David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [167]
6 John H. Jenkins, ed., Papers of the Texas Revolution, vol. 4 (Austin: Presidial Press, 1973), 13–14.
7 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 414. Corzine came to Texas from Alabama in 1835 and settled near San Augustine. In October 1836 he was elected senator to the First Congress of the Republic of Texas, but he resigned two months later to become judge of the First Judicial District. Corzine died in San Augustine in 1839.
8 Ibid.
9 Copy of original Crockett letter and accompanying transcript from Sally Baker, Crockett Tavern Museum Archives, Morristown, TN.
10 Rod Timanus, On the Crockett Trail (Union City, TN: Pioneer Press, 1999), 41. Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Patton, William Hester,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/ online/articles/PP/fpa54.html. Helen Widener, “Republic of Texas—Freedom Fighter—William Patton,” Irving Rambler, August 2, 2007, 11. At one point there were two William Pattons reported at the Alamo, but neither of them was there on March 6 when the old mission was stormed. The older one was William Hester Patton, a Kentuckian who had commanded a company of Texian insurgents at the siege of Bexar from December 5 through December 10, 1835. This Patton became the aidede-camp to General Houston. After the Battle of San Jacinto, he was given custody of Santa Anna and accompanied him to Washington, D.C., prior to the Mexican leader’s release and subsequent return to Mexico. Patton went on to serve in the Second Congress of the Republic of Texas and was murdered by bandits at his home on the San Antonio River in 1842. The other Patton—Crockett’s nephew—may have been sent from the Alamo bearing a message. If so, he thus was spared the fate of the others who perished there. On March 17 his name appeared on the muster rolls of Captain Henry Teal’s company of regulars, an outfit that fought at San Jacinto. Although he was due a sizable parcel of land for his military service, Patton probably left Texas soon after his discharge.
11 Hutton, Introduction, Narrative, xxix–xxx.
12 H. W. Brands, Lone Star Nation (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 349–50.
13 John M. Swisher, The Swisher Memoirs, edited by Rena Maverick Green (San Antonio: Sigmund Press, 1932), 18–19.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Paul Robert Walker, Remember the Alamo: Texians, Tejanos, and Mexicans Tell Their Stories (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2007), 34.
17 Michael Wallis and Suzanne Fitzgerald Wallis, Songdog Diary: 66 Stories From the Road (Tulsa: Council Oak Publishing, 1996), 146–49. After March 6, 1836, Santa Anna was also called the “Butcher of the Alamo,” depending on the side of the border. “His Serene Highness,” the moniker Santa Anna preferred, had a love-hate relationship with the Mexican citizens he governed off and on for many years. “If I were God,” he once said, “I would wish to be more.” He survived a few expulsions, coup attempts, and exiles, as well as battles against the United States and France. The dictator, who had lost a leg to a French cannonball at Veracruz in 1838, died alone, in poverty and mostly forgotten, on June 21, 1876.
18 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 204–6.
19 James L. Haley, Texas: From Frontier to Spindletop (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 29.
20 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 282–83.
21 Amelia Williams, “A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo and of the Personnel of Its Defenders,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1934): 237. John McGregor was born in Scotland in 1808 and emigrated to Texas in the early 1830s. When Sam Houston put out the call for volunteers, McGregor left his farm, armed with a shotgun and his bagpipes, and rode west to San Antonio, where he became known as the “Piper of the Alamo.”
22 Editorial in the Telegraph and Register, published at San Felipe de Austin (vol. 1, no. 24), Thursday, March 24, 1836.
23 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 214.