Waiting for you Birdie!!!!

April 21, 1836

I was there. (Least in a movie!)

You the guy on the far left playing the drum?

Damn, you got me pegged!!!!

That poor kid had never been around so many crazy crackers in his life. He's a gospel singer these days!

I've been to the San Jacinto Battlefield many times. Seen the place where the Texans ran the Mexicans into the water...slaughtering them all the way. The battle didn't last very long...but the killing went on for quite some time. Texas history is some of the best there is. That monument there, and the museum below it, are really worth seeing (but not in the heat of the Summer).

Which movie was that?

Lots of Alamo movies, but not so much on San Jacinto.

Two for Texas. A TNT stinker! But I had fun doing it!!

You cut your hair!!!!!

I didn't get your autograph

Yes I did! December 2004!

How about this one then.
You still have your hair, what's the deal about that!

Remember the comment I made about how you wanted to be an actor?

That was way before I knew your background.

Yep. Sad to see the libs give it back to them without a shot fired. Hell, the Dimocraps are even giving them our money to do it. Well, maybe they will give then give it back to the Indians.

Always wanted to play Puck! You know? Midsummer Night's Dream?




Man,,,,,, I could of played the HELL outta Puck!

Still debating whether I'm gonna be in the reenactment over there this coming weekend.

Anyways, on the events leading up to the battle and the fight itself, I like Steven Hardin's version the best....

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/houstonhardin.html

Company commander Jesse Billingsley expressed the convictions of many San Jacinto veterans:

"The thief and the murderer I can guard against, but the liar I cannot. Therefore I must say that Houston is the basest of all men, as he has, by willfully lying, attempted to rob that little band of men of their well earned honors on the battlefield of San Jacinto. He has assumed to himself credit that was due to others.".....

The Texian Army

To assess the merit of a general, one must evaluate the instrument he had to wield. Most great captains�Alexander, Cromwell, Frederick, Napoleon, Wellington�tailored their armies to fit their talents. Houston inherited an armed mob and was never able to train it to be much more.

Students of military history have observed that armies reflect society at large. That was certainly true of Houston's San Jacinto army. Most Texians who took up arms against Santa Anna were not merely Southerners, but Jacksonian Southerners. Even "Old Hickory's" political opponents tended to adopt certain of his presumptions as articles of faith. Among these were a reverence for the republican government, an innate distrust of the military profession, and a stubborn conviction in the "natural" talents of the "common man" over the education and training of a privileged elite.

While in Congress, David Crockett had demonstrated contempt for the military profession by recommending the abolishment of the Military Academy at West Point. The Academy was, he asserted, a bastion for the ne'er-do-well "son of the rich and influential," who were "too nice to work." "They are first educated there for nothing," Crockett fumed, "and then they must have salaries to support them after they leave there." He liked to remind his constituents that he had been a volunteer during the Creek War. As he told it, "the volunteer goes into the war for the love of his country." A Southerner might volunteer to protect his kin, his home, and his liberty, but he would never willingly "enter into service." That would render him a "hireling." To debase himself in such a manner would disgrace his ancestors and pervert his notions of republican government....


The Texian volunteer was disorderly, bedraggled, and unprofessional. He did not fight for procedures, politics, or pay. His reason stood over the hearth cooking game he had bagged; his reason napped in the crib he had crafted; his reason grew in the fields he had cleared and planted. Because his imperatives were so personal, he zestfully slaughtered any who threatened them. A consummate individualist, he did not want to belong to any establishment�a military establishment most of all. Still, he demonstrated wonderful initiative and marksmanship, as well as remarkable physical courage. A Jacksonian egalitarian, he mirrored both the vices and virtues of his age.

Clearly, there was no love lost between the men and Houston. Indeed, few soldiers ever held their commander in greater contempt. Houston returned the sentiment; he had no confidence that his ill- trained volunteers could hold their own in a stand-up fight with the Mexicans. Consequently, he made every effort to delay a major engagement until he had trained his men, efforts which his soldiers believed to be symptoms of cowardice.

During the San Jacinto campaign many soldiers developed an intense dislike for their general, which later blossomed into full-grown loathing. J. H. Kuykendall, a San Jacinto veteran, believed that Houston "misappreciated" the fighting abilities of his soldiers and resented the general's smug condescension toward volunteers. "A regular army was the general' s hobby," he bitterly recalled. "He had little confidence in the kind of troops he commanded."

Discipline grew even worse after San Jacinto. Old settler Noah Smithwick reported "the only officer who ever had the temerity to try to enforce strict military discipline, paid for his folly with his life." He recalled "the poor fellow, whose only offense was a little youthful vanity, was found in his tent with his brains blown out." Clearly, the practice of "fragging" did not originate in Vietnam....

Naturally, officers found commanding such insubordinate troops a frustrating task. Stephen Austin, James Bowie, and William Travis all resigned their commissions, only to be lured back into service. When Goliad volunteers rejected his authority, Sam Houston went on extended furlough with his Cherokee friends. Judge Advocate William H. Wharton submitted a rancorous letter of resignation in which he bemoaned the "failure to enforce general orders," and concluded, "I am compelled to believe that no good will be atchieved [sic] by this army except by the merest accident under heaven." ...

Fierce in battle and restless in camp, Texians were great fighters but poor soldiers. Once they had the scent of gunpowder in their nostrils at San Jacinto they were indomitable, but convincing them to stay around for the battle often proved a problem. Independent and insubordinate, they were an officer's nightmare. Yet, most of the officers were also touchy of their honor and quick to resign....

Well, one good thing of all this, "Texian" has got to be about the easiest reenacting impression around, at that time and place, among that diverse crowd, most anything early Nineteenth Century fits and at camps you can lounge around with about as much freedom of action and impression as you can as a fur trade-era mountain man. Its fun.

As for the consequences of the battle, Hardin writes...

Some have taught that Texas won its independence at San Jacinto, but that is also a stretch. Texas may have won a breathing period, but during the decade that Texas existed as a Republic, Mexicans never surrendered their claim on the break-away republic.

Not until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 did they agree to abandon Texas and accept the Rio Grande as the international boundary. Yet, Winfield Scott's occupation of Mexico City and the total defeat of their armies during the Mexican War determined that decision, not the battle fought twelve years before.

Along these lines folks generally forget the Mexicans troops, sent by Santa Anna hisself invaded Texas and took San Antonio again in 1842. There was no Alamo per se at that time, first the retreating Mexican army in 1836 and then the Texians having torn down the walls themselves, neither side wanting to ever have to take it again.

Houston's genius of course was preserving Santa Anna's life after the battle (no small feat) in return for Santa Anna ordering the other two-thirds of his army still in the field to turn around and leave Texas. And a good thing they did too, Urrea and Filosoa (spelling?) were both much more capable generals than Santa Anna.

It took the Mexican Army two months to get out of Texas to due exausted supplies and poor roads, there was no organized body of Texians capable of chasing them out.

We forget how iffy the success of the Texas Republic really was and how much of our popular history is hindsight. Texians and Americans in Texas in forces numbering in the hundreds were still gathering in Texas to fight in Mexico under the Mexican Federalist 1824 flag until the very end of that movement in 1840, some resigning their prior Texan commissions to do so. Then there was that whole Republic of the Rio Grande thing.

Santa Anna did us a favor by recognising Texas Independence in 1837 (tho' he had no legal standing in Mexico to do so at the time), and paradoxically did us a favor all over again by having his troops invade Texas in '42.

The capture and three-week occupation of San Antonio by the Mexican forces under the mercenary French General Woll a whole six years after the Alamo making clear how weak the Republic still was militarily and how vulnerable it was to reoccupation by outside forces. In fact it was this realization that gave a major push to the cause of annexing Texas into the United States.

Birdwatcher

Birdy, what have your Heros done for Mexico?

What? You don't find the whole truth invariably more interesting than cherry-picked parts of it?

My heroes are all those who chose to flip the bird in the face of overwhelming force and go down fighting at the Alamo, even tho' no one had gone into the Alamo intending to die there.

And I would be selling Fannin's men short if I didn't point out they only agreed to surrender under terms, and would doubtless have gone down fighting too if they had been presented with the same limited choice as the Alamo guys.

Of the crowd, who stands out for me?

Sam Houston, for having the wits (or cunning) not to hang Santa Anna out of hand, Santa Anna being the executioner of hundreds of Americans and Texians over just the prior two months. I dunno enough to judge Houston otherwise.

Deaf Smith, a plain-spoken and self-effacing cattleman and buffalo hunter,long married to a local, didn't want no part of it until he was crossed. Then in his fifties he becomes absolutely indispensable to the Texian victory.

Travis, if nothing else for his writing abilities.

Davy Crockett, the guy who weren't afraid to cross Jackson and vote his conscience over Indian Removal, even though he knew it was the end of his political career. There's some evidence/accounts too that Crockett actually left the Alamo during the siege to recruit volunteers. Anyone who returned to that fortress even after having witnessed the odds against them has my vote.

Noah Smithwick, for leaving us such a vivid insider's account of those times and proving that folks back then weren't necessarily as one-dimensional as yerself for example

http://www.lsjunction.com/olbooks/smithwic/otd.htm

On the Mexican side maybe the principled soldier Jose Enriquez Dela Pena, who came to despise Santa Anna during the course of the campaign and who left us such a well-written account, details about even the actions of our side we would never have otherwise known.

..and here's an unlikely one, General Edmund P. Gaines, the brilliant and capable hero of the War of 1812 and the Seminole War, and since then known for his quiet and ethical service to the United States across our Old Frontier, and his ability to find solutions that avoided bloodshed to both sides. Not an easy trick to be respected by your own men AND the Indians, but he was. Mostly forgotten in pop history now unfortunately, but has cities and counties named after him by grateful citizens in a few states.

During this Second Texas War of Independence he had American forces massed just across the Louisiana border from Nacodoches with orders to intervene if necessary to preserve stability. Seems like retreating clear to Nacodoches for this to happen was Houston's original game plan.

The normally by-the-book Gaines looked the other way when many of his regulars slipped away with their arms to join the Texian Army just prior to San Jacinto and it seem probable that his presence just across the Sabine was one of the deciding factors tipping Urrea and Filosoa to withdraw rather than advance on Houston's little army.

YMMV,
Birdwatcher

OK Eyeball I'll 'fess up. Being faced with the reality of the Alamo at least once a month as it is my priviledge to be, right there on the ground, I ain't got it in me to condemn the Mexican rank and file who also unflinchingly marched into the jaws of death in the pre-dawn darkness of that cold March 6th morning.

I'm glad we won, but I'm also glad that on the other side God gets to judge us, one at a time, on our own merits.

Again YMMV,
Birdwatcher

I defended the Alamo once upon a time... back when I was young and purdy.







Lots of the guys were great to work with but some turned into hateful azzholes later.



Buck's a good guy. Still communicate with him some.



Youth is wasted on the young.

Way cool, what was the movie?

Nice Barry! That was the Brian Keith/Davy Crockett one made back during the we secquincentennial, wasn't it ?

Was that a silent movie?

That is correct...13 Days to Glory.

It was directed by Burt Kennedy, whom directed many John Wayne movies in his day. Ethan Wayne, John's son was in the movie, and wore the same coonskin cap that his dad used in the original Alamo movie in the 50's.

Lorne Greene played Sam Houston. It was his last movie...He died not long after we wrapped the movie.