I've been reading The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell & while it has a lot of very interesting anecdotes/case studies, I find some of the conclusions he draws from them to be less than convincing. As such, I'm not entirely prepared to just accept his version of events as fact.
When positing the question "Why do we remember Paul Revere but not William Dawes?" my answer was "Because he got a poem written about him."
Gladwell largely claims that the poem was ultimately written for the same reason we remember him now - because Revere's ride was so much more successful than Dawes', and that's because Revere knew more people and how to get in touch with them.
In Chapter 2, he writes:
He was carrying the identical message, through just as many towns over just as many miles as Paul Revere. But Dawes's ride didn't set the countryside afire. The local militia leaders weren't alerted. In fact, so few men from one of the main towns he rode through - Waltham - fought the following day that some subsequent historians concluded that it must have been a strongly pro-British community. It wasn't. The people of Waltham just didn't find out the British were coming until it was too late.
and later in the same chapter:
...he would have known just how to spread the news as far and wide as possible. When he saw people on the roads, he was so naturally and irrepressibly social he would have stopped and told them. When he came upon a town, he would have known exactly whose door to knock on, who the local militia leader was, who the key players in town were. He had met most of them before. And they knew and respected him as well.
The implication being that Dawes didn't know those things/simply wasn't as equipped as Revere to pull it off.
How accurate is this telling of the story?
Are there other reasons that Dawes ride might've been less successful?
Would he have been as successful as Revere if they had swapped routes?
Is there a possibility he simply didn't attempt to warn that many local militiamen since his goal (according to Wikipedia) was to warn John Hancock & Samuel Adams that they were in danger of arrest?
Gladwell cites Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer, but I don't know how much of his narrative actually comes from that book as I haven't read it.
Having reviewed my copy of Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride and compared it with the quotes provided by you from Gladwell, I am not surprised to say the least that Gladwell lifted the entire section from Fischer. This is practically a rewrite of page 142 in Fischer's book.
Fischer, however, is more generous towards Dawes. As a scholar, Fischer makes it clear that we do not know the full story, that we lack the sources to clear up some of the details. Fischer also makes it clear that he is sometimes speculating or guessing about the reasons surrounding Dawes apparent failure to alert towns such as Roxbury and Brookline. For example, Fischer believes that it is probable that Dawes did not know the people he should have alerted. In reality, this is as far as we can go because of the lack of appropriate sources to tell us what really happened. Yet as Fischer points out, Dawes did achieve what he was set out to do: Bring the alarm to Lexington. Paul Revere was just the more experienced rider. At the time of April 19, 1775, Revere had already made two successful alarm rides, both in 1774, and had been involved in the creation and subsequent activities of a local intelligence network in Boston. Fischer's interpretation, therefore, is not wrong and is supported by the available sources. Revere's experience and network made it possible for him to make the first alarm which in turn triggered a process that took the message further into the interior of rural New England. Revere and Dawes were only the first messengers of the night -- their alarms created many, many more.
As for the original question, however, you are right. Because he got the poem written about him. Gladwell's claim is wrong and one wonders if he actually read beyond the page he rewrote in Fischer's book. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the author of the poem, was inspired to write the poem after a visit to the Old North Church (Christchurch during the 18th century) in Boston and hearing the stories associated with the church and Paul Revere. Dawes was not involved in the famous signal from the Old North Church, seeing as he took a different route than Revere. Longfellow specifically made Revere to be a solitary patriotic hero in the poem, to emphasize the notion of a hero who could make all the difference in one critical night. In the context of the poem and the purpose Longfellow had in mind for it to achieve, it makes perfect sense. The poem in turn became incredibly popular and the story told within, repeated over and over again, became part of many American's historical memory surrounding the lead-up to Lexington and Concord.