So far all I can tell is there were fights at the Alamo and San Jacinto and ole Sam and Don Antonio were in charge of the two sides...past that, it's all made up. Most of the central characters existed but acted in no way as portrayed. When they tried to put Emily D. West and Sam Houston together in the first night, I knew it was crappola from Hollywood and gave up before the first night ended. Have seen a few snippets and except for the murder of Fannin and his men at La Bahia (Goliad) most is total fiction.
Emily D. West was a free woman of color from New York who signed a contract (hence could never be a slave) with Col. Morgan to work at his plantation as a cook of one year. She sailed to Texas with Emily de Zavala, wife of the original Vice President of the Republic and never went farther west in Texas than a line running from current Houston to Galveston. She never was in or near the Alamo, she never met Houston till after the battle (and may not even then) and there's no proof outside of hearsay and speculation, that she was 'entertaining' Santa Anna when the attack came. Several of the senior Mexican officers survived and if she had been in El Presidente's marguee that afternoon, they'd have trumpeted it from the tree tops as they did every other thing he did wrong. Sorry, but Tony was an opium addict and I'd bet dollars to donuts he was passed out in said tent. Several "women" were reported working in camp and one was uselessly sabered by one of Houston's officers and the whole thing nearly went to duels. Miss Emily, as she's known in Texas, was a woman of color without papers after the battle and it took intervention of a number of the officers who knew her to get permission to get the hell out of here and go back home to New York, where she drops out of historical sight!
Sorry...but there are snippets that would have made a much better tale than what's been going on TV the last couple weeks. Imagine the fun they could have had with Don Antonio's phobia of swollen creeks, his crediting of it to the snow run off in the mountains (even his aide laughingly commented in his journal about "only his excellency can see the mountains on the deserts of Texas". Build a barge, float ole Tony over, let him get a swallow of opium and off he went to the next creek where it started all over again. And all the time dragging a bronze barreled 12 or 16 pounder, "The Gold Standard" through the coldest and wettest spring on record.
Then the paddle wheel steamer "Yellowstone" made a run down the Brazos and the Mexican Dragoons tried to lasso it to stop it...how much more Keystone Cops could you get. There are a hundred incidents of history they could have drawn on to make a story of unbelievable truth instead of unbelievable MBBW!
Even at the Alamo, a large black man picked up a small Mexican officer and used him to fend off bayonet thrusts from the soldados, who joined in the fun by laughing uproariously and poking bayonet points into the officer's nether regions...I mean, really, the whole story is a comedy of errors and bad decisions, why couldn't we see that?
op: the solution is so simple if you don't like it don't watch it. :v
