MORE ON THE LONG BARRACK EXTENSION

Rick,

Got a chance to dig into the Jameson letter and map key of January 18, 1836, in my copy of Vol. 4 of Papers of the Texas Revolution by John H. Jenkins.

Our discussion on the phone was about the northeastern Indian quarters and their condition during the siege.

Jameson's key in George Nelson's book seems to have been taken directly from Amelia Williams' thesis. It differs in some important details from the key found in Adina de Zavala's History and Legends of the Alamo and Other Missions in and around San Antonio. This is the version Jenkins reprints in his book.

Additionally, while digging through my notebooks just now, I found my Xerox of the map key in an early 20th. century San Antonio newspaper (The Light or the Express) that actually has one more very revealing paragraph after the key.

First, the Amelia Williams version of the key (in Nelson and in the thesis) says for Letter H: "Soldiers' quarters built out of adobe houses and picketed all around as is B.W." There is no B.W. on the key. But in the plat included in Nelson (and not in the thesis manuscript that I have a copy of) it does show B.W. as the designation for "Breast Work" and as a label for the palisade. This, of course, allows one to assume that the houses themselves were of palisado or jacal construction. Since we now believe the breastwork to have been a single row of palisades, this conjecture is reinforced. This is the conclusion Mark came to for his model. Perfectly reasonable.

The version in Vol. 4 of Jenkins' Papers..., however, is from Adina de Zavala's book and includes the more sophistocated plat (as a fronticepiece) which she used (PLEASE, God, give us the original). This plat does not have B.W. as a label for the palisade, but rather the whole word "BREASTWORK." It has the complete set of houses (along the east wall and the east end of the north wall) designated as "H" rather than just the north wall houses, as in the plat in Nelson.

Here is how the key describes the letter "H" in the de Zavala version: "Soldiers quarters built up of doby houses and picketed all round as letter B."

Letter B, on the de Zavala's plat labels the redoubt inside the main gate. Jameson's key for the letter "B" in de Zavala says, "Temporary redoubts of stakes on end and rocks and dirt between, the long one is in front of the house in which Col. Mendoza now lies wounded."

Thus, for the houses, Jameson is saying in effect, "Soldiers' quarters built up of doby houses, and picketed all around with stakes on end and rocks and dirt between."

The additional paragraph in the newspaper printing of Jameson's key is after Letter Y (also ignored by Nelson) and is a personal addendum of Jameson's. It says, "I would recommend that the dobie houses, letter H, be torn down and stone houses to be erected in their stead. The stone can be obtained out of the old Church San Antonio, which is now a wreck or ruin of a once splendid church."

Thus, I truly believe these houses lining the inside of the stone east and north walls were of adobe brick and were protected by an outwork built of a double row of palisades filled with earth -- perhaps both inside and outside the fort.

At the moment, I can't tell you the exact date of the de Zavala based newspaper article with the additional paragraph in it (I just have my own Xerox copy in hand which I redesigned way back when to fit an 8x11 page -- and left off the masthead!), but I do have the original somewhere and am sure I can locate it.

Hope this helps lock in how these structures were built. I'm forwarding a copy of this to Mark Lemon and Craig Covner for their input and posting it on the studies forum. I don't have Jake Ivey's e-mail. Would somebody please forward it to him.

Best,
Rich Curilla

Rich wrote:

Hope this helps lock in how these structures were built. I'm forwarding a copy of this to Mark Lemon and Craig Covner for their input and posting it on the studies forum. I don't have Jake Ivey's e-mail. Would somebody please forward it to him.
Rich,
Your theory sounds interesting. I am going to give it a thorough going over, and try to sketch out some possible configurations. My overall impression still is, however, that that stretch of houses was a mess, and nothing at all like the earlier, sterile-looking long neat row of stone structures that has been depicted often in the past.
Mark

I very much agree with this. I think a lot of that indelible image derived from the restored San Jose Mission Indian quarters and work shops. Right or wrong in that case (and I haven't a clue), they set the trend for Alamo imagery reproduced by Frederic Ray, Alfred Ybarra, and the artists for 13 Days to Glory and A Time to Stand. I think Gary Zaboly was the first to finally break the stereotype in Texian Illiad by making one of them of palisado construction. And now YOU! ;D Seriously, I think we are finally getting somewhere. Thank you.

I dont't think we're talking about putting an outer skin of palisading, rocks and dirt right around the buildings, just the outer (east) face which formed part of the actual "fortress" perimeter. If you were talking down the former in earlier arguments then we were clearly talking at cross purposes.

There may well have been some bracing of the west-facing facade as you suggest, but Jameson's "picketed all round with stakes on end and dirt between" surely refers to the outer (east and north) facades rather than the whole structure.

Well as Rich says it might be a whole lot easier if we had Jameson’s original plan, but we’ve just got to work with what we have, and the starting point for that has to be the clear statement that the ‘dobe houses were picketed "all around" with stakes and a fill of dirt and rubble.

That’s very clearly talking about a breastwork of some kind rather than simple shoring up of an unsound structure. It also makes sense in that he’s talking in the first place about hardening a defensive perimeter rather than routine building maintenance

What’s not so clear is what he meant by picketed “round”.

If we take it literally it would suggest that the houses were entirely encased by the breastwork, which I agree doesn’t make any sense at all unless it was the houses themselves that were then filled with dirt and rubble like the ones used to form gun positions on the NW and SW corners. From a military point of view that might have been a good idea, but I don’t think any of the other evidence supports it.

To my mind a far simpler interpretation is that he just meant round the outside in the sense of around the outer face of that part of the Alamo defensive perimeter, which included the north wall as well as the east wall of the building range.

In other words the walls of the stone convento buildings and church were judged sound enough, but the ‘dobe ones obviously weren’t and so the perimeter there needed some immediate remedial strengthening work.

I agree that the wording is maddeningly imprecise - I’m sure Jameson himself knew exactly what he meant – but of the two alternatives I’d suggest that the second makes more sense.

There's a problem with this. Jameson's plat (if the redraws are to be believed) shows that the outer walls ARE stone and not adobe. I hear him describing adobe houses built against a stone wall. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the stone walls were in good shape. We know that the north wall was reinforced with the cribbing on the outside. My call (at this moment) is that the east wall was "picketed" outside due to crumbling stone and that "all round" does indeed mean just east and north sides. Thinking from Jameson's point-of-view standing in the northeast corner of the plaza and explaining his plan to somebody, I could see him indicating the "dobe" houses with a swish of his hand and saying, "We can picket those all around to protect from attack." (Sorry, thwarted dialogue writer coming out of me.)

In LaBatista, I only see the ditch on the N E corner. Even on the palisade I can barely make out a bit of a hatch representing the logs (but that's only because I KNOW they're there and make myself see it). Is it possible the L B extension was shored up in the same manner in which the N wall was? We know there was a log/timber reinforcement on the north wall, however it doesn't show up at all on the LaBatista or Jameson index or plat. I suggest this because on Labatista the E wall seems to be continuous to the N end of the granary as one long "wall".