Introduction
For 91-year-old Terrell Mott, it is difficult to remember when Alamo was just a word to describe an old, broken-down assemblage of buildings on the edge of San Antonio de Bexar. But it's now 1911, and for 75 years Alamo has been a word to describe the Texas holy of holies, a place where long ago an event occurred that was far more ghastly than glorious.
As Stephen Harrigan's novel The Gates of the Alamo opens April 21, 1911, Mott, the lone remaining survivor of that now-famous battle, is helping celebrate the 75th anniversary of a subsequent battle at the San Jacinto River when Texas won its independence from Mexico with revengeful shouts of "Remember the Alamo."
Most of the mission has been gone for decades, torn down to make room for meat markets and saloons. For Mott, the real Alamo resides only in his memory. Now there's only the old church, standing there in its strange, solemn primacy. "They could tear it down too," Mott says to himself. "Everything passes from the earth. Why not the sacred Alamo?"
Mott is one of the three primary characters created by Harrigan and inserted into this 19th century story to bring it to life in the 21st century. Steeped in historical research, The Gates of the Alamo treats readers to a compelling human story, not the mythical account of March 6, 1836, found in textbooks, television or movies.
William C. Davis, author of Three Roads to the Alamo, says, "Thanks to the author's synthesis of the latest and most authoritative Alamo research, readers will learn more about the real story of the Alamo from this book than from many of the histories that have appeared over the years."
Harrigan doesn't focus on historical Alamo figures such as David Crockett, James Bowie, William Travis and Santa Anna, although they are vividly represented, but he invents a cast of characters drawn into the conflict despite their ambivalence. "A lot of contemporary fiction just feels anemic to me," Harrigan said. "It's hard to get involved.
"Stories that have rich characters and a driving narrative are certainly what I most like to read," he added. "People are starved for real story-driven fiction. I know I am. I wrote the book that I most wanted to read."
Harrigan, fascinated by the Alamo story since he was a boy, spent eight years researching and writing his novel. "I spent two years researching before I started writing," he said, "and I never stopped researching as I wrote, not just about what happened at the Alamo, which is perpetually in dispute and will never be fully solved, but it was also important to convey a sense of the time in which these events took place.
"To do that, you have to know all kinds of weird stuff, such as when somebody puts their hands in their pockets, where are the pockets? Are the pockets in their pants? In their waistcoats? Are the pants even called pants, or are they called pantaloons? You have to search for period expressions and understand the entire context of the time. You're always looking for little nuggets of historical detail that are not always easy to come across."
He explained, "Stuff you know right off the top of your head when you're writing contemporary novels takes years to research."
There were times, he said, when he would need to verify 15-to-20 facts in one paragraph to ensure its accuracy.
Because of Harrigan's extended research, his novel presents a detailed picture of the roofless, old Catholic mission in 1836. He studied period politics, clothing, agriculture, family tales, weapons, fables of war, documents, diaries, maps and drawings. Writing the novel quickly illustrated to him that numerous facts were still missing, and only hunting them down would make his ambitious book a definitive novel about the Alamo.
His memorable characters combined with the tested literary themes of love, personal responsibility and ambition put The Gates of the Alamo on the bookshelf beside the best of novels about the Texas Revolution.
