By RICK LYMAN – November 18,
1998
A memoir purportedly written 150 years ago by an obscure Mexican military officer that details, among other things, the aftermath of a battle and the execution of one of the losing combatants, is expected to draw as much as half a million dollars when it goes on the auction block on Wednesday in Los Angeles.
To understand why, it helps to know that the battle in question is the Alamo and the combatant a man in a coonskin cap named Davy Crockett.
There is no subject in Texas that is more serious -- even sacred -- than the events surrounding the deaths in 1836 of more than 180 defenders of the small mission on what was then the outskirts of San Antonio.
''The central facet of the controversy that has risen up around the diary is this: Did Davy Crockett go down swinging like Walt Disney wanted to see it or did he allow himself to be captured and then executed?'' said James Crisp, a history professor at North Carolina State University who has studied the documents and written about them.
Mr. Crisp and other historians believe that the papers of Jose Enrique de la Pena -- a diary written during the Texas revolution, a subsequently expanded memoir incorporating other accounts and various supporting documents -- are genuine and that the stories he tells, including the execution of Crockett, probably are, too.
Others vehemently dispute this, call the papers a sophisticated forgery and insist that the former Tennessee Congressman, as other eyewitness accounts have it, fought to the bitter end, swinging his rifle, ''Old Betsy,'' like a baseball bat at the approaching Mexican soldiers.
None of the critics have advanced a theory on why anyone would have gone to the trouble to concoct such an elaborate forgery, but they point to what they say are inconsistencies and anachronisms in the text.
One leading critic, Bill Groneman, a New York City fire captain and amateur Alamo historian who published the book ''Defense of a Legend: Crockett and the De La Pena Diary'' in 1994, says he knows why some of the historians insist on believing the diary genuine. ''People want to adjust history to the way they want it to be,'' Mr. Groneman said.
Of course, that's what they say about him, too.
''What you're looking at is an icon inside of an icon,'' Mr. Crisp said. ''It's the icon of Crockett inside the icon of the Alamo. The Alamo is a significant part of the American mythic narrative of how we became a nation, and Davy Crockett is the most famous person at the Alamo. It's a pretty emotional subject for some people.''
Greg Shaw, vice president for books and manuscripts at Butterfield & Butterfield in Los Angeles, said the auction house has been stunned by the level of interest after news of the sale of the diaries by the heirs of John Peace, a longtime San Antonio lawyer and chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents, who purchased them in the mid-1970's from the widow of a Mexican antique dealer.
''It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen,'' Mr. Shaw said. ''We're sitting out here in California scratching our heads going, what the heck?''
The memoirs, historians believe, were written sometime in the late 1830's by de la Pena in an effort to expose what he saw as the ineptitude of top Mexican leaders in the war. The Crockett episode is just one short incident in the long narrative, but it has drawn almost all the attention.
As described by de la Pena, Crockett was one of seven survivors of the battle who were brought before the winning general, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. An officer explained to Santa Anna that one survivor was ''the naturalist David Crockett, well known in North America for his unusual adventures,'' who had taken refuge in the Alamo when the fighting started. Santa Anna responded with ''a gesture of indignation'' and ordered Crockett and the others killed.
At first, soldiers refused to do it, de la Pena wrote, ''hoping that once the fury of the moment had blown over these men would be spared.'' But eventually other soldiers ''fell upon these unfortunate, defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey,'' and tortured them to death with swords and bayonets.
''These unfortunates died without complaining and without humiliating themselves before their torturers,'' de la Pena wrote.
Why such a seemingly heroic death would be unacceptable to those who revere Crockett -- outside of the suggestion that he had tried to talk his way out of it by claiming to be an innocent naturalist -- is a mystery to many who have read the memoirs.
''They died like true soldiers, like men with honor,'' Mr. Shaw said. ''Where does that impugn any basic man stuff?''
Shortly after he bought the de la Pena documents, Mr. Peace placed them with his other items of Texana in the hands of the University of Texas at San Antonio, where they have remained as the John Peace Collection in the John Peace Library. His son, John Peace 3d, decided to sell the documents earlier this year because he was concerned by reports, since denied, that the university intended to break up the collection and because he was growing increasingly weary of answering questions from all the people stirred up by the controversy, said Lisa Wolf, a spokeswoman for the family.
The controversy broke in 1975 when the memoir portion of the de la Pena documents was translated into English. Though there had been other accounts of men, including Crockett, being executed after the Alamo fighting, the memoir seemed to many to be particularly authoritative and corroborative.
Then, in 1978, Dan Kilgore, president of the Texas State Historical Association, published a book called ''How Did Davy Crockett Die?'' in which he accepted the de la Pena memoir as genuine. A firestorm ignited with many in Texas, and around the country, expressing outrage at the idea that Crockett had not died while fighting to the last.
''Crockett's whole life argues against him doing this,'' said Thomas Ricks Lidley, a mental health worker and private researcher in Austin who is also a critic of the diaries. ''A man with such bravery, I don't see it in his character.''
The energy surrounding the debate has not dissipated for more than two decades, and it is now again reaching a fever pitch as the papers go on the auction block.
The auction house had originally valued the manuscript at from $200,000 to $300,000, but based on more recent expressions of serious interest it feels that it may go for as much as $500,000.
One thing that both sides agree on is that the de la Pena papers go into the hands of someone who will keep them open to scholars, and perhaps complete the task of translating all of them into English. This is by no means certain.
''My greatest fear,'' Mr. Crisp said, ''is that some right-wing nut case will put down a bunch of money and then throw it in the fireplace.''
