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Post by Herb on Apr 9, 2009 11:16:40 GMT -5
I know we've discussed this before, but this new topic was spurred by Kevin Young's question about the firewood for the pyres, and the realization that we have quite a few more researchers/historians that have joined the forum since the last time we discussed what happened after the battle.
I'd like to start the debate by asking what happened to the Mexican dead after the battle? We all know the Ruiz account of filling the cemetary and then dumping the rest of the bodies in the river - and the other accounts that seemed derived from him. But they all seem highly dubious, especially since the numbers reported killed were virtually the whole attacking force.
But, even using the much lower Mexican accounts, means approx 70 men had to be taken care of. Hauling that many bodies across the river to the Campo Santo doesn't make much sense, and from what I understand there are no Church records for their interment there.
Any ideas?
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Post by stuart on Apr 9, 2009 15:48:44 GMT -5
I don't think there's a deep mystery over this one, but there are a couple of questions I'd like to pose.
First off, I agree that moving 70-odd bodies across town to the campo santo isn't really practical - not impossible by any means, but it would be remembered if not recorded.
On the other hand I don't see them being slung into the river. You might do that with the enemy dead, but not your own.
That means they have to be in the vicinity of the Alamo.
Were they burned? I'm curious about this one; what was/is the Mexican attitude to cremation? I ask, because I have a recollection of some reference on the Alamo de Parras site to there being some doubt as to whether the ashes found in the San Fernando were indeed from the Alamo or from an earlier battle - something to do with Mexican buttons and fragments of uniform. Clarification?
Burial, I would have thought would have been most likely, which would in turn suggest a trench dug in some reasonably soft ground somewhere on the north side. There is however another possibility which again raises a question; in similar circumstances it was often a case of putting the bodies into an existing ditch and then collapsing it over them - how well have the known ditches been plotted and excavated?
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Post by TRK on Apr 9, 2009 20:17:57 GMT -5
Were they burned? I'm curious about this one; what was/is the Mexican attitude to cremation? From what I've read, human cremation was a practice among some of the Mexican tribes in in prehispanic times but was proscribed after the Conquest (except, of course, during the Inquisition, when they cremated plenty of people without the benefit of dying first). If cremation was still taboo in the 1830s, one would think that Santa Anna wouldn't have risked the outrage of his own troops by burning his own dead. But then, this is the same man who eleven years later left hundreds if not thousands of his own dead and wounded on the battlefield of Buena Vista, so respect for his own dead doesn't seem to have been one of Santa Anna's virtues.
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Post by ranger2518 on Apr 10, 2009 14:36:28 GMT -5
First off, I agree that moving 70-odd bodies across town to the campo santo isn't really practical... I don't see how it would be greatly more impractical to move seventy-odd bodies a mile by cart or other means to the camposanto than it would be to move two-hundred or more a few hundred meters to the alameda or other purported cremation site. Why necessarily recorded? Funeral processions aren't very newsworthy, and I would think less so in a community where a major battle had just occurred. I wouldn't think any sane commander would do that to the water supply of a vicinity they intend to occupy, regardless of the decedents' side.
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