When the Alamo's defenders divided the perimeter among them, David Crockett and his Tennessee volunteers drew the palisade — the low wooden stockade and earthwork spanning the gap between the chapel and the main gate on the compound's southeast side, the weakest stretch of the whole line. A former Congressman who had lost his seat and ridden west telling his voters they could go to the devil while he went to Texas, Crockett reached San Antonio in February 1836 with a handful of mounted Tennesseans and their long rifles. Through the thirteen-day siege his marksmen made the open ground before the palisade deadly for any Mexican soldier who tried to cross it.

W. Britain's figure shows Crockett on watch rather than in the fight — the long flintlock rifle cradled upright in both hands, its butt resting against his hip. He wears a plain brown frontier coat open over a figured waistcoat and a dark neckcloth, olive-green trousers, and worn boots, a powder horn and hunting pouch slung at his side; he is bareheaded, hair to the collar, the coonskin-cap caricature set aside for the working dress of a Tennessee hunter. He stands on a sandy base strewn with broken masonry — the rubble of the Alamo walls. Set him alongside William B. Travis and James Bowie for the defenders' command trio, with General Santa Anna and his columns pressing the walls beyond, and the group builds into a diorama of the siege's final days.

Model: 10063 / W. Britain / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set