Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Puzzled Mexican authorities believed that after his escape Bowie went all the way to Mississippi to raise troops to bring back to Texas.34 They were mistaken. He made his way to Nacogdoches by early July, along the way meeting his old friend Caiaphas Ham who was just returning from a visit to Louisiana. In fact, he certainly had it in mind to go to Louisiana and Mississippi, but more for money and investors in the Mason grants than to enlist volunteers. But now events began to control him just as they directed everyone else in Texas. Travis and others expelled the garrison at Anahuac a few weeks before, and now Mexican activity intensified at the garrisons along the frontier. The political chief at Nacogdoches, Henry Rueg, reacted to the Anahuac affair with fear that there would be a general clamping down on Texas by the Mexicans, and decided within days of Bowie's arrival to urge the citizens to form a militia.

  By July 13 nearly one hundred men gathered in the public square, and either by election or common assent they elected Bowie their “colonel.” In a crisis men seemed naturally to turn to him. With the celebrity gained by his escape, not to mention his prior reputation, he naturally seemed the right man when they needed a commander. Though there was no official sanction, he would naturally have been given, or assumed, the title of colonel, not so much as a recognized rank but as a title of command customary among southerners for more than a generation now whenever any number of them gathered for an armed enterprise.

  Either by his direction or as a spontaneous act, they marched to the Mexican warehouse where local commander Pedro Bean kept a small armory. Without actual violence, but most certainly by the threat of it, Bowie and his men broke into the warehouse and removed enough muskets and accoutrements to arm themselves. The act had the double advantage of arming the militia and removing weapons that the Mexicans might use against them. Bean was outraged. He believed that Bowie intended to foment rebellion, and immediately reported the offense to his commander Ugartechea, asking instructions on what to do about Bowie. The only good news seemed to be that the majority of the people in the Nacogdoches area did not seem inclined to countenance or join with the upstarts. Convinced that Bowie planned to lead a revolution, Bean concluded within a few weeks that the lack of local support had forced him to abandon the project.35

  Bowie was not all that passive, though. Just a week after taking the muskets, he learned from a mail carrier passing through Nacogdoches that a sealed packet of dispatches addressed to the Mexican consul at New Orleans had been left at a house just east of San Augustine. The packet awaited an eastbound courier to take it on its journey, but Bowie decided to change its destination. “Col. Bowie ever alive to the true interests of Texas,” said John Forbes, spoke with a few men in town and among them they decided to intercept the packet. He sent word to two friends near San Augustine to get an authorization from their alcalde to take the packet, and soon they sent it back to Bowie in Nacogdoches. He called a meeting of the townsmen in the public square, and there they read aloud the Mexican dispatches, detailing as they did their accusations against the Texians for treason and plotting, orders for the arrest of Travis and others involved in the Anahuac capture in June, and news that the Mexicans were considering a military occupation of Texias.36 If Nacogdoches needed anything to arouse its ire, this performance “moved their deep wrath and indignation.” For a member of the war party, it was a wise stroke of opinion molding, especially at a time when many in Texas were reacting strongly against the taking of Anahuac as reckless and inappropriate. Bowie may have sensed this in the aftermath of apathy that followed his seizure of the muskets, and within a few days he would hear from Travis much the same, as he realized now that the time was not right, that public sentiment did not yet support the war party, and anything that could be done, such as the revelation of these dispatches, would help to fan the guttering flame of revolt into life.37

  Bowie's standing grew rapidly now. First the escape from Matamoros—forgetting his involvement with the despised Mason—then the taking of the armory, and now the capture of the dispatches. When Rueg received information that several groups of renegades were starting trouble among the Indian tribes on the northern border of Texas, he recognized at once that with the prospect of Mexicans perhaps invading from the south, the Texians could not handle a war with the Comanche and others in their rear. He asked Forbes to send the town's sheriff to drive the renegades away and try to establish peaceful relations. Significantly, however, Rueg directed that Forbes should put the mission, including the sheriff himself, “under the direction of Col Bowie.” Once again, when the prospect of a crisis loomed, people looked instinctively toward James Bowie.38

  Those instructions from Rueg mark the first time that someone in an official capacity referred to Bowie as a colonel. He had exhausted his horse on the long ride from Matamoros, and with the animal not yet refitted, he looked for another in company with Ham. Sam Houston lived in town at the time, and Bowie knew that he had a fine animal, fresh and strong. “Houston, I want your horse,” Bowie told him, no doubt in a tavern. When Houston good-naturedly refused, Bowie typically said: “I am going to take him,” and left the room to get the animal. Houston turned to Caiaphas Ham and asked him if he thought he ought to lend Bowie the horse. Ham, who knew Bowie's determination far better than most, replied that it might be a good idea under the circumstances. “D—m him,” said Houston, “let him take the horse.”39

  On July 31 or August 1 Bowie and his small party rode north into the Cherokee country along Trammel's Trace. Several villages on the way were all having drinking frolics, which could make them dangerous, and so he bypassed them and went about forty miles north of Nacogdoches on to the Caney Creek settlement of Chief Bowl, head man of the Cherokee in Texas. Bowl agreed to bring some of his own men with Bowie on his mission, and sent couriers to the Shawnee and other Cherokee to rendezvous at his village in early August to help in the expedition. Meanwhile Bowie moved on to the west another forty miles or more until he came to the Neches River on August 3, and there he met a man who told him that 250 Texians from San Felipe had also gone on an expedition to calm the northern border, and that they were well ahead of him in their march north. There being no chance of catching up with them to act in unison, Bowie decided to go straight north himself. The informant on the Neches told him that large groups of Waco, Towashi, and Tawakoni had joined with some Comanche at the Coffee's Station trading house north of Crossed Timbers on the Red River. Holland Coffee was reported to be encouraging the natives to kill Mexicans and bring their livestock to him for purchase, and when some Tawakoni told him they had killed some Texians, he even said it did not matter and encouraged them to continue, with the promise that he would buy all their plunder.

  Having learned that Coffee also had some two hundred Tawakoni and twenty-five renegade whites protecting him and his establishment, Bowie knew there was no point in his going ahead with his small party. He sent a report south to Nacogdoches with a recommendation that Rueg raise a party of fifty or more and send them to join with Bowie and Bowl's men to march for Coffee's Station. They ought to be able to link with the Texians from San Felipe, and together they could break up Coffee's establishment and disperse his allies.40 Bowie needed to decide what to do next while he waited for Rueg to act, and typically he apparently determined to go on in advance of any men who might be coming from Nacogdoches. Just how far he got, though, is a mystery, and so is his intent, for within a few days he changed his destination once more. Word may have reached him that the natives and Coffee were not in fact as menacing as rumored and that he need not go farther. He may have decided to go west on his own to check into the activities of the Comanche. He may have decided that his recent confrontations with Mexican authority called for him to disappear for a time, or even concluded that with the people of Texas not yet in a temper for active resistance, he should take advantage of the doldrums to make that trip he had planned for some time.

  Whatever the case, without returning to Nacogdoches, Bowie set off for Louisiana,
leaving behind him a mystery as to his disappearance and, within a few weeks, rumors that the Comanche attacked and killed him early in August.41 He may have passed through Arkansas on his way, to visit with John Bowie at his new home in Helena on the Mississippi, where he had just been elected to the legislature and was still trying to dabble in the land business, though now legitimately.42 If James met with him, he undoubtedly impressed on his brother the mounting state of urgency in Texas, and perhaps asked him to help encourage volunteers to hurry to the province to help in resistance to the feared Mexican invasion. Certainly John Bowie did what he could. A few weeks later he hosted a grand barbecue, ostensibly in honor of the Bowies' friend Littleberry Hawkins, and within a few days a party formed to take the road for Texas.43

  By that time James had gone ahead. There might be more land deals to look after in Louisiana now. McNeil would have informed him by March that Robert Walker had given up his attempt to secure title on the Sutton report claims purchased from Bowie. That made the claims, bogus as they were, available for James to attempt to pursue once again, though he should have learned more than enough by now to realize that he was never going to get them approved.44 Still, there was always the possibility of selling them to someone who might not yet have heard of the famous “Bowie claims,” and so James got someone to register copies of the spurious conveyances in Natchitoches a few months earlier, on May 26, by his power of attorney.45 As much as his dishonesty in land dealings invited the harshest condemnation, James Bowie's determination, once set, was a true marvel.

  Looking into all this required a visit to Natchez, where he called on his friend and attorney Angus McNeil. Besides starting anew the Louisiana land efforts, Bowie had something even bigger to discuss. With his commission to handle the Mason grants, he could offer the lure of vast expanses of cheap land. He went to work at once on his old physician William Richardson, whom McNeil found to be “very much under his influence, as was most of his other friends.” Richardson had a considerable fortune, “and Bowie could easily have obtained from him any reasonable amount of money.” He promised the doctor his own league of land on the Navidad, his original settlement grant, in return for $5,000. But that was to be only the start. McNeil marveled anew at Bowie's ability to sell himself and his ideas, and to persuade his friends to hand over their money. Before he left he had raised close to eighty thousand dollars, most of it apparently in Richardson's hands to invest in Bowie's Mason grants. Richardson and McNeil also decided to come with him on the return journey to Texas to look over the property for themselves.46 It was Bowie's last visit to the storied city on the river that figured so strongly in the making of his reputation as a fighter, and even more prominently in the tall tales soon to be told of him. No doubt he enjoyed the entertainments Natchez provided, so much more varied and refined than what Texas could offer. If he read the local press while he was there he might have seen a review of a new book that the editor praised as “decidedly the best thing we have met with for many a day.” It was Crockett's blast at Van Buren.47

  By late September or early October, Bowie and his party, which may have grown to include several besides McNeil and Richardson, recrossed the Sabine into eastern Texas. No sooner were they there than Bowie encountered the Presbyterian missionary Sumner Bacon, who had traveled the traces of Texas for several years now trying to counter the enforced—and increasingly ignored—Catholic faith. In what seemed an old story at camp meetings, a few rowdies threatened to break up Bacon's service near Nacogdoches until Bowie told him to go ahead, and himself walked around the crowd with a double-barreled shotgun in hand. It was almost a repeat of that Good Samaritan act several years before.48

  Bowie got back to Nacogdoches to find that much had happened in his absence, with dramatic shifts in sentiment. The Mason grants that he represented were more unpopular than ever, and there was talk that the permanent council might recommend to a forthcoming consultation, to gather on October 16, that it declare all of the Monclova legislature's 1834 and 1835 land laws in Texas null. Nevertheless, once in Nacogdoches Bowie managed to execute transfers for nine of the eleven-league parcels, no doubt to Richardson's investors, once the doctor had a chance to see what the land looked like. Unfortunately, given the state of political upheaval, there would be no hope of gaining actual title until the situation calmed, and the same applied to securing a proper title for the league that Bowie sold personally to Richardson.49 In that case, Richardson very probably held onto the eighty thousand dollars he carried for the investors, and most likely also the five thousand due Bowie, especially if he learned on seeing it that the property was really worth no more than five hundred. McNeil apparently did not like what he saw and remained only a short time before returning to Louisiana, there to start founding the town of Shreveport.50

  In fact Bowie found the land speculators like himself being charged with fomenting the current disturbances. Seeing this, and fearing the effect it could have on the genuine war party movement, Houston may have told him that he intended to suggest the grant nullification measure to the permanent council, news that would not make Bowie happy.51 Houston also feared that the speculating demoralized men who might otherwise volunteer for the growing militias, particularly as leaders like Williams made no move to take up arms. Indeed, of the speculators, the only one to have risked himself actively was Bowie, which saved him from some of the odium attaching itself to the others.52

  Waiting for him too, when Bowie reached Nacogdoches, was a July 30 letter from Travis. Bowie knew the young lawyer, though not well. Travis had handled a small land transaction for him several months earlier, and of course Bowie knew of Travis's June adventure at Anahuac, the act that really ignited the current unrest.53 Beyond that the two had nothing in common, and their different temperaments probably would not have encouraged close friendship. Yet after his recent Anahuac experience, and when he heard of Bowie's exploits with the Nacogdoches armory and the captured dispatches, Travis seemingly sensed some kindred sympathy in Bowie, and on July 30 wrote him some encouragement in the face of the dominant influence of the peace party at the moment. Indeed, what Bowie read seemed to contain both encouragement, and advice, with possibly a hint of something else. “Unless we could be united, had we not better be quiet and settle down for a while?” asked Travis. It seemed to be a suggestion that Bowie do nothing more, rather presumptuous of the lawyer from San Felipe. But then, in speaking of those favoring a policy of submission, he suggested that if the people had “a bold and determined leader” they might rise up and defeat the Peace Party. Was he suggesting that Bowie should be that “bold and determined” leader?54

  Of course much had changed by mid-October, when Bowie finally saw Travis's letter.55 Stephen Austin, released from imprisonment, returned to Texas on August 30, at last resolved on a more aggressive policy, but following rather than leading events now. Fearful of an armed outbreak, especially in the wake of Bowie's seizure of the muskets and other small provocations, Ugartechea ordered the citizens of Gonzales to hand over a cannon in September. They refused, Cós sent soldiers, and on October 2 shots were fired. The revolution so long hoped for and feared had begun. Meanwhile General Cós had landed at Copano in mid-September with a small force and soon marched on San Antonio. Militia captured Goliad, a vital point on Cós's supply link to the coast, and soon volunteers began mustering from all over the region to form an army to drive the Mexicans out of Béxar. They elected Austin commander of the “Volunteer Army of the People” on October 11, and soon the three-hundred-man army set out from Gonzales, its numbers growing every day. Overhead in the night sky on October 14 they first saw that same comet that Crockett followed. It seemingly blazed a quarter of the way across the heavens, pointing the way to San Antonio.

  Bowie had no intention of missing this action. Ham and Donoho and a few other Louisiana friends, including Richardson, were with him in Nacogdoches when word of the outbreak came. They rushed off to find the nascent army, stopping briefly in San Felipe on
October 15, where Bowie and Richardson registered the conveyance of the Navidad league.56 By the time they got to Gonzales, Austin had left, and Bowie finally caught up with the army on the evening of October 19 in its camp at Cibolo Creek, forty miles west, and only twenty miles from San Antonio.57 Austin got there two days before, but halted his progress to allow more volunteers to arrive, bringing his numbers up to 366 in eight companies. With men arriving daily, by October 21 there would be eleven companies, totaling 453 or more, with 25 to 30 men joining every day.58