"Where's Juana?"

Well, the carrier pigeon finally made it and yes what a splendid article. However...

I have to disagree very strongly that the Alsbury account supports the suggestion that the "fort" where Crockett's body was found was the gun position which she had to thread.

Plainly it was just a cramped little former room and only the fact it no longer had a roof(?) would have prevented it being described as such. In the circumstances Alsbury can be forgiven for not having noticed Crockett's body if it actually was lying there, but structurally the gun position was still a part of the house and I really can't see it being described as "a fort". We could argue semantics on this one, but its not the most obvious way to describe this particular position, unlike the Fortin de Condelle which certainly was a recognisable "fort" - and moreover fits Ruiz description of it being to the west of where Travis lay

That's the one, and its also worth pointing out once again that although the question is complicated as always by the fact that we only have somebody's translation of what Ruiz supposedly said (and so can't be 100% sure of what we have), Reuben Potter got the same story from him and wrote of the fort where Crockett was found being at a height, which would not only fit with the Fortin de Condelle, but simultaneously rule out the gun position described by Alsbury as it was plainly at ground level.

Hansen p702-703

Final para on the first page:

"I cannot locate this gun with certainty, but it was probably the twelve pound carronade which fired over the centre of the west wall from a high commanding position [my emphasis] ... According to Mr Ruiz... the body of Crockett was found in the west battery just referred to"

Now so far as my argument goes its a bit awkward at first glance that he clearly refers to the centre of the west wall, but he's also equally unambiguous in stating that it was firing from "a high commanding position", which the Alsbury gun certainly wasn't. Potter does however admit to a degree of uncertainty and if you scroll back to the beginning of the paragraph the gun in question is again very unambiguously quoted by Potter as being "on a high platform".

The way I read the paragraph as a whole is that Potter is describing the damage done by this gun on the high platform, and then says Ruiz told him Crockett's body was found there. The bit about the carronade is an unsuccessful interpolation which quite misleadingly moves Crockett from the high platform (Fortin de Condelle) to the ground level gunnade position on Alsbury's doorstep.

This reading is certainly consistent with Ruiz' original testimony that Crockett's body was in a fort to the west of Travis, rather than in a house on the west wall.

Perfectly true but unless you go in for the non-contextualised hair-splitting practised by TRL the meaning of the paragraph taken as a whole is pretty straightforward.

Potter, citing his witnesses, describes the damage done by a gun on a high platform and then says that Ruiz told him Crockett's body was discovered on the same position.

The confusing bit is that he inserts into the middle of that otherwise straightforward account a conjecture of his own that the gun in question may have been the gunnade. Take out that otherwise unsupported (and quite contradictory) speculation and the rest of its straightforward enough, as is Ruiz' original statement.

The difference between a "battery" and a "fort", which in this case I'm taking to be the Fortin de Condelle is that a battery is a collection of two or more guns, which can as in this case be sited in an open position. The Fortin de Condelkle on the other hand was a self contained position, in effect a small tower ("high platform")

No I have to disagree. Remember that the naming of the various positions by Cos' men was a pretty standard military procedure to uniquely identify each one irrespective of character.

Viewing them, perhaps for the first time, Ruiz would have seen two very different structures; a battery erected on the north wall and a quite separate, higher gun platform on the NW corner.

Now I agree that the unnamed guide, (who no doubt first paused for dramatic effect) exclaimed that a "room" on the west wall which fits the description of both the gun position described by Alsbury and the gunnade position referred to by Potter was where Crockett's body was found, but as I said above that particular passage by Potter is quite clearly about the gun mounted up on the Fortin de Condelle - where he conjectures Crockett either commanded or was posted as a sharpshooter. Now although real snipers are actually taught to get as low as possible (in the British Army anyway), in the popular imagination sharpshooters are invariably to be found high up in trees, on church towers and other elevated positions, not down low and sharing a cramped little room with a cannon. This is the final clue which I reckon resolves any ambiguity in Potter's narrative as to whether he was saying Crockett was found up there, or whether he was low down by the gunnade.

Doesn't complicate it all. I'll refine my comment about sharpshooting... In modern sniping the idea is to get down low; at that time the obvious place for a sharpshooter is a commanding position cf. the famous Winslow Homer illustration of a civil war sharpshooter, and of course the story about the guy who got Ben Milam being in the tower of the San Fernando church.

The point here is that Potter's reference to the possibility of him being posted by the gun as a sharpshooter clearly points to the "high platform" of the Fortin de Condelle rather than the ground-level position on Alsbury's doorstep.

As to the relative heights of the "battery" where Travis got his, and the Fortin de Condelle, I don't know. They may not have been so very different, or the fortin could have been slightly higher. The important difference is that the battery was an open position firing over or through the northern parapet, while the Fortin was a self-contained position set into the walls of the (former) northernmost room and so quite different in character, hence Ruiz' describing them in quite different terms

Both emplacements, Condelle, and Teran, were essentially the same height, according to all the data available. They were set on platforms (one free-standing-Teran, and the other built onto fill in the northern Castaneda room-Condelle) which both were about 8.5 feet in height. Interestingly, they were built not quite so high as originally intended, possibly due to the encroachment of the Texans, or perhaps due to the lack of additional rubble or earth to fill them in the available time. Both were embrasured positions, and neither fired over the walls, but rather through them. Don't know what this does to the discussion here, but there it is....
Mark