How Texas Made the Old West Even Wilder and Bloodier

At least in my Texas history class, we weren't taught that the Alamo was a battle of strategic importance. And obviously, the Texans lost, so it didn't help us in that way. It was though an important cultural moment that became a rallying cry and unifying force (ie 'those evil Mexican bastards massacred us at the Alamo, we need revenge!').

And its hard to argue with the result the Texans got.

The writer of this article in Texas Monthly, Bryan Burrough, co-authored a recent book about the Alamo: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (2021)

As the title indicates, the book demolishes one of the biggest myths in American history: the legend of the Alamo. The author follows the trail of hagiographic heroism from 1836, the year of the iconic battle led by William Barret Travis, a man whose own memoirs show that he was a syphilitic womanizer. Like many of the slave traders and land speculators who illegally crossed into the Mexican province of Tejas, Travis was a failed businessman, crushed by debt, who abandoned his wife and children in Alabama to play soldier of fortune on the frontier. Worse, this incompetent officer disobeyed direct orders from Sam Houston to evacuate the old Spanish mission at the Alamo, which was understood by virtually everyone to be impossible to defend against the Mexican army. The predictable result was total defeat and slaughter. After that, myth-makers began re-writing the history to turn the Alamo into a heroic tale of military glory. The mission itself was mismanaged for more than a century, large sections of the original structure were allowed to fall into disrepair, and the iconic shape of the Alamo building - the bell-shaped facade on the front wall of the chapel - was added many years after the battle of 1836. Today the battle over the Alamo continues in the form of struggles by the community to recover the authentic history of the place, while hard-line conservatives insist on maintaining the fiction of the fake past.

https://www.amazon.com/Forget-Alamo-Rise-Fall-American/dp/19...*

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> People genuinely believe it [....] passing laws based on perceived views

The factual accuracy doesn't actually matter though. The laws are being passed based on the current generation's values. And that seems fine with regard to values. "Genuine belief" is kinda what makes a thought a value.

My great grandfather wrote down some stories of his life in Southern Kansas at the time, and I was always struck by how less exciting it was than you’d think.

He talks about taking a horse and cart alone into Oklahoma “Indian territory” and how he scrounged up an old pistol because he was afraid of being scalped. He spends two nights camped out and every group of native Americans that pass by him just entirely ignores him.

He also talks about going to see the Dalton gang just after their famous shootout, and mentions how it was weird to see the bodies just laid out and people cutting scraps of clothing off them as souvenirs. He said it wasn’t romantic at all, just depressing.

When you go see renaissance cultural stuff romanticizing the ancient romans and greeks do you crap all over it on the basis that the societies they're romanticizing had spicy takes on women or that their economies were comparatively primitive? Are you going to complain that they didn't have running water and electricity in the old west while you're at it?

The past was generally rife with problems that hadn't yet been solved. Some of those were technical and some of them social. But dismissing it all as racism or whatever is misleading at best. People (generally, I'm sure there's a few exceptions) aren't romanticizing the racism or the violence or the outhouses or the lack of antibiotics or any other negatives that have since been solved or improved upon, when they romanticize these periods of history.

The Confederate diaspora was relatively small compared to immigrants and Northern-born settlers.

Originally an anti-littering ad campaign.

(seriously!)