On the evening March 5, 1836, Colonel William Barret Travis made a stirring speech to the garrison of the beleaguered Alamo.

“My brave companions,” he declared. “Our fate is sealed. Within a few days –- perhaps a very few hours –- we must all be in eternity. This is our destiny, and we cannot avoid it. This is our certain doom.”

The approximately 200 men of the Alamo were outnumbered more than ten-to-one by the besieging Mexicans led by General Santa Anna. They could expect no help. They had three options: Surrender, and be shot as traitors; scatter like rats, and make a vain attempt to slip through the Mexican lines; or stay where they were and sell their lives as dearly as possible.

Travis laid out the grim alternatives, and left it to each man to decide for himself which course to follow. “My own choice,” he said “is to stay in this fort and die for my country, fighting as long as breath shall remain in my body. This I will do even if you leave me alone.”

With that, Travis drew his sword and traced a line in the sand, calling on all those ready to die with him to cross over. One after another, the heroic defenders crossed the line. Jim Bowie, desperately ill with typhoid and confined to his bed, asked to be carried over.

When, as a boy, I saw this scene re-enacted in the 1960 John Wayne movie, I was awestruck by the bravery of these men.

But is the story true?

Skeptical historians point out that there was no mention of it until nearly forty years after the event, and that the supporting evidence is slender and suspect. There is thus a high probability that it was a later invention. Indeed, the makers of the 2004 movie about the Alamo, who strove for historical accuracy, chose to omit it –- to the fury of many tradition-loving Texans.

In their excellent book, A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory, Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, assess the evidence impartially and conclude that the skeptics might be right.

“But,” the authors go on to say, “they also just might be wrong. The idea of scratching a line in the dirt and then asking men to cross to one side or another was hardly novel. Southerners often voted in this method, and Ben Milam supposedly rallied Texans to take Bexar in December 1835 with just such an action. Certainly it was a melodramatic gesture, but it was a melodramatic age and Travis was far more melodramatic than most. His letters are filled with dramatic excesses and lofty hyperbole. He courted the notion of death as avidly as he wooed females – thinking about it, speculating about it, writing about it. In several letters he considered how people would think about him after he died, seemingly more concerned with his posthumous reputation than his chances for survival. One senses, reading his letters, that death probably didn’t frighten Travis as much as the idea that in death he would be forgotten or considered a fool. Not only was Travis capable of tracing a line in the sand, the action would have been a perfect expression of his character.”

In short, the real Travis was probably every bit as vain, arrogant, bombastic –- and courageous –- as Laurence Harvey portrayed him in the 1960 film. If the story of Travis tracing that line in the sand with his sword is a myth, it is a myth that is more compelling, more durable and more illuminating than mere fact.