bill_schubert | What I did for my summer vacation (Reply)

Texas reading material

I ran across the outrage that is known as "Forget the Alamo" through our glorious LT GOV who was appropriately offended by the whole thing. So I read it on my Kindle from a library loan and got about halfway through it. The book is about the 'first' battle of the Alamo where a bunch of land grabbing slavers were killed by Santa Anna but is even more about subsequent battles. From the one waged by Disney, Fess Parker, and John Wayne to the ones waged today kicked off by Phil Collins and his extensive collection of Alamo kitsch, AKA sacred relics from the site the battles have been ongoing since 1836. The battles after the one with Santa Anna are at least as good a story as the original. But they are complex and require a lot of flipping back and forth to understand what is going one today (and it IS going on today).

Then the whole thing just grew out of proportion and I had to know the story before and after. The thousand page tome by Harrigan was the result. He really is a little nicer in his assessment of the progenitors of today's Texians but let's just say the British castoffs who settled Australia got nothing on the original Texians. Failures and misfits and con artists every one. Tale of the west, I guess.

I'm only a fifth of the way through the big Texas book and still have the second half of the Alamo so it will be a while. Fortunately I have time.