Sanchez-Navarro

[Herb]

I know Sanchez-Navarro was an assistant Inspector General assigned to the staff of the Department Headquarters (Matamoros?) when he was sent to Bexar in 1835, to inventory supplies, and that he arrived there in December, shortly before the Texian attack.

I assume he was with Cos during his withdrawl, and due to the practical impossibility of him joining the Vanguard Brigade, he returned to Bexar on March 3rd with the infantry reinforcments. (a sidenote if the Alamo sketch was done from the Veramindi House while the Alamo was still occupied by the Texans, it has to be a look at what the compound looked like on March 4th or 5th).

I know S-N was not at San Jacinto, so my long winded question is, where did S-N serve for the rest of the Texas Revolution?

[Jake]

I don't recall, Herb -- I think Jack covered that briefly in the article on S-N we did for SWHQ, and I have a copy here, but didn't Jim just post a link to that somewhere?

Funny I hadn't read your by-line, or whatever you call it, before, at the bottom of your postings ... wish I'd said that. Anyway, I'll poke around in what I have and see what I come up with.

[Herb]

Feb 8, 2012 18:49:02 GMT -5 Jake said:

Funny I hadn't read your by-line, or whatever you call it, before, at the bottom of your postings ... wish I'd said that. Anyway, I'll poke around in what I have and see what I come up with.

I've seen where some cite it as a quote by Will Rogers; I have to wonder about how common electric fences were back then, though.

[Hollowhorn]

Some links to earlier discussions on the subject:

Sánchez Navarro Map - Assault on the Alamo, 1836

Sánchez Navarro View and Plan of the Alamo, 1840

Sanchez-Navarro pro/con

[Jake]

Oh, man ... HH, I didn't know we had to study for this.

Can I take the position that I don't care what I said before about S-N, so I call "do-overs"?

Well, I guess not, since that wouldn't be true.

[Jake]

Herb asks: "I know S-N was not at San Jacinto, so my long winded question is, where did S-N serve for the rest of the Texas Revolution?"

Actually, S-N's story is a fabulous one -- you don't wonder that Lindley decided the whole thing had to be a forgery, because it is really derring-do. We need a translation of the entire two-volume ledger (yes, you whiners, even the accounting stuff), and I keep thinking that would be a great project for my old age, whenever that starts. Retiring sure ain't it.

Anyway, he was one of the sons of the Sanchez family that owned pretty much all of Coahuila, and in 1840 the family made a relatively small addition to the family holdings, the hacienda of the Marques de Aguayo. But that's an answer to a later question.

I don't know what he was doing during the rest of the Texas campaign after the fall of the Alamo -- it's in his journal, but at the moment I'm working on other stuff so I can't stop to find it. I sort of feel like I remember he stayed with some of the garrison units in San Antonio, but that's pretty likely to be untrue.

Jose Juan retreated from Texas with the army after San Jacinto, and later was assigned to duty on the new northern frontier. "He ... participated in the campaign against Federalist uprisings along the Rio Grande," says Jack, and gained a reputation as an Indian fighter. Promoted to Lt. Col. in December, 1836, full col. in 1840 for his service in the Federalist campaign, attached to Gen. Mariano Arista's command. By mid-1843 he was a brigadier gen. and interim gov. of Coahuila. He fought against the US again during the Mexican war, but I don't know in what campaigns, and in 1848 became the commandant general of Coahuila, a rank and post he held until his death on June 2, 1849. More detail on this brief outline is available in the S-N article in SWHQ that Jack and I wrote, mostly contributed by Jack based on notes he made from S-N's military records that he found in the Instituto Estatal de Documentation, now in Ramos Arizpe near Saltillo.

[Jake]

Two quotes from the "Altar" thread:

Jim Boylston: “I don't completely dismiss SN, but he's such a poor draftsman I 'm not sure his vista is reliable other than in a general context.”

Gary Zaboly: “that Sanchez-Navarro was no fine artist need not be driven home again; but he's all we got.”

A neat point-counterpoint. Thing is, he was a good draftsman, in the literal sense. I took "mechanical drawing" in junior high, and we were taught the use of the ancient instruments, pen, compass, straight-edge, all those little bits in the mechanical drawing sets you see in museums, pretty much the same back into the 1600s if not earlier. I've still got one at home. I imagine he took a similar course at some point in school, or learned later.

After I was looking through the S-N article in SWHQ, I came back and added this: Jack found another map, other than the Aguayo map, that S-N had drawn, "what was probably the most significant map of the states bordering the Republic of Texas along the Rio Grande." Jack, who knew maps, describes it with great favor. And S-N drew all of the "Aguayo" map, including redrafting the "Estado" section from an earlier map by another map-maker. And when he's writing for the record, in his Ayudantia volumes, his handwriting is extremely good -- he probably was the guy the general would call in to write the final drafts of letters. I think we can say he was a good draftsman.

But he clearly wasn't an artist in Gary's sense of the word. And he is all we got for a view of the place pre-battle. So we need to get what we can from him.

[Allen Wiener]

So, I guess this is the place to move my last question:

Jake,

Regarding the 1840 S-N sketch, what was his purpose in drawing it on the map, as well as his equally familiar Alamo plat?

Also, what is the background on the Berlandier copy, which, I believe, dates from the same period? The S-N (the copy in Nelson's book) lacks the kind of detail on the top of the church's west wall that we do see in the Berlandier. On the latter sketch, the features do look like blocks, which could represent sandbags, stones, etc. Similar features on the southwest corner also seem more clear on both sketches (where the small enclosure with the flag was constructed).

Allen

[Jake]

To a question over in "Altar," I said:

“I guess it was Jack and I that said he "redrew it from memory," although what we were saying was that we suspected it was a rough, quick sketch that didn't show much, and he cleaned it up and added to it from memory. Certainly it's reasonable to think that the version we see on the 1840 map is some level of redraft and improvement, since it isn't the original, and shows so many things that don't seem to have been there, and shows so many things that were there so badly.”

But no, that Jack and I originated it isn't true. I checked our discussion, and we (on p. 212 and n. 15 in the SWHQ article) cited Craig Covner's article in the Alamo Journal, “Before 1850: A New Look at the Alamo Through Art and Imagery,” part 1, 70(March, 1990):3-10. “We know that even the ‘index’ plan [on the inside cover of the Ayudantia volume] was probably produced more than two months after the battle of the Alamo, and that the ‘finished’ plan and elevation [on the Aguayo map] are a ‘set’; it’s not unreasonable therefore, to suggest that the elevation has a similar post-San Jacinto origin. The point is that when we re-examine Sanchez-Navarro’s pictures, it must be kept in mind that this is how he remembers the Alamo – we are likely seeing a reconstruction based on notes and sketches at best.” (p. 8)

[Jake]

Allen Wiener: “Regarding the 1840 S-N sketch, what was his purpose in drawing it on the map, as well as his equally familiar Alamo plat?”

Allan, Jack offered the following in the SWHQ article: “Although the Vista serves as a space filler, like the illustration of the capture of Zapata on the early ‘Arista’ map [the one I mentioned above that S-N also drew], no doubt he placed it there as a tribute to Mexico’s most redeeming and gratifying victory in the recent Texas war.” Not to mention being able to show his pride in his own participation in such an event, at this time of the family acquisition of another important piece of property.

Allen Wiener: “What is the background on the Berlandier copy, which, I believe, dates from the same period? The S-N (the copy in Nelson's book) lacks the kind of detail on the top of the church's west wall that we do see in the Berlandier. On the latter sketch, the features do look like blocks, which could represent sandbags, stones, etc. Similar features on the southwest corner also seem more clear on both sketches (where the small enclosure with the flag was constructed).”

Again, I’ll turn to the SWHQ article Jack and I wrote. This was largely my writing, since I had already done a lot of the tracing of the origins of the S-N maps and drawings. Actually, the narrative in the article is too long to put here, so I’ll say that the Berlandier copy was found in his papers. After his death in 1851, the papers were sold off, several times. John C. Ewers, in the Indians of Texas in 1830 by Jean Louis Berlandier (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969), traces how the Berlandier collection arrived at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. The original Labastida map was also in this collection, but ended up at the CAH in Austin. Berlandier apparently traced the Vista from the original Aguayo map, and that’s how it arrived in his collection. He added a note saying it was drawn from the roof of the Veramendi building by José Juan Sanchez Estrada. Also included in the Berlandier collection, and now at Yale, was a tracing of the accompanying plan of the Alamo, beside the Vista on the Aguayo map. Both were made presumably by Berlandier himself, between 1840 when the Aguayo map was drawn and 1851 when Berlandier died. He was an avid collector of information on this contentious frontier between the US and Mexico, and his collection contains a huge amount of stuff.

[Jim Boylston]

I think we can say he was a good draftsman.

But he clearly wasn't an artist in Gary's sense of the word. And he is all we got for a view of the place pre-battle. So we need to get what we can from him.

Okay, poor choice of words on my part. But it's still a lousy rendering, if you ask me. As I said, I don't think it can be dismissed completely, but I take a lot of it with a grain of salt.

Jim

[Jim Boylston]

Feb 9, 2012 16:44:03 GMT -5 Jake said:

To a question over in "Altar," I said:

“I guess it was Jack and I that said he "redrew it from memory," although what we were saying was that we suspected it was a rough, quick sketch that didn't show much, and he cleaned it up and added to it from memory. Certainly it's reasonable to think that the version we see on the 1840 map is some level of redraft and improvement, since it isn't the original, and shows so many things that don't seem to have been there, and shows so many things that were there so badly.”

But no, that Jack and I originated it isn't true. I checked our discussion, and we (on p. 212 and n. 15 in the SWHQ article) cited Craig Covner's article in the Alamo Journal, “Before 1850: A New Look at the Alamo Through Art and Imagery,” part 1, 70(March, 1990):3-10. “We know that even the ‘index’ plan [on the inside cover of the Ayudantia volume] was probably produced more than two months after the battle of the Alamo, and that the ‘finished’ plan and elevation [on the Aguayo map] are a ‘set’; it’s not unreasonable therefore, to suggest that the elevation has a similar post-San Jacinto origin. The point is that when we re-examine Sanchez-Navarro’s pictures, it must be kept in mind that this is how he remembers the Alamo – we are likely seeing a reconstruction based on notes and sketches at best.” (p. 8)

Thanks, Jake. I think Craig makes a reasonable argument.

[Allen Wiener]

Thanks for the references and explanation, Jake; I need to dig out that article in SWHQ by you and Jack and re-read it. I also have the first of Craig's two articles, but am missing the second (or the other way around; need to check).

My curiosity about the Berlandier tracing stems from his clearly drawing the block-like crenelations that do not appear that clearly at all on the S-N that we do have on the map.

Allen

[TRK]

Link to a jpeg of Berlandier's "Vista del Fuerte del Alamo"

brbl-images.library.yale.edu/PHOTONEGIMG/zoom/Z372/z3728605.jpg

[Allen Wiener]

That's the one, Tom; trouble is that this one appears as often as the original and may cause some confusion as to what S-N actually drew.