Status Updates From Duel of Eagles: The Mexican...

(3/3) "...smiling at those miserable men who scarcely had the energy to see him, offering them their full pay with one hand but ordering it not to be disbursed with the other. There were many fools who were encouraged by his words, but to mislead them was an insult to their misfortune.”

(2/3) "...The wailing of the wounded and their just complaints penetrated the innermost recesses of the heart; there was no one to extract a bullet, no one to perform an amputation, and many unfortunates died whom medical science could have saved. General Santa Anna doubtless thought that he could alleviate the sufferings of his victims by appearing frequently among them, ...

(1/3) The fate of the Mexican Army's wounded soldiers after the battle at the Alamo from Colonel José Enrique de la Peña:

“In fact, the plight of our wounded was quite grievous,” de la Peña bitterly declared, “and one could hardly enter the places erroneously called hospitals without trembling with horror.

They would name steamboats, railroad trains, frontier towns, and a marching song after him. They would anoint this day, March 6, 1836, the inaugural moment of Manifest Destiny.

As it was, in the end, shortly after six o'clock in the morning, David Crockett made a choice. The Go Ahead man quit. He did more than quit. He lied. He dodged. He denied his role in the fighting.

Later, Americans would claim that there was no surrender, that Crockett went down like Hercules, clubbing Mexican soldiers into a bony mash at his feet with the shattered stump of Old Betsy. They would dress him up like Natty Bumpo in buckskins and a raccoon cap, put oaths on his lips and a dripping Bowie knife in his hands.

The farther north they reached, the more Santa Anna's blitzkriegers looked like refugees. Their shoes and sandals gave out. Their shirts rotted, leaving them to wear their uniform jackets against their skin. And they hungered.

Food was provided ... One pound of meat and some beans or corn per day. For the final thirty days before reaching San Antonio, soldiers ate only eight ounces of toasted corn cake daily.

Thinking he could breast his way through the conflict, Travis told the mercenaries that if they were dissatisfied with his command they could elect one of their own. The mercenaries promptly named Colonel Bowie to lead them.

...

For his part, Bowie threw a wild party, turning San Antonio into an animal house for the next several days. It was a disgraceful, stumble-drunk orgy of power and corn liquor.

"Crockett witnessed the extraordinary flowering of his alter ego, he saw the crowds and heard the applause, and he forgot what he really was... an aging, semi-literate squatter of average talent. The worst part of this celebrity who believed in his own fame was that his hubris was attached to a cartoon figure of his own making."

"Crockett didn't go to Texas to fight a revolution. He didn't go to sharp-shoot tyrants and defend liberty. He went for himself.
He wanted land.
He wanted money.
And he wanted to catch that monster."

The monster being the larger-than-life persona built as a political stunt that escaped his control until it reached absurd proportions.

Also, "morganatic": a marriage between people of unequal social rank, where the lower ranked spouse and their children have no rights to the higher-ranked spouse’s title or property. Used to describe 27 year old Santa Anna’s courtship of the Mexican emperor Iturbide’s 60 year old sister, Doña Nicolasa. Santa Anna responded to the rejection by leading a revolt against Iturbide. Men and their egos, hmmm?

Learning new words! "Alameda": a tree-lined street or avenue, used to describe a street in San Antonio de Bexar.

I'm LOLing just about every other page at how different this is from what I learned about the Texas Revolution at school:

(quote p61)

These supposed great war heroes that we were taught to venerate in school resemble more the participants in a spaghetti western barroom brawl, per this book.

I might have stayed awake in my junior high Texas History classes, if they'd been as interesting as this book has been so far. But then, I somehow doubt the state would have approved textbooks that provided such an honest look at our "founding fathers".

...the boy grabbed the man's legs crying out, "Ave Maria Purisma! Per Dios, salva mi vida!" "I begged the man to spare him...," Sgt. Bryan said. "The man looked at me and put his hand on his pistol, so I passed on. Just as I did so, he blew out the boy's brains."