Crockett query

We've gone over this on other threads at some length. Check out those threads and see if they don't answer your questions.

Another question is why Almonte has been identified as the Mexican who identified Crockett, when he never mentioned Crockett or the executions in his diary for that day; he did remark that he had been robbed by his own soldiers though. Of course, the Almonte diary itself is not the original, which apparently is lost, but a transcription of it.

AW

See page 87 in Almonte's Texas, Edited by Jack Jackson; Translated by John Wheat (Texas State Historical Association, 2003). Almonte does describe Crockett as a "lunatic politician," based on what he'd read about him in U.S. newspapers. In fact the document presented here is Almonte's translation of a story that had appeared in the New Orleans Merchant Daily News on March 19, 1834. Almonte's purpose in translating the article was his belief that it showed that the U.S. was determined to wrest Texas from Mexico, not to comment on Crockett, who was merely mentioned in passing in the story. The article actually says:

"We believe that the de facto government of Mexico would be acting most irrationally should it refuse to sell, especially at a good price, the lands lying between the boundaries of Louisiana and Coahuila, because it would find it as hard to contain Colonel Crockett as to govern their new subjects in Texas."

Almonte may not have understood that the reference to Crockett was to his staunch independence and unwillingness to buckle to party discipline, not to the outsized, fictional image of "Davy" Crockett, thus Almonte's footnote identifying Crockett as "a lunatic politician from the United States of America."

Remember, the press was heavily politicized at the time and there were many pro-Jackson papers that would routinely ridicule Crockett, a staunch anti-Jacksonian, and exaggerate his backwoods, wild man, bumpkin image. Almonte was only repeating what he'd read about Crockett. Note that Jack Jackson's footnote (#46) on that page has some confused information about Crockett's autobiography (the Narrative) and the earlier, unauthorized bio Sketches & Eccentricities of Col. Crockett, written by James Strange French, but published anonymously in 1833. The book's original title was Life and Adventures of Colonel Crockett.

Jackson has some good discussion of the sources of the Crockett death stories, although he failed to mention the earliest newspaper reports that appeared in New Orleans, some of which, as Jim pointed out elsewhere, confused the reports of executions with mention of Crockett as one of the men killed in the Alamo. An original report separated those two facts (the death of Crockett in the Alamo, and the execution of prisoners there), while later reports combined and blurred the two separate statements, making it sound like Crockett was among those who were executed.

The best and most thorough discussion of this issue is William C. Davis's article "How Davy Didn't Die," Journal of the Alamo Battlefield Association, 2 (Fall 1997), 28.

AW