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Enrique Esparza was a boy who survived the Alamo massacre and told his story completely only when an old man, to a newspaper reporter. The account was published in San Antonio in a series of articles, which are recreated at book length in From Under Gods Wing, by Paul J. Lyon.
The premise of this history fiction novel, which contains extensive footnotes, is that the manuscript was suppressed for a century as being contrary to the popular conceptions about the famous battle. The majority of the footnotes are excerpts from travel books, journals, novels, poems, and first-person accounts of the early 1800s.
Esparza sketches the details of the Alamo fight from the ground up, filling it in with the similar descriptions by these others of the same era: the reader is introduced to the slang, common food, clothing, and attitudes of the people trapped in the fort for 12 days of siege, discusses why the men decided to stay and die, and reveals a blow-by-blow account of the battle itself.
Many of the mysteries of the Alamo, such as whether or not Crockett died heroically, are resolved not by theory or speculation, but by the words of those likely to know best. Lyon has concluded that the garrison was motivated throughout the crisis by the men s powerful obligations to protect their families and the loved ones of others who had fallen under their protection in the old mission, and Esparza patiently describes the values of the day honor, the defense of women and children, and patriotic devotion to explain the actions of his family and those he remembers in the Alamo.
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