Buy the Book DUEL OF EAGLES: THE MEXICAN AND U.S. FIGHT FOR THE ALAMO * Main selection of the History Book of the Month Club * Texas Literary Award Now, in a rich, powerful, and comprehensive history that removes the myths from the battle for Texas, we have the true story, as dramatic as any legend, of what led to the Alamo and what followed from it. Most such accounts are told only from the perspective of the Anglo-Americans, Duel of Eagles gives us the people and events on the Mexican side as well – starting with the fact that Texas belonged to Mexico by treaty and that most of those who set out to free it went not for patriotic reasons but for their own. From 1832, when Andrew Jackson took office, the great heat sweeping the South, the Anglo-Americans, Texas offered free land and a chance to wipe out the failures, crimes, or poverty of their pasts. To the Mexicans, Texas was golden, and it was theirs. The men in charge on both sides had motives and appetites of their own. President Jackson wanted Texas, whatever maneuvers were needed to get it. Jackson’s handpicked man was the flamboyant Sam Houston, flagrant alcoholic and opium addict, a general who wanted to be an emperor. There was James Bowie, known now for his knife, but back then for his slave trade and for land fraud; Texas meant big money to him. David Crockett, the man who became the prisoner of Davy Crockett fables, was a great bear hunter and a great liar, but hardly great at anything else. William Travis, under whose command was the Alamo, was a man emotionally unfit to be a leader. And Santa Anna, a master of destruction and terror, was an opium addict who suffered from delusions of grandeur: He called himself the Napoleon of the West, but thought he was God. Thanks to his battle plan for the Alamo and the fact that his men were never taught to aim their muskets, most of the Mexican casualties were Mexican inflicted. Here is the brilliantly depicted story of driven leaders and starving, ill-clothed, and untrained men, of forced marches through terrible terrain, of carnage and the final, futile siege of 1836. Among the officers and men on both sides – and among the women and children who survived the Alamo – were those who recorded the events preceding and following the siege. Jeff Long went to those primary sources – contemporary journals, letters, articles, government documents, newspapers – as well as to secondary sources to give us a vivid, moving, and poignant picture of the grandeur of the land and the terrifying pettiness of those trying to occupy it.