The War of Mexican General Santa Anna's Leg Takes a Big Step Forward Will Connors - The Wall Street Journal
go to original November 10, 2016

Santa Anna's wooden leg is at the Illinois State Military Museum (Seth Perlman/Associated Press)

Update: Student Pilgrimage to Retrieve Mexican General's Leg Goes Home Empty-Handed (Northern Public Radio)

The War of Santa Anna’s Leg has raged for 169 years. It started when the Mexican general abandoned his wood, cork and leather prosthetic in a carriage, and resumed most recently when a group of classmates from Texas took a 20-hour pilgrimage by bus to a small museum in a bid to get it back.

“For any other person it’s just a prosthetic leg, you know?” said Andre Grajeda, a 19-year-old sophomore history major at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio. “For me, it was kind of majestic, and it was magical.”

The students’ next mission is to repatriate the leg to Mexico. Mr. Grajeda puts their chances at about 70%. The staff at the Illinois State Military Museum, where the leg resides, offers the students considerably less hope.

“The answer has always been no, will continue to be no,” said Lt. Col. Brad Leighton, public affairs director for the Illinois National Guard which oversees the Illinois State Military Museum. “It’s not something that we’re negotiating on.”

So went the latest chapter in the battle for the leg of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the 11-time president of Mexico and archetypal villain in countless Texas school books.

Best-known for defeating a few hundred Texans at the Battle of the Alamo, Santa Anna lost his leg to cannon fire in a different battle and replaced it with a specially made prosthetic.

A few years later, while fleeing U.S. soldiers at the battle of Cerro Gordo in Mexico in 1847, Santa Anna left his leg behind in a carriage, along with a chicken lunch and $18,000. According to the museum, soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, who were part of the fighting force, ate the lunch, turned in the money, and took the leg home.

Read the rest at The Wall Street Journal

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