The only flag known to have survived the Battle of the Alamo has been found on display at a museum in Mexico, more than a decade after Mexican officials said they had lost it, a newspaper reported Sunday.
Several flags reportedly flew at the Alamo during the March 1836 battle between a small band of Texas fighters and a Mexican army 10 times their number. All except one were destroyed.
More than a decade ago, Texas officials stepped up efforts to get the flag back, but the Mexicans said they had lost it.
A reporter from The Dallas Morning News recently found the flag at Mexico’s National History Museum.
It now rests in a glass case alongside 19th-century rifles. The once-blue rectangle of silk has faded to dirty white, but the gold fringe is intact and an eagle still spreads over the words “God & Liberty.”
The triumphant Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna sent the surviving flag to Mexico City with a message that it would “show plainly the true intentions of the treacherous colonists and of their abettors, who came from parts of the United States of the North.”
Spokesmen for Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Mexican President Vicente Fox indicated it may be possible to work out a deal that would return the Alamo flag to Texas.
“The governor has discussions with Mexican officials all the time,” Perry spokesman Robert Black said. “I’m sure that at the appropriate time, the governor will broach this.”
Fox spokesman Agustin Gutierrez Canet said, “If the United States has some Mexican flags, perhaps there could be an exchange. But that’s a hypothetical idea.”
