Characters
Harrigan says the historical context in which his fictional characters are placed was constructed with care. Edmund, Mary, Terrell, Blas and Telesforo are imaginary, though their backgrounds may include a stray fact or two from the biography of an actual person. "Many of the other characters, including Joe, Travis' slave, really existed and are depicted as they seem to me to have been," Harrigan wrote.
Harrigan's characters have human flaws, but he still treats them with respect. He understands the complexity of individuals and groups involved in the political and social climate of Texas in the 1830s. And he maintains a reasonable degree of impartiality with characters from both sides of the battle.
"At this level of ambition, everybody is complex," he told the Austin Chronicle. "Everybody has mixed motives. Everybody has feet of clay. And what's exciting to me as a novelist is to depict people who are flawed and three-dimensional. I don't think there are any heroes in this book."
He added, "I'm not interested in characters that don't have some sort of internal conflict. It became necessary, for my interests, to have characters who were undergoing a battle of their own against themselves."
Here's a brief look at 10 (five historical, five fictional) of the key characters in The Gates of the Alamo:
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna -- Governor, president, general and dictator, even Santa Anna receives careful, nonstereotypical characterization. He is not the small, dark, brooding figure usually portrayed, but the Santa Anna we first see is elegant and sophisticated. Later he becomes the obsessive 42-year-old military leader who orders the deaths of the Alamo prisoners, the Santa Anna of history.
James Bowie -- The Mexican government called Bowie, Travis and their Texian cohorts "pirates," and Harrigan gives readers little reason to disagree. Loud and boisterous, a braggart and a bully, Bowie, 39, is also presented as a man who loved his Bexarena wife and cared for her family. He wrestled alligators and wielded his famous knife in the opening pages, but in the end he's too ill to fight and relinquished command of the Alamo to Travis.
David Crockett -- Perhaps the most interesting of Harrigan's historical characters is Crockett, a former U.S. Congressman from Tennessee who joins the Texians in February 1836. Large, loud and political, he is a man with humor and sensitivity, not completely a backwoods lout. A review in the Austin Chronicle calls him "something like Opie's dad with a Kentucky rifle and a heavy heart." Harrigan told the New York Times, "What a good guy he seems to have been."
Joe -- The Negro slave of Travis who is spared from death by Santa Anna's army. Slavery was forbidden in Mexico, and since Texas was part of Mexico, Joe "lived half in hope and half in anxiety that someday a boatload of Mexican soldiers was going to come up the Brazos River and tell him he was a free man."
Edmund McGowan -- A 44-year-old botanist in the sometime employ of the Mexican government, McGowan roams the unspoiled land in one of the book's great pleasures. Harrigan's choice of McGowan is particularly apt since through him Harrigan is able to use his considerable talents as a nature writer. But McGowan's wanderings have led him to a self-imposed monasticism that prevents him from ever fully connecting with people, including Mary, who falls in love with him. Will they or won't they survive the Alamo and make a life together in the new Texas?
Blas Angel Montoya -- A quietly dedicated sergeant, he commands a company of sharpshooters in Santa Anna's army that is ordered to travel north to Texas in anticipation of the coming battles.
Mary Mott -- She is as earthy and practical as McGowan is aloof and intellectual. Widowed two years earlier, this 36-year-old proprietress of an inn in Refugio is fighting the Karankawa Indians as she is introduced. Her parental love and search for Terrell and her romantic love and pursuit of McGowan dominate the emotional life of the novel to the final pages.
Terrell Mott -- Harrigan paints a convincing portrait of a teenager, 16, cutting ties with home to grow up and become a man after a shattering experience with love. It just so happens that in his march into manhood, he finds himself hurled into war at the same time feeling disgraced in his mother's eyes. Harrigan opens and closes his book 75 years later with Terrell as the 91-year-old former mayor of San Antonio.
William Travis -- Travis and his Texian cohorts are motivated as much by lust as by idealism. Harrigan's Travis is called a fornicator too fond of Texana girls, but he is also a loving father and a man concerned about ending his marriage properly. An attorney, he wrote deeply passionate letters from inside the Alamo to suggest a magnetic leader enthralled with his presumed destiny. His most famous letter of Feb. 24, 1836, is addressed to "the people of Texas and all Americans in the world" and expresses his convictions: "I shall never surrender or retreat." Travis, 26, took command when Bowie became ill.
Telesforo Villasenor -- Santa Anna's mapmaker, an ambitious lieutenant in the Mexican army, becomes a member of the general's inner circle through a display of valor.
