The name of the Irishman Major Robert Evans is almost unknown in his home country. Similarly, Robert McKinney, Burke Trammel and William B. Ward, all Irish, are probably unfamiliar names on this side of the Atlantic.
Yet thousands of miles away, in the Texan city of San Antonio, Evans and his fellow countrymen are remembered as heroes, as famous in their way as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, the men beside whom they died.
Evans, McKinney, Trammel, Ward and at least seven other Irishmen left their mark, not on any Irish soil, but amid the rubble of an old mission building in south Texas, where their remains were burned on March 6th, 1836, along with those of 176 other men who died defending the Alamo.
Initially, it seems surprising that the flag of the Irish Republic should be honoured beside the flags of Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia and the other American states included in the Alamo shrine. San Antonio is a long way from the traditional Irish strongholds of Boston and New York. More to the point, in the early 19th century south Texas was inhospitable territory, a frontier area contested by Spaniards, Mexicans, AngloAmericans and Apache raiders.
Spanish-ruled Texas
Yet natives of Ireland were among the first settlers in Spanish-ruled Texas, attracted by the promise of 4,000 acres per family offered to settlers for a small fee. Later, four Irishmen were signatories of the Texas Declaration of Independence and Irishmen comprised one seventh of the Texan forces at the battle of San Jacinto.
Hugo Oconor, generally acknowledged as the first Irishman to arrive in Texas, acted as governor of Texas in 1767 and successfully fortified the city of San Antonio against Apaches. A Belfast man, Philip Nolan, is said to have been the first man to fully map Texas, though this is a matter of dispute. The Spaniards were so incensed by his activities that they killed him, leading one to suppose that map-making might well have been one of Nolan's lesser activities. Two other Irishmen, John McMullen and James McGloin, established a colony numbering 200 Irish Catholic families in Texas under Mexican contract - a colony that, incidentally, endured hardships as extreme as any suffered by settlers in the US. They named their first town San Patricio de Hibernia and by 1850 there were almost 1,500 Irish people living in Texas.
Bearing such Irish incursions by the Irish in mind, it is understandable that the Alamo's tiny force of 187 defenders included 11 Irishmen. Their names are recorded on the walls of the mission building among the Heroes of the Alamo: in addition to the four mentioned above, they are Joseph M. Hawkins, James McGee, Jackson J. Rusk, William Daniel Jackson, Thomas Jackson, James Nowlan and Andrew Duvalt. In fact, more than 11 Irishmen may have perished at the Alamo: a man named Samuel E. Burns may also have been Irish and Stephen Dennison was either Irish or English.
Formerly named the Mision San Antonio de Valero, the Alamo was a home to missionaries and Indian converts for almost 70 years. In 1793, Spanish officials secularised San Antonio's five missions and the lands were distributed to the Indian residents.
Renamed the Alamo
Then, in the early 1800s, the Spanish stationed a cavalry unit at the former mission, which the troops renamed the Alamo after the Spanish word for "cottonwood". From then on, the Alamo became home successively to Spaniards, rebels and Mexicans - following the granting of Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 - until the Texas Revolution.
In December 1835, Texan and Tejano volunteers, tired of Mexican rule, fought a houseto-house battle with Mexican troops quartered in San Antonio, eventually forcing them to surrender. The volunteers then occupied the Alamo and began strengthening its defences in anticipation of a counter-attack. That attack began on February 23rd, 1836, when the army of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who had assumed the presidency of Mexico following a coup in 1833, arrived outside San Antonio, catching the defenders almost completely by surprise. Curiously, Santa Anna is recognised as one of the worst tacticians in military history. At San Jacinto, his entire army was wiped out by the Texans in 18 minutes, while Santa Anna was asleep. Tall and skinny, he lost a leg fighting the French in 1838 and had it buried in a special ceremony.
Santa Anna's failings and the ongoing debate about the facts of the siege do nothing to diminish the bravery of the Alamo's defenders. They held out for 13 days against a force of several thousand and, when the Alamo's commander, William B. Travis, drew a line in the sand and told the defenders that any man who wanted to leave could do so by stepping over the line, only one man took up the offer. Even the scouts Travis sent out to plead - unsuccessfully - for reinforcements returned to die beside their comrades. Only 32 men ever arrived to assist the defenders, a party of volunteers from Gonzales who made their way through enemy lines on the eighth day of the siege.
On the morning of March 6th, 1836, under a red flag which signified no mercy for the defenders, Santa Anna's forces took the Alamo and killed every man within its walls.
Hand-to-hand fighting
It was during this final hand-to-hand fighting that Evans lost his life, attempting to fulfil the crucial task with which he had been entrusted. Realising that they were about to be overrun, the defenders agreed that the magazine should be exploded while the attacking forces were within the walls, blowing up the attackers, the surviving defenders and the mission itself. Evans was killed while trying to light the fuse and his death is the subject of a special commemorative plaque within the Alamo.
After the Alamo and the achievement of Texan independence, the Irish influence on Texas led to the establishment of the county of San Patricio on March 17th, 1836 and the Irish continued to play a notable part in Texan history for the rest of the century: during the American Civil War, a company of all-Irish Confederates under the command of Richard Dowling successfully engaged and repulsed the Union fleet at Sabine Pass.
By 1980, 200 years after the arrival of Hugo Oconor and almost 150 years after the Alamo, over 500,000 Texans claimed to be of Irish descent.