And they had given Texians—and Americans—a definition of bravery. Not the sort of courage that Bowie showed in a spontaneous battle at the Sandbar, or of the man who in the last seconds of his life dies well. Few, even the strongest and most resolute, could really control their deaths in battle, for that lay as much in the hands of chance and their slayers. The better bravery, the real courage, lay in the fact that for nearly two weeks Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and the rest knowingly placed and kept themselves in harm's way, aware each day that the Mexicans could overwhelm them at the next dawn, and yet they stayed. Regardless of their motives for enlisting in the revolution and coming to the Alamo, that alone made them heroes, though not a one of them had yet faced death as a certainty.
Dawn would come a few minutes before 7:00 A.M. on March 6. The exhausted sentinels inevitably dozed at their vigils. Travis placed a few men in picket posts outside the fort's walls, in order to detect any movement in the night, but they, too, slept. No one heard the distant sound of horses and the muffled jingle of sabers and spurs around 3:00 A.M., just as Travis fell into a deep slumber. No one heard mounted men slowly form a loose circle around the fort a hundred yards or less out in the night. No one saw the moonlight, no longer full but still bright, glinting off polished steel. No one heard the inevitable rustling and stumbling of more than a thousand pairs of feet, the clatter of bayonets rattling on their sockets, and the occasional thud as ladders banged together. It was just as well. The men in the Alamo needed their sleep.
The door to Travis's chamber in a house on the west wall burst open at about 5:30, just as the sound of not too distant shouts of “Viva Santa Anna” may have been awakening him.100 Officer of the day J. J. Baugh rushed in, shouting: “The Mexicans are coming.” Travis leaped from his cot, and even as he reached for his shotgun and saber and yelled to Joe to wake up to come with him, he heard the thudding of two axes and crowbars on the wooden doors and windows of the houses along the perimeter. Followed by Joe, he rushed out into the darkness, saw flashes of gunfire on the north wall, and ran the seventy yards to the earth ramp that led up to the gun emplacement.
By now men were coming alive from their slumber throughout the compound, but he could see they had been taken by surprise. His outer pickets must have been overrun, and by the time he got to the top of the parapet, the enemy Toluca Battalion was already near the foot of the wall on the other side. The gunners had opened on them with the cannon, illuminating the night scene with eerie flashes of yellow light followed by darkness, and at first did terrible damage, but by now the front ranks of the foe were so close that the artillery could not be depressed sufficiently to reach them. They had ten scaling ladders and were about to place them against the wooden revetment.101 Travis yelled back into the compound, “Come on Boys, the Mexicans are upon us, and we'll give them Hell!”
Leaning over the edge of the parapet to take hasty aim, Travis gave the Mexicans both barrels of his shotgun. Out of the milling throng below a spotty volley came back at him. Flying at shattering velocity, a lead ball more than three-quarters of an inch thick struck him full in the forehead and sent him reeling back against one of the cannon. Joe thought his master was stunned yet still living, but did not stay to find out. He turned and raced for one of the barricaded houses to hide. Yet surely, with a missile as great as a brown Bess bullet plowing through his brain, Travis was dead as he hit the ground. Defiant even after the end, he still clutched his gun in his hand.102
It is just possible that someone got word of Travis's fall to Crockett. He may even have seen it or caught a glimpse of Travis's body, since Crockett could have been anywhere that morning. Travis may have assigned him to the picket palisade in front of the church back on February 23, but that was no surety that he would still be there thirteen days later. In any case, with the heaviest pressure coming on the north wall, men from several other positions no doubt ran there to try to stem the tide of soldados starting to swarm over. With Travis down, one of the captains would be next in the line to assume command, but it hardly mattered, for there were no orders to give.103 Men simply had to stand their ground where they were, rush by common instinct to where the newest danger arose, and slowly—but inevitably—fall back when Mexican numbers on the walls grew too great.
Down on the south wall a Mexican assault column skirted off to the left of the palisade rather than attack it, and passed around the emplacement guarding the main gate, heading for the southwest corner to try a lodgement. At least one Texian almost certainly heard nothing of their passage. By now Bowie was probably in a near-constant delirium, when not actually asleep. Somewhere in this third week of the typhoid, he lay shaking and sweating on his cot as the constant high fevers of the worst stage of the disease robbed his body of everything, even lucidity. He may have heard nothing at all of the fighting that went on at the opposite end of the parade, or of the firing and yelling that gradually, and then suddenly, drew very close to the south wall as the resistance everywhere gave way. Many of the remaining defenders went to ground in their fortified rooms along the perimeter. In full control of the parade ground now, the soldados took the Texians' own cannon and started blasting them out of their rooms, one by one.
It took no artillery to open the door to Bowie's room. He was alone. The night before someone had put a blanker over him to keep out the cold and help his wasting body's remaining warmth fight the racking chills. The covering still lay over him now, perhaps even shielding his face from the cold. If the terrible din outside did awaken him, he may have been too weak to pull the fabric from his eyes. Possibly he did not even hear the sound of feet stepping into his room. Confined for days now to this cot, he no longer wore the knife at his belt.
To the Mexican soldiers who warily entered the chamber, at first all they say was a cot with rumpled blanket covering something beneath. Perhaps they heard breathing or a cough. More likely in all the cacophony of sound outside, they heard nothing but saw a movement, a shiver. Or one of them simply pocked at the blanket with his bayonet, or lifted back the corner to see Bowie beneath. If they had found him in the hospital with the other sick, they would have known that he, too, was incapacitated. But finding him like this, by himself, covered by a blanket, while his brave comrades fought bitterly and died hard outside, they could only suppose that this Texan was actually trying to hide from them. He may never have known what was happening. What the bayonets started, another massive bullet finished, leaving his blood and brains splattered on the wall behind him. In a cruel irony at the end of a remarkable life, one of the most fearless men of his generation died at the contemptuous hands of soldiers who mistook him for the worst sort of coward.104
There were simply too many Mexicans and too few Texians. Once the initial breakthrough came on the north wall, the west wall and south-west corner gave way. The collapse came so quickly that the Texians did not even have time to throw all their grenades over the wall into the teeming mass of soldados. The men not now isolated in the houses lining the parade ground, and grimly awaiting their turns to be blasted or bayoneted, had pulled back over the east wall, either into the horse and cattle corral, or the yard in front of the church. But the Mexicans were pushing them, another column started to come around from the north to strike the upper half of the east wall. By instinct rather than design they began to abandon the fortress.
First a good number of them came out through the gun emplacement at the northeast corner of the cattle pen. Leaping over the wall, they raced for the brush lining a small ditch. Soon thereafter about fifty Texians went over the wall of the horse corral farther along the wall and almost beside the church. They, too, raced for the ditch and chaparral, and then a third group went over the palisade and through the abatis. In all perhaps eight men, a third of the garrison, were out-side the Alamo now. They had no plan and no hope. They had simply been pushed out of the fortress by overwhelming numbers. It was either go over the walls to fight and live a little longer, or else stand and be swarmed where they were.
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It might have been better for them if they had stayed. Now they discovered for the first time the Mexican cavalry. Commanded directly by Ramírez y Sesma, it was there patrolling precisely to prevent anyone getting away. When Ramírez y Sesma saw the first breakout, he sent a company of lancers to ride them down in the brush. Even though testifying to “the desperate resistance they posed,” Ramírez Sesma saw that his mounted men made short work of them. The second group of fifty or more put up an even greater defense, as Ramírez y Sesma himself saw that the Texians were “ready to sell their lives at a very high price,” and he had to send reinforcements twice before his lancers finished them one by one. The last group to go over the wall fared no better. The brutal lances killed all of them but one, a man who took deep refuge in dense brush and had to be short.105 Perhaps Crockett was one of them. He had told Susanna Dickenson he preferred to “die out in the open,” not penned up like cattle. And if he was still assigned to the palisade or its vicinity when the battle began, then he was right where the third group went out, and very close to the point of departure of the second, largest breakout. But maybe he did not get that far. If he ran to where the fight began and raged the hottest, he could have fallen anywhere from the north wall all the way to the south, or been trapped in ay one of the rooms that lined the parade. There he could have been killed by a cannon's blast and rush of bayonets, or captured and put to death out in the center of the compound, where several others met a similar fate. If he escaped that, and did not go out to face death at the end of a lance, then perhaps he did fall where Sutherland left him thirteen days before, somewhere in the dirty yard in front of the church. He may even have died very early in the battle in the redoubt that projected out of the center of the west wall.106 No one who knew him saw him fall and lived to tell of it. “That Crockett fell at the Alamo is all that is known,” a visitor concluded sadly a few months latter; “by whom or how, no one can tell.”107 He was the most famous man in the Alamo, yet his death was just like his birth, an event shrouded in complete obscurity. Or perhaps the opposite was the case. His death, like his life, was simply too big to contain within the normal bounds of mortals. In the best heroic fashion of Nimrod Wildfire, Jeremiah Kentucky, Daniel Boone, and a whole generation of Americans searching for a new identity all their own, Davy Crockett, David of the River, Davy of the West, Loco Davy had died everywhere, because he was a host in himself.
Besides, his end fitted the life of a legend. For when no one sees a legend die, then the legend lives.108
22
ENSHRINEMENT
Dawn, March 6, 1836—Posterity
In some good cause, not in mine own, To perish, wept for, bonor'd, known, And like a warrior overthorwn.
J. HAMPTON KUYKENDALL, Sketches of Early Texians
They all died in the darkness. As the glimmers of dawn softened the shadows in the compound and out in the chaparral, they revealed a ghastly scene. Well over three hundred dead, Mexican and Texian, lay in scattered heaps. The victorious yet stunned soldados filled the Alamo searching every room. finding Susanna and Juana and the other women and children, even locating and sparing Joe because he was a slave. Some still stabbed at the corpses with their bayonets and here and there fired a shot, so overwrought by the fight or loss of comrades that even vengeance against a dead foe seemed to help.
Santa Anna and his staff entered through the main gate, having watched from the near distance. He surveyed the carnage, perhaps ordered the execution of the few who gad been taken alive, and issued instructions for the care and safety of the women and children. That done, he wanted to see the bodies of the the men he had conquered, not the common soldiers, but Travis and Bowie. Joe led him to his dead master up on the gun platform of the north wall, and the word went through the Mexican army that his enemy had died well. Triavis's old foe Gen. Martín Perfecto de Cós led one of the columns that hit this wall, and now perhaps he at last looked down on the bloody face of the man who had caused him so much trouble. Not surprisingly, the body showed signs of bayonet wounds, though the bullet certainly killed him almost instantly.1
Joe knew where Bowie stayed, and took the general to the little room to the left of the gate. There lay the emaciated hulk of a man Santa Anna might conceivably have met some years before when Bowie was in company with Vermendi. Certainly every upper-class Mexican had heard of Santiago Bowie—el fanfarrón, as some called him, “the braggart.” What they saw now must somehow have seemed not enough to have been such a man, especially with some of his brains splattered on the wall behind his cot. It was a new vision of the firmament: James Bowie, not just dead but defeated.2
Santa Anna probably did not ask about Crockett, not knowing that he was in the garrison, and quite probably not even aware of who he was or why the Texians attached such importance to him. But when he heard Joe and some of the tejanos now filtering curiously into the Alamo from San Antonio refer to Crockett as “colonel,” he wanted to see him, too. They had to look for him, and most likely Joe simply pointed out the body when he spotted it in a general survey around the entire scene of the battle. Joe never said where he saw him, but Susanna Dickenson later thought she had seen him laying with many of his Tennessee comrades somewhere in front of the church, when she was led out of the sacristy, deep in shock. His cheeks were still red.
Less than two hours after the close of the battle, Santa Anna wrote a hasty report of the action to send back to Mexico City. “The picture the battle presented was extraordinary,” he said. “Among the bodies were found the first and second chiefs of the enemy—Bowie and Travis—colonels as they called themselves—Crockett of the same title and other chiefs.”3 Having seen them in death, he wanted to see them no more. Moreover his soldiers could not spare the time for burial, for they had their own dead and wounded to attend to. He gave orders for the soldados to collect most or all of the Texians into three piles, two smaller ones probably composed of men killed outside by the lancers, and a large pyre for the men who fell inside the compound. Then he sent tejanos out into the countryside with their carts to gather dry wood, and when they returned, they stacked the bodies and the wood in alternate layers, poured combustible camphene on the pyres, and set them alight. The fires burned and then smoldered for hours and on into the night. The next day a tejano came to look at a pile of charred wood and ashes, and saw mixed with it fragments of bones and even bits of charred flesh. A darkened moist ring a foot or two wide surrounded each of the pyres. It was the fat broiled out of the bodies by the flames.4
Texians in the distance, hoping to hear Travis's signal guns, heard nothing that day or in those following, though a few may have seen the thick column of smoke rising from the direction of San Antonio on March 6. That same day Travis's last dispatch, the one written March 3 and sent out with Allen, reached the convention in Washington, and the president called a special session to read it to the delegates. They voted to print a thousand copies to distribute. Houston thought it a “thrilling” document, patriotic and courageous, and yet couched in what he called “the language of despair.”5
In Texas at large, everyone wondered and waited for more news from the Alamo. A rumor spread that Travis had turned back an enemy attack, killing five hundred Mexicans, and that he still held out; and Forbes in Nacogdoches, the man who gave Crockett his oath, wrote confidently that “the Alamo is bravely defended by Cols. James Bowie and Travis, and numbers are marching to their relief.” Not Fannin, however. Having lost all nerve or resolution, he panted himself in Goliad and refused to move. By March 6 one member of the convention, after hearing the reading of Travis's letter, turned gloomy: “It is much feared that Travis and company are all massacred,” he wrote. March 10 came in Washington, and still there was no news, “Much anxiety is felt for the fate of the brave men there,” Col. William Gray wrote that day. “it is obvious that they must be surrounded.” The next day, with still no word, he observed that “the anxiety begins to be intense.” Yet a few remained confident. One man with Fannin a
t Goliad assured his father on March 10 that “Davy Crockett and James Bowy are fighting at San Antone like Tigers.”6 He seemed to have forgotten that Travis was at the Alamo. But then, so had Fannin.
Finally it came, the news that they had feared. On March 11 two tejanos from Béxar reached Gonzales with a garbled account that had Travis and Bowie and several others committing suicide rather than die at Mexican hands. Houston sent Travis's old friend Deaf Smith and others off toward San Antonio to ascertain the facts. Certainly they heard no signal guns. Then they came upon Susanna and Joe and the other survivors, on their way east after their release by Santa Anna. Now there was no doubt. Gradually the word spread, reaching the convention on March 15, and Nacogdoches within a week.7 The news stunned men and women every where. Travis's old student Kuykendall was in Gonzales when the survivors came in that evening. The “astounding intelligence” they brought inspired disbelief in him at first.8 But the wives of Gonzales, who sent their husbands off in that thirty-two-man reinforcement that followed El Colorado to the Alamo, believed it sure enough. Their weeping and cries of anguish turned Gonzales into a town in mourning even as the people packed and hurried off to the east to escape Santa Anna's army.9 Pleasant Rose's two girls, when they learned of their friend Travis's death, grieved for days even as they joined the exodus of Texians away from the path of enemy invasion.10 David Ayers at Montville still had little Charlie Travis with him, and as he evacuated toward Harrisburg he had to break the news to the boys.11 And at Cummings's Mill the word arrived late one evening. Others heard Rebecca screaming. Just a few days before a letter written by Travis on March 3 finally reached Rebecca, its contents then and forever an eternal secret between them.12
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