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

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

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

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

by William C. Davis

Paperback

$21.99 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Usually ships within 6 days
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

"William C. Davis's Three Roads to the Alamo is far and away the best account of the Alamo I have ever read. The portraits of Crockett, Bowie, and Travis are brilliantly sketched in a fast-moving story that keeps the reader riveted to the very last word." — Stephen B. Oates

Three Roads to the Alamois 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 one of the most famous and tragic battles in American history—and about what really happened in that battle.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060930943
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 04/07/1999
Series: Harper Perennial
Pages: 816
Sales rank: 369,238
Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.34(d)

About the Author

William C. Davis is the author or editor of thirty-five books on the civil war and southern history, most recently A Way Through the Wilderness, "A Government of Our Own ": The Making of a Confederacy, and the prizewinning biography Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour. For many years a magazine publisher, Davis now divides his time between writing and consulting for book publishers and television.

Read an Excerpt

1

Crockett

1786-1815

I never had six months education in my life I was raised in obs[c]urity without either wealth or education I have made myself to every station in life that I ever filled through my own exertions . . .
David Crockett, August 18, 1831

When he wrote his autobiography in the winter of 1833&ndash34, David Crockett insisted that it should run at least 200 pages. That, to him, was a real book. As he wrote he studied other books, counted the words on their pages, and compared the tally with his own growing manuscript. As a result, when published his narrative spanned 211 pages, and he was content. By that time in his life he had been a state legislator, three times elected to Congress, the subject of a book, the thinly disguised hero of an acclaimed play, a popular phenomenon in the eastern press, and touted for the presidency. Yet he devoted more than one-fourth of his own work to his youth: a time when his "own exertions" availed him nothing. He remembered youthful pranks, a few adventures, and vicissitudes that should have made him wise but only left him gullible. Repeatedly he returned to three things he remembered from his first eighteen years: that the father whom he loved was a stern disciplinarian and could be violent; that he wept easily as a child and as a young man; and that he was poor. Certainly it took no stretch of memory to recall the last in particular. For David Crockett poverty was never yesterday.

His was the story of a whole population of the poor who started moving from the British Isles in the1700s and simply never stopped. Despite the misnomer "Scots-Irish," they were almost all Scots, as surely were Crockett&rsquos ancestors.1 Like so many who grew up ignorant and illiterate on the fringes of young America, he knew little of his forebears, and some of what he believed was erroneous. Indeed, that father whom he loved yet feared knew little himself, or else chose not to speak of it. Perhaps the child David did not listen or kept his distance, especially when John Crockett had been at the drink and felt ill-tempered and prone to reach for the birch.

The man David did not even know where his own father had been born, and believed it was either in Ireland or during the ocean passage to the colonies.

What People are Saying About This

Stephen B. Oates

The portraits of Crockett Bowie, and Travis are brilliantly sketched in a fast-moving story that keeps the reader riveted to the very last word. Far and away the best account of the Alamo I have ever read.
—Stephen B. Oates, author of the Whirlwind of War and The Approaching Fury

Robert Utley

Exhaustive research by a master practitioner, sweeps aside layers of legend to reveal three giants of the Alamo in their true character and significance. Three Roads to the Alamo will occupy the authoritative high ground for years to come.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews