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“You can all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.”
Famed folk hero and red-blooded American myth David “Davy” Crockett was not thrilled to lose his 1834 Congressional bid for reelection. After leading a life of frontier adventure and cavalry skirmishes in Alabama and Florida, the incumbent Congressman from Tennessee’s 12th congressional district felt scorned by both his electorate and the nation surrounding him. America’s embrace of Jacksonian ideals in the 1834 election was, to Davy, unconscionable. He would leave these states. He would go to Texas.
The Texas of 1834 was different from the one we know now, chiefly because it was Mexico. The Mexican government was in dire need of funds — funds that rich Americans had — so, an agreement was reached: The Mexican government would sell land in Mexican Texas to white Americans for cheap, and the Americans would promise to engage in the economy, pay taxes and not actively attempt to overthrow the government. Predictably, this agreement did not last long.
Soon enough, Mexico banned slavery, and the overwhelmingly slave-owning American populace of the territory began to rebel. In the two years following Davy’s move to Texas, he joined a brigade that expelled all Mexican forces from East Texas. But that’s not enough. Davy and the Texans moved southwest. They didn’t want just some of Texas. They wanted it all.
All of Texas was a nearly impossible feat, though. The Mexican Empire was an overwhelming one, housing the largest military on the continent, and the disorganized Texan militia would have had no hope in a direct confrontation. Then, for just a moment, a gap opened in Mexico’s forces, and the Americans moved forward into southwest Texas. In the heart of San Antonio, surrounded by a magnificent golden cottonwood grove, was a sprawling military complex — one with enough resources and a strategic enough position to be the deciding factor in Texas’ war for independence. If they could keep this hulking compound, they could keep Texas.
It’s a beautiful old thing, built more than a hundred years earlier during a Catholic Spanish Mission. It had taken on new meaning over the years, first as a secular townhouse, then as a Mexican fort. Somewhere along the way, the compound was renamed after the Spanish word for the cottonwood grove surrounding it: the álamo grove. The Spanish Mission; the Alamo.
And so, in the coming months, the Alamo fulfilled its historical prophecy. Mexican troops soon encircled the understaffed fort, daring the Texans to make a move. Led by President-General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the Mexican soldiers did not immediately seize the compound — its fortifications were far too strong for a direct confrontation, despite the entrenched militia’s limited size. No, Santa Anna would instead lay the Alamo under a 13-day siege. On the first day of the siege, Cavalry Officer William Travis sent a message addressed to “the People of Texas & All Americans in the World.” Throughout, he repeatedly begged for reinforcements — he knew their battalion would not last. But, it was also clear he knew no one was coming. Nearly the whole of the letter is forgotten by history, save for its final line:
“If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country,” he writes. Then, hauntingly:
“Victory or Death.”
There were 1,000 Mexican soldiers surrounding the Alamo, with 200 Texans still inside. I think all 1,200 men knew what outcome would manifest itself in the upcoming battle. As the Texans stood there, guns in hand and cannons aimed, outnumbered at least five to one by those at their gates, they all knew. And they stayed. Rather, they waited.
The morning Santa Anna finally broke through the walls, the fight ended quickly. Cannon fire and gunshots shaved excess soldiers from the Mexican army’s fleet, but the force was strong enough that, in the end, it wouldn’t matter.
Once the Mexican forces fully breached the mission, they began to kill the last remaining Texans, many of them with their own guns. There was a ragtag group of fighters left; one of them was Davy. He raised his pistol against Santa Anna, but surrounded by masses of Mexican soldiers, what is one gun to hundreds of rifles? Despite his best efforts and his valiant stand, Davy did not survive. In 1718, the Alamo was a mission. In 1830, it was a fortress. Now, since the morning of March 6, 1836, it remains a tomb.
Once word reached Texan forces in the East, it galvanized them. Record numbers of men suddenly enlisted in the Texan army and brazenly stormed through the unprepared Mexican military. In their victory during a vital battle, they captured Santa Anna, tactically exchanging his life for an independent Texas. All throughout the battle they shouted their rallying cry, still heard in Texas today: “Remember the Alamo!”
In the years following Texas’ annexation into the United States, the events of the Alamo became something greater. It was no longer a white compound named after the slow swaying shrubbery around it. What was once a mausoleum became a symbol, one whose shadow rested heavily on the Lone Star State. In that cottonwood mission, with its land divine and its floor bloody, something rose from the dirt.
The myth didn’t end when Texas was freed. On the sanguine tiles of the Alamo, a new site was baptized. No longer would the Alamo serve as a simple tragedy: a lost battle, a graveyard for the dead. No, it was here in this old Catholic chamber that it was rechristened as an All-American Texan Genesis — a frontier founding myth.
Creation myths are centerpieces of faiths worldwide. They serve as stars, creating heliocentric systems of belief reliant on the pull of their origin. Take the Biblical Creation Myth — Eve’s consumption of the apple and the casting off of humanity from the Garden of Eden into the untamed Earth. It fosters an adherence to authority at all costs. Texans aren’t so subservient. For Texas, rebellion is piety — we do not yield, we do not stop and we will die fighting. The Lone Star State, a land born of violence, gladly accepts that violence. Moreover, it gladly accepts Travis’ final statement. Victory, or death; or perhaps, victory through death.
Inherent to the myth of the Alamo is the valiance of a worthy finale — an ending with a purpose. This isn’t to say it’s specific to the act of martyrdom; rather, it’s the obtainment of a meaningful narrative conclusion. The intensely dramatic saga of the Alamo set the stage for the intensely dramatic saga of Texas in the 1800s. The largest state in the union was filled with stories, all with immortal endings. And if we know endings are holy, then what is the Alamo, the grandest ending in American history? How could it be anything but pious and grandiose?
There are the living folk hero cowboys of cattle country, single-handedly taming the frontier and living daily adventure. There are their shoot-offs, the rodeo cowboy, with his weekly battle against nature and flirtation with conclusions. Later in the century the industrialists, with their oil rigs and train tracks, transformed the earth around them into playthings for mankind. The drama of the Alamo was the founding myth for a century of cowboys, westerns and adventure. It was the founding myth for Texas.
If this sounds like too much, consider the painting hung in the Texas State Senate Chamber, “Dawn at the Alamo,” which depicts Davy and Travis as holy figures cast in the same light used centuries before to illuminate the Holy Spirit and John the Baptist. Yes, to those beyond the Lone Star State, it was melodrama. It was nonsense. But here, it meant something different.
It’s hard to be a frontier cowboy.
I don’t mean that in an active way. Sure, I imagine the day-to-day procedures of cowboy life were difficult — shooting criminals, arresting bad guys and riding solemnly into the sunset on their stallions. A tough job description, to be sure, but what I mean is that it was hard to become a cowboy. There is the issue of the job’s difficulty (quickfire aim is necessary, not preferred) and of course, its high mortality rate (especially if one is on the path to becoming a better man), but the largest hurdle in the path of a cowboy-hopeful is the simple fact that, especially after the year 1900, they don’t exist.
While there might be the fringe stories of the Jesse James and Wyatt Earp types, by and large, the profession was a total fabrication, constructed by East Coast copywriters and pulp authors. Unfortunately, no one had told Texas.
Peter Bogdanovich’s (“Paper Moon”) 1971 film, “The Last Picture Show,” based on the book of the same name, is hopeless. I don’t mean that in an active way — it sure does hope, a lot. Those hopes simply disappear into the film’s hot Texas air. I mean hopeless in its secondary meaning, “The Last Picture Show” is filled with despair.
The film follows high school senior Sonny (Timothy Bottoms, “Johnny Got His Gun”), in Anarene, Texas, a tiny oil town that seems to have been planted in the center of a Minecraft flatland biome. We watch as Sonny navigates his final year of high school before, in theory, moving on from Anarene to live out the rest of his life.
In the film’s first few minutes, a truck drives by our main characters. In the back of it is a horse, locked in a wooden cage so thick you can barely see the stallion inside. On this, in a director commentary, Bogdanovich says,
“It amused me. That’s about what the West has come to.”
There’s nothing much to do in Anarene, except go to the one movie theater, which shows a rotation of Westerns and cowboy flicks that infatuate Sonny. Anarene’s citizens might not be churchgoers, but what does that matter when you’ve got faith in the silver screen? Sonny might not be able to say it out loud, but more than anything, he wants to be one of those men shot through the projector. Anarene, on the other hand, is anything but screen-ready.
Bogdanovich shoots the film in a muddy black-and-white, turning, by his own admission, a quite beautiful landscape into an empty horizon above a gray world. The town itself isn’t much better, the whole of the film being shot in the tiny, real-life Texas oil town of Archer City. The place is definitionally shabby, with rickety homes, unpainted walls and rural decay as far as the eye can see. Gone are the blazing colors and shocking landscapes of John Ford (“The Searchers”). Instead, all we’ve got is whatever the hell Anarene is supposed to be.
Yet, you can see what Anarene, and Texas as a whole, used to be: Tumbleweeds regularly blow through the town, the swinging doors of the pool club evoke the loose-hinged fun of an ol’ saloon and wandering the city’s streets are men old enough to have the West trapped in their eyes. These men watch Sonny’s generation of high schoolers with a distinct sadness in them. One of these old men is the owner of the town’s movie theater, Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson, “Rio Grande”). He is one of the last things in Texas that reminds us of what the state used to be. Or rather, what we thought Texas used to be.
Ben Johnson, an old-school Western star, makes the character of Sam the Lion feel like he stepped directly out of a John Ford flick. Gravel flies from his mouth by the word, his timbre shaking the shoes of whoever he speaks to. His eyes are fixed into a steady squint, his fingers into a weary flexion. Sam the Lion is a cowboy — or whatever’s left of one. His once straight stature has eroded into a weathered lean, his once fearsome strength now old and worn. He stands like his movie theater: weary, with holes in the walls, having seen better days. You can barely see the horse through his wooden cage. Yet, onto Sonny, he imparts whatever wisdom he has left. He tells him how to be a gentleman, how to love a woman and ultimately, how to grow up.
Feeling inspired, in part by Sam and in part by his old movies, Sonny spends the film trying to become something. He goes to parties, attempts to court pretty girls and repeatedly tries to leave — to get out of the vast nothingness that surrounds him. Yet he continually fails. Looking for something, some thrill in his life, he resorts to engaging in an affair with his high school coach’s middle-wife, Ruth (Cloris Leachman, “Young Frankenstein”). A woman of the ’50s, she is also trapped, this time by the walls of the room around her, forgotten by time. Her life is dull; she is the only one in the home, and her husband doesn’t love nor make love to her. For the past decade, perhaps more, she has simply been another object that exists in her house. When Sonny enters her life, suddenly she feels cared for; she feels loved. Even when Sonny vows to never see her again and avoids her the best he can in minuscule Anarene, she can’t help but think of him. It doesn’t matter to her that Sonny is just killing time and doesn’t seem to actually like her, let alone love her — for those sparse moments Sonny sees her, she is evident.
Around Sonny, people begin to leave him: His best friend joins the army, his high school sweetheart sprints to college and all the other kids his age seem to slowly trickle with them out of Anarene. After returning to Anarene following a vacation to Mexico, Sonny finds Sam The Lion dead of a stroke. Gone with Sam is whatever hope Sonny had for what he could be, whatever hope he had for what Texas could be. Maybe worse than anything else, Sonny was never able to say goodbye.
With Sam gone, the theater goes with him. When its last picture, a Texan Western, shows, Sonny is there. He leaves the theater, looks around and realizes that he remains with no one but himself. He, like the cowboys in the movies, is lonesome. But unlike the cowboys he idolizes, he is alive and he is real. His drama, his loneliness, it’s for nothing — all it does is make him suffer. He gets in his car and drives away, his gas pedal parallel to the ground. He passes Anarene’s borders, and there, too, he sees nothing.
He is trapped in no compound; there are no enemies at the gates. He is not under siege by an incontestable enemy, nor does he have faith in the everlasting nation that he is fighting for. Sonny is neither a just man nor an unjust man — he is simply a man. The car begins to slow.
He will receive no great farewell, no tumbling of his walls. There are no enemies at the gates, just his own face staring back at him. The car slowly draws to a stop.
He won’t die and be remembered forevermore, but god, wouldn’t that be easier than this?
Sonny turns his car around and drives back to Anarene.
He returns to Ruth’s home. She tries for a moment to rage, to scream, to reject, throwing her coffee pot against the wall and berating him. But of course, she can’t. If Sonny left, what would she do? How would she spend her time? What would all the waiting she had done be for?
He puts his hand in hers. She smiles a thin, guilty smile. His face is still. She tells him she loves him. He nods. Her old, weary eyes well with tears and project deeply into his. His eyes seem to return the favor. But soon enough, you realize: He’s not seeing her — he’s looking at her — at her pain, at her wrinkles, at her desperation, and more than anything, at her boredom. Her loathsome, repulsive boredom is a sour thing, a frightening thing. He refocuses and looks at her pupils. Rather, into her pupils. And there he sees it reflected back at him: his boredom. Equally loathsome, perhaps even more repulsive. It pierces him.
Sonny looks away.
“That’s about what the West has come to.”
A cannonball burst through the walls of the Alamo, exposing the compound to the whims of Santa Anna and his men. Blood began to pour from the walls as Mexican soldiers breached the mission. Crimson bayonets sprouted from the throats of Texan revolutionaries, who barricaded themselves with one last cannon: one last hope for success.
Santa Anna’s forces burst through the walls to the side of them, killing the Texans in one swift, final move. The cannon that would have been their salvation were turned to whatever Texans remained in the Alamo, their own weapons turned against them. The Mission has turned into a bloodbath.
Texan soldier Robert Evans, with four musketballs in his stomach and blood filling his lungs, began crawling toward the Alamo’s gunpowder magazine. He extends his arms, a torch between his fingers, just inches away from the one-ton mound of unstable combustible ash. If the Texans can’t have the Alamo, no one will. A bullet pierces the back of his skull. He does not finish his journey.
There is a strangeness in the rubble of the Alamo. Buried with the dead there are the ghosts of the lies we tell ourselves; the ghost of the West that Texas repeats to itself ad nauseam. The state is a well-oiled machine literally built to create myths. Myths like the Alamo, and the Texas Rangers and the rodeo, oh god the rodeo, but also so much more than just that. It’s the athletic myths too — Vince Young, Johnny Football, Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith, Dirk Nowitzki and all the high school talent that Texas has pumped into America like a heart on amphetamines: Texas lives through its athletes. It’s no wonder that once the idea of real cowboys was reduced to movie magic, replacements on the gridiron were created in their stead.
Even the air of Texas refuses to lose mythological humidity. Things like the Waco siege and the JFK assassination, wholly horrid events, maintain a sick finality to them, a constant call for elaboration and conspiracy. These haunted places for escapism and fantasy are all, for better or worse, uniquely localized in the state of Texas.
And yet, we find ourselves trying to escape it.
We pursue these legends in the wind, these folktales, only to find ourselves trapped in a wooden cage too thick to see through. Why? Why do we keep running, trying to find endings for ourselves, to find our own Alamos — may they be stories of grandeur or terror — that we can live in from now until the opposing forces break through again?
It is because we are afraid. We are afraid of the truth that lies warm on the tar of a central Texas highway and floats through the humid air of Houston. We are afraid of the truth that flies through tornadoes in Texarkana and remains in the reflections of the glass high-rises of Dallas. We are afraid of that thing, that awful, nightmarish thing that Sonny saw in Ruth’s eyes: the fact that nothing ever ends.
Things might stop — cars, roads, hopes and heartbeats — but they don’t end. Metal rusts, tar rots, hopes are remembered and heartbeats mourned. Lives have no grand arc, no moral climax, no fateful day. They stop, they slow, they cease but they do not end.
Take Davy Crockett: I lied to you earlier. He didn’t die in one last standoff with Mexican soldiers — that’s just the story most people like to tell. We don’t know how he died. We just know that it was a gunshot to his head, a limpness in his knees and the tug of gravity on his head. In real life, there are no last stands, no final fights, no valiant sieges — just last breaths.
That day, back in 1834, when Davy turned his back on the Tennessee legislature and left for Texas, he told reporters this:
“You can all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.”
There was only one issue: He damned them both to hell. Davy just took the long way.
Senior Arts Editor Rami Mahdi can be reached at rhmahdi@umich.edu.
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