My family divided up this past Memorial Day, with half of us headed to Baja Alabama, and the other half bound for Baja Texas. Those of you who understand Spanish know that “Baja” as an adjective means “low,” but when it comes to land it refers to “lower.” Thus, for us, Baja Alabama meant Gulf Shores, and Baja Texas meant San Antonio, respectively.
I once got called on the carpet for referring to the Pensacola area as Baja Florida. It was my last duty station before retirement, and I worked out of the Naval Air Station which, at the time, was the home of the admiral who oversaw all Navy training throughout the world. He was my boss, and I was responsible for all Navy chaplain training worldwide, including the Chaplain School, the Chaplain Clerk School (Religious Program Specialists), all continuing education programs, as well as our post-graduate degree programs at various universities around the country. I was “double-hatted,” responsible both to this admiral and to the Chief of Chaplains in Washington, D.C. The admiral was a decent enough fellow, but his Number Two was hard to get along with. He was a former F-4 Phantom back-seater, and we had already had a run-in on Okinawa years before. I felt like he had experienced one hard landing too many, but he was a brave man.
Since I was on the road most of the time, to stay sane, I volunteered to write a weekly column for the Naval Air Station newspaper. The column that the #2 didn’t like was an innocuous little story about the condominiums that were springing up like mushrooms along the Florida Gulf coast. He felt that the term “Baja Florida” was disrespectful, and that I shouldn’t have used it. I tried to explain what “Baja” meant, but he wouldn’t have it.
However, I digress. Riding in a car for the twelve hours to San Antonio, thankfully with other family members driving, I had ample time to reflect on events I’ve associated with the passing Texas towns over the years. Let me share a few as we roll down Interstate 10, headed west.
Beaumont smells bad and, at night, when all the oil refineries and other petroleum-related industries are lighted up, it looks like a dystopian world right out of the Harrison Ford movie, “Blade Runner” (1982). All we need is to see Rutger Hauer’s warrior “replicant” character, Roy Batty, hitchhiking alongside the road. If we picked him up, maybe he’d say:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Foregoing some of the most famous lines in cinematic history, Beaumont, or rather, Port Arthur, a few miles away, is home to two noteworthy people firmly imbedded in American culture: high school classmates Jimmy Jones and Janis Joplin. Jones (1943 -) the two-time Super Bowl winning coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was once (1966) an assistant football coach at Picayune Memorial High School in Picayune, Mississippi. Janis Joplin (1943-1970), the famous but tragic rock and roll singer, came to my mind a couple hours ago, passing through Baton Rouge: “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train.” (“Me and Bobby Magee,” 1971).
Near Baytown, just twenty miles off the highway, is Texas City, Texas, the site of the “deadliest nautical industrial accident in United States history.” On 16 April, 1947, the freighter, SS Grandcamp, loaded with volatile ammonia nitrate, similar to what was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, as well as small arms ammunition and bales of sisal twine, cooked off on its own. The resultant explosion killed at least 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department. The explosion also triggered the first ever class-action lawsuit against the United States government.
I just heard on the radio, as we passed a road sign indicating the way to Galveston, the annual hurricane predictions from Colorado State University. They are predicting eleven major hurricanes this year. This curious juxtaposition of events reminded me of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, also known as the Great Galveston Flood. Cited as the greatest natural disaster in United States history, the storm claimed at least 8,000 victims in the United States, with most occurring in or near Galveston. One positive result of the tragic storm was the reorganization of a National Weather Service, more focused on the accurate prediction of hurricane strength and landing perimeters.
A major shortcoming of my life is that I tend to get caught up in the minutia of the moment, rather than focus on the goal which, in this case, is to visit San Antonio, one of my favorite cities. For some, a visit to San Antonio is a visit to Sea World, Mexican food at the fine restaurants along the River Walk, a night ride on one of the many tourist boats plying the hemmed in San Antonio River, or perhaps a visit to one of the five missions which made up the original settlement of San Antonio. The village was given its name on 13 June, 1691, by a Spanish expedition which came to a river they called “Rio San Antonio” in honor of the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua. For others, older people like me, it’s an opportunity to pick up some comfortable SAS shoes (San Antonio Shoes) at the factory. My HQ in San Antonio has always been a hotel, right on the River Walk, which was formerly the Alamo National Bank. It was built in the early 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash, and its Art Deco styling is reminiscent of a bygone age.
For many, however, San Antonio is synonymous with the Alamo, a historic Spanish mission compound which was the site of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, a pivotal event in the Texas Revolution in which three American folk heroes, William Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett were killed.
When you walk into the Alamo church, which along with the adjacent Long Barracks, are the only original buildings remaining, you walk into the ongoing controversy about why the defenders of the Alamo wanted independence from Mexico in the first place. As with any drama, you must first identify the players: the “Texians” and the “Tejanos.” Texians were Anglo-American residents of Mexican Texas and, later, the Republic of Texas. Today the term is used to identify early Anglo settlers of Texas, especially those who supported the Texas Revolution. Mexican settlers of that era and area are referred to as “Tejanos,” and all residents of modern Texas are known as “Texans.”
While the current governor of Texas has decreed that Texas public schools teach a more “patriotic” version of the causes of the Texas Revolution against Mexico, the facts seem to indicate that the real cause was Mexico’s abolition of slavery in 1821, shortly after it gained independence from Spain. Texian settlers, many who had migrated from the American south in search of cheap land, depended heavily on slave labor and saw their way of life threatened unless they gained independence from Mexico. Although some disagree, many historians feel that the Texas Revolution was caused by Mexico’s abolition of slavery and cultural differences between the Texians and the Mexicans. Frankly, it sounds very much like the old state’s rights vs. slavery argument which led to the American Civil War, and which still finds traction in some circles today.
Although the Revolution began with a series of victories for the Texians, a large army of Mexican soldiers and calvary under General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna soon trapped a small garrison of rebels at a former mission in San Antonio, called the Alamo, and named for the tall cottonwood trees that surrounded it. During the resultant battle, which took place from February 23 to March 6, 1836, all 257 defenders were either killed or executed by Santa Anna’s troops.
Mexican losses were estimated to range from 600 to 1600 with hundreds wounded. The Texians gained some revenge about a month later at the Battle of San Jacinto, near present day Galveston, where their army, led by General Samuel Houston, defeated Santa Anna’s forces and captured him in a massacre which lasted only 18 minutes. This was the final and decisive battle of the Texas Revolution.
Whatever the reasons for the creation of the Republic of Texas, and the actual truth about the Alamo fighters’ motivation, which has become shrouded in myth, I have always been more interested in the personalities involved. While not to minimize the worth of the other 254 killed, three men have long been identified with the battle: William Barret Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett. For all of them, frontier Texas was the place where they went to start, and tragically end, the second act of their lives.
Travis, credited by some with single-handedly starting the Texas Revolution against Mexico, was a failed lawyer from Clairborne, Alabama, when he arrived in south Texas in 1831. Some of his first clients were men who evidently shared his distaste for the Mexican government. He soon emerged as the loudest, angriest voice calling for them to be driven out of his adopted home. When the Texian leader, Stephen F. Austin was imprisoned in Mexico, Travis filled the vacuum of leadership, and his actions resulted in his being named a co-commander of the Alamo defenders, along with Jim Bowie. Unfortunately, as reported by one of the few Alamo survivors, a soldier’s wife, Travis was among the first to die, struck in the forehead by a musket bullet.
Perhaps made more famous by Walt Disney than his participation in the Battle of the Alamo, Davy Crockett was born into a frontier family in what is now eastern Tennessee. After settling on a farm near the Alabama border, he was elected to the state legislature. When a flood wiped out the farm, he moved to western Tennessee, and it was there that he developed a talent for killing bears, ringing up 105 in one year alone. Popular tales of his bear hunting propelled him to a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. At the height of his fame, however, he was defeated for reelection and famously said: “I told the people of my district that, if they reelected me, I would serve them faithfully; if not they could go to hell, and I would go to Texas.” Moving to San Antonio, he, of all things, joined the army as a private only to meet his destiny at the Battle of the Alamo. By all accounts, he fought to the death.
Of the Alamo’s holy trinity that followers of the siege would come to embrace, Jim Bowie would go down as the battle’s tragic hero, brought to a sad end by bad luck and the bottle. Raised in a large Louisiana family around modern Alexandria, he was perhaps the prototype of the roving western gunfighter. After winning a duel on a Mississippi River sandbar, using his enormous “Bowie knife,” the blade of which was more than twelve inches long, he discretely moved to San Antonio in 1828. Dabbling in land speculation, he soon amassed claim to more than one million acres. The Mexican government, however, annulled his sketchy “purchases,” which suddenly fueled his zeal for an independent Texas. While back in Natchez, Mississippi, on a business trip, he nearly died in a friend’s home of the cholera, which had recently killed his wife in San Antonio. Returning ill to San Antonio, and to constant drinking, his natural leadership and fighting qualities led him to the Alamo, where he was reportedly killed in his sickbed, unable to defend himself.
So ended the lives of the Alamo’s most celebrated defenders. In a famous and often quoted scene in George Orwell’s novel “1984” (1949), Winston Smith wakes up one day in the Ministry of Truth and realizes the fundamental principle of history: “Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.” If the Alamo and its questionable history as loved by so many Texans in the present are any indication, the myth of the Alamo’s past will persevere, even as it continues to be celebrated today.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
