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  • How Did Davy Die? And Why Do We Care So Much?
  • Paul Andrew Hutton
How Did Davy Die? And Why Do We Care So Much? Commemorative and enlarged edition. By Dan Kilgore and James E. Crisp. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010. Pp 120. Illustrations, notes. ISBN 9781603441940, $18.95 cloth.)

In 1975 Texas A&M University Press published Carmen Perry's translation of the journal of Mexican officer José Enrique de la Peña's With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution. First published in Mexico in 1955, the book had long been known to Alamo scholars. In 1960 Walter Lord took note of it in his classic A Time to Stand, still the best book on the Alamo. Perry, former director of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo, was quickly assailed in the national media for suggesting that Davy Crockett was captured and executed at the Alamo. The 202-page book contained a single page relating the execution of Crockett and a handful of other prisoners on the direct order of Santa Anna. In the book, De la Peña, who was no friend to Santa Anna, used the execution story as a criticism of his brutal commander. "Has the King of the Wild Frontier been relieved of his coon-skin crown?" asked the Jackson (Tennessee) Sun, in one of the milder headlines. The October 13, 1975, issue of People magazine blamed the messenger with its headline: "Did Crockett die at the Alamo? Historian [End Page 449] Carmen Perry says no!" A picture of John Wayne in his 1960 film role of Davy Crockett ran with the story, which was perfect since the entire response seemed based around Hollywood, not Texas, history.

In response to this furor, Dan Kilgore, a Corpus Christi businessman who served as president of the TSHA in 1977, gave his presidential address on Crockett's death. He expanded that speech into a meticulously researched and highly intelligent little monograph that Texas A&M University Press published as How Did Davy Die? in 1978.

The reaction to Perry was mild compared to the rantings directed at Kilgore, who was denounced as everything from being a smut peddler and communist to, worse still, an intellectual. Kilgore remained amused by it all, commenting that "I wouldn't have minded all this if they'd bought my books. Nobody even read the damn book."

Well, plenty of folks have read it since and, in fact, a cottage industry of sorts has emerged around the topic. Leading the charge to redeem Davy was William Groneman, then a lieutenant with the New York City Fire Department (and by September 11, 2001, the company commander of Engine Company 308 that performed heroic service at Ground Zero that day and throughout the following weeks) who published Defense of a Legend in 1994. In that and subsequent books, including a 2005 biography of Crockett, Groneman made a measured argument against the validity of the De la Peña manuscript as well as other accounts of Crockett's death. He was supported by Alamo experts such as Thomas Ricks Lindley, William Davis, and Stephen Harrigan and vigorously countered by others including this reviewer, Stephen Hardin, and James Crisp.

Crisp, the author of the marvelous book Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett's Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution (2005), here provides a fifty-page afterword to this thirtieth-anniversary edition of Kilgore's book. Crisp's lively prose and careful research make this volume indispensable to all those interested in Crockett, the Alamo, and, more importantly, the nature of myth, memory, and the historical process. Crisp also adopts a less contentious and acerbic tone than in his previous writings, dealing respectfully with Groneman, Lindley, and others he disagrees with, and recognizing their important contribution to our knowledge about Crockett in particular and the Alamo in general.

Not only will this little book engage all readers interested in Texas history, it will prove useful in both high school and college classrooms as a marvelous case study of historical methodology. [End Page 450]

Paul Andrew Hutton
University of New Mexico

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