You can tell the difference with a single touch. The stone wall of the actual Alamo, in the center of downtown San Antonio, has a cool, clammy feel, due mostly to the surrounding skyscrapers and tourist attractions casting mountainous shadows over their new dominion. But the Brackettville “Alamo,” facing steady sun and wind-driven sand, is warm and gritty to the touch, and its solitude in the sandy prairie of South Texas gives a flavor that matches our expectations.

The original chapel building, the visual image most often associated with the Alamo, still stands on Crockett Street in downtown San Antonio, an American shrine preserved and protected by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas since 1905. The chapel turned fortress receives more than three million visitors a year. Inside, even on the busiest tourist days, the scene is hushed. No running children, no flashbulbs popping off (taking photographs of the chapel interior is strictly forbidden), but only quiet conversation and soft footfalls, as if in recognition of the 189 men who gave their lives for Texas independence.

Step outside the main chapel, however, and the sense of serenity is shattered. The chapel stands not far from a clamorous commercial street, and leaving it is like walking from a confessional into a casino. Picturing this building as the lonely outpost that in 1836 held out for thirteen days against General Santa Anna’s force of at least twenty-five hundred troops requires a stupendous effort of the imagination.

Some 125 miles to the west, however, seven miles north of the small Texas town of Brackettville, the feel of the past remains easily attainable. The original movie set created for John Wayne’s 1960 epic The Alamo attracts visitors year-round. Brackettville’s “Alamo Village” contains not just the chapel building but the entire mission compound, constructed true to size as it stood during the fight, complete with adobe brick walls and massive fortified gates.

The Alamo Village cost more than one and a half million 1958 dollars and covers four hundred acres of the 19,000-acre ranch of J. P. (“Happy”) Shahan, a Texas cattleman who took an active part in recruiting Wayne to build and film his Alamo project on this site. More than two years in the making, the re-creation of the Alamo fortress exactly as it appeared during the 1836 engagement was done with scrupulous accuracy. Striving for authenticity, Wayne and his art director, Al Ybrarra, insisted on using adobe bricks for most of the construction, necessitating the employment of artisans from Mexico who still knew how to make them. Almost a million bricks eventually went into the village. For the main chapel building, measurements were