of Texas?

“For the first thirty-eight years of the twentieth century,” wrote Thomas Ricks Lindley, “William P. Zuber’s story of Moses Rose’s alleged escape from the Alamo was an unsubstantiated tale accepted by few historians.” Then in 1939 came a thunderbolt: Texas archivist Robert B. Blake had uncovered land grant statements from the Nacogdoches County Courthouse containing elements that seemed to verify Zuber’s story. Because Blake appears to have believed him, he assumed that a Stephen and a Lewis or Louis Rose who, in their day, had signed testimony about Alamo defenders to the Board of Land Commissioners, were but one and same old Frenchman whose real name was Louis Rose. According to Blake, it was the very Rose described in the Texas Almanac for 1873, “Moses” becoming a nickname given to him by the Alamo defenders for his great age, 50 (Gordon C. Jenning, 56, was the oldest Alamo fighter at the time.)

In 1982, Steven G. Kellman, professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, brought fresh grist to the mill by publishing a short study, “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” Kellman believed that the xeroxes of military documents he had obtained from the Services Historiques de la Défense in Vincennes, France, showed that “Moses, né Louis” was Lieutenant Louis Roze (haphazardly misspelled "Rose" on one of the copies he got), born in Laferée, Ardennes, on May 11, 1785.

Two different first names – Stephen and Lewis or Louis – plus a nickname, Moses – for the same man now explicitly identified by Professor Kellman as an officer in Napoleon’s army brought questions to historian Gerard Dôle's mind. His personal curiosity was all the keener because a Napoleonic veteran in his family, Capitaine Charles Gouget, had saved the life of a Lieutenant Louis Roze (note the different spelling) during the disastrous campaign of Spain. It is also important to note that his father René, Émile, Moïse (“Moses” in French) Dôle, was baptized “Moïse” in accordance with the wishes of his uncle Charles Dôle, whose godfather was Capitaine Gouget. Could Lieutenant Louis ROZE be the same ROSE who had been branded the “coward,” the “traitor of the Alamo,” or the “Yellow Rose” by some Texas historians? Dôle's quest for the truth soon began.

Gerard Dôle was determined to find out exactly who this good friend of Capitaine Charles Gouget actually was. In order to retrace the life of Louis Roze, he consulted Louis Roze's complete military records at the French Archives Historiques de la Défense in Vincennes, as well as the complete dossier on his Légion d’Honneur at the Archives Nationales in Paris. At the same time, his assistant Stéphane Vielle went to work collecting and studying various official documents concerning Lieutenant Louis Roze, born in Laferée, Ardennes, on May 11, 1785.

Upon completing their research, Dôle and Vielle understood that there had been a case of mistaken identity. There was no way Louis Roze, born in La Ferré, could have been the Louis Moses Rose of Nacogdoches and the Alamo, for a simple and obvious reason: the Louis Roze born in the Ardennes had never crossed the Atlantic.

Sifting through and scrutinizing the official records and documents of the various towns where Louis Roze resided, Stéphane Vielle finally did discover two documents mentioning his name as a witness to various events in civilian life which occurred during the period that interests us. On June 5, 1833, Louis Roze acted as a witness to the christening of the daughter of Paul Masure, notary in the town of Braine (Aisne). A few years later, on August 30, 1837, he was one of the witnesses on the death certificate of the wife of Paul Masure, then named as a former notary.

Louis Roze died on May 25, 1851 in Braine, and the certificate was signed and witnessed by his friend Paul Masure. The document again mentions that Roze was a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and native of Laferrée.

In light of this evidence, how could anyone believe that this exemplary officer, whose military career was spotless, whose beautiful penmanship and flourished signature can still be admired, might have donned the ragged clothing of a loner and a rambler, been branded as a cowardly deserter from a besieged fort ?

We shall therefore conclude with the formal assertion that Louis Roze (misspelled “Rose” by Dr. Kellman,) son of Pierre Roze and Marie Magdeleine Henaux, born May 11, 1785 à La Férée, never set foot in Texas or at the Alamo.