Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Siege of the Alamo?

Where did you do that? Because it isn’t there.

No, it certainly isn't. A good friend has one of the most eclectic collections of Western Historical items, this is just one of many...

We are going in April to the Texas Rangers Museum in Waco, and then to the Alamo.

Don't forget these landmarks...

Birdwatcher;
Good afternoon to you Texas time, I hope the first day of March is progressing acceptably for you.

Thanks once again for adding some of the details which aren't as easily found elsewhere, I always appreciate you and kaywoodie - and the others of course - who do so.

We were there about this time in 2018, I want to say about 3 or perhaps 4 days before the Alamo was overrun.

Our in-laws who used to winter down in Weslaco met us at the airport in San Antonio and had booked us each a room in a hotel close to downtown, which turned out to be the Gibbs Hotel - built on Samuel Maverick's ranch site so we found out later and just across the street from the Alamo.

Later on we read the Gibbs is one of the more well known "haunted" hotels in San Antonio, but we didn't experience anything extraordinary there.

I will say however that even though I'm emphatically not "that guy" who "feels" things, when we went into the church especially, there was definitely something about it which both my wife and I "felt" for lack of a better way to articulate it.

We were both taken aback that other men kept their hats and caps on inside and kept chattering away about nothing connected to the site. We just couldn't do either.

Anyways Birdwatcher, I've been to a couple other battle sights in my life and would have to say that so far the Alamo has been the one that affected me the most personally.

It was a bucket list item for me and I'm glad we were able to see it.

All the best and thanks again to all who've contributed.

Dwayne

Sacred ground. Very humbling to be there.

Never been there but, would love to go.

The Viet Nam Memorial in 'Washington, D.C.

You were most likely misled. Nobody is certain what the original looked like. I did have a photo of one Bowie supposedly gave to an admired actor. Looks nothing like it should! Just a big butcher knife, like his brother described it.

[quote=Birdwatcher]

Great stuff as per usual Mike !

Happy Texas Independence Day!!!

Travis’ personal failings are well recorded for anyone who cares to look. There’s a great line in the Billy Bob Thornton movie where Travis self-deprecatingly observes something to the effect that while he did countenance abandoning his wife and son and was a serial adulterer he drew the line at drinking. But his cousin and close firiend James Butler Bonham thought enough of him and the cause that he felt compelled to return to the Alamo and the near-certainty of death if only to bring the message that no help from the 500 man Texian Army at Goliad would be coming.

Bowie was a high roller who made and lost fortunes, legally or otherwise. Him and his brother Rezin were the guys who defrauded at least seventeen individuals out of significant sums of money by selling them fraudulent land titles in Arkansas, no record of those they swindled ever getting their money back. Jim and Rezin then made a fortune in the nasty business of smuggling African-born slaves into Louisiana via Cuba and Texas.

He was a natural leader of men tho and what speaks well of him is the high regard he was held in by decent folk around him and also because he was notably unlucky in love (ya gotta love first before you can be unlucky at it). His first fiancé in Louisiana died of a fever within a month of their wedding.

Here in San Antonio Bowie did court and marry 17yo Ursula Veramundi. By all accounts the Union was a happy one, possibly resulting in two children in as many years. Jim was away in New Orleans when cholera struck, killing Ursula, their children, her brother and her parents in the space of a week. Subsequently accounts have it that Jim became a heavy drinker, careless of his appearance, this is the Bowie we get in the Thornton movie (except the Musso bowie he carried was prob’ly WAY bogus). He obviously could still lead men and fight, until possibly typhoid fever struck him down during the siege.

David Crockett might be the nearest thing we have to an Alamo Saint. Whatever the intricacies of his political career in Washington he had been one of the few who dared to cross his former mentor Andrew Jackson ”I was a Jackson man when Jackson was Jackson”. Crockett was one of the few who voted against Indian removal on principle even though he knew to do so was political suicide ”I would rather be honestly and politically damned than be hypocritically immortalized.”

In particular, Crockett was one of the few men of his era that would tell the tale of having been so hungry during the Creek War that he and his companions ate potatoes from the basement of a home inside which they had just previously burned alive a crowd of Indian men, women and children. The potatoes were cooked in the fire and basted in human fat.

All of that and he also left us with this: ”You may all go to Hell and I will go to Texas.” 😎

There is a lot that you don't know and this is one of those things. It is documented and probably cost more than your house...

Three Roads to the Alamo showed all three men as they were. That reality raised them in my estimation from cardboard heroes to imperfectly complex men taking on a lawless, hostile environment with all they had. Bowie was a first rate scoundrel and convincing con man. If he died on the sand bar, that's how he would be remembered if at all. As I recall Travis left his wife and bad debts in Alabama after she took up with the lawyer he was reading under. He surely loved his prostitutes in Beaumont, if that's adultery. Debatable point maybe. I don't think he remarried. He was more important to founding independent Texas than his celebrated peers due to his legal intellect. Three giants for sure, but all of those men were unbelievably selfless. It's a bit disheartening that where they gave their lives has become such a "cool place to see." I would drive the money changers off the scene and across the street for starters. That's a sacred place.

Thanks, Daughter lives in Allen Tx. So I have seen those.

Well, that's a bold bet! You are right, at least, in that there is a lot I do not know. But since you're so touchy, I'll apologize - if you share with us the documentation. I'm only casually familiar with the subject myself. That's why I couched my opinion in such conciliatory and respectful terms. All the renowned experts will be at least as honored as anyone here. So dig it out and display! The photo of you holding it would be memorable indeed.

There is a pretty decent chance that the original James Bowie knife was found at a river crossing the Mexican Army used as it headed east. It’s call the “Sea of Mud Knife”.

https://blademag.com/knife-history/the-sea-of-mud-knife-james-bowies-knife-found-pt-1/amp

I can't show you any documents, especially when this belongs to an individual that doesn't want his identity splashed all over the Internet. Bold is stating no one knows what one looks like. I do know the provenance of this knife and it does indeed, exist. People like this have more access to things you and I have never heard of and because you don't know, it is true, you just don't know...

If I’m following right, Shrapnel is talking about Crockett’s knife or one of them, not a knife owned by Jim Bowie.

Some great history in that link, and more in the links provided in the link.

I do wonder if Bowie ever saw much less used a knife that we would recognize as a bowie. The presentation models Rezin Bowie had made resembled in shape fancy, silver-clad examples of regular butcher knives.

I wonder too how much of the popular names arose from the marketing by the Sheffield UK companies that made many of the bowies used in the US. I believe it was in Russels classic Firearms Traps and Tools of the Mountain Men there’s a picture of a knife that was sold as a “Buffalo Knife” in Canada, “Bowie Knife” in the US and “Gaucho Knife” in South America. Same blade, different handles.

JMHO- I've always thought the Edwin Forrest
knife would be "the " knife from reading the
letters Rezin had written to the newspapers of
the day, and the accounts of the sandbar and
silver expedition fights.
I think we'd like to glamour up a good many things
because of Alan Ladd and John Wayne and
Fess Parker and all them. One of my ancestors
came here to be a mountain man and trapper
( like the jerimiah johnson movie, except really
in the 1800's) but he ended up fighting in the
mexican war, and going to CA for the gold rush,
and fighting in the war between the states, and
all that mess, and that side of the family just
had tools for utility, and not prestige.
As far as I know, my daddy's generation was the
first to have a purpose built " hunting " knife and
deer hunting specific firearms