What the Battle of the Alamo Was Really Like

Warfare History Network

Security, Americas

Always remember the Alamo.

The siege of the Alamo is one of the most celebrated military confrontations in American history. There have been other instances of American soldiers fighting against the odds, from Custer’s Last Stand in 1876 to the embattled Marines defending Wake Island against the Japanese in 1941. But no other incident has struck such a deeply emotional chord among Americans as the Alamo. The Mission Chapel façade has become an icon, instantly recognizable to people the world over as a symbol of men fighting heroically against the odds.

The Alamo had all the necessary ingredients for high drama, so it’s not surprising it has been a film subject almost from the movies’ birth. The first known picture was the 1911 production The Immortal Alamo. A few years later famed movie pioneer D.W. Griffith released Martyrs of the Alamo in 1915. The battle scenes are well staged, but to modern viewers the racism is unsettling. Early in the picture, before the siege, a Mexican officer flirts with Susannah Dickinson. For this “crime” her husband Almeron shoots him dead.

Over the next 40 years about a half-dozen Alamo movies followed. None, however, had the impact of a television show produced by Walt Disney in the 1950s. Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontierchronicled the story of the legendary hunter and woodsman. One of its chief assets was actor Fess Parker, a lanky, laid-back kind of a guy whose southern accent and down-home charm struck exactly the right note.

Disney’s Davy Crockett wasn’t just a show; it was a phenomenon that dramatically demonstrated the awesome power of TV. Millions of children all over the country could not get enough of Davy. Stores could not keep toy rifles or coonskin caps in stock, and parents became sick of constant renditions of the show theme song, “Ballad of Davy Crockett.”