first draft, he says, followed the line that Crockett had survived the battle and had been executed afterward. He attributes this account of Crockett's death to recent historical scholarship, notably a 1974 translation of a memoir by one Jose Enrique de la Pena, a Mexican officer at the Alamo: "As I researched the subject further, however, I concluded that the story of Crockett's execution, like the equally well-known story of the line Travis [military commander of the Alamo] drew in the dust at the Alamo, was folklore" (51). In other words, the popular imagination had overtaken judicious review of evidence in a way that had the effect of promoting a spurious version of the truth.
The culture-wars aspect of Pena's memoir, says Lind, surfaced because it was translated into English in 1974, in the wake of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, which had polarized the U.S. politically. According to Lind, the view that Crockett was executed was favored by historians who felt that that mode of death exposed an ultrapatriotic myth of Crockett's dying heroically in battle. In other words, to accept the execution story was also to assert that the romantic coonskin-cap image of Davy Crockett was a fraud (52). On the other hand, in 1974 the execution story appears to have been rejected by those who considered the traditional account of Crockett's death in battle to be the correct one. One thing that complicates the project of authenticating either story is something rather practical: The owner of the Pena manuscript has apparently refused to allow physical scientific tests of paper, ink, and so on
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