Texas Rising
Page 4
Foremost of the armed Texians who headed for Gonzales to aid the effort were many of the rangers recently returned from Colonel John Henry Moore’s Indian expedition. By September 30, more than a hundred men had gathered in Gonzales, including former ranger captains Edward Burleson and Robert Coleman. The assembled volunteers voted on leaders, electing Moore as colonel, Joseph Washington Elliott Wallace as lieutenant colonel, and Burleson as major. The settlers prepared for action while Dr. Launcelot Smither rode from Béxar to attempt to keep the peace with Lieutenant Castaneda. Moore’s men held a council of war and decided to fight.3
A squad of men dug the Gonzales cannon from the Davis orchard, while townsmen gathered metal scraps to use as canister shot. A Methodist preacher, Reverend William P. Smith, delivered a sermon that night with references to the American Revolution. He told the determined volunteers that the blood “of our ancestors in ’76 still flows in our veins.” Castaneda’s troops moved their camp about seven miles upriver by dusk on October 1 while Colonel Moore’s 180 men began crossing the Guadalupe River, nearly one-third mounted on horseback. As dawn of October 2 approached, Moore ordered his men to take cover in a thicket along the riverbank.
Small rounds of sniping ensued during the early morning hours on the farm of Ezekiel Williams, one of the Old Gonzales Eighteen. Forty mounted Mexican cavalrymen charged. The Texians wounded one of their opponents before falling back into cover of a wooded riverbank. Castaneda sent Dr. Smither forward to request a parley, but Colonel Moore had him taken to the rear under arrest. Moore and Castaneda then met on neutral grounds between their forces to discuss the situation. After a brief but tense exchange, Castaneda announced that he was obliged to follow his orders to seize the rebels’ cannon.
Moore returned and ordered artilleryman James Clinton Neill to fire their cannon toward the Mexicans clustered on the hill. The Texians then unfurled a defiant battle flag, sewn from the white wedding dress of Green DeWitt’s daughter Naomi. It sported the outline of an unmounted cannon bearing the phrase COME AND TAKE IT in bold print. Neill’s cannon boomed out its first shot of metal scrap as Moore’s riflemen fired their first volley and charged. Lieutenant Castaneda’s outnumbered troops turned and fled toward Béxar.4
The Texians suffered only one man slightly injured while the Mexican force had at least one soldado killed. The whole event, later dubbed the Battle of Gonzales, could scarcely be considered even a skirmish but it marked the beginning of the Texas Revolution. Lexington, Massachusetts, had been the first battle of the American Revolution in 1775, in which the “shot heard round the world” had been fired. The Gonzales skirmish was no comparable battle but the little Guadalupe River settlement was thereafter referred to by some newspapers as the “Lexington of Texas.”
THE STAGE FOR REVOLUTION had been set. The next act against Santa Anna’s regime took place in mere days as word spread through the colonies of the action at Gonzales.
The hero of Tampico had already determined that stronger measures were needed to maintain peace in Texas and had dispatched his brother-in-law, General Martín Perfecto de Cos, with five hundred soldiers into the troublesome area to disarm all colonists. The troops landed at Copano Bay and had reached Gonzales by October 2. Some three hundred colonists rallied in Gonzales during the next week, encouraged by the “victory” near the river and intent upon marching in force upon San Antonio.
The defiant spirit exercised by the Gonzales colonists was contagious. Settlers of the coastal town of Matagorda met on October 6 to elect officers for a provisional militia company. Captain George Morse Collinsworth of Mississippi was elected into command and the force marched that evening toward Goliad, known to many as La Bahía. Rumors had spread that General Cos had marched into the town with a military chest containing at least fifty thousand dollars. Collinsworth’s militiamen intended to attack the Mexican garrison at the presidio of La Bahía outside Goliad. This fortress was crucial in that it guarded the principal supply line from the port of Copano on Aransas Bay to San Antonio. More than one hundred other volunteers joined them en route, many of them tejanos who felt the Mexican forces had stripped them of their rights. Another who joined the march was a well-known recent prisoner of Mexico, Benjamin Rush Milam.5
General Cos had departed already for Béxar with most of his soldiers and his war chest. The volunteers under Captain Collinsworth desired to defend the republican institutions of the Constitution of 1824 by driving out any Mexican soldiers remaining at the La Bahía fortress who might threaten their rights. They found only fifty-three officers and men holed up in the old Spanish fortress when they assaulted the presidio before dawn on October 10. The militiamen seized La Bahía in less than half an hour, suffering only one of their own—Samuel McCulloch, a free slave formerly owned by Collinsworth—wounded in the shoulder by a bullet.
The fort was found to contain lance heads, bayonets, and about two hundred muskets and carbines, although most of the latter were in almost useless condition. Other reinforcements soon arrived at Goliad, including volunteer companies led by captains John Alley and Ben Fort Smith. The combined troops proceeded to organize themselves, electing Smith as colonel, George Collinsworth as major, and Philip Dimitt as captain. Empresario Stephen F. Austin sent word that a force under Captain Dimitt should remain to hold the La Bahía fortress while the balance of the colonial troops marched toward Gonzales to join Austin. They brought with them two of the captive Mexican officers to meet with Austin as plans were laid for a follow-up siege.
THE CROWDS GATHERING IN Gonzales were energized by the easy victories both near their town and at the presidio La Bahía. Many, perhaps fueled by corn liquor, spoke out strongly that the fight should be carried to San Antonio de Béxar to put down the freshly landed military force under General Cos.
Numerically, the Texians had the upper hand. A full revolution with more than thirty thousand settlers could hardly be contained by less than seven hundred Mexican troops at Cos’s service. The settlers could easily contain any supply shipments arriving at the coast, forcing Mexican reinforcements to San Antonio to travel overland more than four hundred miles from San Luis Potosí. By October 11, the swelling force of volunteers in Gonzales elected General Stephen Austin as their commander. His judgment and militia experience dealing with hostile Indians were respected by his peers, even if he held no formal military training.6
Austin knew that he had more men than guns and a critical supply of gunpowder and lead. There was no uniformity to the ragtag little Texian army that would carry forth the revolution. Some men had shotguns, effective only for short-range action. The more precise weapons were the Kentucky long rifles carried by many settlers. The only attempt of a cavalry he had were novice lancers who carried cane poles topped with sharpened steel files. They rode slow mules or half-broken mustangs. The whole lot would be sorely outmatched by a first-rate Mexican cavalry company, but it was all that Texas had.
One of those arriving from Matagorda was blacksmith Noah Smithwick. His father had fought in the American Revolution, where one of his uncles was killed at Cowpens. As a boy, Noah watched his older brother march off to serve in the War of 1812. He dreamed of the day he could don a bright new uniform and march off with people cheering, drums beating, and flags flying. “I thought it was the grandest thing on earth,” he recalled. Upon his arrival in Gonzales, Smithwick found neither glare nor glitter.7
Smithwick went to work in the blacksmith shop of Andrew Sowell, where the men scraped and scoured the old six-pound cannon before mounting it on old wooden trucks built from trees. “We had no ammunition for our artillery,” he related, “so we cuts slugs of bar iron and hammered them into balls, ugly-looking missiles.”
True, the rebels were poorly equipped with proper supplies, horses, arms, and training. They wore no uniforms. What they lacked in all of this, they made up in determined spirit. And Austin found key figures available at his disposal. One notable arrival was that of William Travis, who had already played a major
role in the two disturbances at Anahuac. Noah Smithwick found that recruits arrived daily in town, “each squad being duly officered as if there were men enough to go round, and we soon had more officers than men.” Austin reorganized the mass of volunteers into proper companies, wherein many of the smaller squads were absorbed.
The Texian force marched from Gonzales toward Béxar, seventy miles away, on October 12. Austin named Captain Ben Milam commander of a mounted spy company to help lead them through the unfamiliar country. The volunteer army of Texas did not come close to resembling the army Smithwick had dreamed of joining in his childhood. Most men wore buckskin pants, some soft and new with a yellowish color; others wore buckskins that were black and shiny, hardened with grease, dirt, and rain. Footwear ranged from moccasins to shoes to boots. The Texians had no common soldier’s cap for their army, their heads instead being adorned with a wide variety of coonskin caps, broad-brimmed sombreros, and even tall, silk “beegum” hats. Austin’s force marched with the “Come and Take It” flag at the head of his formation and two yokes of long-horned steers hauling the little brushed cannon in its center.
When the Texians made camp on the banks of Cibolo Creek, Milam’s scouts discovered the trail of a hundred Mexican cavalrymen only ten miles away. Austin sent other scouting parties to locate this enemy force. On October 15, the patrol under Lieutenant Pleasant M. Bull fought a brief skirmish on the Cibolo with a ten-man Mexican cavalry patrol. Bull’s men chased them for two miles as the cavalrymen retreated for Béxar. The minor skirmish was the first action since the little army had left Gonzales and it served to energize the Texians.8
General Austin’s army marched to within five miles of San Antonio by October 20 and made camp on Salado Creek. The Mexicans appeared to be too well fortified for a full frontal assault. He hoped instead to surround Béxar with enough men to prevent General Cos from receiving any reinforcement or provisions until he opted to surrender himself. One of his greatest aids to Austin came in the form of support from tejanos, Mexican-born citizens who declared themselves loyal to the Mexican Constitution of 1824, which President Santa Anna had abolished.
Victoria alcalde Plácido Benavides reached the volunteer Texas Army with about thirty mounted rancheros on the day of the Cibolo skirmish. On October 22, twenty-eight-year-old Juan Nepomuceno Seguín rode into camp with news that many Mexican citizens of Béxar supported the revolt and were willing to fight. The following day, General Austin authorized him to “raise a company of patriots to operate against the centralists and military.”9
Juan’s father, Erasmo Seguín, was a former Béxar alcalde and a good friend of Austin. A devout federalist, Erasmo had built a fortified compound known as Casa Blanca on the nine-thousand-acre tract of land his family owned downriver from San Antonio. General Cos, upon learning that young Juan Seguín had sided with rebels skirmishing with Mexican troops near Monclova, Mexico, forced his father out of San Antonio on foot. Captain Juan Seguín was thus only too happy to recruit Mexican Texians from the ranches on the lower San Antonio River to join General Austin’s troops gathering outside the city. During the next days, more than one hundred tejanos would be available to General Austin, including twenty-six under Seguín’s brother-in-law, Salvador Flores. The tejanos were invaluable as skilled horsemen and were well acquainted with the Béxar countryside to lead foraging parties or to serve as couriers.
Stephen F. Austin’s ragged army thus gained tejano advantages, to which was added another necessary ingredient: rugged, raw courage and fearless fighters. He found that in several men, one of the most notable being a forty-year-old Kentuckian named James Bowie, who had come into Texas in 1830. Bowie was a powerful man of six foot height and 180 pounds, with a fair complexion, gray eyes, and high cheekbones. Once his family had moved to Louisiana, Jim Bowie and his brothers bought and sold slaves, some captured in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico by the pirate Jean Lafitte. Bowie had an easygoing disposition but a vicious anger when he was aroused by insults. Family tales say that he trapped bears, rode alligators, and caught and rode wild horses in his early years.10
Some of Bowie’s fights were legendary. On September 19, 1827, he participated in the Sandbar Fight, in which two opponents had proposed to settle their differences with a pistol duel on the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Neither man was able to fire accurately enough to wound the other but one of the observers drew his own pistol to settle the dispute. Jim Bowie tried to prevent bloodshed but he was shot twice in the process—one lead ball passed through his lung and another slammed into his thigh. Three opponents then fell on Bowie, stabbing him with their sword canes in his hand and his arm. Another blade was bent as it was plunged against his breastbone. Louisiana parish sheriff Norris Wright, a bitter rival of Bowie, then pulled the bloodied frontiersman to his feet. Bowie used his remaining strength to drive his large butcher-like hunting knife into Wright’s chest, where he twisted the blade and caused Wright to collapse. The frightful river sandbar brawl only ended after Bowie severely slashed another of his opponents in the side with his blade.11
Bowie’s superhuman strength was reported in newspapers across the country and his prowess with his lethal blade became legendary. He would recover from his dreadful wounds while men in many regions began asking blacksmiths to make them a large knife like that of Jim Bowie. Jim and his brothers lived for several more years in Louisiana, dealing in slave trade, land ventures, and even a steam-powered sugar mill. Bowie then moved on to Texas, married the daughter of wealthy Don Juan Martín de Veramendi, and became an official Mexican citizen after being baptized into the Catholic Church.
He became fluent in Spanish, and in fall 1831 went in search of fabled silver mines in the hills around the San Saba River. Accompanied by his brother Rezin and ten others, Bowie soon found that his party was being trailed by a large group of Indians. They were attacked, and from a grove of trees and behind a hastily assembled breastworks, Jim Bowie’s party fought for their lives for thirteen hours. When it was over, three of Bowie’s men were wounded and another lay dead. They estimated they had killed or wounded seventy of their opponents. Fighting such a battle, outnumbered perhaps by at least ten-to-one, only gave rise to the increasing fame of Bowie as a fearless fighter.
Bowie was a man of action. He led citizen soldiers on a scouting expedition in early 1832, and was asked by Stephen Austin that summer to help put down an insurrection in Nacogdoches. He arrived one day late to prevent a skirmish between two hundred Mexican soldiers and three hundred Texians, but he ambushed the Mexican troops as they marched from town and marched most of them back into town as prisoners.
That fall, his wife, Ursula, his mother-in-law, father-in-law, and other members of the Veramendi family died from an outbreak of cholera that had spread into the region. The only two children born to him by Ursula had also died soon after birth. Heartbroken, Bowie turned to shady landing dealings in 1834 that helped him amass more than a half million acres of Texas land. He hoped to make a fortune in land deals to incoming immigrants, but he and other speculators were rounded up and imprisoned in May 1835 by Santa Anna. Bowie and a companion managed to escape from their captors in Matamoros and made their way to Nacogdoches. Within days of his arrival in Nacogdoches, a hundred men gathered in the town square and elected Bowie to be their honorary “colonel” in command of their local militia. He and his men marched to a warehouse in San Antonio used by the Mexicans to store weapons and armed themselves with muskets.
When Jim Bowie heard the news of the outbreak of hostilities in Gonzales in October 1835, he and some companions saddled up and rode toward the Lexington of Texas to join the cause. Bowie was always good for a fight and President Santa Anna’s brutal tactics were just the thing to take on.
4
“THE DAY WAS SOON OURS”
REVEREND DANIEL PARKER BELIEVED in the gun as much as he did the Bible in 1835. He was not a man prone to fight but he lived on a frontier where violence was likely to find him or his family.
Fifty-four-year-old Reverend Parker, a former state senator in Illinois, was now representing the Municipality of Nacogdoches. His family had settled near present-day Groesbeck in eastern Texas and built Parker’s Fort on their vast landholdings. The wily Baptist preacher, knowing that Mexican law forbade the creation of non-Catholic churches in Texas territory, had found these same laws could not prevent the immigration of an already organized Protestant church. So, on July 26, 1833, Daniel Parker and his family formed the Pilgrim Predestinarian Regular Baptist Church and prepared to move to Texas.
The subject of proper frontier protection was on Parker’s mind when he arrived at the Brazos capital with his brother James Wilson Parker, who had been elected a delegate for the Municipality of Viesca. The provisional government had on September 19 called for a consultation, at which representatives from each Texas district would attend. Due to the state of the young revolution, two-thirds of those previously elected were in the field and unable to attend when the Consultation convened on October 15. Those who had gathered chose to proceed as a temporary “Permanent Council” until a proper quorum of the elected representatives could be gathered in the near future. They elected Richardson Royall of the Matagorda District as their president and commenced official business.