Real-Life Legends and Reluctant Revolutionaries: Stephen Harrigan's The Gates of the Alamo

33SouthweStern AmericAn LiterAture

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Real-Life Legends and Reluctant Revolutionaries:

Stephen Harrigan’s The GaTes of The alamo

Richard Black

Unlike a majority of Alamo narratives, the main characters of Stephen Harrigan’s novel The Gates of the Alamo are fictional creations. Ed-mund McGowan is a naturalist, working under a commission from

the Mexican government to catalog the florae of the Texas colony. He and Mary and Terrell Mott, a widowed innkeeper and her son from the town of Refugio, become enmeshed in the events of 1835 and find themselves in the Alamo when the Mexican Army of Operations attacks on March 6, 1836. Edmund and Mary are reluctant patriots, ambivalent about their participa-tion. In contrast, the 16-year-old Terrell accepts the revolutionary rhetoric with youthful enthusiasm and uses the siege of the Alamo as an escape from disgrace in Refugio. Sprinkled throughout the stories of these three characters are those personages considered the “real” heroes of the Alamo: the “holy trinity” of Jim Bowie, William Travis, and Davy Crockett.

The shift of focus from the three historical figures to three fictional characters signals that Harrigan is not interested in providing yet another romanticized and romanticizing account of the Alamo’s “holy trinity.” By emphasizing fictional characters who are not burdened with the historical and cultural baggage of Bowie, Crockett, and Travis, Harrigan establishes a fresh vantage point from which to engage decades of romantic myth residue that has gilded the Alamo. Harrigan says of the Texas creation myth and his novel:

I don’t think the myth of the Alamo needs to be turned on its head, to say that all Texans were opportunistic and all Mexicans were high-minded. I’m very impatient with that kind of black-and-white thinking. But I did feel it was absolutely imperative to try to dramatize the story of the Alamo from every perspective that I could find. To that degree I’ve created characters who allow the reader to experience those different perspectives. I have Mexican characters. I have Anglo characters. I have a historical character named Joe who’s a slave of Colonel Travis, the commander of the Alamo. And the black perspective is fascinating be-

34 SouthweStern AmericAn LiterAture

cause the Mexicans were fighting against slavery. As much as the Texans were fighting for freedom, they were also fighting for the propagation of slavery. (“Stephen Harrigan” 143-44)

Harrigan’s novel functions as what Philip Wheelwright calls a consum-matory myth-narrative, characterized by its attempt to “recapture the lost innocence of the mythopoeic attitude by transcending the narrative, logical and linguistic forms which romantic mythologizing accepts and utilizes”1 (Slotkin 13). First, by engaging his fictional characters with the historical heroes Harrigan recapitulates the Anglo revolutionaries’ experience in Texas’ foundational event and recaptures the mythopoeic consciousness. For Edmund, Mary, Terrell, and others they meet, the myth’s idea of order “compels belief in the vision of reality” constructed by the heroes and unites these Anglo-Texan “individualities to a collective identity” (Slotkin 6, 8). Second, the novel transcends “the narrative, logical and linguistic forms which romantic mythologizing accepts and utilizes” (13). Unlike the authors of romanticized Alamo stories, Harrigan eschews a traditional narrative form primarily focused on the hero figures and undercuts the personal and ideological agendas of the romantic myth by refusing to engage in xenophobic or political propagandizing. Finally, he keeps a “degree of critical distance from [his] material,” namely the distortions and glamorizing of the Alamo event and its representative heroes (Slotkin 13). In these ways The Gates of the Alamo provides a new vision of the Texas creation myth, one which emphasizes its importance as myth but also responds to the cultural pres-sures for greater racial inclusion and a more holistic account in re-visiting the Alamo and its legacy. Rick Bass’ assessment of John Graves’ writing and contemporary Texas rings relevant here also: Bass notes that Texas is becoming a culture “in which knowledge is seen as the source of wealth or empowerment” (Bass xix). Only through narratives such as The Gates of the Alamo are Texans able to reconsider and reshape the romanticized “knowledge” of their history provided by more racially and experientially diverse and thus more empowering and comprehensive understandings.

Tribal Heroes and their Audience:Mythogenesis in The Gates of the Alamo

Traditional accounts of the Alamo have focused on the heroes, the myth-making artists, at the expense of the other faction necessary to myth construction: the artist’s audience, in this case that audience contempo-rary with Travis, Bowie, and Crockett who, as in any age or with any myth, lags behind the visionary mythmaker. Harrigan reconstructs the process by which the Texas origin myth eventually created a successful collective “tribal” identity among the Texan population, and he narrows the gap


between the myth-making artist and his audience by shifting the focus to those who also participated in the Battle of the Alamo, people who came to this position with hesitation and consideration. Thus he is able to recapture the mythopoeic state of mind of those involved in the Texas Revolution and narrate how this mythic attitude spread through the population, inspiring belief in and action toward Texas’ creation.

Early in the novel, in the spring of 1835, Edmund McGowan rides to the port of Copano to board a vessel for Mexico, where he seeks to petition the Mexican government for an extension of his contract. On the way he meets a pa-trol of Mexican soldiers headquartered in the Alamo, at the time still under Mexican occupation. His meeting with the soldados prompts Edmund to consider the political and military situation of Texas. He knows “[n]othing was certain in Texas, except that some ugly event was brewing” (Har-rigan 24). He “expected war within the year, though he could not predict the nature of this war or who exactly its protagonists would be. Perhaps the radicals among the American colonists would be the ones to spark it” (24). The gap between the myth-making artists of the Texas Revolution and the perceptions of their audience, here embodied by Edmund, is apparent in his indecision as to where his sympathies lie. He describes this radical element as being “restless and aggrieved, always meeting in conventions and forming committees of safety, petitioning the Mexican government to make Texas a separate state, to grant it special concessions on slavery, on taxes, on tariffs—all the while harboring in their hearts the conviction that Texas should not belong to Mexico at all” (Harrigan 24). This secret conviction is eventually voiced through the revolutionary rhetoric of Wil-liam Barret Travis and all of those who came to fight the Mexican army at the Alamo, including the fictional Edmund.

Harrigan’s Travis epitomizes the radical character who Edmund fears will push events to war and who is the primary artist in constructing the Texas origin myth. After arriving in San Felipe de Austin with his slave, Joe, Travis and his companion Willie Williamson discuss the Mexican uprising in Zacatecas and its influence on their own plans for Texas. When Williamson asks if the Texans should simultaneously revolt with the Zacatecan rebels, Travis answers:

Even if we join with the Mexican federalists and help them defeat Santa Anna, what are we left with? Even if we achieve separate statehood, what are we? A remote Mexican state? Who wants to be that? The days


of fighting against Mexico for the right to be a part of Mexico are over. We should fight to be free…. It’s utterly impossible for two peoples so diametrically opposed in everything to be amalgamated, Willie. Inde-pendence is the only answer. (Harrigan 112-13)

Travis’ call in this passage for total independence as opposed to better representation in the Mexican government or the reinstitution of the 1824 constitution articulates the Texas origin myth. Williamson regards Travis as a prophet: “Fighting to be free of Mexico. You’re a little bit ahead of everybody else there. As usual” (Harrigan 113). But Travis goes a step further by projecting himself as an agent of destiny. He declares: “A year from now the case will be resolved, one way or the other…. Texas will be a free land or it will be broken and enslaved by tyrants. And my own course will have come clear as well” (114).

In his first appearance, Jim Bowie shares and espouses the same world-view. Wakened from a drunken sleep, he joins a debate over the conflict with Mexico at the Mott dinner table and says:

“They want to make you a slave instead, sir. How can a free man toler-ate what Santa Anna has done? Shutting down state governments, overthrowing the Constitution of 1824. It is tyranny pure and simple, and contrary to every American principle.” “But this is Mexico,” Edmund said nonchalantly. (62)

Bowie’s argument extends Travis’ call for independence to issues of per-sonal liberty, property and the rule of law and asserts that Texas, despite its ownership by Mexico, properly belongs to its Anglo colonists. He tells Edmund: “The fact that this is Mexico is precisely the problem. Texas wants to be a part of the States. God knows it and Hickory knows it and you know it too” (Harrigan 62). Harrigan’s one-dimensional and often cartoonish presentations of Travis and Bowie as mythic heroes, along with their relegation as secondary players in the novel, is a way to array the Texas origin and hero myths for outside and critical examination by Edmund, Mary, and the reader.

Edmund and Mary represent the resistant faction of the Tribal Heroes’ contemporary audience and reveal by their principled opposition that the mythogenetic process must bring the whole population into the fold of the collective Anglo-Texan tribe for the origin myth to succeed. Their respec-tive journeys to Béxar and the Alamo mission and their relations along the way with the people, both historical and fictional, reveal the mythogenetic process at work.

Although she refuses to be explicitly linked with the “War Dog” faction, Mary reveals Bowie’s influence when she tells Edmund that she fears an imminent “invasion” by Santa Anna. Edmund denies that it would be an invasion since he says that Santa Anna “can hardly invade his own coun-try” (Harrigan 74). But Mary says: “Plenty of people will see it so. And hotheads like Mr. Travis will suddenly be turned into respectable patriots”


(74). This exchange reveals how the Texas origin myth comes into being and gains traction with its audience. Edmund recognizes this process when he tells Mary that he is not sure that the war talk is “nonsense.” He says: “[T]he idea of independence has great currency, and should not be dismissed” and even asserts that due to Mexican political mismanage-ment of the Texans’ grievances “now nothing less than a total break will do” (Harrigan 102).

When Mary and her guests receive word that Santa Anna has crushed the Zacatecan insurgency, “the fall of Zacatecas figured only briefly in the dinner conversation at the inn” (155). But in a self-reflexive mo-ment, Harrigan acknowledges its centrality to the actions in Texas in 1836. The insur-gency is often absent in romantic accounts of the Alamo and creation myths because it complicates the Anglo-freedom versus Mexican-oppression binary. Like narratives of the Alamo that omit Mexican perspectives, the events in Zacatecas are similarly omitted, although they are part of the same larger story of centralization versus federalization in which the Texas revolution plays a part. For Mary, who observes the conflict, Santa Anna’s actions represent “scenarios for disaster.” She is increasingly in the minority, however. Her youngest guest illustrates the growing success of Travis’ myth-paradigm when he says: “This is American soil…and no pepper-belly president ought to think he can take it away from us” (155).

On their way to the Alamo Edmund and Mary meet with a group of men in Gonzales who, similarly influenced by Travis’ creation myth, are headed to fight at the Alamo. Edmund describes his companions as being “polite enough but…coarse adventurers at heart” and notes that “they had come to Texas as much for a fight as for free land, and subscribed to the common fiction that Mexico was trying to steal Texas from the States, and would not listen when [he] tried to tell them that the situation could be considered in the reverse” (Harrigan 336-37). These encounters with characters who have internalized Travis’ mythic order reveal how his subjective reality comes to be reconstituted as an objective reality for Anglos in Texas, one which Edmund similarly begins to internalize when he objects to turning back from their destination:

Edmund marvelled at his own obdurate fearlessness. The lion’s den was where he wanted to go, and as they rode that night to Béxar he saw the same bewitched eagerness in the faces of their companions. His plan was to hire a cart, hurriedly load it with his collections, and withdraw a

Stephen Harrigan


safe distance—perhaps to New Orleans—to await the resolution of the war. But even with his practical errand at the front of his thoughts he felt an unreasonable impatience to arrive in Béxar, to be present at the place where so many years’ worth of resentment and ragged conflict seemed to be reaching a culmination. (Harrigan 336)

The riders’ belief in the divine reality of the creation myth “bewitches” their faces, even affecting the stolidly rational scientist, Edmund. His normally empirical worldview is replaced by his describing their anticipated arrival as being “unreasonable,” thereby exhibiting the myth’s effect of stimulating a “non-logical perception” of events and reality (Slotkin 7). That Edmund’s scientific mind falls under the spell of the constructed myth reveals how powerful a force it is, despite its inherent fictitiousness. Furthermore, his reaction comments on the “need for myth as myth,” for the Texas origin myth as a regenerating cultural force explains and justifies “to the deepest needs of the psyche” the ideological values that drove the violence behind Manifest Destiny and other expansionist American projects in the 19th-century Southwest (Slotkin 13).

Once inside the Alamo compound, Edmund volunteers for military service while Mary serves as a nurse in the hospital barracks. She is in proximity to Bowie, who is slowly succumbing to consumption, and she is in the hospital when Travis recites his famous letter:

Travis produced a sheet of paper, unfolded it, and lifted the candlestick from Bowie’s bedside to illuminate the letter as he read. “To the people of Texas and all Americans in the world,” went the audacious salutation. The letter was succinct, defiant, bombastic, some-how brilliant. “I shall never surrender or retreat,” Travis pronounced, and Mary shuddered at the arrogance of that “I,” this young man ready to doom them all in order that “all Americans in the world” would not forget his heroism. “Victory or death,” he declared at the end, and then folded the paper again and leaned down to Bowie. (Harrigan 382)

Travis’ earlier premonition of how the Texas Revolution would shape his destiny is affirmed with this historical letter, for it becomes the primary document of the Texas origin myth and the de facto Texas Declaration of Independence. And Harrigan’s introduction of the letter as an artifact of the myth and Mary’s response to it destabilize the romantic depictions of Travis. Mary assesses the letter’s author as an arrogant and zealous rebel leader whose words, though hyperbolic, are indeed brilliant in their ability to move the population into sharing the myth-paradigm that they construct.

Along with hearing Travis’ letter, Mary handles two other significant missives during her hospital service that represent alternate visions of the Alamo story. Prior to the battle, Crockett asks Mary to carry a letter for him should he perish in the fight: “It’s to my son. I found a good place for a headright claim up on the Red, and the letter will tell him where to


find it, though him being my son, he’ll probably get lost in some canebreak somewhere and never find his way out.” Mary takes the letter from Crockett and places it in her pocket, “where it joined the letter Dick Perry dictated to her yesterday from his pallet, full of high-blown language about ‘throw-ing off the yoke of oppression’ and admonishments to his family, especially his dear sister, not to weep at his passing but to ‘rejoice’ that he had been fortunate enough to give his life for Texas” (Harrigan 410).

The two letters in Mary’s pocket illustrate the dichotomous narratives about those who migrated to and fought in Texas. Ironically, the heroicized Crockett exhibits a singular self-interest in land, whereas the marginal Perry espouses the liberal idealism of the creation myth. Harrigan comments criti-cally that the creation myth is mainly a work of fiction, albeit an immensely powerful and evocative one. The two letters chafing against one another in Mary’s pocket is a key moment in the novel, one that recaptures the primary myth and comments upon it. The inherited myth and contemporary critical readings of the Alamo and its heroes collide against one another but still manage to co-exist.

Since the deaths/sacrifices of the Tribal Heroes are the events that most signify within the creation myth, the accounts or stories told of their deaths are the most discussed and debated among historians, enthusiasts, and the population at large. As Harrigan says in his “Au-thor’s Note,” “it matters to people how Davy Crockett died” (579).2 He maintains, “in the writing of this book I have not been whimsical with the facts,” and “when I began The Gates of the Alamo I made a pledge of absolute fidelity to the truth of events.” He acknowledges: “Historical truth is an elusive and subjective thing, and never more so than in the story of the Alamo, which is buried in so many layers of myth and counter-myth as to be nearly irretrievable” (Harrigan 578-79). The truth may indeed be irretrievable, but the ideological attitudes behind the myth’s construction are not, and if his novel is not wholly successful (as how could it be?) in recapturing the truth of the Alamo, it does recapture this mythopoeic state of mind. Consequently, Harrigan portrays the deaths in brief and violent but ultimately muted fashion, for he realizes that the details are ultimately inconsequential to the myth-narrative; the sacrifice is the only matter of importance.

Holly Beachley Brear reads the demise of Bowie, Crockett, and Travis, as “the inception of a painful birth rather than of death” (24). She says the Alamo becomes “the mythic baptismal font,” from which flows “the

Since the deaths/sacrifices of the Tribal Heroes are the events that most signify within the creation myth, the accounts or stories told of their deaths are the most discussed and debated among historians, enthusiasts, and the population at large.


blood of the Alamo heroes, the life-giving fluid from which Texas liberty is born” (31). She also views the Alamo story as a close parallel to the Judeo-Christian myth, with Travis functioning as the Texas creation myth’s Christ figure. She writes: “He, more than any of the other men within the Alamo, becomes the sacrifice necessary to bring life to an independent Texas,” and asserts that Travis’ destiny is accomplished when he “dies in the process of birthing Texas” (41).

Picking up on this mythic birth motif, Harrigan details several scenes of painful, as well as aborted births that illuminate the creation myth and Mary and Edmund’s relationship to it. In one scene, Mary guts a sawfish to collect its liver oil and lets loose a collection of baby fish, “perfectly formed, fully alive, all of them flailing in bewilderment.” The sight of the fish prompts Mary to reminisce about the gestation of her deceased daugh-ter and of an “ancient fear that she herself had once harbored.” Before bringing the child to term, Mary “had had a dream that she gave birth to a malevolent, unrecognizable thing that was not human at all” (Harrigan 153). After butchering the fish and returning to Refugio she learns of Santa Anna’s attack on Zacatecas. In the other scene a child is miscarried who Mary believes was fathered by Terrell. The child was actually conceived by Mexican soldiers under General Martín Perfecto de Cos’ command when they occupied Refugio. Of the mother, Edna Foley, Mary exclaims to Edmund, “How is it possible to be so simple, so completely—inattentive? …To have a baby growing inside you, and not know of it!” (Harrigan 231). After this discussion, Sam Houston’s December 12, 1835, proclamation calling for volunteer soldiers arrives in town.

The linkage of the violent birth images in the novel with crucial events of the Texas Revolution is a meta-narrative of the creation myth, Mary and Edmund’s involvement in it, and the birth of the Texas Republic. In one scene, a birth is accomplished; in the other, the child is stillborn. Regarding the first, the fall of Zacatecas and Santa Anna’s unforgiving actions there convinced the Texans that a fight for total independence was necessary, and the violent, bewildering but successful birth of the fish reinforces the creation myth’s sacrificial quality. In the other scene, Edna’s stillborn child is fathered by a gang of Mexican soldiers whose rap-ing of her symbolizes the type of Mexican oppression that Sam Houston would call in his proclamation a violation of the “sanctity of our hearths and firesides” (“Proclamation”). The dead child thus signifies the failure of Mexican dominion over Texas. Conversely, the “child” of the revolution, the Republic of Texas, is successfully brought to term at the Alamo and San Jacinto. These images reinforce and justify the use of violence in the Texas and Manifest Destiny projects, as they relate to the constructed mythic binaries regarding liberty and tyranny. In Mary’s act of violence against the sawfish, the baby fish are effectively liberated from their de-caying and dying mother, metaphorically rewritten here as the Mexican


nation. In contrast, the tyrannical use of violence by the Mexican soldiers against an Anglo female body representing the whole Anglo-Texan tribe, is an unsuccessful and un-regenerative activity.

Other(ed) Voices: Mexicans and African Americans in The Gates of the Alamo

In addition to reconstructing the mythopoeic state of mind of the

origin myth, The Gates of the Alamo responds to the cultural pressures for change in contemporary Texas society. The 1836 Alamo event solidified the collective identity of Anglo-Texans, yet in the following years, especially in the 20th century, the Alamo story and its legacy received challenges from audiences in Texas traditionally excluded from or vilified in the creation myth, especially the Hispanic audience. Brear notes that “[t]he problem for Hispanics wishing a part in the past presented at the Alamo is how to be included. How do they change an entire mythology of the struggle between the good Anglo and the evil Hispanic portrayed in most Alamo films?” (3).

Recent scholarship and sentiment reinforces this ethnic divide in present-day audiences over the figure of the Alamo and what it has come to represent. Richard Flores writes: “For Anglos, the Alamo serves as a sign of rebirth, the coming-of-age for a state and, eventually, a nation in the modern period. It is not quite the same for Mexicans. For them, the Alamo reverberates with ambivalence. It serves as a reminder, a memorial to a stigmatized identity” (11). This “stigmatized identity” is, in large part, the end result of decades of romantic myth-narratives promulgated in films, TV shows, and other media that effectively erased, Othered, or vilified non-Anglo participants in the Battle of the Alamo. Yet the fact remains that the Alamo functions as a cultural site and event whose heritage is shared by Anglos, Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans, for members of all four ethnic groups were either present at the battle or felt its impact. Millennial Texas reflects this ethnic identity. The 2000 Census reveals a Texas population that is 52.4% Anglo, 11.5% African-American, and 32% Hispanic or Latino (“Texas”). Additionally, The Handbook of Texas Online reports that “[b]etween 1980 and 1990 Hispanic population figures increased by 45 percent, African Americans by 17 percent, and whites by 10 percent” (“Census and Census Records”). The novel responds to these demographic representations by transcending the romantic myth’s racist representations of Mexican and African-American participants by giving voice to both groups.

An historical player who often appears in narratives of the Alamo, generally in a passive role, is William Travis’ slave, Joe. Yet in The Gates of


the Alamo Joe provides one of the novel’s primary points of view. Almost every appearance of Travis in the text is related through Joe’s perspective. By this narrative strategy Harrigan depicts the Tribal Heroes as mythopoeic figures and filters them through a critical lens, revealing what Slotkin calls a “double awareness” (13) characteristic of the consummatory myth-narrative. Although Travis and Bowie construct an origin myth determined by a fight for freedom against tyrannical forces, Joe’s portrayal of them in the novel reveals how the origin also signifies “the fight for a prosperous future built on land, cotton, and slaves” (Roberts and Olsen 142).

Although Mexico is portrayed as the tyrannical regime in the mythic clash, the fact remains that slavery was outlawed in Mexico and the Texans were fighting for its continuation. Joe considers running away to Mexico and distances himself from Travis’ mythopoeic state of mind, referring to the Texan insurgency as “their war,” exhibiting no stake in it (Harrigan 286). Joe’s point of view allows Harrigan to deconstruct the creation myth simultaneous to its mythogenetic reconstruction. Joe thinks of how “Tra-vis and all the other white men in the Alamo talked about freedom all the time,” but he cannot

quite grasp the nature of the bondage they were fighting to release themselves from. They had had the freedom not to come to Texas in the first place, and they had had the freedom to leave it once they determined that Mexico no longer wanted them here. (Harrigan 412)

Joe finally decides that the “whole war was airy,” which is precisely the point of the myth (Harrigan 413). The political facts on the ground must be replaced by Travis’ mythic vision that will unite the Texans—specifically male, Anglo-Texans—into a collective identity. Joe does not, and cannot, subscribe to the myth’s reality because it is a reality which only objectifies him as property.

In a brief skirmish before the main battle, the Mexican forces test the defenses of the Alamo, and Joe is afforded the opportunity to abandon the compound. When Mexican scouts tell Joe “Ven con nosotros, negro” (“Come with us, negro.”), he considers whether to stay in the Alamo to face death or continued servitude or to chance the ostensible independence offered by Mexico. For Joe,

[t]he thought was enormous. Inside this room he was a slave. If he went out with these men through the window, he would be free. It was true, then, what was said about Mexico. Though it was, as Travis had insisted a hundred times in Joe’s hearing, a country ruled by tyranny, there was no special tyranny set aside only for black men. (Harrigan 390)

Joe’s response is automatic and without deliberation—his actions speak for him before he is cognizant that “he could choose to die as a slave in the Alamo or live out his life as a free man” (390). The creation myth designed to inspire action from its audience also does so in Joe’s instance, but his


action is one of refutation. In doing so, Joe appropriates the creation myth from its orthodox usage to assert his agency.

However, Joe’s momentary opportunity for flight is dashed, and he is again pressed into service. But he is among the few survivors of the battle, spared because he is a slave, and he is among the first to offer an account of the Alamo’s fall to Sam Houston and the Texan army. Historically, he is best known for this report and his relation of Travis’ death. Roberts and Olsen note that Joe “would later give several versions of Travis’ death. In one account he said that Travis was hit and fell back bleeding, but when a Mexican general tried to behead the Alamo commander, ‘the dying Colo-nel raised his sword and killed him!’” (162). This image was seized and romantically elaborated in reports of the battle and the heroism of the Alamo defenders. In the novel Harrigan allows Joe to voice an explanation for this fabricated story:

When Sam Houston and the other men of the army questioned him about the Alamo he had answered them with strict honesty and compli-ance, but each word of recollection he spoke seemed to threaten him with madness. They wanted to know if Travis had died “gallantly,” and he said he had, and he even made up a story about Travis drawing his sword after he’d been shot and running it through a Mexican officer. He did not know why he told that story, only that they seemed to want to hear something like it, and in the act of substituting this scene for the horrible true moment in which Travis’ brains had flown out of the back of his head he felt as if he had managed to place a plaster over a wound of memory that otherwise might never heal. (Harrigan 527)

Joe does not romanticize his former master’s fate as later generations of Anglo mythmakers would do. Rather, the story is a survival strategy for dealing with personal trauma in the wake of the battle. Travis’ sacrifice—which would be invoked by the rallying cry to “Remember the Alamo!”—is not what most concerns Joe. For him, his fabricated story is rather a call to un-remember, through which he tries to alleviate the very real carnage in his own memory. Brear’s notion of the myth as a “violent birth through death” does not signify for Joe. Rather, his erstwhile master merely, and quite finally, dies.

When Joe sees the Mexican soldiers during one of their pickets, he describes them as having “skin almost as dark as his own” (Harrigan 412). Joe and the soldiers are allied by skin pigmentation, which is generally what disqualifies or denigrates Mexican and African American accounts in traditional stories of the Texas creation myth. But, as with Joe, the novel devotes a considerable amount of its narrative to the Mexican experi-ence at the Alamo. Santa Anna, of course, figures in the story, but more significant to Harrigan’s project of transcending the romantic narrative are the stories related by the historical Colonel Juan Almonte and the fictional characters of Lieutenant Telesforo Villasenor and First Sergeant Blas Angel Montoya.


Almonte serves to deconstruct the creation myth as it applies to the Mexican policies against which the Texans rebel. Almonte explains:

As to the grievances…what more can the president do? He has all but revoked the provisions of the 1830 law that the colonists found so odi-ous. Immigration has been reopened, it is now legal to speak English, a blind eye has been turned to the practice of the Protestant religion, the laws of indentured servitude have been postponed so that your great cotton empire can be built upon the suffering of black slaves. Yes, there are still tariffs. But doesn’t a nation have a right to impose tariffs on foreign goods? Doesn’t even the wondrous United States protect its economy in such a manner? (Harrigan 167)

Almonte asserts that Americans “have a habit of carrying their constitution in their pockets, expecting it to be honored by every other country” (Har-rigan 169). His argument is legitimate and persuasive in its deconstruction of the Anglo-freedom/ Mexican-tyranny binary of Travis’ paradigm. The revocation of the 1830 law, which altered the liberal statutes of the 1824 Mexican Constitution that the Texans, at least in theory and rhetoric, were fighting to reinstate, renders their grievances irrelevant and challenges the entire creation myth.

Almonte’s argument against the Anglo-freedom/ Mexican-tyranny model is reiterated by Don Osbaldo Espinosa, a Tejano loyalist to the Mexi-can government. About the true purposes of the Texan rebellion, he says: “[W]hat these sons of Jefferson, these supposed believers in the rights of man, truly desire [is] an empire for slavery” (Harrigan 303). Harrigan offers Mexican characters who defy stereotypes, and he imbues them with voices that criticize the American creation myth promoted by Thomas Jefferson and the other “Sons of Liberty,” which the Texans appropriated. In effect, the Mexican characters are representatives of the contemporary audience that turns a critical eye toward both creation myths.

The most common and egregious portrayal of the Mexican soldiers in earlier narratives is of the nameless, faceless, marauding horde that swarms the Alamo during the attack. In the film Martyrs of the Alamo, for instance, Flores reports a scene depicting hand-to-hand fighting, where the “screen shifts to a small, unarmed boy cowering behind a cannon, tak-ing cover from the fighting around him. From nowhere appears the arm of a Mexican soldier grabbing the youth by the neck and pulling him out of camera view” (101). At its best, the screen time afforded the Mexican participants portrays a drunken, slovenly population; at its worst, they are a disembodied menace. The novel offers no such stereotypes; rather, it is the Mexican soldiers who voice ethnographies and thereby prescribe cultural identity to their Anglo-Texan adversaries. Sergeant Blas tells his troops: “The nortes are not an army….They are adventurers, and so there is no standard weapon. Many of them, I’ve been told, own Kentucky rifles, which can hit a man at two hundred and fifty yards if well aimed, but many


others only have shotguns. And still others only Indian tomahawks and scalping knives.” One soldier asks if the Texans indeed scalp their enemies and another answers, “They do…. And cut off their scrotums to use as coin purses” (Harrigan 125). The inversion of traditional Othering discourses, here focused on Mexican attitudes and depictions of Anglos, challenges the myth’s portrayals of race and virtue and attributes “savage” characteristics to the Anglo participants.

In the romantic portrayals, the Mexican army also seems to material-ize magically out of the Texas prairie for the sole purpose of slaughtering the huddled Anglos defending the Alamo. Little mention is given of the depredations experienced by the army, largely made up of conscripts, during their brutal winter march through the Coahuilan desert to San Antonio. Harrigan relates this experience through Sergeant Blas, who tries to transport his forces safely through the harsh environ-ment. His troops are attacked by Indians and suffer widespread sick-ness, famine and dehydration, and many casualties. They pass graves on the roadside marking the dead from advance Mexican columns, as well as the carcasses of oxen, horses, and mules, and Blas considers its effect: “Observing all this wreckage [he] wondered if there would be anything left of the army when they reached Texas” (Harrigan 279).

Finally, Harrigan has a Mexican character who mirrors the ambitious and glory-seeking Travis who “hungered and thirsted for fame…not the kind of fame which satisfies the ambitions of the duelist and desperado, but the exalted fame which crowns the doer of great deeds in a good cause” (Roberts and Olsen 28). The same ambition is seen in the fictional Telesforo Villasenor. Like Travis, Villasenor considers the Texas Revolution the vehicle by which to achieve his destiny. Telesforo exhibits a “yearning to raise himself above other men, to live apart from them at a higher pitch of feeling and experience.” Like Travis, he has a “boiling need to be noticed,” which he assumes “was a trait of all exceptional men.” He acknowledges how on several occasions he “had imagined himself gravely accepting General Houston’s sword on some blood-soaked swath of Texas prairie” (Harrigan 228). Any equation of a Mexican soldier with one of the Alamo heroes would be unfathomable heresy in romantic narratives of the battle, but Villasenor’s musing on the importance of personal ambition, the meaning of fame and glory, bravery and distinction, hits closer to Travis’ motivations than the creation myth’s sole emphasis on sacrifice ever acknowledges. Through Almonte, Espinosa,

Through Almonte, Espinosa, Blas, and especially Villasenor, the Mexican experience is not only provided a voice, it is explicitly linked to the Anglo experience and provides the kind of balance required by the cultural pressures for change in the Alamo story.


Blas, and especially Villasenor, the Mexican experience is not only provided a voice, it is explicitly linked to the Anglo experience and provides the kind of balance required by the cultural pressures for change in the Alamo story. The novel’s erosion of strict racial binaries reveals at least a beginning to address the problem that Brear notes of Hispanic inclusion.

Reclaiming the Alamo: The Gates of the Alamo as Consummatory Myth

When a young man, Terrell Mott regards battle in a fashion similar to Villasenor. Terrell holds a conviction that “there was something fine within him…something that had not yet emerged, and that could emerge—could shine clear—only in the heat of some great extremity, some great battle.” He feels that “[i]t did not much matter to him if he survived such a battle, as long as he could have even a glimpse of his true self” (Harrigan 296). In

the main narrative, Terrell fights beside Bowie and other Texan ir-regulars at the battle of Lipantitlán and, while scouting from the Alamo position, is the first to sight the advancing Mexican army. But his most significant function in the novel occurs in the Battle of Flow-ers sections, set on April 21, 1911, which bookend the main narrative. Here, Terrell is a 91-year-old man who is honored in a parade and

rides in an automobile adorned with a placard that announces his achieve-ments: “Mr. Mott/ Messenger of the Alamo/ Last Surviving Hero of San Jacinto/ Former Mayor of San Antonio” (Harrigan 3). In the novel’s opening Terrell is an artifact of the creation, propped up by the ministrants of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT). He serves first to override the romanticization of the Alamo before then recognizing and reasserting the necessity of the origin myth.

The Battle of Flowers parade was initiated in 1891 to salute “the heroes of the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto” (“Fiesta San Antonio”). But Flores says the event, like the DRT organization, demonstrates the ways in which “[t]he Alamo as symbol…is pressed into service…for the ruling classes as they attempt to solidify, through spatial dominance, their hold on the local terrain” (158). Brear also notes how these social and pseudo-royal organi-zations, like the Battle of Flowers Association and the Order of the Alamo, arose from Texans’ obsession with tracing lineage to the Alamo defenders

Terrell, the reluctant and exploited representative of the Alamo’s primary myth, is held hostage by his own granddaughter and the romance she represents, for she urges the driver to make sure that “my grandfather doesn’t escape.”


and from the more general “late-nineteenth-century interest in historical pageantry” (87). Like the DRT, these organizations enabled the ruling elite to assert their dominion over the Alamo, both as site and symbol and to appropriate the creation myth for their own social agendas.

Terrell is dubious of the elitist organizations and their rituals: “There was something sinister…about the whole affair,” he thinks, especially in the way “[t]he men of the Order of the Alamo, in their secret balloting to decide which girls would be elevated to royalty, reminded him of heathen potentates reserving for themselves that year’s crop of ripe young virgins” (Harrigan 5). While physically participating in the parade, internally he is firmly situated outside the romantic myth and criticizes its various appropriations of the Alamo to construct social and capitalist Anglo iden-tities. First, he feels that San Antonio “would always be a Mexican city, in its heart and his,” and he realizes that in appropriating the Alamo as space and symbol of the creation myth the effective agenda of the ruling Anglo elite is to erase all Hispanic heritage from the site. This effort is so successful that a Mexican restaurant is labeled as a “‘Spanish’ restaurant,” revealing how “the Anglo victors…had succeeded in giving the word ‘Mexican’ a distasteful turn.” And in addition to the social “priests,” he notes how capitalist ones are also complicit in the Alamo’s appropriation, as the San Antonio streets are lined with “the Alamo Butter Depot, the Alamo Cornice Works, the Alamo Savings and Loan, the Alamo Poultry Yard” (Harrigan 7, 569).

The mythopoeic attitude, of which Terrell is a representative, is absent in the contemporary audience, and he is consequently described as a “relic” and a “curiosity” that is “on display” (Harrigan 3, 9, 14). Any insight into the mythopoeic state of mind behind the creation myth, to which he is a witness, is irrelevant to the artists and rituals of the romantic myth, wherein a woman speaking about the fall of the Alamo is chastised by Terrell’s granddaughter, not for her message but for “wearing artificial flowers to the Battle of Flowers parade.” Meanwhile the whole event is pure artifice for Terrell. (Harrigan 14).

The collision of the romanced Alamo of 1911 and its reality in Terrell’s memory finds its two ultimate metaphorical representations in the parade and the actual Battle of Flowers event. As the parade makes its way toward the Alamo mission, Terrell sees that “[t]he carriage conveying the Duchess of Bluebonnets had overturned while negotiating a sharp left turn” (8). In the wreck’s aftermath, “[t]he duchess was lying on her back in a nest of chiffon,” while the “frightened horses were still dragging the capsized carriage down the street, scraping off its veneer of bluebonnets and sow-ing confusion throughout the whole parade” (8). The incident functions as a metaphor for the novel’s project, wherein the pageantry ritualized in the romantic myth is first revealed as hyperbolic and artificial and then literally capsized by the presence of Terrell. His memory destabilizes and


re-signifies the parade’s representations of the creation myth. Terrell’s granddaughter Parthenia, meanwhile, serves as the agent of the romantic myth—a poetess-priestess of the past—who attempts to restore order to the parade and thus its romantic mythic significance. Terrell, the reluctant and exploited representative of the Alamo’s primary myth, is held hostage by his own granddaughter and the romance she represents, for she urges the driver to make sure that “my grandfather doesn’t escape” (Harrigan 8).

When Parthenia ultimately restores order, the “haphazard and me-andering” streets of San Antonio lead to an Alamo that looks “like some charged object in a fairy tale” (Harrigan 9). After speeches by the artificial flower woman and the governor, the ritual Battle of Flowers commences at the foot of the Alamo church:

For a long moment the façade of the Alamo was obscured by a continuous flurry of flowers, the blossoms wafting to the ground like heavy flakes of snow. The duchesses in their carriages were giddy. The governor smiled indulgently, and the onlookers in the streets cheered the battle on. Terrell could not get over the softness and silence with which the flowers drifted to the pavement in front of the Alamo. The old church, he realized for the first time, looked like a tormented face, with its gap-ing mouth of a doorway and the shaded niches above, which had once held statues of saints, now as dark and empty as the eye sockets of a skull. The face looked on as the flowers fell, onto ground that had once been covered with thick pools of black blood, the dead lying in stupe-fied silence with their vitals coiling out of their bodies, steaming with warmth in the cold air of that March morning. All it had taken was one terrible hour. (Harrigan 14-15)

As the romantic replaces the primary myth, the flowers replace bullets and ordinance to reveal how the ritualized event and its purposes obfuscate and gild the Alamo and its heroes. The current representatives of the Tribe are not soldiers but debutantes and secret societies. But for Terrell, the hollow ritual invokes a reverie of the battle’s carnage, in which images of blood and entrails are covered in flowers.

In the opening Battle of Flowers section Terrell is so disgusted with the romantic portrayals of the event that he wants to destroy the myth entirely. The Alamo “church itself, which the Army had crowned with a curving parapet that reminded Terrell of the headboard of a bed, bore no real resemblance to the broken, roofless, weedy ruin of the siege. They could tear it down too, as far as he was concerned. Everything passes from the earth, why not the sacred Alamo?” (Harrigan 11-12). However, his rever-ies reveal to him the importance of the creation myth and its shrine to the Texan people. In the concluding section, he thinks:

Alamo—it was hard to remember when that word had just been a word, when the place it described was not the Texas holy of holies, but just an old broken-down assemblage of buildings on the edge of Béxar, where long ago an event that was far more ghastly than glorious occurred. No wonder that the doctor in the jaguar suit had wanted to meet him. He was


a Mexican himself, or at least of Mexican heritage, his people cast out and displaced by the marauding nortes; yet even he could not turn away from the stirring myth that the Alamo embodied, a myth as carefully cultivated as a hothouse plant: Travis drawing his line in the dirt with his sword, calling on his men to give their lives for liberty. The men answering his call, crossing the line, their eyes raised to heaven, God Himself smiling down approvingly upon their sacrifice. (Harrigan 569)

As relic, artifact, and historical curiosity of the Texas Revolution, Terrell realizes “he was the only man alive that could dispute the myth if he chose to, who could point out that the Alamo garrison had indeed given their lives—but…not exaltedly” (Harrigan 569). Yet the myth retains power over his life in all of its representations and forms. He is described in the novel’s final lines as being “suspended between those two realms,” those of primary and romantic myth awareness. This resulting tension estab-lishes him as a consummatory artist of the Texas creation myth: he is “an ancient man recalling a primeval Texas, his mind vibrant with a thousand things—like the sight of those flowers today falling across the face of the Alamo—that were not in his power to forget” (577). He uses the images of the romantic stage (the flowers) as a conduit to his memory of the cre-ation (the sacrificial blood and bullets) and acknowledges that the Alamo myth cannot be repudiated, destroyed, or forgotten. Rather, Terrell’s clos-ing reverie confirms T.R. Fehrenbach’s claim that people “can cherish old myths without having to reimplement them” (224). And if this goal can be successfully accomplished, Harrigan suggests, the myth may also provide Texans with understanding of where we’re going.

Notes

1 Wheelwright defines the “mythopoeic mode of consciousness” as “the state of mind that transforms experience, perception, and narration into the materials of a myth” (Slotkin 7).

2 Some say Crockett died heroically, slaying dozens of Mexican soldiers before falling. Others claim Crockett surrendered ignominiously, only to be executed by Santa Anna. For fuller discussions, see William C. Davis. “How Davy Probably Didn’t Die,” Journal of the Alamo Battlefield Association 2 (Fall 1997): 3-35, and José Enrique de la Peña. With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1975.

Works Cited

Bass, Rick. “Introduction,” Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 2003. Print.

“Fiesta San Antonio.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical As-sociation, n.d. Web. 12 April 2009.

Brear, Holly Beachley. Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. Print.


“Census and Census Records.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Histori-cal Association, n.d. Web. 12 April 2009.

Fehrenbach, T.R. “Texas Mythology: Now and Forever.” Texas Myths. Ed. Robert F. O’Connor. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1986. Print.

Harrigan, Stephen. The Gates of the Alamo. New York: Penguin Paperback, 2000. Print.

Flores, Richard R. Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol. Austin: U of Texas P, 2002. Print.

“Proclamation of Sam Houston, A Call for Volunteers, December 12, 1835,” Texas State Library & Archives Commission, n.d. Web. 12 April 2009.

Roberts, Randy and James S. Olson, A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory. New York: Touchstone, 2001. Print.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. 1st paperback ed., 2000. Print.

“Stephen Harrigan,” interview by Ramona Cearley, Conversations with Texas Writ-ers. Eds. Francis Leonard and Ramona Cearley. Austin: U of Texas P, 2005, 135-144. Print.

“Texas.” U.S. Census Bureau: State and County QuickFacts, n.d. Web. 12 April 2009.

Real-Life Legends and Reluctant Revolutionaries: Stephen Harrigan's The Gates of the Alamo

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