A Line in the Sand: the Alamo in Blood and Memory.

By Randy Roberts and James S. Olson. (New York and other cities: The Free Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xii], 356. $26.00, ISBN 0-684-83544-4.)

The Alamo is no longer like Thermopylae in having no messenger. Instead, there are quite a few Alamologists. In A Line in the Sand Randy Roberts and James S. Olson .translate myth into reality by examining three battles of the Alamo: the original struggle, the early-twentieth-century Driscoll-De Zavala effort to preserve the site, and more recent cultural and historical warfare over the siege. Roberts and Olson provide an excellent summary of the "Davy Crockett craze" (p. 247) and a valuable discussion of the symbolism of William Barret Travis's famous "line in the sand." Overall, their contribution to the canon of Alamo literature is as readable and significant as the reconstructions of Lon Tinkle's 13 Days to Glory: The Siege of the Alamo (New York, 1958) and Walter Lord's A Time to Stand (New York, 1961).

Having praised the authors for their insights, research, and ability to present a tableau vivant, however, Texas historians will be hard-pressed to interpret the minor role that J. Frank Dobie plays in the book; he receives virtually the same amount of attention as does Ozzy Osbourne. Dobie, after all, told revisionist historians that it did not really matter whether or not Colonel Travis drew the line, for he should have drawn it. (Texans are still drawing such lines of moral commitment today, sometimes in very difficult Middle Eastern sand.) When push comes to shove, other recent studies remain essential to understanding the mythological interpretation of Travis's line in the sand. Brian Huberman, for example, has closely studied the story of Louis (Moses) Rose, the man who left the Alamo like Josephus is sometimes have been alleged to have left Masada, and whose letter to the editor in the 1873 Texas Almanac was the original source of the "line" myth.

Minor sins of omission and commission occur in both Texas and southern history because many historians remain dedicated to a Whiggish "usable past"--Edward A. Pollard's "objectivity" is one example, and Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was even used to stuff a Comanche war shield. (Too bad Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb were too late for that honor.) Sins of commission are usually a bit more difficult to explain. Because of questions surrounding the diary of Jose Enrique de la Pena, published as With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution (College Station, 1975), it is possibly unwise to rely too heavily on its short passage concerning Davy Crockett's surrender and execution until a historical verdict has been more fully rendered. This "Texfake controversy," which Roberts and Olson examine, remains unsettled, and so we still continue to ask--as did Dan Kilgore's 1978 book of that title--"How did Davy die?"

The question of de la Pena's authenticity is but another chapter in the Alamo myth. Myth-history differs from history wie es eigentlich gewesen, which calls to mind a conversation with a descendant of a member of the Gonzales relief expedition to the besieged Alamo. When asked why his ancestor had abandoned everything for freedom, he replied, "The Alamo was his only escape--from his wife, his children, and his failing farm." Such is not "usable history," nor is it the way Texas history should be taught. Myth, however, can lead to the comprehension of higher moral truth, in the Aristotelian sense that "poetry is truer than history." Roberts and Olson amply demonstrate that proposition with both moral and historical understanding in A Line in the Sand.

GILBERT M. CUTHBERTSON
Rice University