My own tourist picture of the Alamo chapel, with Crockett Hotel in the background

I ran across this week’s phrase while reading an article by Jeff Wagg about the legend of the Alamo. The article discusses several variations in the story from conflicting sources, as does the official Alamo website. I had only a vague notion of the Texan/Spanish/Mexican history behind the famous siege and battle. Texas belonged to Mexico at the time and many of the Anglos defending the fort were, in essence, illegal aliens invading Mexico. That terminology from Wagg is provocative (imagine the outrage if a high school text book used it), but pre-Civil War America was pursuing its Manifest Destiny. Texas joined the Union as part of that era.

What really intrigued me in Wagg’s article was speculation on why the Alamo became the quintessential piece of Texan history when other battles were at least as important. The official website calls the Alamo a shrine; that’s quite a commemoration.

Part of the reason may be the presence of American heroes whose feats became grist for fiction that continues today. (How could TV have lied to me in my childhood: “David Crockett never went by the name ‘Davey’ so far as historians can tell. There’s also no reliable record of him wearing a coonskin cap…[Neither did Daniel Boone!] Images of Crockett wearing one were probably from the stage shows depicting his antics in hyperbolic style.” The Alamo’s location in the beautiful city of San Antonio also doesn’t hurt its popularity.

Wagg suggests “that the Alamo became the official shrine of all that is Texas simply because there was a building there that people could affix their pride to.”

While the Alamo was a four acre fortress, “the building that is commonly associated with the words ‘the Alamo’ was an unfinished chapel,” which has since been renovated. “During the siege and battle of the Alamo, the facade of the chapel was a ruin, with a mostly flat or jagged top. Most people today would not recognize it, which is why nearly all movies and posters show the chapel as it looked after its reconstruction.”

I think Wagg is on to something. It’s one thing to know intellectually about an event and another to visit the actual site, to see the remains, to touch history. That’s very human of us, so we remember the Alamo.