Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The Mexican troops stormed the walls with ladders and began to climb. The Texans emptied their rifles down upon the Mexicans but not fast enough to keep them from coming over the top. The fighting was hand to hand—sword and bayonet, knife and pistol, rifle butt and fist—as the eastern sky lightened. The bravest of the Mexicans battled past the defenders on the ramparts and into the fort itself, then fought their way to the gates, which they threw open to their comrades. Hundreds of additional Mexican troops poured inside.

  The fighting grew even more intense. Santa Anna had decreed that no prisoners were to be taken. The rebels were pirates trying to steal Mexican land, he said. Their lives were forfeit. The battle was to the death.

  And it was utterly chaotic. “Our soldiers, some stimulated by courage and others by fury, burst into the quarters where the enemy had entrenched themselves, from which issued an infernal fire,” de la Peña recorded. “Behind these came others who, nearing the doors and blind with fury and smoke, fired their shots against friends and enemies alike, and in this way our losses were most grievous. On the other hand, they turned the enemy’s own cannon to bring down the doors to the rooms or the rooms themselves; a horrible carnage took place, and some were trampled to death. The tumult was great, the disorder frightful; it seemed as if the furies had descended upon us; different groups of soldiers were firing in all directions, on their comrades and on their officers, so that one was as likely to die by a friendly hand as by an enemy’s.”

  The slaughter continued until the last Texans were cornered in the chapel. The Mexicans turned the rebels’ cannons against the heavy structure, but its stone walls absorbed the blows intact. The cannoneers targeted the thick oak doors of the chapel. These finally gave way. The attackers stormed the building and didn’t stop killing until the last Texan was dead.

  OR PERHAPS NOT QUITE. DE LA PEÑA TOLD OF A HANDFUL of Texans who had been taken prisoner in the battle. “Among them was one of great stature, well proportioned, with regular features, in whose face there was the imprint of adversity, but in whom one also noticed a degree of resignation and nobility that did him honor. He was the naturalist David Crockett.”

  David Crockett was the most famous of the Alamo defenders. Indeed he was one of the most famous Americans of his generation. A Tennessee frontiersman with a knack for self-promotion, Crockett had been elected to Congress not long after Andrew Jackson became president. Jackson’s foes lavished attention on Crockett, hoping to establish him as a foil to the Tennessean in the White House. Crockett played their game, humoring authors who wrote his biography and playwrights who put his life into dramatic form. Eventually Jackson’s allies mounted a counteroffensive and contested Crockett’s reelection. Crockett campaigned on a simple platform. “I told the people of my district that if they saw fit to reelect me, I would serve them as faithfully as I had done before,” he said afterward. “But if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”

  He lost, and arrived amid the Texas revolution. Crockett had fought Indians and the British; he saw no reason he shouldn’t fight Mexicans. Hearing that William Travis needed reinforcements in San Antonio, he traveled there, arriving not long before Santa Anna and the Mexican army.

  Crockett became a favorite with the garrison during the siege, and he fought beside them during the climactic battle. If de la Peña’s account is accurate, he survived the battle and, with several others, was brought before Santa Anna afterward. A Mexican officer named Castrillón, sickened by the carnage of the morning, asked that Crockett and the others be spared. Crockett, he pointed out, was a foreigner, a late arrival to Texas.

  The general refused. “Santa Anna answered Castrillón’s intervention in Crockett’s behalf with a gesture of indignation and, addressing himself to the sappers, the troops closest to him, ordered his execution,” de la Peña related. “The commanders and officers were outraged at this action and did not support the order, hoping that once the fury of the moment had blown over, these men would be spared. But several officers who were around the president and who, perhaps, had not been present during the moment of danger, became noteworthy by an infamous deed, surpassing the soldiers in cruelty. They thrust themselves forward, in order to flatter their commander, and with swords in hand, fell upon these unfortunate, defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey. Though tortured before they were killed, these unfortunates died without complaining and without humiliating themselves before their torturers.”

  15

  BLOODY PALM SUNDAY

  IN THE AFTERMATH OF HIS VICTORY, SANTA ANNA SUMMONED Susanna Dickinson, the wife—now widow—of one of the slain defenders of the Alamo. She stepped forward, clinging to her infant daughter. Susanna Dickinson and several other women who had come to the Alamo with their husbands had taken shelter with their children in the chapel as the storm of battle raged. Though terrified by the cannon blasts and the wholesale slaughter, they survived and were spared by the Mexican soldiers.

  Santa Anna gave each of the women two silver dollars, a blanket and their freedom to go. Susanna Dickinson received, in addition, an escort to the lines of Sam Houston’s army. She was to convey the news of the destruction of the Alamo and Santa Anna’s warning that a similar fate would befall any who continued to oppose him.

  JAMES FANNIN GOT THE GRIM NEWS AT GOLIAD, NINETY MILES southeast of San Antonio. Fannin commanded a rebel force of some four hundred, of whom the great majority weren’t Texans, but new recruits to the Texas cause. Upon the outbreak of fighting the rebels had advertised in newspapers in Louisiana and elsewhere for volunteers to defend liberty in Texas. In exchange for their services the volunteers would each receive eight hundred acres of land. The bargain seemed a good one before the fall of the Alamo, and hundreds of volunteers had found their way to Goliad. Fannin valued the reinforcements, but it galled him that the fate of Texas depended on these foreigners. “I have but three citizens in the ranks,” he grumbled. “Though I have called on them for six weeks, not one yet arrived, and no assistance in bringing me provisions.” Fannin considered himself badly used by his compatriots. “I feel too indignant to say more about them. If I was honorably out of their service, I would never re-enter it.”

  Yet here he was. And Santa Anna was approaching. Fannin received an order from Houston to evacuate Goliad and retreat to the east. The loss of the Alamo’s garrison dealt the rebel cause a grievous blow; Houston couldn’t afford the loss of Fannin’s men too. “The immediate advance of the enemy may be confidently expected,” Houston wrote. “Prompt movements are therefore highly important.”

  Fannin hesitated. At Goliad he could fight from behind walls. In the open he and his men would be more vulnerable. For days he couldn’t decide.

  He finally chose to follow Houston’s order. He and his men burned the town and headed into an ominous quiet. “The country around us seemed entirely deserted,” Herman Ehrenberg, one of the soldiers, recollected. “Even the usual spies had stopped prowling around.” The evacuation did not go well. “A large number of wagons laden with foodstuffs and ammunition encumbered and slowed up our march, for, unwilling at first to lose all our belongings, we had taken with us much heavy baggage.” Fannin, constantly looking over his shoulder in the direction from which the Mexican army would come, jettisoned a large part of the baggage. This measure helped some, but not enough. “Several wagons were broken up or merely abandoned, and their teams hitched to the remaining carts,” Ehrenberg continued. Even this left the pace of the march too slow. Fannin ordered the rest of the vehicles left behind.

  He didn’t act soon enough. Mexican horsemen caught Fannin’s column on the prairie that afternoon. He ordered his troops to form a hollow square, with cannons and rifles aiming out. As the Mexican cavalry charged, the Texans unleashed a raking fire that killed riders and horses alike. The Mexicans fell back. But, regrouping, they charged again. And again. Each time, they were driven back, but each time they inflicted more casualties on the rebels.

  As the m
ain force of the Mexicans reached the scene, Fannin realized his position was untenable. Low on ammunition, suffering from lack of water, outnumbered soon if not already, the Texans could hold out for a few hours, perhaps longer. But they could not prevail. And they could not escape.

  Fannin delayed a decision overnight, on the thin chance reinforcements might appear. They didn’t. Instead Mexican artillery was moved into position to obliterate the Texans. Fannin, after consulting his lieutenants, decided to raise a white flag and ask for surrender terms.

  The answer he received became a matter of subsequent dispute. The Mexican commander, knowing Santa Anna permitted no quarter, said he could accept nothing but unconditional surrender. The Texans heard something different: that they would be treated as prisoners of war.

  Both sides were happy to avert a massacre then and there. But Santa Anna was not. When he learned that Fannin and his men had been taken prisoner, he flew into a rage. His entire policy toward the rebels depended on swift and certain punishment of those who took up arms against his government. He ordered that the prisoners be executed at once. His subordinates reluctantly prepared to comply.

  “GREY CLOUDS HUNG OVER THE HORIZON, AND THE AIR WAS hot and sultry,” Herman Ehrenberg recalled of Sunday, March 27, 1836. The Texans had been marched back to Goliad and imprisoned there. Now they were ordered to march forth again. “Mexican soldiers met us on either side as we came out of the main entrance,” Ehrenberg wrote. “They were drawn up in two lines, one man behind the other, so that we were closely guarded on both sides when we marched forward.” Some of the prisoners thought they were being moved to a more secure location. Their guards offered no clue. “The Mexican soldiers, who were as a rule very talkative, were unbearably silent; our men were grave; the atmosphere hot and close,” Ehrenberg said.

  Half a mile from the fort the prisoners were ordered off the main road. “On our left there stood a row of mesquite trees, five or six feet high, stretching in a straight line as far as the bank of the San Antonio River, which lay some way off,” Ehrenberg remembered. “The river flowed between banks thirty or forty feet high, which on our side rose almost perpendicularly from the water. We followed the hedge towards the river, wondering why we were being taken in this direction.”

  They learned soon enough. “A command to halt, given in Spanish, struck our ears like the voice of doom, for at that very moment we heard the distant rattle of a volley of musketry,” Ehrenberg said. An officer ordered Ehrenberg and those around him to kneel. The Mexican soldiers leveled the muzzles of their guns at the prisoners.

  Ehrenberg hoped the Mexicans were bluffing, perhaps to frighten the Texans into giving up their rebellion and joining the Mexican side. The Mexicans were deadly serious. “A second volley of musketry came to our ears from another direction; this time a wail of distress followed it.” The soldiers at hand opened fire. “Thick clouds of smoke rolled slowly towards the river. The blood of my lieutenant spurted on my clothes, and around me the last convulsions of agony shook the bodies of my friends.”

  Somehow Ehrenberg survived the execution volley. Amazed he wasn’t dead, he dove to the ground and scrambled away, providentially hidden by the smoke of the fire that had killed nearly all his comrades. He reached the river and threw himself in. Mexican soldiers fired at him, but between the obscuring effect of the smoke and the cover of the water, their bullets missed.

  He swam to the other side, crawled out on the bank, and hid in some brush. He looked back. The Mexicans were still shooting and yelling. Amid the clamor Ehrenberg could just hear the groans of his dying comrades.

  16

  LAYING THERE YET

  MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED TEXANS WERE KILLED AT Goliad, half again as many as at the Alamo. Yet fate had further blows for the Texans. The aim of Santa Anna’s no-quarter strategy became clear in the weeks after the Goliad massacre. The Mexican leader, taking to heart General Terán’s warning about the out-of-control Americans in Mexico’s border province, determined to solve his American problem by removing all the Americans. “I am firmly convinced that we ought not to risk allowing either Anglo-American or European colonists to remain on the frontier,” he told his war secretary. Legal immigrants who swore loyalty to Mexico should be relocated to the interior. As for the illegal immigrants: “They should be immediately expelled from Mexican territory.”

  Santa Anna realized that this amounted to an expulsion policy for all the Americans. Most of the legal immigrants would go back to the United States before they would accept forced relocation to the Mexican interior. Nor, after the killing of the Goliad prisoners, would the Americans have any confidence in Mexican promises.

  The Americans didn’t wait to be uprooted by the Mexican army. They uprooted themselves and fled before Santa Anna’s approach. In what they would laconically call the “Runaway Scrape,” thousands of Texans evacuated their homes and headed for the American border. Creed Taylor, a teenage soldier in the Texan army who returned to his family’s farm to help with the evacuation, recalled the fright that seized the populace on learning that Santa Anna was approaching. “The first law of nature, self-preservation, was uppermost in the minds of the settlers,” Taylor wrote. “And thus the great exodus began.”

  The Taylor family had a single cart, with heavy wheels cut from a log. Taylor’s mother wanted to load the family possessions onto the cart. Creed and his brother pointed out that they would never outrun the Mexicans in such a slow vehicle. They talked her into leaving most of their belongings behind and packing the rest on a horse, which could move faster.

  Creed took a final look at the place where he had grown up. “There was a little corn left in the crib, a large supply of nicely cured bacon in the smokehouse, and the yard was full of chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks, besides a good stock of hogs,” he recounted. “All of these we left to the invaders.” Mrs. Taylor was stoic. “If mother shed a tear, I never knew it, though there was an unusual huskiness in her voice that day. Mother was brave and resolute, and I heard her say to a lady while crossing the Brazos, under great difficulties, that she was going to teach her boys never to let up on the Mexicans until they got full revenge for all this trouble.”

  On the main road east, they ran into many other families in flight. “People were trudging along in every kind of conveyance, some on foot carrying heavy packs,” Creed Taylor said. “I saw every kind of conveyance ever used in that region, except a wheelbarrow, but hand-barrows, sleds, carts, wagons, some drawn by oxen, horses, and burros. Old men, frail women, and little children, all trudging along.”

  Taylor would live to see other hard times, but the Texans’ flight before Santa Anna stuck in his memory. “I have never witnessed such scenes of distress and human suffering. True, there was no clash of arms, no slaughter of men and horses, as on the field of battle; but here the suffering was confined to decrepit old men, frail women, and little children”—the men of fighting age being mostly with the army. “Delicate women trudged alongside their pack horses, carts, or sleds, from day to day until their shoes were literally worn out, then continued the journey with bare feet, lacerated and bleeding at almost every step. Their clothes were scant, and with no means of shelter from the frequent drenching rains and bitter winds, they traveled on through the long days in wet and bedraggled apparel, finding even at night little relief from their suffering, since the wet earth and angry sky offered no relief.”

  Moments of hope glimmered through the darkness. A widow with four children, whose husband had died at the Alamo just weeks before, brought a fifth child into the world, with the help of strangers. “A family having a rickety open wagon drawn by two lean ponies gave the helpless mother bed and transportation by throwing part of their belongings from the wagon to make room for a woman they had never seen before,” Taylor said. “During rains, by day or night, willing hands held blankets over the mother and babe to protect them from the downpours and chilling storms.”

  The trials of the weakest were the most heart
-wrenching. “It was no uncommon sight to see women and children without shoes, and otherwise thinly clad, wading in mud and chilling water almost to their knees,” Taylor recalled. “When a cart or wagon became mired, which was an hourly occurrence east of the Brazos, there was no dearth of helping hands. But in proportion the men were few, and so the women and children were forced to perform most of the labor. Thus these half-clad, mud-besmeared fugitives, looking like veritable savages, trudged along.”

  SAM HOUSTON RETREATED TOO. IN FACT IT WAS HIS RETREAT that triggered the flight of the civilians, who reckoned that if Houston was leaving there would be no one to protect them from Santa Anna. Many roundly cursed Houston for cowardice; those who lost loved ones to disease and exhaustion on the exodus never forgave him.

  But Houston knew two things those who cursed him didn’t. The first was that his army was no match for Santa Anna’s. The Mexican troops were trained and well armed; their officers understood discipline and tactics. They outnumbered the rebels badly. For Houston to stand and fight risked a third debacle, after the Alamo and Goliad, that would annihilate the army and snuff out the infant republic. Retreat was his only option.

  The second thing Houston knew was that help awaited in his rear. The boundary between American Louisiana and Mexican Texas was the Sabine River. But there was some dispute as to which branch of the Sabine counted. Houston knew that Andrew Jackson took the western branch—which most people called the Neches River—as the boundary. Houston also knew that Santa Anna deemed the eastern branch the true boundary. If anything was certain about Andrew Jackson, it was that Old Hickory would defend every inch of what he considered American territory. Houston supposed something similar about Santa Anna: that he would defend all the territory he thought belonged to Mexico.