The State of Texas put an old woman in San Antonio on a pension for the rest of her life because of what she said she had done inside the Alamo.
Her name was Maria Andrea Castanon Villanueva, though hardly anyone called her that. She was Madam Candelaria. The baptismal record has her born on the first of December, 1803, at Presidio del Rio Grande, and she spent the long back half of her life in San Antonio, a small figure in a shawl who had become one of the most photographed people in Texas. In March of 1888, a man named William Corner sat down with her and asked her straight out whether she had been inside the Alamo's fortifications during the fight. She said she had. She said that when the end came she was in the old church, nursing Colonel James Bowie, who was sick in his bed and could not rise from it.
Three years later the Texas Legislature took a vote on her. The House went 72 to 5. The Senate went 21 to 9. What the lawmakers recorded was that she had nursed the sick during the siege of the Alamo, and on the thirteenth of April, 1891, they voted her a yearly pension. The Alamo Monument Association formally accepted that she had been there. Mary Maverick stood behind her. So did John Salmon Ford, the old ranger everyone knew as Rip, who had spent a lifetime among men who remembered 1836 firsthand.
And people have been arguing about her ever since. She told the story many times across many years, to many different listeners, and it did not come out the same way every time. Photographs sold in her own lifetime carried a caption calling her 113 years old, which would put her birth back in 1785, while the baptismal record says 1803, which made her 95 when she died in February of 1899. Later historians picked at other seams. Crystal Sasse Ragsdale, who wrote a book about the women and children of the Alamo, landed about where the evidence leaves a careful person: "there is no clear evidence to dispute that Villanueva was in the Alamo."
So it sits there, unsettled, and has done so for more than a century. The people who lived closest to it believed her. The people who came along afterward, working from documents instead of memory, were not so sure. And the State of Texas, which had to come down on one side or the other, came down on hers and paid her.