Replacing the Alamo

Every January, when leisure travelers are staying away and the convention business is slow, city workers drain the portion of the San Antonio River that snakes through downtown and dredge its mucky bottom. They usually find chairs from restaurants’ patios, pint glasses, wine glasses, and shot glasses, cell phones, jackets — everything you’d expect to fall into the river from the limestone paths of the River Walk. But last year they found the Alamo on the riverbed near the Navarro Street bridge. It was covered in layers of thick, grayish-brown mud. Judging from the shape, the workers thought it was maybe a Volkswagen Beetle. But as they began washing off the mud with sprayers, they pretty quickly realized it was the Alamo.

The church had been stolen five months earlier. (The perpetrators left the Long Barracks and Low Barracks.) City and state officials held several emergency meetings and, to avoid the humiliation of losing the Alamo on their watch and lawmakers’ demands for their heads, decided they would replace it with a replica that had been built in the early aughts for a movie about the Battle of the Alamo. They covered up the gap where the Alamo had been with a large canvas tent, told the public they were giving it a thorough cleaning, and brought in the replica in the middle of the night. Visitors to the Alamo noticed the difference, though they didn’t realize it was a fake Alamo. The site’s customer experience scores increased markedly. Within a few weeks, the number of visits was up dramatically. The two most common remarks in surveys were that it looked exactly like the Alamo they’d seen in that movie and that it was somehow fresher than they’d expected. More importantly, the experience left them inexplicably happy, almost euphoric in some cases, the result of some particular combination of quarried Austin limestone, mortar, and craftsmanship that stirred something in them.

But a problem came to the surface as the Alamo’s popularity surged. The Battle of the Alamo ended in an appalling defeat, with as many as 257 dead Texians and Tejanos, and many triumphant Mexicans. And it didn’t take a military expert to understand what an absurd strategic blunder its defenders had made. There was a yawning mismatch between the historical facts visitors were given during the tour and how the structure made them feel. The managers of the Alamo responded by putting more emphasis on the battle’s importance as a rallying cry for fighters later in the war for Texas independence. But when that failed to close the fact-experience divide, they changed the defeat to a victory that was biblical in scale.

Eventually, the new history of the Battle of the Alamo triumphed through the power of repetition over the resistance of professional historians. And it turned out the Texas Board of Education was eager for a new version of the story.

The discovery of the real Alamo in the San Antonio River was an unwelcome development. The same functionaries who decided to replace it with the replica now had to decide what to do with the original. Storing it at some secret, secure location was tempting, but were there any truly secret locations left these days? It seemed unlikely. So, they opted to pulverize the Alamo.

After hosing off the mud, the city workers were given orders to cover the church with a tarp. At 2 a.m. on a Thursday, two days after discovering the Alamo, a crew of six descended to the riverbed, set up three powerful work lamps, and threw themselves on the structure with jackhammers and sledge hammers like it was prey.