the things one admires and making them embody the individual as a whole. When a historian comes along and says, “Oh, you do know that William Barret Travis came to Texas one step ahead of the law to avoid being jailed for his debts, abandoning his wife and two small children in the process?,” that can be discomfiting. I will freely admit, as realistic about figures in the past as I am, that it disappointed me when I learned of Travis’s misdeeds, even though I had no great expectations of him. It was an irrational response, born of the residue of early training about Travis’s actions at a
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