Every year the Alamo’s March 6 anniversary ignites lively debate among aficionados concerning many details of the battle. The death of David Crockett, the Alamo’s most famous combatant, draws most attention.
James Bowie, the Alamo’s other frontier celebrity must shake his head in the Texas Valhalla. His death, as sacrificially heroic as Crockett’s, does not generate the same interest. However, versions of Bowie’s death, while not as numerous as Crockett’s, are as varied and interesting.
According to stories spread after the battle, Bowie either died: as a murder victim; a suicide; a battle casualty; or a victim of sadistic torture. He may have died fighting from his sickbed; died helplessly in his sickbed; or died of illness before Mexican soldiers did the job. He may have been killed by swords, bayonets, gunfire, or fire. He may have died heroically, or as a coward.
One of the first reports to Sam Houston after the battle reported, “Bowie was killed lying in his sick bed.” Houston and others passed on this information interpreting it to mean he had been “murdered” while sick in bed. However, Houston changed the story two days later writing, “… our friend Bowie, as is now understood, unable to get out of bed, shot himself as the soldiers approached it.”
An unidentified Mexican soldier expressed a different opinion in the April 5, 1836 El Mosquito Mexicano. He stated, “The perverse and braggart Santiago Bowie, died like a woman, almost hidden under a mattress.”
Alamo survivor Susannah Dickinson Hannig weighed in on the subject thirty-nine years later. She stated that Bowie, sick in bed and when the Mexican soldiers entered his room, “… killed two of them with his pistols before they pierced him through with their sabers.” Nothing in Hannig’s statement indicates she witnessed this.
The most horrifying tale of Bowie’s death came in 1882 when William P. Zuber, who popularized and probably concocted the Alamo’s famous “line in the sand” story, told to a young Mexican fifer Apolinario Saldigna. “Polin,” according to Zuber, witnessed Bowie brought out alive on a cot and placed before a Mexican captain. Bowie delivered a short patriotic speech to the captain which so outraged him that he ordered his soldiers to cut out Bowie’s tongue and hurl the still living man onto the Texan’s burning funeral pyre.
The celebrated Madam Candelaria, who in later years developed a sort of cottage industry around Alamo stories, told in 1888 how she had been in the act of giving the ailing Bowie a drink of water when Mexican soldiers rushed in, killed Bowie in her arms, and wounded her on the chin in the process. Two years later her story changed when she related how Bowie had died in her arms a few minutes before the solders swarmed in. However, one of them thrust a bayonet into Bowie’s lifeless head and lifted his body from her lap.
Still another story attributed to Candelaria appeared in 1899, a year after her death, this one more action packed. In it a dozen or more soldiers sprang into the room and Bowie emptied his pistols in their faces killing two of them. She threw herself in front of them as they lunged at him with bayonets, receiving wounds on her arm and chin. The soldiers thrust her out of the way and butchered him before her eyes.
Alamo survivor Juana (Navarro) Alsbury stated in 1898 that she witnessed soldiers enter Bowie’s room upstairs in “the old church,” bayonet him and carry him out into the plaza below while he still lived. They tossed him up and caught him on their bayonets until a cavalry officer dashed in and lashed the soldiers with his sword until they desisted.
Enrique Esparza, a child survivor of the battle, gave his version in 1907. He stated that Bowie, though sick with fever, fought on until wounded and had to be carried to a cot in one of the rooms on the north side of the church. He fired his rifle and pistol at the enemy from his cot while they closed in on him. As they made their final rush he rose up in his bed burying his knife in the breast of one as another fired a shot killing him. They then riddled his body with bullets.
As with most aspects of the Alamo battle the exact details of Bowie’s death may never be known. The best quote regarding his death is attributed to his mother, Elve Jones Bowie. Walter Worthington Bowie wrote in his 1889 The Bowie’s and Their Kindred, “…it is said that when she was told that her gallant son, James, had been killed by the Mexicans at the Alamo, she received the news calmly, remarking that she would wager no wounds were found in his back.”
William Groneman be reached at wgroneman@yahoo.com
