Amazon.com: Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis: William C. Davis: Books

Amazon.com
Ever since the day in March 1836 when an obscure Spanish mission in Texas fell to Mexican forces led by President Santa Anna, Americans have been exhorted to "remember the Alamo." And remember it we do--primarily as the place where American folk legends Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis met their end fighting for Texas independence. Though it is primarily the Alamo we remember today, the battle itself takes up just a few pages of William C. Davis's Three Roads to the Alamo; Davis is far more interested in what brought three such disparate men as Crockett, Bowie, and Travis to Texas in the first place than in how they died there. As any schoolchild knows, Davy Crockett was the "king of the wild frontier," a bona fide folk hero in his own time who rode his legend to political office first in Tennessee and then as a United States congressman. Bowie was both less well known and less heroic--a land speculator not above resorting to fraud and forgery to get what he wanted, while William Travis, the youngest of the three, brought little but potential with him to Texas.

Davis does a good job of illuminating both the personalities of his subjects and the situation in which they found themselves in Texas. He thoroughly explores the lives of these three men--their successes, their failures, their hopes for the future--and lays out the arguments for and against Texan independence from Mexico in which they found themselves embroiled. By the time Crockett, Bowie, and Travis finally arrive at the Alamo, it seems the inevitable conclusion to the roads they each have been traveling over the course of their lifetimes. Three Roads to the Alamo is a fine piece of historical research and an entertaining read, as well.

From Publishers Weekly
In 1836, Bowie and Travis, who would lead the 200 doomed Texas rebels at the Alamo, met for the first time at the walled adobe buildings that were largely comprised of the church of San Jose y Santiago del Alamo de Parras. A few days later, David Crockett wandered in from Tennessee, where he had lost his bid for reelection to Congress and vowed never to return. In the siege of the compound, all three would die violently in the predawn hours of March 6. Crockett had long been a legend in his own time when he turned up in San Antonio to join Bowie and Travis in the pantheon of frontier gallants. Davis, a much-published historian of 19th-century America, contends that we "part reluctantly with our myths, and the more so when by removing the fable, we leave a hole in the story that we cannot fill with fact." In weaving the three strands of his narrative, which come together only in the last pages as the frontiersman, con man and entrepreneur join forces in the Alamo, Davis evokes boisterous Jacksonian America. His 187 pages of notes attest to the thoroughness of his research. Of the three, Crockett comes off the best, as inventive, yet not immoral like the other two. Bowie, a forger of land claims, and Travis, an unscrupulous country lawyer, hardly fit our prescription for heroes after Davis is done with them. His relentless search for facts sometimes bogs down the reader in excessive detail, yet that may be the best way to reduce romantic myths to reality. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis (Hardcover)

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