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Alamo Letter Auctioned at Sotheby’sOne of only four known copies of a February 1836 letter, in which doomed Alamo commander William Barret Travis vowed never to surrender or retreat from the Mexican army, was sold December 3 at Sotheby’s auction house in New York for nearly $300,000. The letter was not the original, which is in the archives of the Texas State Library in Austin, but was one of a handful of broadsheets distributed at the Texas provisional government convention shortly afterwards.The Travis letter was one of four items pulled from a private collection just minutes before a June 18 auction when a retired Texana dealer, W. Thomas Taylor, questioned whether they had been stolen from the state library some 40 years earlier. It and a letter announcing the loss of the Alamo battle were recently returned to Sotheby’s for sale, while the remaining two lots—an 1835 letter written by Alamo defender James Bowie and a printed account of the siege—will likely go back to the archives because the library has better evidence of ownership, the Associated Press reported December 3. “There’s been almost a proliferation of collections coming to auction in the last year or tow,” State Archivist Chris LaPlante said in the December 2 San Antonio Express-News. “It’s a great concern. They were created as public records; they belong to the people. Yet trying to prove ownership beyond the shadow of a doubt is very difficult.” Posted December 10, 2004. |
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