The Alamo's Backdoor

[sloanrodgers]

Several months ago I was eating lunch with Mike Cox at the
Old Bakery across from the State Capitol, when Mike asked
me a strange question. He wanted to know if I'd heard of a
buried secret tunnel that once ran from the Alamo to Mission
Concepcion.
I was obviously at loss with this tale. I came on here to ask
the Alamo experts, but no light was shed at the time on the
passage way to possible defender freedom. Mike was able to
track down the story and wrote it up in a texasescapes.com
column which I thought some of you fellows might find a little
interesting even if the tunnel is some kind of odd Alamo drain-
age system. What do you think of it?

www.texasescapes.com/MikeCoxTexasTales/Alamo-Backdoor.htm

By the way, Mike's new book The Texas Rangers: Wearing the
Cinco Peso is out in all the major book stores and is proving to
be an even better read for me the second time around. All for
now amigos.

[Jim Boylston]

Interesting article, RR. I'm awaiting comments from our experts!
jim

[Allen Wiener]

Me too. Has anything on this ever emerged from any of the digs around the Alamo? Or, have any of those digs taken place in the area where this tunnel might exist. If there were an entrance in the church floor, I wonder if it was simply covered by the gun ramp during the siege.

AW

[sloanrodgers]

It's such an obscure source that it probably is more of a
question for Alamo archeologists than historians.

[Rich Curilla]

I could be way off base with this, but I believe an underground tunnel from Valero to Concepcion would have been way overkill if not just impossible. I come from the Pennsylvania coal mining regions and have seen the technology it takes to provide air to underground tunnels -- not something I envision the Franciscans as doing. An acequia for miles? Yes. An underground tunnel? No. Ridiculous.

That said, the San Antonio rumors and legends of such have abounded for over a century. Even a woman visiting Alamo Village some years ago said she spent her childhood in the small 1840's house (still there) a few hundred feet behind the Crockett Hotel, facing on Crockett St. It is now in the middle of a parking lot. She said that there was a trapdoor in the floor that opened into an underground tunnel "high enough to ride a horse through." I showed her the aerial view in George Nelson's book (where her house is visible) and the early Bexar plats showing the acequia system, and she could not quite agree that it *might* have been one of the laterals from the eastern acequia to the one right behind the Alamo.

In April of 1967, I was in corresponded with Lon Tinkle and asked him about the tunnel theory. Here was his response:

"One place I went was San Antonio, where I inquired about the alleged discovery of the possible tunnel. The director of the Alamo Library told me that this rumor was a matter of entire confusion. The expert who conducted the inquiry was named Tunnell; apparently the local papers there got mixed up and reported discovery of tunnel evidence instead of the identity of the expert! Believe nothing of the rumor, said the director. I am sorry that this clue thus seems to become another of the unsolvable and contradictory puzzles about the Alamo.

"I myself believe, without any confirming evidence alas, that secret tunnels did exist, probably inspired by the priests' need for security and for communication in so lonely an isolation as that in which they lived. They could easily have had experience of such tunnels either in Mexico, where I understand they do exist, or in Spain. But I have had not time in the past few years to continue my research about this, having been absorbed in other fields of Texas' economic history."

That from the author of 13 Days to Glory!

So keep digging, guys and gals.

[sloanrodgers]

Thanks rlc. As always, you're a wealth of knowledge.

[Rich Curilla]

rangerrod said:

Thanks rlc. As always, you're a wealth of knowledge.

More like a waft of noise. But O.K., I won't keep silent.