Crocket death report source

No one knows. I think de la Pena mentions Castrillon; only one source suggests or mentions Cos and some say the source for that version is Cos himself. IIRC, it is the most laughable of the accounts and has Crockett, dressed in his Sunday best, secluded in a room somewhere, sitting out the battle and telling the Mexicans that he happened to wander by just as the Mexican army arrived and fled to the Alamo. It was just his bad luck to be stuck in the middle of a battlefield, where he was mistaken by the Mexicans for a combatant. Something like that.

The de la Pena memoir is taken from more than one source and is only partly based on de la Pena's personal experience and observations. His book is well worth reading and is readily available. Its historical value has unfortunately, and incorrectly, I believe, been denegrated on the basis of the single page that mentions Crockett (which was mis-translated by Carmen Perry anyway; she mentions Crockett by name twice, for example, when de la Pena only mentions him once). There is much valuable information in the book about the Texas war, and Gregg Dimmick has verified a lot of what de la Pena described in his own book "Sea of Mud." See Jim Crisp's "Sleuthing the Alamo" for more on the way de la Pena has been treated.

AW