No one knows the story of the end. Even the number of the victims is matter of dispute to-day. Some say there were a hundred and eighty-three defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. Some say one woman escaped; some say two. Some declare that one negro servant got away; some say two. The state of Texas adopted the “Alamo baby,” but the Alamo baby did not see Crockett fall. There are different reports. Some state that there were six Americans left hemmed up against the wall, and that the Mexican general, Castrillon, called upon them to surrender. They did so, Crockett being one of the six. Confronting the Mexican commander, they were treacherously ordered to be shot down. It is said that Crockett, bowie knife in hand, sprang with all his force for the throat of the Mexican general, but was cut down or shot down with the others, “his face even in death wreathed in an expression of contempt and scorn at such treachery.” All this is but imagination; and there is all reason to suppose that there never was any surrender of these six last survivors. The commoner story is that Crockett fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed against the wall, before him lying the bodies of some twenty Mexicans. The usual impression is that he killed these twenty Mexicans himself before he was cut down, but this is perhaps the result of emotional writing. No one knows how many foes had fallen to his arm. No one can tell how many Mexicans each of these raging, fighting men destroyed before he himself went down. Earlier in the siege Crockett recounts picking off five cannoneers one after the other. He tells how the Bee Hunter and Thimblerig did their sharpshooting, how the Pirate died of wounds received in a sortie, how the Bee Hunter—a most unlikely thing—burst into poesy and song at the hoisting of the Texas flag. Some of these things have too unreal a sound. There is something not quite Crockett, though à la Crockett, in the conclusion of Crockett’s so-called, or rather alleged, diary: “March 5.—Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! throughout the day. No time for memorandums now. Go ahead. Liberty and independence forever!” These are the last recorded words of dear Davy Crockett. It is probable in the extreme that he never wrote them. It is unlikely to an equal degree that, in all the turmoil of the Alamo fight, he could deliberately have kept a diary, or that it could have been preserved after all the horrible details of that bloody and disastrous conflict. As to the end of Davy Crockett, there is and has been no living human being who could speak with absolute accuracy and authenticity. Bloody San Jacinto, the field where the cry “Remember the Alamo!” was the watchword of a dire and just revenge, left but few Mexican eye-witnesses of the Alamo.