The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation

by James Donovan

  The men in Anahuac organized a militia company, ostensibly for protection against Indians, electing as their captain attorney Patrick Jack, who shared an office with his friend William Barret Travis. Jack was arrested for accepting the position, since a militia was in violation of Mexican law, but was soon released. Meanwhile, the owner of two runaway slaves had hired Travis to recover the men; Bradburn had given them sanctuary and used them as laborers on his barracks, and he refused to yield them despite repeated prodding from Travis. When a mysterious cloaked figure delivered letters to a Mexican sentry that announced a militia marching on Anahuac for the purpose of taking the blacks by force, a nettled Bradburn suspected a hoax, with Travis behind it. On May 17, he sent a dozen soldiers to the attorneys’ office to take Travis into custody for questioning. When Jack barged into Bradburn’s office demanding his friend’s release, he, too, was arrested. Fifteen other purported troublemakers would eventually join the pair as Bradburn attempted intimidation.

  Travis and Jack were first placed in the guardhouse, then moved to an empty brick kiln. No formal charges were filed, though Bradburn announced a military trial for the prisoners to be held in Matamoros, three hundred miles away in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. These developments further enraged the Anglo colonists, who sometimes failed to remember that they were no longer in the United States and that their civil rights were no longer protected by the U.S. Constitution. “They all go about with their constitution in their pocket, demanding their rights,” wrote one Mexican general after an 1828 tour of Texas. Soon, about 160 settlers from Austin’s colony organized and marched toward Anahuac. Led by Frank Johnson, the vocal leader of the independence movement, and Robert “Three-Legged Willie” Williamson, the handsome, fun-loving San Felipe attorney whose wooden leg never seemed to impede his movements, the group reached the town on June 10 and approached the garrison.

  Bradburn ordered the two prisoners bound and staked to the ground. Guards were posted around them, their rifles pointed at the pair. The colonel threatened the prisoners with death if the colonists opened fire. Travis, his hands tied over his knees, shouted at Johnson’s group to ignore his personal safety and attack the fort in the name of a higher duty. He would die like a man, he told them.

  Both sides stood down. The colonists left after issuing a warning to Bradburn threatening action if any harm should come to the two attorneys. Over the next few days there were skirmishes, including a small battle at Velasco, seventy miles down the coast, and a near siege of Anahuac. Finally Bradburn’s superior arrived from Nacogdoches and negotiated a truce, removing the colonel from command. Travis and Jack were released on July 2, after seven weeks of imprisonment. Bradburn, fearful for his life, stole out of town and made his way east to New Orleans.

  Stephen Austin was eventually able to persuade the authorities that the fracas merely indicated the colonists’ hatred of Bradburn, not a desire to rebel against their adopted homeland. But Travis and his compatriots were feted as heroes of the emerging Texian cause—whether it be independence, statehood, or just the civil rights every American immigrant expected.

  Perhaps in an effort to capitalize on his newfound fame, in August Travis moved inland, west to San Felipe and its five-hundred-odd inhabitants. He had been an unknown when he arrived there a year earlier; now he hoped his celebrity and experience would bring in enough business to support him. His gamble paid off. Though there were still several capable attorneys in the area, this time he found all kinds of work, from land dealings and slavery transactions to wills and colonization cases and criminal defense. He soon developed a thriving practice, earning enough to rent a house for a year and buy another house and a hundred acres east of town for investment purposes. He also sent a man back to Alabama to pay his debts there. Travis continued to buy even more land, and eventually owned so much that he was able to donate five hundred acres on the Brazos River to an enterprise attempting to introduce a steamboat into the interior waterways of Texas. He employed a French gardener, and rented or bought a few slaves, among them a woman named Matilda and a twenty-year-old man named Joe, who hailed from Kentucky—“five feet ten or eleven inches high, very black, and good countenance,” according to a friend of Travis’s.

  He also developed a busy social life, and engaged in the usual pursuits of a single man in such a place: gambling, Masonic meetings, stag parties, horse races, and the occasional dance or ball. He liked to dress well. As his income increased so did his wardrobe, and he became fastidious about washing his clothes (not a particularly common affectation in his part of the world at the time). He enjoyed buying gifts for others, particularly children, and frequently contributed to charitable causes. He continued his voracious reading, mostly history and historical novels—whatever he could buy or borrow in the small frontier town. He never was much of a drinker beyond the occasional social libation, but he began to play at faro and other card games, losing a bit more than he won. And he cut quite a swath through the small group of single women in the area, some of them proper, but more of them prostitutes.

  Late in 1833 he met a young woman named Rebecca Cummings, a few years older than he, who helped her brother John run an inn on Mill Creek about seven miles north of San Felipe. He continued to see other women (and occasionally bed them) while courting her, but he spent more and more time at Mill Creek, and not just for the superior food and comfortable lodging. Soon he fell in love with Rebecca, and gave up other assignations. He eventually told her about Rosanna, having changed his mind about returning to his wife and family in Alabama, if that had truly been his intention at all. By mid-April 1834, Rebecca agreed to marry him once his divorce was finalized in Alabama. Rosanna had acquiesced to an official end to the marriage and agreed to grant Travis custody of Charles Edward, a concession Travis lost no time acting upon. Within a month, he had met with her in Brazoria and returned to San Felipe with his four-year-old son. Though the Alabama legislature still needed to legally dissolve the marriage, and that could take some time, he was confident that it would happen, particularly since Rosanna had also found someone else, a man who wanted to wed her.

  San Felipe was not only the headquarters of Austin’s colony; it was truly the center of Anglo Texas. Everyone important eventually came through the town, and politics was the lingua franca at every tavern. After the Anahuac disturbance, Travis had remained uninvolved in such discussions for a time, but he was soon swept up into the political maelstrom. For the moment, those favoring peace held sway in most of Texas. Disenchantment with the Mexican government was growing, however, and San Felipe was the beating heart of the revolutionary spirit.

  For a while relations remained peaceful. In February 1834, Travis accepted a position as secretary of the San Felipe ayuntamiento (city council), and worked closely with his friend Robert Williamson, the new alcalde. The job put him in the middle of things, politically speaking, and increased his influence. He also began mixing with other members of the fledgling War Party, young hotspurs dissatisfied with the thought of Texas as a Mexican state. For these War Dogs, as they were called, independence was the only answer—and if that meant war, so be it, and the sooner the better.

  In June 1833, Austin had been sent to Mexico to deliver the colonists’ proposal for statehood. He would not return to Texas again until September 1835, almost two years after his arrest and imprisonment for treason. By that time, events outside his control would be set in motion, events that would decide the future of Texas, and Travis would find himself in the thick of them. Once again, the flash point was Anahuac.

  Since the 1832 disturbance, customs collection in the area had been neglected. In the spring of 1835 the cash-strapped Mexican government sent another customs officer to Anahuac, with another company of troops to assist him in carrying out his duties. There followed the inevitable clashes between soldiers and citizens, who felt that the taxes were unfairly levied. When a friend of Travis’s, an Anahuac merchant named Andrew Briscoe, was jailed for suspicion of smuggling—or
perhaps for embarrassing the new customs officer, it was not quite clear which—the news spread through the colonies. At a secret War Party meeting held in San Felipe, a plot was hatched to free Briscoe from jail—and Anahuac from military rule. Travis was not only at its center, he was elected to lead the ambitious attempt. The two dozen volunteers for the expedition elected Travis commander. Their password slogan, likely his suggestion, was “victory or death.”

  Down the coast from Anahuac, they chartered a sloop, mounted a six-pound cannon, and sailed into Galveston Bay. Late in the afternoon of June 27, they reached Anahuac and fired a cannon shot to announce their presence. The rebels rowed ashore in two small boats, then sent a demand for surrender to the officer in charge, Captain Antonio Tenorio. At some risk to his life, Travis met with Tenorio and insisted on an immediate capitulation. After a period of discussion, the Mexican garrison of forty-four men surrendered, and were paroled after pledging to leave Texas.

  A few days later, Travis returned to San Felipe to find himself castigated for his actions. The Peace Party still prevailed, and the majority of Texian colonists were fearful of reprisals, with good reason: a federalist uprising in the Mexican state of Zacatecas in May had been brutally crushed by General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the recently elected president, and the news of his punitive actions there was both fresh and frightening. Several Texian communities issued resolutions condemning the Anahuac action and pledging their loyalty to the Mexican government, Travis being prominently—and pejoratively—mentioned in more than one. His Mexican counterpart, Captain Tenorio, rode to San Felipe and was received as a hero.

  Travis, angry and dismayed, published a notice in a newspaper asking the public to withhold judgment, an announcement that satisfied no one. Then he wrote to the military commander in Béxar, Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea, suggesting they open a correspondence that would allow Travis to explain his actions. He received no reply. Instead, the Mexican authorities issued orders in August for the arrest of Travis, Robert Williamson, Frank Johnson, and several other agitators. Santa Anna himself issued the orders.

  Most of the Anglo colonists were not happy with Travis’s actions. They had worked long and hard for what they had, and any trouble with Mexico might cause them to lose everything. But if Travis was a hothead, he was their hothead. The thought of several of their most prominent citizens being seized and put on military trial, and perhaps executed, was intolerable, and the local authorities refused to carry out the arrest orders. More meetings were held in Anglo communities throughout the province. Another convention, this one referred to as a Consultation, was called for October 15 in Gonzales, the center of empresario Green DeWitt’s colony to the west of San Felipe, and the call went out for delegates from every settlement in Texas.

  Travis hoped to attend as a delegate. He spent a good deal of his time writing letters to influential friends and acquaintances, stirring them to the banner of rebellion. “We shall give them hell if they come here,” he wrote in late August 1835, upon hearing the news that two hundred soldados (soldiers) would be garrisoned in San Felipe within a few weeks:

  Keep a bright lookout. Secure all the powder and lead. Remember that war is not to be waged without means. Let us be men and Texas will triumph…. If we are encroached upon, let us resist until our bodies & our property lie in one common ruin, ere we submit to tyranny.

  Travis even advised Austin, who arrived in San Felipe in mid-September, on the delegate elections and the upcoming convention. But before the Consultation could convene, the war that Travis had advocated so enthusiastically broke out in earnest. In the village of Gonzales, colonists resisted attempts by Mexican troops to confiscate a single unmounted cannon tube. It was hardly a battle—hardly even a skirmish—yet the shots fired there finally ignited Texian passions in a way that Travis’s mere words had so far failed to do.

  THAT WAS IN OCTOBER. It had brought Travis the rebellion he had longed for. And then, in the chilly first days of 1836, his orders to reinforce Béxar.

  Now, early in February 1836, at the age of twenty-six, Travis, like some romantic hero of yore, commanded a cavalry legion (or what passed for one). Three months after entering the service as a lieutenant, he had been unanimously elected lieutenant colonel—and that after his recommendations for a corps of cavalry had been accepted and then implemented with only a few changes. His name was known in every household in Texas, and respected in most of them: public opinion had changed drastically over the previous few months, and few colonists still supported the status quo. Travis was present at the dawn of a new country, instrumental in its birth and fighting for its existence against a despot, much as his two grandfathers, both of them veterans of the American Revolution, had done sixty years before. Anything seemed possible: greatness, riches, even immortality. Just the previous August he had written to a friend, echoing Thomas Paine: “Huzza for Texas! Huzza for Liberty, and the rights of man!… God grant that all Texas may stand as firm as Harrisburg in the ‘hour that will try men’s souls.’… I feel the triumph we have gained and I glory in it. Let Texas stand firm and be true to herself and we will have nothing to fear.”

  He had led his command from San Felipe west to Beeson’s Ferry on the Colorado River, where they had stopped for a few days to scour the countryside for more necessities. They came up with some provisions, a horse, saddles, bridles—some charged to the government, some to Travis’s personal credit. He managed to recruit one volunteer, but the new man hardly made up for those whom Travis had lost. By the time the legion arrived at Burnham’s Crossing, twenty miles upstream, a few days later, nine others had deserted the group, a dispiriting turn of events. Then Travis had written the two letters to Smith, asking for new orders in the first and offering his resignation in the second. He lingered on the Colorado, hoping for a quick reply from Smith, but none came. He traveled west toward Gonzales, and somewhere on the road decided to go on ahead alone to Béxar. The men were in good hands under his second in command, Captain John Forsyth, a New Yorker who had relocated to Kentucky after the death of his wife in 1828. Forsyth had raised a company of volunteers when war in Texas broke out, and joined Travis’s mounted spies at Béxar; soon after the battle he received a commission as a captain in the Texian cavalry. He had spent every penny he had helping Travis with expenses. His commitment was not in doubt, nor was his competence; Travis could confidently leave him in charge.

  Indeed, he had already done so once—for entirely personal reasons. Before Travis left the Colorado River area, he had made a special trip to spend some time with his son, then six, at the home of David Ayres, a friend of Travis’s upriver in Montville. Charles had only recently begun boarding there; he would soon begin attending the school that was scheduled to open on February 1. Before Travis had to leave, the boy whispered in his father’s ear, asking for fifty cents to buy a bottle of molasses to make candy. Travis handed him the four bits, so Charles and the other children would have their candy that evening—a pleasant thought for Travis while riding away.

  TRAVIS’S LEGION WAS HARDLY WORTHY of the name, a source of some embarrassment. Which was not to say there were not good men behind him: William Garnett, the young Baptist preacher from Virginia; the small, redheaded jockey from Arkansas, Henry Warnell, who always had a chaw of tobacco in his cheek (his wife had died in childbirth, and Warnell had left his infant son, John, with friends to seek his fortune in Texas); and his personal aide, Charles Despallier, the young Louisiana Creole whose brother, Blas, counted James Bowie as a good friend. Still, Travis hoped an express from Henry Smith or Sam Houston was on the way from San Felipe that would relieve him of his current orders. Until then he would do his duty. His country—for he did think of Texas, the land he had lived in for less than five years, as his country—needed him.

  He passed the first of the markers on the crude road—the numeral 1 emblazoned on a stake beside the trail, signifying one mile from Béxar. A few minutes later he reached the empty thirty-foot-high watchtower
and the other old, abandoned Spanish army structures on Powder House Hill, where he could look down the gently sloping road into the tranquil and lush San Antonio River valley. A half mile away was the battered town of Béxar, still recovering from the previous winter’s siege and battle, and the high bell tower of the Church of San Fernando looming over the town’s pale stone buildings.

  Even closer, on the east side of the shallow San Antonio River, was the dilapidated mission turned fortress called the Alamo.

  TWO

  “O! He Has Gone to Texas”

  A vast howling Wilderness of wild things, wild cattle wild Horses wild Beasts and Birds, and wild Men savages hostile in the extreme…

  JAMES HATCH, Lest We Forget the Heroes of the Alamo

  The very earliest explorers—Spanish conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado—marched deep into the heart of the wilderness in search of gold and other precious minerals. The kingdom of Gran Quivira, where everyone ate from dishes and bowls of gold… the Seven Hills of the Aijados, where gold was even more plentiful… the Sierra de la Plata, or the Silver Mountain—all these had lured men seeking fortunes. But these searchers found no gold or silver, and the land they called Tejas, or Texas, an Indian word meaning “friend,” was ignored for a century and a half. Early in the eighteenth century, Catholic missionaries ventured north from New Spain in search of souls to save. Soldiers accompanied them for protection against the Indians, who liked their souls just as they were.