The mystery of Crockett’s death at the Alamo
Meanwhile, Crockett lost another bid for re-election to Congress, leaving office for good in March 1835. Later that year, partly at the urging of his friend and fellow Tennessee politician Sam Houston, he headed to Texas for a fresh start. “I told the people of my district that, if they saw fit to re-elect me, I would serve them as faithfully as I had done,” Crockett reportedly told a crowd shortly after his arrival. “But, if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas. I was beaten, gentlemen, and here I am.”
At the time, Texas was fighting to gain its independence from the Mexican Republic. The promise of cheap and abundant land had drawn so many settlers from across the U.S. border that the Mexican government banned further immigration into Texas in 1830. Disputes between settlers and government officials finally erupted into the Texas Revolution in October 1835. The Mexican Army’s attempts to subdue the revolutionaries led to several violent clashes, most famously the 13-day siege of the Alamo in San Antonio in February and March 1836.
It was at the Alamo that Crockett met his end on March 6, 1836, adding a mysterious concluding chapter to his myth. In many newspaper accounts, he went down fighting. The Arkansas Advocate, for example, reported that he’d shot 23 Mexican soldiers before dying with a butcher knife in one hand and the remnants of his broken rifle in the other—presumably after swinging it like a club. Both weapons, the paper added, were “bathed in the blood of his enemies.”
Other papers, such as the Vermont Telegraph, suggested that he and several other men had attempted to surrender, but the Mexicans refused and made them fight to the death anyway, after which their bodies were “thrown into a heap and burned.”
One slightly later report, apparently originating in a Texas newspaper, claimed the men had surrendered and been taken as prisoners of war, only to be executed on the orders of Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna. While that version of events might have undermined the legend of Crockett’s heroism, it also made the Mexicans’ actions seem all the more reprehensible.
“Remember the Alamo!” became the rallying cry of the revolution, which ended in April 1836, when troops under Crockett’s friend Houston forced the Mexican Army to retreat south of the Rio Grande.