Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  With the shock of the first news came exaggerated an unfounded rumors: Travis shot himself when he saw the garrison about to fall. No, he stabbed himself. Bowie was killed in his bed, or killed himself, or did he stand in the doorway of his room, pistols and knife in hand, and take several of the enemy with him before he went down? Crockett fell “fighting like a tiger.” Seven men did surrender, only to be executed at Santa Anna's order, and there was even one report that mentioned the executions in such close juxtaposition to Crockett's name that it appeared he might have been one of those who sought quarter.13

  No one took the news harder than Houston, for almost as much as Fannin, he bore the brunt of the responsibility for failing to relieve the garrison in time. His skepticism and disbelief, tinged by his political opposition to the faction Travis represented, and certainly influenced by a desire to stay at the convention to exert his influence there, meant that he had all but abandoned the Alamo to its fate. For a man with his ambitions that could be fatal, and so almost immediately he began covering his conduct. On March 7 he still expressed doubt that the Mexicans were even in San Antonio, despite all of Travis's dispatches and the certain eyewitness testimony of the couriers.14 Then two days after definitive word of the fall of the Alamo reached him, he began the refrain that he would pursue for the rest of his life. He had given orders to blow up the Alamo and remove its guns, he claimed, but first the removal of all the draft animals by the Matamoros filibusters—“the author of all our misfortunes—and then the unwillingness of the garrison to leave, took the matter out of his hands.15“Our forces must not be shut up in forts,” he proclaimed on March 15. Within two years the fault would be Travis's and Bowie's: “The fall of the Alamo,” he declared, “resulted from disobedience.”16 Houston's excuse was sufficiently persuasive that by September some blamed Henry Smith for failing to approve the request to below up and abandon the Alamo. He “had the blood of both Fannin and Travis on his hands,” charged one critic.17 By the time Houston got around to writing his memoirs, Bowie came to bear the blame for disobeying his order, though Houston would say at the same time that Travis, Crockett, and Bowie were all “brave and gallant spirits.” They acted openly and boldly: “Their policy of warfare was to divide, advance and conquer.”18 He conveniently forgot that at the time, his policy had been to stay drunk on eggnog in Washington. “It was a bad business,” he privately confessed then of his behavior. “I hated it.”19 As for his “order” being disobeyed, it was never an order in the first place, but only a suggestion to Governor Smith. When not blaming Travis or Bowie, he blamed the council for secretly countermanding his nonorder.20 Henry Austin, a cousin of Stephen's, no doubt had Houston, among others, in mind when he wrote just three weeks after the disaster that “painfull as the event is in itself to me it came as the harbinger of Salvation to Texas—for I had long been convinced that some severe disaster alone could call the wretched set of men who have obtained the lead in public affairs to a sense of their duty to the people.”21 Whatever other emotions it produced in Texians, the fall of the Alamo did most certainly get their attention.

  Back in San Antonio itself, the defenders of the Alamo held the attention of their foes along after they were dead. In the brief battle, and despite their disadvantages, Travis and his command inflicted terrible losses on Santa Anna's army. Of the sixteen hundred men involved in the attack, some four hundred fell wounded, including one general and twenty-eight officers, and seventy-five of them would die later.22 The number actually killed outright in the fight is unclear. Santa Anna claimed only seventy when he reported the action that morning, but then he underestimated his wounded by fully one hundred, and other Mexicans present would place the dead and mortally wounded closer to two hundred.23 Regardless of the exact count, two hundred or more Texians inflicted at least 33 percent casualties on the attacking columns in the space of less that an hour. No one could say they did not give a good account of themselves. Six weeks later a Texian saw the wounded from the Alamo in their hospital. “A pretty piece of work ‘Travis, and his faithful few’ have made of them,” he said.24

  Meanwhile the campaign continued, the Alamo being just a stop for Santa Anna, not a goal. A few days after the fight more soldiers arrived, including Travis's old adversary from Anahuac, Juan Davis Bradburn. By June, with all the changes in the military situation, and with the Mexicans in Texas being supplied by sea, one commander reported to the secretary of war in Mexico City that “Bejar is almost insignificant,” and some even argued for its evacuation.25 By the end of April they were doing just that, for a partial Texian victory at San Jacinto on April 21, and the capture of Santa Anna the next day, virtually ended the revolution.

  Well before the Mexicans left Béxar, in fact just four days after the battle, a new unit of lancers arrived. Santa Anna ordered them quartered in the Alamo, where no doubt the curious men ransacked the place for any remaining souvenirs, while their horses trod through and kicked about the three piles of dusty ashes outside the compound. By late May, when a Texian visited the spot, he saw only the vestiges of the piles. “The bones had been reduced to cinders, occasionally a bone of the leg or arm was seen almost entire,” he wrote in his journal. “Peace to your ashes!”26

  Yet nearly a year passed before those ashes met that peace, and in the meantime the wind and rain scattered and eroded the heaps, and small scavengers carried away the bits of bone. So preoccupied was newly independent Texas with other affairs that not until February 25, 1837, did it pay its proper respects to the Alamo's fallen. Fittingly, Capt. Juan seguín brought his company of cavalry to San Antonio that day and examined what survived of the piles of charred remains. He gave orders that the bells in San Fernando should start to peal, and keep ringing throughout the day, then engaged a Béxar carpenter to build a coffin. They covered it with black cloth, then placed the ashes from the two smaller piles in the box. Though the contents reflected part of scores of men, Seguín caused to be inscribed on the inside of the lid just three names, Travis, Bowie, and Crockett. Laying a Texian rifle and sword atop the casket, his men carried it to San Fernando, and there it remained as a procession gathered in the street outside, the bell tolling all the while.

  At 4 P.M. Seguín led the mourners back through the main street of town, across the San Antonio, and back toward the Alamo and the remaining pile of ashes. Setting the box down, his troopers fired three volleys over it, then did the same over the remaining larger pile. After his men gently laid the casket atop that heap, Seguín addressed the crowd in Spanish. “Even now the genius of liberty is looking down from her lofty seat, smiling with approbation upon our proceedings,” he said, “and calling to us in the names of our departed brethren, Travis, Bowie, Crockett.” When he finished, Maj. Thomas Western spoke to them in English, stating the obvious when he averred that “in those ashes before us we behold naught and tangible remains of a Travis, a Bowie, a Crockett.” That done, they buried the coffin and the remaining ashes on the spot and fired three more volleys. Then they marched back to the town with their banners flying and their musicians playing. They did not think to mark the spot, for who could forget the resting place of the immortal Alamo garrison. Within a few years a small grove of peach trees grew up above the grave site, yet within scarcely more than a generation, the spot was lost. Ironically the commander who gave Seguín the order to come and perform these last obsequies was Albert Sidney Johnston, younger brother of Bowie's old nemesis Josiah S. Johnston.27

  Inevitably the word of the deaths reached relatives and friends far away from Texas, and in every instance prompted a desire for revenge. Travis's family in Alabama knew by late March 1836, and his brother Mark resolved to go to Texas to fight the Mexicans himself, though he never actually made it until the war between the United States and Mexico some ten years later, suffering a wound that afflicted him the rest of his life.28 In Tennessee Crockett's widow Elizabeth was left to ponder the odds of woman being twice married to men killed in massacres in forts, while his son Ro
bert was working in the field when the horrible news came. He lost no time in rushing to Texas, where a captain saw him “so wrathy” for revenge that he wanted to kill all Mexicans. Afterward he led a small company of his own toward Matamoros, that eternal poisoned will-o'-the-wisp that had so prejudiced his father's chance of survival.29 There years later John Crockett won his own seat in Congress, and there took up his father's old lost cause. In 1841 he succeeded in seeing passed a bill to provide cheap land to Tennessee squatters.30

  No one took it as hard as Rezin Bowie. Thomas J. Green went to Mississippi and Louisiana to raise volunteers for Texas immediately after the fall of the Alamo, and on April 9 offered Rezin the colonelcy of a new regiment to be raised. Bowie accepted, though he feared that his failing eyesight would keep him from active service. That did not matter or Green. Just the knowledge that Bowie held a commission would benefit Texas measurably.31 Bowie went to New Orleans to enlist men in his regiment, and by April 12 was ready to take them upriver for the rendezvous. “From his known experience and skill in arms, together with his own and his brothers popularity,” said Green, Bowie “will be able to carry many of the elusive spirits.” Green could not mistake Bowie's motivation. “He longs to avenge his brothers murder.” On May 5 they started for Texas, but not before a ceremony at Natchez in which citizens raised a cenotaph on the stage of the Natchez Theatre inscribed with the names of Bowie, Travis, and Crockett, among others.32

  None of them arrived in time for the decisive battle on the San Jacinto. Through a combination of Santa Anna's overconfidence and Houston's good luck, an isolated portion of the Mexican army suffered a costly defeat, Santa Anna became Houston's prisoner, and the balance of the invasion force not captured left for the Rio Grade. Bowie's old lawyer friend Quitman missed the battle but was there immediately afterward, and actually saw the captured enemy general, who seemed to “cringe and cower” when interviewed. He also learned that when the Texians attacked at San Jacinto, they ran into battle yelling “Alamo! Alamo! Alamo!” and “Alamo! Travis! Crockett!” Others, he reported, “charged at a trot shouting ‘Remember the Alamo.’” In that victory the friends of the dead found both hope and revenge. “I congratulate you sir on the ascendancy of your great cause,” a man wrote to Travis's friend William P. Harris. “What can stop it now?” And back in Clarke County, Alabama, where men remembered the struggling lawyer with too few cases and the publisher with no subscriptions, the local press gloated that San Jacinto was “retribution for the savage butchery of his fellow soldiers who were massacred at the Alamo, whose blood cried aloud for vengeance on a lawless enemy.”33 San Jacinto did not end the revolution, however. In the months of inactivity and uncertainty after the battle, the old lethargy returned, and with it no little cynicism about Texian leadership. Late that summer, when the military authorities wanted to regarrison and fortify San Antonio, Green found volunteers reluctant to go. “We have to encounter the Travis, Bowie & Crockett prejudice with the soldiers,” he complained.34 Moreover, complaisance that the Mexicans would never invade again took over. “The same false logicts that prevailed last campaign is still in the country,” complained one Texian, who feared they would not change their ways until “the texians are to meet with some disastrous”35

  But there were no more disasters, and Texas became an independent republic. There was much to do for a new nation, though Texians did not forget their dead heroes. Before the end of 1836 Bowie' heirs began the long process of closing his estate, which proved to be surprisingly little after the near fortunes he had made and spent in his lifetime. They petitioned to collect $6,625.00 for the cattle used by Fannin's command, sold his moth-eaten coats and a few tools for a mere $47.13, and even then faced a considerable debt that he owed.36 His only other property was his headright land, and most of that he sold to Dr. Richardson, yet more than forty years after his death the Veramendis would be trying to get it as due to them for Ursula's unpaid prenuptial settlement.37 Crockett's estate started through probate on the same day as Bowie's, July 10, 1837, and was much simpler since he was entitled to bounties for his service and his death, and neither were encumbered. His son Robert was handed a warrant for $240.00 for Crockett's military service, then years later in 1854 settled permanently in Texas, taking up the headright his father was entitled to at his death.38

  Travis left the most complicated estate, though chiefly because of the nature of his legal practice. There were small notes that he owed, totaling a few hundred dollars, rent due on his office in San Felipe, and papers on cases pending that needed to be turned over to his clients. John. R. Jones, his executor, had to feed, clothe, and hire out to his slave John and pay the proceeds into the estate, and would have done the same with Joe except that the young black ran away, all but disappearing forever. No doubt he believed that in risking a horrible death at the Alamo, he absolved himself of any need to do anything more for Travis, living or dead. Jones dealt with the joint assets of the new partnership with Starr, including the law texts. The notices of their new partnership were still running in the Texas press even after Travis's death. In the hurly-burly of the Alamo and the invasion, Starr never thought to take them out of the papers. William Cato came to Texas in November to look after the interests of Rosanna's children, and now in death Travis probably provided for Charles and Susan much more substantially than ever he had in life.39

  Of course there was more left behind as their legacy than papers and debts and pieces of land. Partly from guilt, but chiefly out of veneration for their sacrifice, Texians soon began to memorialize them. In October 1836 Reuben Potter's poem “Hymn of the Alamo” spoke of “how Travis and his hundred fell amid a thousand foemen slain” in order to give Texas “freedom's breath of life.”40 In time counties bore the name of each of the three, Travis County being the first, when the legislature created it in November 1836. No sooner did the revolution end than the Alamo itself became an object of curiosity. “I never look into the ruins of the Church without shedding a tear,” an old tejano woman told one of the mounting number of visitors in 1843: “I knew them all.” Five or six years after the fight men still saw the dark spots on the wall of that room to the left of the gate, where Bowie's brains and blood spattered the mud. But then someone replastered the room and erased the stain, just as the winds and the small creatures all but obliterated the remainder of the piles of ashes outside. By the early 1840s many Texians smoked souvenir pipes or wore crucifixes made of stone from the crumbling walls.41 Almost forty years after the siege, Travis's slave Joe reemerged in the new capital, Austin, in Travis County. A local editor proposed making him and Susanna Dickenson guests of honor for a celebration of the anniversary of San Jacinto, but then Joe disappeared once more. Hiding had saved his life at the Alamo, and he may have spent years hiding or running after he escaped from slavery. Not being seen had become for him virtually a way of life.42

  Inevitably their fame spread beyond the bounds of Texas. Only Crockett had enjoyed a prior national reputation, and his death at the Alamo seemed almost tailored for his legend. Ironically, he quickly became the best known and remembered of the men in the Alamo pantheon, even though he could hardly have been said to be a Texian yet by the time of his death, and it had never been his intention originally to involve himself in the revolt. Crockett souvenirs became immediately prized. Nearly twenty horses were sold at varying times in and around Washington, and at highly inflated prices, all purporting to be the one he rode into Texas astride, despite the fact that the “large American horse” that bore him our of Tennessee was actually returned to Elizabeth Crockett within a few months, along with the watch Crockett sold in Arkansas. But then the legendary Crockett, “Davy of the West,” could have ridden twenty horses at once.43 His threat to go to Texas if Van Buren won the White House soon became a catch-phrase among Whigs and Calhoun Democrats. Even as Crockett visited Nacogdoches on his way to San Antonio, Bowie's old friend Quitman in Natchez felt so disgusted at the prospect of Van Buren as president that he thre
atened to “go to the wild woods of Texas,”44 In his sometimes counterproductive worship of absolute honesty, David became in the public mind a paragon. “I am a plain and anxious seeker for unsophisticated truth,” wrote an Alabamian a few weeks after the Alamo. “I know very well that when this truth is presented, it is like the lone Davy Crockett battling with a hundred Mexicans. It is a lone truth against a hundred sophisms.”45 David would have liked that, and he would have loved the way the country at large seemed so reluctant to part with him. “Alas, poor Davy!” wailed a Nashville editor, “thine was a horrible fate; but like a man, and an American, you met it!”46 Even the more sedate eastern press caught the spirit. “He was indeed a character,” said a New York journal, “one that no other country but our own ever did or ever will produce.” He was a pure through and through product of the frontier, it asserted, and in his death he, “in the flash language of the country, became a steamboat.”47 All across the country men read again his autobiography, and the other, spurious works that soon appeared. For the first time in American history, entrepreneurs began to capitalize by marketing books and products associated, if only by name, with a national celebrity. Even in the spurious works, however, three lived a spark of that distinctive American vernacular and humor that Crockett first so effectively utilized.