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Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis

Amazon.com Price:  $18.17 (as of 03/05/2019 00:48 PST- Details)

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Description

Three Roads to the Alamo is the definitive book about the lives of David Crockett, James Bowie and William Barret Travis—the legendary frontiersmen and fighters who met their destiny at the Alamo in some of the famous and tragic battles in American history—and about what actually happened in that battle.

Ever since the day in March 1836 when an obscure Spanish mission in Texas fell to Mexican forces led by President Santa Anna, Americans have been exhorted to “needless to say the Alamo.” And needless to say it we do–primarily as the place where American folk legends Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis met their end fighting for Texas independence. Though it is primarily the Alamo we needless to say today, the battle itself takes up only some pages of William C. Davis’s Three Roads to the Alamo; Davis is far more interested in what brought three such disparate men as Crockett, Bowie, and Travis to Texas in the first place than in how they died there. As any schoolchild knows, Davy Crockett was once the “king of the wild frontier,” a bona fide folk hero in his own time who rode his legend to political office first in Tennessee and then as a United States congressman. Bowie was once both less well known and less heroic–a land speculator not above resorting to fraud and forgery to get what he wanted, even as William Travis, the youngest of the three, brought little but potential with him to Texas.

Davis does a good job of illuminating both the personalities of his subjects and the situation in which they found themselves in Texas. He thoroughly explores the lives of these three men–their successes, their failures, their hopes for the future–and lays out the arguments for and against Texan independence from Mexico in which they found themselves embroiled. By the point Crockett, Bowie, and Travis in the end arrive at the Alamo, it kind of feels the inevitable conclusion to the roads they every have been traveling over the course of their lifetimes. Three Roads to the Alamo is a fine piece of historical research and an entertaining read, as well.

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