A Portrait of Amos Pollard: The Doctor at the Alamo

Abstract

A Portrait of Amos Pollard:The Doctor at the Alamo Francis J. Leazes Jr. (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution There are five known oil portraits of Alamo garrison members. Amos Pollard's was done from life before he went to Texas. From the Collections of the Historical Society of Cheshire County, Keene, New Hampshire. [End Page 438] At the back of Prospect Hill Cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont, at the bottom of a steep slope, a small broken gravestone with a barely legible inscription carved into it lies flat, partially concealed by mud and dry grass. This unassuming headstone is the eternal link between Brattleboro and San Antonio, Texas, because it marks the final resting place of Fanny Oella Wilder, the only surviving grandchild of Doctor Amos Pollard, who perished within the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Historian William C. Davis wrote in Three Roads to the Alamo that it was the deaths of the backwoods politician David "Davy" Crockett, knife-fighting plantation owner Jim Bowie, and the lawyer, turned soldier, William Barret Travis, that made their lives "a matter of interest."1 While Doctor Amos Pollard shares in the same glory of the famed Alamo trio, much less has been written about how this determined and educated New Englander came to live in Texas and die at the Alamo. Pollard stands in the shadow of those famous Alamo luminaries, but his story should also be a matter of [End Page 439] interest. His death at the Alamo is an exclamation point marking the end of his life. Ambition fueled Pollard's search for respect and standing as he tested what American liberty meant. This biography brings Amos Pollard out of the shadow and tells his long overdue story. The story of Amos Pollard's dramatic life is a complex saga. It unfolded during the period historians identify as the Early Republic (1790–1840) when, according to J. M. Opal in Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England, ambition shaped the lives of New England men like Amos Pollard. The essential facts of his biography are that he was born in 1803, obtained his medical degree in 1826, and then left the farm forever. He practiced his profession in reform-centered Boston until early in 1828, when he moved to New York City and married. During the next five years his medical skills and resilience were severely tested, his politics matured, and his association with the nation's reform agenda strengthened. In 1833, he left New York for Texas, leaving behind his wife and child, but not his ambition or convictions. He settled at Brazoria in Stephen Austin's colony in Southeast Texas, a fractious place brimming with opportunity and rife with conflict. Pollard had by then embraced the idea of a slave-free Texas independent from Mexico. In October 1835, he accepted an appointment from Austin to be the surgeon in the Texas army that marched to besiege San Antonio in December 1835. He never left. Dedicated to his profession, he died at his hospital post on March 6, 1836, within the walls of the battered Alamo. Amos Pollard's Alamo story does not end with his death. The epilogue to his life story centers on two dramatic props: his portrait and a combbacked rocking chair. Considerable irony and tragedy for his surviving family is intertwined with the preservation of those personal possessions. Both items reminded subsequent generations that the man in the portrait was a real person, who, in the last three years of his life probably sat in that rocking chair listening to the medical complaints of Texas patients, while discussing what liberty meant to them. The aspiring physician was still grappling with that question himself, even as he ultimately decided to fight to his death for what he believed to be a worthy cause. That is who the Amos Pollard of this biography is: not a failed transplant from the far distant hills of New England or crowded New York neighborhoods, and not a rugged pioneer or frontiersman; he was an ambitious, educated, dedicated professional searching for standing and respect with a determined focus on the future...