Back To Basics:
Conspiracies, Common Sense, And Occam's Razor
by James E. Crisp
his is the last installment of my response to Thomas Ricks Lindley's extended critique of my 1994 article on the de la Peña diary and the death of David Crockett.1Throughout these recent issues ofThe Alamo Journal, four alleged eyewitness accounts of the execution of prisoners following the battle of the Alamo have been the chief focus of Lindley's dissenting analyses, and of my replies as well. It might be helpful at this point to review briefly our basic agreements and disagreements with regard to these four documents, three of which identify Crockett as one of the slain prisoners.
The Four Documents
The first of these documents is the memoir published in Mexico in 1837 by Ramón Martínez Caro, the personal secretary to General Antonio López de Santa during the Texas campaign. Since Lindley and I agree that this was an authentic eyewitness, whose reportage of the incident is likely to be accurate in the essentials, Martínez Caro's account of the last defenders of the Alamo is reproduced below, as translated in 1928 by Carlos Eduardo Castañeda:
The enemy died to a man and its loss may be said to have been 183 men, the sum total of their force. Six women who were captured were set at liberty. Among the 183 killed there were five who were discovered by General Castrillón hiding after the assault. He took them immediately to the presence of His Excellency who had come up by this time. When he presented the prisoners, he was severely reprimanded for not having killed them on the spot, after which he turned his back upon Castrillón while the soldiers stepped out of their ranks and set upon the prisoners until they were all killed.2
In a footnote, Martínez Caro added, "We all witnessed this outrage which humanity condemns but which was committed as described. This is a cruel truth, but I cannot omit it."3
The second of the four accounts is the one ostensibly written by Lt. Col. José Enrique de la Peña. This lengthy memoir of the rebellion in Texas, which first appeared in print in Mexico City in 1955 and was published in English by the Texas A&M University Press in 1975, is based on manuscripts which are now housed at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Tom Lindley argues, as does his colleague Bill Groneman, that these manuscripts are forgeries, despite the public notice given in Mexican newspapers by the historical de la Peña in 1837 that he had kept a diary during the Texas campaign, and despite de la Peña's published statement from prison in 1839 that his long-awaited observations, based on this diary, had not yet been published but were "almost finished."4For reasons that I have already explained in great detail (and for others which I will outline at the end of this article), I remain convinced that the de la Peña manuscripts at UTSA are genuine, and that they do indeed constitute this Mexican officer's memoirs of the war in Texas.
The third account is the letter written by Texan Sergeant George Dolson from Galveston Island to his brother in Michigan in July of 1836, and published in September of that year in a Detroit newspaper. The story of Crockett's death related in this letter is based, according to Dolson, on an interview with a Mexican prisoner of war at Camp Travis, on Galveston Island, where Dolson was serving as an interpreter for Col. James Morgan. Lindley and I discussed at great length this letter and its proper interpretation in our second exchange in the pages of this journal. While Lindley believes that the Dolson letter is a fatally flawed work that is partly "fiction," I maintain that the alleged flaws may be reasonably explained (as shown in my second installment), and that this letter is a credible report by the Texan sergeant of what he was told by the unnamed captive Mexican officer.
It is important to note that the Dolson letter, though written in the summer of 1836, was not discovered by historians until 1960, and thus could hardly have been utilized by any alleged forger of the de la Peña memoir, which was published in Mexico in 1955. Moreover, given the fact that the Martínez Caro account cited above did not appear in print until 1837, Dolson could not have utilized it in any fictionalized elaboration of the prisoners' execution. This apparent mutual independence of the very similar Dolson and de la Peña accounts (and the fact that they are in basic harmony with Martínez Caro's description of events) struck me initially as most impressive, and as the strongest single indication of their accuracy and authenticity.
Tom Lindley is to be commended for bringing a fourth document to the center of our attention, however: a letter from Galveston written on June 9—almost six weeks before Dolson's. This letter was published in theNew YorkCourier and Enquirer, and subsequently reprinted in other publications, including theFrankfort(Kentucky)Commonwealthof July 27, 1836. Although I did, indeed, fail to notice the significance of this letter in my 1994 article, the existence and influence of the letter was already well known. Dan Kilgore, in his 1978 bookHow Did Davy Die?, discussed the fact that it was reprinted widely, and that portions of it were incorporated into a spurious Crockett "autobiography" that was published in the summer of 1836.5
For reasons to be discussed more fully below, Lindley also rejects as fiction this earlier letter's story of Crockett's execution. Lindley is right when he suggests that the scenario of Crockett's death described in the June 9 letter from theCourier and Enquirertheoreticallycouldhave been plagiarized by either a fictionalizing Dolson or by a supposed forger of the de la Peña manuscripts. But to borrow (and to rephrase) Lindley's own words, his evidence for such plagiarism is "thin" at best, and it is "probably not" sufficient to prove his conclusions "beyond a reasonable doubt." Let's examine his reasons for insisting thatboththe Dolson letterandthe letter of June 9 should be dismissed as "fiction."6
A Dolson-Green Conspiracy?
Since the Dolson letter is clearly a contemporary document written by known member of the Texan army, Lindley must explain why it is not a credible source of information. Dismissing the explanations of the letter's alleged "flaws" which I offered in my original article and in my second reply inThe Alamo Journal, Lindley maintains that the letter is a work of partially fictionalized "propaganda," written by Dolson either at the behest of Thomas Jefferson Green, or in an attempt "to curry favor with Green."7
Lindley believes that Dolson took the information from the earlierCourier and Enquirerletter, and added material that would have been helpful to Green's efforts to secure his rank of general in the Texan army and to simultaneously recoup the small fortune that he had sunk into his recruiting efforts for the infant Texas Republic. The payoff to Dolson for producing this propaganda, Lindley seems to hint, was his promotion from private to orderly sergeant while serving in Green's brigade in July of 1836. Should this be true, Dolson would certainly appear to have sold his honesty cheaply! However, Lindley claims that further evidence for a "conspiracy" between Green and Dolson is to be found in similarities between Dolson's letter and Green's writings of the time.8
What are these "similarities," and how compelling are they in providing evidence of collusion between Green and Dolson in the production of a phony narrative of Crockett's execution? In the first place, Lindley informs us that "both men wanted to prevent Santa Anna's return to Mexico." Wow! So did virtually everyone else in the army! Interim President David G. Burnet's policy of repatriating Santa Anna in exchange for his promise to arrange for Mexico's recognition of Texan independence had produced by early June of 1836 what historian Paul D. Lack calls a "popular rebellion"—a rebellion which reached its dramatic climax when "a body of soldiers" seized from shipboard the somewhat traumatized Mexican president—an event described in several of the documents quoted by Lindley.9
In one of these documents, a letter of July 31 to Sam Houston, Green himself spoke to the near-universal sentiment for detaining the dictator when he asserted that "The Army when about 2000 strong voted with solitary exception to bring Santa Ana [sic] to the Army for safe keeping & future disposition." Of course, this reference to the size of the army becomes Lindley's second sign of collusion, when he notices that Dolson, writing earlier that month, told his brother in Michigan that "upwards of 2000 volunteers have entered the country since April last."10This must be what Tom Lindley means by "thin" evidence of a conspiracy! It was not easy in the summer of 1836, with troops passing freely both into and out of the Texas Army, to know just how many soldiers were in it. Professor Lack's meticulous study of the revolutionary army led him to estimate that new recruits brought its numbers up to between 1,300 and 1,700 by early July, with perhaps a total of 2,500 men reached over the next two months.11 In other words, if someone were to make a guess in mid-to late July as to the size of the army, 2000 would be a good round number. Apparently, both Dolson and Green, at separate times and in different contexts, made such similar guesses. Are we really to base a conspiracy theory on evidence like this?
Lindley's third tell-tale "similarity" between the writings of Dolson and Green is the fact that "both men wanted the flow of volunteers from the United States to continue to flood Texas." Perhaps lapsing into total cynicism for a moment, Lindley tells us that "there is no obvious reason why Dolson, except to support Green, would have wanted the men to continue coming. Green, however, needed them to meet his quota of 1,000 men in order to receive his general's star and be reimbursed for his expenses, which were great."12
Should Dolson have realized in July of 1836, as Lindley seems to believe today, that the only reason that he and other new recruits were in the Texas Army was to secure promotions and fortunes for men like Green? Did Mexico no longer exist? There were indications from the Rio Grande that a re-invasion was imminent after General Vicente Filisola was replaced by the more aggressive General José Urrea in June, and Paul Lack notes that although President Burnet had earlier discouraged more volunteers from coming to Texas, "in the face of an apparent renewal of hostilities with Mexico, Burnet recanted on demilitarization and even ordered the resumption of conscription on June 20."13Yet we are asked by Lindley to believe that Dolson was more likely to be lying to his brother in order to get himself promoted to sergeant by currying the favor of a superfluous and impecunious would-be general, than he was to be hoping for reinforcements prior to the expected resumption of action against the Mexican army!
Lindley's fourth and final piece of evidence of a Dolson-Green conspiracy is no more convincing than the first three. It is the fact that both Green and Dolson refer to Santa Anna's opium use at the time of his shipboard seizure. These two references (which are by no means identical) can hardly be seen as evidence, however, of a close conspiracy between Green and Dolson, when information about Santa Anna's alleged use of opium on the day of his abduction was readily available in the newspapers almost a month before Dolson wrote his letter. And Lindley readily admits that this was the case!
This gossamer-thin "evidence" of a conspiracy between Dolson and Green is not the only problem with this theory of a "fictionalized" Dolson letter. There also remains the troublesome fact that theCourier and Enquirerletter may reasonably be interpreted as offering substantial corroboration for Dolson's version of Crockett's death. The stories told by the two letters, as Lindley's extended comparison has shown, while not identical are remarkably similar. In order to turn this into evidence which supports rather than contradicts his thesis that the story of Crockett's execution is false, Lindley must show not only that Dolson used the first letter as the basis of his own, but also that the story told by the first letter is fraudulent!
The Anonymous Reporter
Aided by the very interesting information supplied from New York by his colleague Bill Groneman, Lindley attempts to show that the anonymous author of the first letter was the newspaperman William H. Attree, and that Attree's word is no more to be trusted than those headlines in today'sNational Enquirerthat tell us about Nazi flying saucers discovered in Antarctica!
Groneman, whose previous misleading insinuations about the Mexican editor of the de la Peña manuscripts have shown him to be a master of historical character assassination,14has skillfully selected references to Attree and his flamboyant later employer, James Gordon Bennett of theNew York Herald, which together seem to paint a picture of Attree's reckless inaccuracy in reporting. When read carefully, however, these statements actually show little more than the criticism of rivals who objected not so much to Attree's imprecision, as to his explicitness in dealing with stories of crime and sex. And Groneman has failed to reveal to us another side of Attree, perhaps best shown in the following paragraph from Professor James L. Crouthamel's recent scholarly monograph on Bennett'sHeraldand the rise of the popular press in America:
Special events such as a speech by Daniel Webster were usually covered by aHeraldstenographic reporter, and the paper developed a reputation for accuracy of which it was proud. Indeed, Bennett suggested that the government rely on theHerald's accurate stenographic reports of the debates in Congress and stop subsidizing their publication by a Washington sheet; theHerald's reports were more accurate, he claimed, than those in the semiofficialWashington Globe. One of these stenographic reporters, William H. Attree, took over theHerald's Washington bureau in 1842.15
So! Attree was stenographic reporter who recorded the debates of the United States Congress, and who became a Washington bureau chief for theNew York Herald! This may not be a journalist on the level of theNational Enquirer, after all!
Two Letters, One Source
At any rate, we have two letters written from Galveston Island in the summer of 1836. The first letter, assuming that Groneman and Lindley are correct in their identification of Attree, is from a newspaper professional of some note (Attree had edited both theNew York Transcriptand theNew York Courier and Enquirerbefore coming to Texas),16who is quoting from a source that he identifies as an "eye witness." The second letter is from a bilingual Texan soldier who says that he assisted in the interview of a Mexican officer, detained on Galveston Island as a prisoner of war, who also claimed to be an eyewitness to the Alamo executions. Do we have any evidence, other than that offered by Lindley and Groneman, which might shed some light on whether these two letters are what they claim to be, or are instead merely calculated "fictions"?
We do. While Lindley takes a page and a half to show the similarities between the two letters, in an effort to show that one has been shamelessly copied from the other, there is simply no obvious plagiarism. In fact, one of the most glaring discrepancies between the two letters, Dolson's celebrated misstatement of the prisoners' being marched to thetentof Santa Anna, is (as I argued in 1994 and again in my second reply to Lindley) suggestive of an honest mistranslation of the Spanish wordpabellón, which could mean either "tent" or "national flag." This kind of mistake could only have been made if Dolson were, as he explained to his brother in his letter, interpreting directly from the Spanish, rather than elaborating on Attree's story from the newspaper.
Lindley makes the point that the seven basic elements of the two stories of General Castrillón's taking of the prisoners to Santa Anna come in exactly the same order in the two letters. In each, an introduction is followed by these statements: that Castrillón found the defenders still alive; that he, being humane rather than cruel, marched the men to Santa Anna; that Crockett was among them, appearing bold even in captivity; that after Castrillón's presentation of the six prisoners, Santa Anna questioned the general's failure to kill them immediately, whereupon some of Santa Anna's own men at once set upon them and murdered them on the spot in cold blood.
One might ask how these seven elements could have come in any other order and still make sense, but a more useful observation would be that, yes, these two similar stories in all likelihood did come from the same source. That source, however, is in all probability exactly what Dolson claimed—a Mexican prisoner on Galveston Island, who told his story first to Attree in June and then to Dolson in July. TheFrankfort Commonwealth, from which historians have taken the letter that originally appeared in theNew York Courier and Enquirer, failed to mention any of the circumstances surrounding the writing of the June 9 letter from Galveston, but that is not true for another source of the reprinted letter, which to my knowledge has never before been cited by Alamo scholars. The August 10, 1836, edition ofThe Biblical Recorder, published in New Bern as the voice of Baptists in North Carolina, carried the June 9 letter from theCourier and Enquirerwith the introductory statement that it was written from "Galveston Bay" by "a gentleman who has been in familiar conversation with the Mexican prisoners confined there."17
Tom Lindley would have us believe that the two letters were written by two monumental liars, the first trying to sell newspapers by long distance, and the second trying to ingratiate himself to his commanding officer by penning helpful propaganda that both knew to be false. I would argue that the evidence suggests a much simpler story.
Occam's Razor
How are scholars to choose between two competing theories, each of whichcouldbe true? The most famous answer to this question was given in the fourteenth century by William of Ockham (also spelled Occam), and is known to students of logic as "Occam's Razor." In a nutshell, according toThe Academic American Encyclopedia, the principle attributed to Occam
states that a person should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything, or that the person should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony. Since the Middle Ages it has played an important role in eliminating fictitious or unnecessary elements from explanations.18
It is possible, as much of the writing of Bill Groneman and Tom Lindley has shown, to spin all kinds of theories about whatmighthave happened, or what the fragmentary available evidencecouldallow. But if we use Occam's Razor to shave away all the strained hypotheses and unnecessary conspiracy theories, the truth is likely to shine through.
It is important to note that Lindley has had to assume that Attree picked up the story of Castrillón's intervention from one or more of the "execution stories floating about Texas" in the spring and summer of 1836.19The problem here is that the description of Castrillón's action found in the Attree letter wasnot"floating about Texas" in 1836; it appears nowhere in the public record (nor in any subsequently discovered document) until Attree's letter of June 9, yet his description of the executions and of Castrillón's role in them (though not his identification of Crockett) was confirmed by Martínez Caro's memoir of the revolution when that work was published in Mexico in the following year.
Lindley constantly refers to the Attree letter as the "Alleged Caro" account, following the suggestion made by Walter Lord inA Time to Standthat the account in theFrankfort Commonwealthsounded "suspiciously like Ramón Caro."20But Lindley admits that there isnoevidence that Martínez Caro told his captors this story of Santa Anna's direct role in the Alamo executions while he was in Texas, and it is unlikely that the reporter Attree could have heard the story from Caro himself. Along with Santa Anna and two other high-ranking officers (including Colonel Juan Almonte), Martínez Caro was held apart from the Mexican prisoners who were housed on Galveston Island. These four Very Important Prisoners were not taken to the island at all prior to Attree's letter of June 9, except for three days early in May when they were held on board a ship in Galveston's harbor while in transit from the San Jacinto area to Velasco.21
Thus we are left with these three remarkably similar accounts: the first two written in 1836 in different months from Galveston Island, each claiming to recount the story of a Mexican prisoner of war who witnessed the execution of David Crockett; the third, confirming that an execution event involving Castrillón and Santa Anna happened as narrated in these letters, coming in 1837 from the pen of Santa Anna's own personal secretary.Even without the celebrated account from the de la Peña diary, therefore, there is compelling evidence that a Mexican eyewitness to the executions saw David Crockett among the slain prisoners.Lindley's efforts to refute the two Galveston letters by impugning the motives and integrity of Attree and Dolson are unpersuasive, and take the form of theories which rest on wishful thinking rather than on evidence.
Back to Basics: José Enrique de la Peña
When we do turn our attention to the de la Peña account, it must be acknowledged at the outset that plagiarism is chronologically possible. The de la Peña manuscripts appeared in the 1950s with unknown provenance, and if they are forgeries, it would have been possible for the clever forger to have taken the story of Castrillón and Crockett from the widely-circulated Attree letter, even though Dolson's letter to Michigan would not be discovered until 1960.
But thepossibilityof forgery hardly means theprobabilityof forgery in this case. No one, including Bill Groneman in either his 1994 book or his more recent writings, has been able to make this charge against the de la Peña memoir stick, and neither does Lindley's present effort.22Some of the brickbats thrown at the de la Peña manuscripts are downright bizarre in their logic. Acknowledging the historical de la Peña's references to the existence of his diary in the 1830s, Lindley suggests: "Perhaps the allegation that he had kept a diary and was going to publish it to expose the incompetence of senior Mexican army officers was nothing more than an empty threat to keep those same officers from having him executed." Pardon me for asking, but just how dumb would such an officer have to be not to realize that the best way to prevent the diary's publication in such a case would be to deep-six the troublesome de la Peña before the diary was in print? Lindley is arguing directly against himself!
Lindley also goes well beyond his evidence when he says that the bruising blow—"un golpe contuso"—received by the historical de la Peña in the assault on the Alamo was a possible "concussion" and therefore a blow to the head (that isnotwhat these words mean!) and a "serious wound" which "most likely" would have prevented de la Peña from witnessing the executions himself. After having leapt to this remarkable conclusion, Lindley insists that de la Peña (ifthe manuscripts are authentic, of course) was simply lying when he said that he was present as a witness when the prisoners were killed!23
But Lindley doesnotthink that the manuscripts are authentic. There are, he believes, just too many errors. He finds "absurd," for instance, the idea that the sapper officers would hesitate to kill the prisoners after hearing Santa Anna's direct order, since the order of the day was to take no prisoners.24Yet Lindley must acknowledge that Castrillón himself had certainly hesitated to kill them, and surely Lindley cannot ignore the comment of his one "authentic witness," Ramón Martínez Caro, when he says (as quoted on the first page of this article) that the killings were "cruel," and an "outrage which humanity condemns." Would Martínez Caro have found such hesitation "absurd"?
As for the rest of Lindley's efforts to show that the de la Peña descriptions are based on other documents utilized by a forger, some important points need to be kept in mind. The first is that Lindley's ingenious methodology allows him to see both disagreement and agreement between sources as evidence of plagiarism. Lindley can argue that even direct contradiction is a sign of plagiarism, provided that "common elements" are being discussed, as he does when he suggests that the claim of the spurious Crockett autobiography that the hero "died without a groan" was the inspiration for the statement in the de la Peña manuscript that the prisoners were "miserable ones [who] died moaning."25
On the other hand, if there are similarities in the stories of eyewitnesses, such as those that exist between the Attree letter and de la Peña's account, Lindley assumes that one writermusthave been inspired by the other, dismissing the distinct possibility that they saw the same event. He also ignores the fact that a Mexican officer held on Galveston Island long enough to talk to both Attree and Dolson would still have been back in Mexico by 1838 and 1839, when de la Peña was, according to his own account, expanding his diary into memoirs based on the observations of other eyewitnesses besides himself.
This last point is an important one. Because de la Peña was incorporating other material in addition to his own diary and observations into his manuscript at least as late as November of 1839, it is a simple but often unrecognized fact theauthenticity(which is not always the same thing asaccuracy) of the de la Peña manuscripts does not stand or fall on the originality of the description of Crockett's death found therein. De la Peña says that he saw the executions, but he does not say who told him that one of the prisoners was Crockett, nor does he say where he heard of Crockett's "excuse" for being found in the Alamo at an inopportune time.
As so often happens in historical inquiry, we are left to wonder. Could Jeff Long be right when he stretches the evidence to say that Crockett "lied[,] . . . dodged[,] . . . [and] denied his role in the fighting," at least to Castrillón if not to Santa Anna?26 Did de la Peña drop into his memoir a good story that he had picked up from material published since the revolt (such as the often reprinted Attree letter)? Did he hear the story from the same Mexican officer who spoke to Attree and Dolson at Galveston?
Or, as Tom Lindley argues, could the manuscripts be very clever forgeries, exposed by the similarity of particular facets of the Crockett story told in them to elements of the alleged third-hand "Urissa" and "Cos" accounts? With regard to the first of these two, I will concur with Lindley when he says that "the similarities between de la Peña and Urissa arenotthat pronounced and one can argue that they may be coincidence."27
Lindley goes too far, however, when he claims that the similarity between de la Peña and the alleged "Cos" version of Crockett's death retold by William P. Zuber "eliminates coincidenceand suggests that the de la Peña manuscripts are forgeries."28 Zuber's dubious story, first written in 1904 and not published until 1939, was that he was told by a man who had interviewed the captive General Cos following the Battle of San Jacinto that Cos claimed to have found, locked up in a room in the Alamo, a man who said,
I am David Crocket [sic], a citizen of the State of Tennessee and representative of a district of that State in the United States Congress. I have come to Texas on a visit of exploration; purposing, if permitted, to become a loyal citizen of the Republic of Mexico. I extended my visit to San Antonio, and called in the Alamo to become acquainted with the officers, and learn of them what I could of the condition of affairs. Soon after my arrival, the fort was invested by government troops, whereby I have been prevented from leaving it. And here I am yet, a noncombatant and foreigner, having taken no part in the fighting.29
The supposedly corresponding passage in the de la Peña diary says:
It was the naturalist David Croket [sic], very well known in North America for his novel adventures, who had come to examine the country and who, happening to be in Béjar in the moments of surprise, had confined himself in the Alamo, fearful of not being respected in his capacity as a foreigner.30
I will acknowledge that these passages contain elements which are tantalizingly similar, but given the circumstances of Crockett's actual presence in Texas, I am not willing to concede the total impossibility of coincidence. Moreover, I believe that Lindley commits at least two errors of logic when he tells us that the Zuber story is most likely fiction created by Zuber himself, and then states unconditionally:
If one accepts that the de la Peña noncombatant description has no basis in truth or honest error, thenthe only explanationfor it being in the de la Peña account is that the creator of the de la Peña description obtained the element from the Cos [i.e., the Zuber] account.31
What Lindley is telling us, in other words, is thatit is possible for Zuber make up stories, but nobody else is capable of this—not de la Peña, and not anyone who gave information to de la Peña. Lindley is also telling us that it is not just unlikely, but simply impossible, for Crockett to have made such excusesto Castrillón or anyone else in the last desperate minutes of his life.
These are not logical conclusions on Lindley's part, but leaps of faith. We simply do not know where de la Peña obtained his story of Crockett's presence in the Alamo. We do know that he worked for three years after the Texas campaign reworking and expanding his diary. We also know that the "final draft" of the manuscript at UTSA is four times as long as the "first rewrite." These circumstances gave ample opportunity for stories from a variety of sources to find their way into de la Peña's manuscripts.
And while the Zuber letter and de la Peña accounts do have similar elements, we also know that only one document has ever come to light that actually contains language that is repeatedverbatimin the pages of the manuscripts that Lindley believes to be forgeries.
And what is this document? It isUna Víctima del Despotismo, the pamphlet published by José Enrique de la Peña with the help of his friends in 1839, while he was being held in the Inquisition Prison in Mexico City. This pamphlet was unknown to any historian of the Texas Revolution until the 1994 discovery of a single copy—the only copy presently known to exist—in the Archives and Manuscripts Collection of the Yale University Library. No forger could have possibly created the UTSA manuscripts without having read and copied portions of this incredibly rare, and until very recently unknown, pamphlet.32
Thus, the only "smoking gun" found to date in the search for the real author of the alleged de la Peña manuscripts at UTSA points, not surprisingly, to José Enrique de la Peña himself. Lindley and Groneman can argue, of course, that their alleged master forger could have found, copied, and kept secret a document that eluded Streeter, Jenkins, and every other collector of Texana for over 150 years. But my money is on de la Peña, because that is where, I believe, all of the available evidence, when taken together, inevitably leads us.
NOTES Lindley's critique begins inThe Alamo Journal#96 (May, 1995); my response begins in the same issue in which Lindley's third and final installment appears:The Alamo Journal#98 (Oct., 1995). For another exchange of views over the authenticity of the de la Peña diary, see the articles by Bill Groneman and James E. Crisp inMilitary History of the West, 25 (Fall, 1995), 129-165. For a final (I hope!) word, see the "Letters to the Editor" section ofMilitary History of the West, 26 (Spring, 1996), [forthcoming].
José Enrique de la Peña,Una Víctima del Despotismo A. S. E. el General Presidente(México: Imprenta del Iris, 1839), 8.
Tom Lindley and I have both been unsuccessful in locating the copy of theNew York Courier and Enquirercontaining the original story. I'm sure that we would both be grateful to any reader ofThe Alamo Journalwho could direct us to the location of this source.
Another quote by Lindley ("Killing Crockett: Lindley's Opinion," p. [5]), from theCourier and Enquirerletter's account of Castrillón's presentation of the prisoners, has also accidentally dropped a sentence. After the words, "how shall I dispose of them?" should come the following sentence: "Santa Anna looked at Castrillon fiercely, flew into a violent rage, and replied, `Have I not told you before how to dispose of them?"