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Heroes, hypocrisy, and the truth in between...

C. A. Gerber

3/17/2026

Review of Three Roads To The Alamo

Book Author: William C. Davis

tags: history , biography 

A famous battle surrounded in myth—what truly remains when legend is stripped away?

For a book to be eight hundred pages long, it must inevitably cover a topic for which there is a wealth of information. Regarding the Alamo and the lives and fortunes of the three men whose lives ended at that historic siege, there is indeed an abundance of material; the problem lies in the fact that much of it is false. Historian William C. Davis does an excellent job of dissecting truth from falsehood and history from myth, carefully tracing the available information on these three men while remaining clear of the dangerous shore of deification into which popular media has so often drifted. In doing so, Davis strips away the romanticized versions of these men, who, far from flawless, exhibited many transient weaknesses and moral failings.

From the son of a tavern owner in Tennessee, to the backwoods adventurer, to the congressional manipulator and naïve legislator, Davis presents a compelling portrait of the most famous of the three: Davy of the wild frontier. Prey to his own public image, Crockett becomes both its beneficiary and its victim. Loved by the people, hated by his party, and eventually alienated from both, this complex man flees to Texas, like the other two, as a means of escaping the consequences of his political and personal failures.

Then there is “Big Jim” Bowie, whom tradition credits with inventing the Bowie knife, though this honor properly belongs to his brother, Rezin. From fraudulent land dealer and slave trader, to collaborator with the pirate Jean Lafitte, to a man of explosive temper and a readiness to fight and kill, James Bowie’s ambition and moral flexibility ultimately propelled him to San Antonio, Texas. His reckless pursuit of wealth, whether in rumored gold or contested land, coupled with his personal sense of moral rectitude and genuine desire to defend the innocent, renders him a hero of a deeply flawed sort.

Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, there is William Barrett Travis, alone among the three to be largely forgotten by the annals of history. The son of a minister, Travis emerges as a man driven by an intense desire to make a name for himself, an ambition he pursued repeatedly and unsuccessfully before heading west to Texas. A man marked by serious moral failings, including the abandonment of his wife and children, womanizing, and slaveholding, Travis was nevertheless acutely aware of his own shortcomings and continually sought redemption. A devout Christian and committed patriot, he had only recently begun to take responsibility for his young son in the months preceding his premature death.

Author William C. Davis, a renowned expert on the antebellum South, frames the story not as a myth of American beauty, nor as a rallying cry for a return to the golden age of patriotism. Nor does he deliver a one-sided attack on the character and lives of these complex men; rather, uncovering all the evidence, and writing on both the good and the bad, Davis shows us the portraits of three human beings, consumed, as most Americans, with a sense of rugged individualism, of willing the impossible and then doing everything in their power to bring the impossible to pass; sometimes succeeding, more often failing, but always, as Theodore Roosevelt said, “in the arena.”

Finally, each man was forced to forge his name in one of the most memorable battles—or massacres—in American history. The fight for Texas Independence started at the Alamo. The lives of William Barrett Travis, David Crockett, and James Bowie ended there—as men who, despite their flaws and overwhelming ambition, died for the defense of what they knew to be right.

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

March 17th, 2026