The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Wednesday, Nov. 2:
In the poker-faced diplomacy surrounding Gen. Santa Anna's prosthetic leg, it's not as if we haven't asked nicely.
We have. For three decades, various delegations of Texans have tried to sweet-talk Illinois into sharing the coveted cork leg it has held hostage _ wait, strike that _ that it has sheltered for the last 169 years.
The reply has grown steadily testier: From "Sorry, but no," to just "No." Last week, it amounted to "Hell, no."
"To us, it's non-negotiable," said Lt. Col. Brad Leighton, public affairs director for the Illinois Department of Military Affairs, in an interview with the Springfield State Journal-Register. "They say they want to start a conversation. That conversation has been made before. We're not interested in a conversation. The answer is no."
The prickly response may have been prompted by the delegation doing the asking this time: a group of students from St. Mary's University in San Antonio who want the leg turned over not to Texas, but to Mexico. They were led by an earnest professor who accused the Illinois State Military Museum, where the leg is the prize exhibit, of "fetishizing a body part" and using it as a "freak-show exhibit."
It was never, in a strict title-holding sense, ours to ask for. Texas history's most famed despot, Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, still had both his original legs when he conquered the Alamo and was subsequently defeated at San Jacinto in 1836.
The general lost his leg to a wound during a minor conflict in 1838 between France and Mexico known as the Pastry War. The leg was replaced with a prosthesis, a lifelike cork-and-wood replica clad in a black dress boot.
The leg was captured by Illinois troops after the U.S. victory at Cerro Gordo in 1847. Legend tells us the general fled the field on a donkey, leaving behind a gilded carriage containing the leg, a lockbox full of gold and a partially eaten chicken. The boys from Illinois finished off the chicken, gave the cash to the paymaster and took the leg back home, where it has resided ever since. Finders, keepers, right?
Yet Texas keeps trying to wheedle the leg away. Why? Perhaps because we lay claim to all things Santa Anna: He looms large in our state's quasi-national mythology. He's the cruel dictator every Texas schoolchild knows as the Lone Star State's own George III (if that seems a little one-sided, it should be noted that he wasn't uniformly popular with the citizens of Mexico, either).
So Texas keeps asking for a swap, a loan, or an outright gift: To return to Mexico, or for our 1986 sesquicentennial or for a 2014 San Jacinto display. In an editorial published Sunday, the San Antonio Express-News argued plaintively that the leg belongs in new museum that is being planned adjacent to the Alamo ("It's what Lincoln would have wanted," was the Express-News' bold speculation).
Illinois is sure to say "no" again. But count on this: Texans are determined, and we don't give up easily.
