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

by James Donovan

  The diplomatic Stephen Austin managed to obtain a temporary exemption from the immigration ban, but as troops—largely unschooled peasants pressed from the fields—began to march into Texas, the colonists’ dissatisfaction with the new regime continued to escalate. And with thousands of Americans each year illegally entering Texas across the Red River to the north and the Sabine to the east—many of them rough elements and squatters who felt less loyalty to Mexico than those who had received land grants—rumors of an American invasion, whether government-sponsored or fostered through independent filibustering schemes, increased, and Mexican distrust and jealousy kept pace.

  After another round of political maneuvers in Mexico City, an ambitious military hero of the revolution named Antonio López de Santa Anna—a tall, charismatic criollo hailed as the savior of Tampico, the coastal city where he had driven off an invading Spanish force—swept into power in late 1832. Since he fought on the federalist side, with those favoring the liberal constitution of 1824 and stronger states’ rights, Texians eager for separate statehood hailed the general’s victory and looked forward to his support. Bored with the actual work of running a country, and aware that the capital was a hotbed of centralists, the new president retired to his extensive hacienda in Jalapa, in the state of Veracruz, and left his liberal vice president, a former physician and professor named Valentín Gómez Farías, in Mexico City to run the country. But he kept his finger to the wind.

  A change in its direction was not long in coming. Farías initiated several expansive reforms, most of which reduced the power of the Church and the military, but resistance from those two institutions and the landed gentry pushed Mexico deeper into political chaos and potential civil war. Representatives of those three classes made the journey to Santa Anna’s hacienda to implore him to help. The new system was not working, they told him, and stronger leadership was required. Fortunately for them, Santa Anna’s only loyalty was to his own ambition.

  In April 1834, fifteen months after his retirement, Santa Anna made a triumphant return to Mexico City and seized the reins of power from his vice president. Making short work of the liberal constitution of 1824, he assumed near-dictatorial powers, dissolved the country’s Congress, and canceled Farías’s republican legislation. Mexico, Santa Anna decided, was not ready for democracy. “A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty,” he told the former American minister to Mexico. “They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them.”

  When he called for greatly reducing the independent state militias and declared that state governors and legislatures would be controlled by the central government, almost half the country’s nineteen states expressed their dissatisfaction in some way, several in outright revolt. Those states farthest from Mexico City protested most.

  The liberal-leaning city of Zacatecas, home to several rich silver mines, refused to disband its large, well-trained militia. Santa Anna decided to act quickly to crush the uprising there first. He knew the region well, having spent years as a young cadet with General Joaquín de Arredondo hunting down insurgents and Indians throughout the area.

  In April 1835, he led a four-thousand-man army out of Mexico City north to Zacatecas. Three weeks later, before dawn on May 11, he met the city’s four thousand militiamen on the outskirts of the mountain city. They were well armed and supplied, but undertrained and badly led, and their commander, former Zacatecas governor Francisco García, lacked military experience. The apparently evenly matched contest proved to be no contest at all. The centralist artillery and infantry successively battered and overwhelmed the cívicos, and when the latter turned and ran, the government cavalry turned the right flank and swooped down on the survivors from the rear. After two hours, the battle was over. The centralists incurred only a hundred casualties; the Zacatecan militia lost as many as twelve hundred citizens. “The field of battle presents a most horrifying picture,” exulted Santa Anna after the carnage, in a letter to Mexico City.

  Santa Anna’s soldados were rewarded with a period of forty-eight hours in which to sack Zacatecas, and they responded enthusiastically in a riot of destruction, rape, pillage, and murder. Foreigners, especially the British and Americans, were paid particular attention, and many were killed. The city would not recover for years. The victorious commander returned to Mexico City in a triumphal tour that wound through several cities, whose inhabitants turned out to celebrate him with parades and parties.

  When news of the Zacatecas butchery reached Texas, Anglo colonists took note, and some settlements organized Committees of Safety and militia companies. They knew that Santa Anna would likely attend to them next. He had visited punishment and death without mercy on his own people. They were in no doubt as to what he would do to those born on foreign soil.

  Soon after his return to Mexico City, the “Hero of the Fatherland” met with an Anglo political prisoner. At the April 1833 Consultation, Texian delegates had drafted a constitution for statehood, and Stephen Austin had been chosen to deliver it to the Mexican authorities. He arrived in Mexico City a few months later and presented the petition to acting president Farías, who ignored Austin for several months. A disgusted Austin wrote a letter in October to the Béxar ayuntamiento recommending that they organize a state government without permission. The letter contained several incendiary statements, including “The country is lost if its inhabitants do not take its affairs into their own hands.” Soon after, Austin succeeded in persuading the government to repeal the April 1830 immigration ban, and gained several other concessions—though statehood was put on hold.

  In January 1834, on his journey home, Austin was arrested at Saltillo on suspicion of attempting to incite insurrection in Texas: his October letter had fallen into the wrong hands and been sent to Farías in Mexico City. The man who had preached and lived allegiance to his adopted country for so long was transported to the capital in irons and jailed in the century-old Prison of the Inquisition. He was denied a trial, and kept in solitary confinement for three months. The authorities moved him to another jail, and then another. He was finally freed eleven months later, on December 25, under a general amnesty for political prisoners. But he was not allowed to leave the city until June. He reached the port city of Veracruz in July 1835 and prepared to sail for New Orleans.

  But the weary empresario ran into trouble leaving the country—a not-so-simple matter of the wrong papers. To gain permission to leave, he called on Mexico’s president, the general again relaxing at his hacienda just outside Veracruz. The hero of Tampico, and now Zacatecas, the self-styled Napoleon of the West, cleared up the problem, and told Austin he would visit Texas the following March—as a friend. Austin took his leave, but was unconvinced. “His visit is uncertain—his friendship more so,” Austin wrote of his meeting with Santa Anna. His suspicions would prove to be well founded.

  THREE

  “The Celebrated Desperado”

  He seemed to be a roving man.

  CAPTAIN WILLIAM Y. LACY

  On the warm, clear morning of September 19, 1827, two groups of well-dressed men made their way by small boat, by horse, and then by foot to a peninsular sandbar on the Mississippi side of the Mississippi River, just above Natchez. A duel had been arranged between Samuel Wells and Dr. Thomas Maddox. There was bad blood between the two, and between several other members of this unusual excursion party, most of them prominent gentlemen from Rapides Parish in Louisiana.

  Samuel Wells had brought with him one brother, two cousins, and two other friends, one of whom was thirty-year-old James Bowie.

  Ten men and several servants accompanied Dr. Maddox, including Major Norris Wright, the former sheriff of Rapides Parish—a small man but a crack shot with a pistol who had slain more than one enemy in a duel. A year earlier, Wright and Bowie had crossed paths at an Alexandria, Louisiana, hotel card game, and a long-simmering enmity between the two—likely a mix of polit
ics and personal animus—erupted. Bowie, having heard that Wright had been slandering him, confronted the major; in response, Wright had fired a pistol at point-blank range. Somehow, the bullet—perhaps deflected by a pocketknife or a silver dollar—only bruised the target’s left side, and the tall, thickly muscled Bowie pounced on the smaller man and had to be dragged off before he strangled him.

  The single-shot flintlock pistols of the day were unreliable and took time to reload, and might “snap,” or misfire, for one reason or another. After the altercation, Bowie decided to carry a large hunting knife in a leather scabbard for protection, as a regular part of his dress. He would not be found defenseless again.

  Most of the men this September day were armed with one or two pistols. At least a couple in the Maddox party carried shotguns, another a hunting rifle, and two others wielded sword blades concealed in canes. Five doctors in both groups were present to minister to any wounded.

  Previous incidents in the long-simmering feud included political arguments, unpaid loans, personal insults, a sword-cane stabbing, shootings, and, inevitably, an insult to a woman’s name. Several other dueling challenges had gone unanswered; this one would decide, in an instant, whose side would claim the greater honor.

  The location on the Mississippi side of the river had been chosen because dueling was illegal in Louisiana. The sandbar was heavily wooded, save for an open area in the center, where only an occasional piece of driftwood jutted out from the bare sand. For decades men had fought duels here—a Mississippi governor for one, the military man Winfield Scott for another—and some had died here.

  Now, under a bright sun, with the loud murmur of the river in the background, Bowie and the Wells faction stood less than a hundred yards from the field of honor, in a grove of willows above the beach. The Maddox party gathered a few hundred yards away at the opposite end of the sandbar.

  Just after the appointed time of noon, the two duelists, Wells and Maddox, took their places eight paces apart in the sand, their pistols at their sides. On the count of three they raised their weapons and fired. Neither scored a hit. Another round was fired—the code duello required at least two exchanges of fire—and neither man’s aim was any better. Some of the onlookers, and certainly the two principals, breathed a sigh of relief, hoping for an amicable settlement. Neither Wells nor Maddox held any special animosity for the other, but had simply been caught up in the rigid code of honor peculiar to the American South. Now that honor had been upheld on each side, the two shook hands, and Maddox suggested they all celebrate with a glass of wine—his friends had brought some. They turned and walked across the sandbar in the direction of the Maddox party.

  Had some blood been spilled, that might have been the end of it.

  Both groups of observers emerged from the willows and made their way toward the principals. The Wells faction was much closer, and they hurried across the sand at an angle, arriving first to confront the duelists—that Wells and Maddox had settled did not mean everyone else had. One of Samuel Wells’s cousins, the volatile Samuel Cuny, confronted Colonel Robert Crain, of the Maddox party. “We might as well settle our troubles here and now,” he said, and began to draw his pistol. Trying to prevent bloodshed, Cuny’s brother stepped in front of him, and Wells grabbed his shoulders. Crain stepped back, but when James Bowie moved toward him, he let loose with one of his two pistols.

  The ball missed Bowie, who fired a second later, yelling, “Crain, you have shot at me, and I will kill you.” Crain turned and retreated a few steps, jumping across some gullies in the sand. By this time Cuny had freed himself and moved toward Crain, who fired his other pistol at him, hitting him in the thigh. Cuny fell backward to the sand, blood pumping from his injury; the ball had severed his femoral artery. He would die from severe hemorrhage within minutes.

  Bowie drew his knife and charged Crain, who turned and threw his spent pistol at Bowie, knocking him off his feet. As Bowie stood up, Maddox grabbed him, but Bowie threw him off. Norris Wright and two of his cohorts, the Blanchard brothers, ran up. Bowie veered off to a thick driftwood tree stump sticking six feet out of the ground and took cover behind it. Wright strode forward and drew his pistol.

  “You damned rascal,” yelled Bowie. “Don’t you shoot.” Someone scampered over and handed him a pistol and Bowie and Wright fired at each other, both missing. Wright leveled another pistol at Bowie and pulled the trigger; the ball slammed into Bowie’s chest, traveled through his lung, and exited out his back. Bowie staggered, then plowed through the sand toward Wright before a shot from one of the Blanchard brothers passed through his thigh, and he finally fell to the ground.

  Wright and one of the Blanchards unsheathed their sword canes and fell upon the downed Bowie. They stabbed him several times, but Bowie fended off some blows with his knife and free arm, though one stroke tore into his free hand. Another found his breastbone, which bent the blade.

  Somehow Bowie found the strength to sit up and grab Wright’s cravat. Wright reared back, pulling Bowie to his feet. Bowie put all his remaining strength into one thrust with his big knife into Wright’s chest, then he twisted the blade. Wright collapsed, dying, onto Bowie, pinning him to the ground. Blanchard stabbed again at Bowie, but then Thomas Wells shot him in the arm, allowing Bowie to reach up and slice Blanchard in the side. Blanchard retreated, the melee ended, and the Sandbar Fight quickly passed into legend.

  Bowie, the recipient of several deep stab wounds, at least two lead balls, and one accurately hurled pistol to his head, was “not expected to recover,” claimed one newspaper. But it would take more than that to kill Jim Bowie.

  The Sandbar Fight was reported in newspapers across the country, including the young nation’s most widely read newsweekly, Niles’ Weekly Register, published in Washington, D.C. Bowie’s superhuman feats of personal combat in the free-for-all made his reputation as perhaps the most feared fighter in the South and on the frontier. Years later, he would tell a Presbyterian minister he happened to be traveling with of the fracas and of his encounter with Wright. “It did my very soul good,” he said, “to wrench it through his heart, and kill such a mean puppy, who would stab a man already down.” Courteous to strangers, loyal to friends, and chivalrous to women, James Bowie was unforgiving of any man who became an enemy.

  BOWIE WAS BORN IN 1796 in southern Kentucky, the son of Rezin Bowie, of Scottish descent, and the Welsh-blooded Elvira “Elve” Jones, an iron-willed young volunteer nurse during the Revolutionary War. She cared for Rezin after he sustained an injury while fighting the British with Colonel Francis Marion, married him soon after, and bore him several sons and daughters. In 1800, the family moved to Spanish-owned Missouri, on the Mississippi. When James was six, Rezin moved his family again, this time downriver to the bayou in Louisiana, some thirty miles west of Natchez. A few years later, in 1809, the Bowie patriarch pulled up stakes one more time, to another bayou eighty miles south, near Opelousas, where the family prospered in the timber-cutting business.

  By that time the Bowie children were reaching adulthood, or nearing it. James and his brother Rezin Jr., almost three years older, were inseparable: always outdoors, hunting, fishing, roaming the countryside, roping and capturing wild deer and horses, even riding alligators and catching bears, except when Elve Bowie—an “exceedingly pious woman,” according to the oldest Bowie brother, John—kept them inside to teach them the basics of the three Rs—“reading, writing, and ’rithmetic,” as they were colloquially referred to. Whenever possible she would bring a circuit rider in to preach to her brood. As an adult, James would fill out to a muscular 180 pounds and six feet, with chestnut brown hair and dark gray-blue eyes set deep in a fair-complected face that women found attractive. His eyes were calm and penetrating until he was angered—when, it was said, they resembled a tiger’s.

  In January 1815, with the British preparing an expedition against New Orleans, eighteen-year-old James and his brother Rezin mustered in Opelousas. Their military regiment marched towar
d the Crescent City, but the Battle of New Orleans concluded on January 8, before they arrived. In that clash, Andrew Jackson defeated the British, and peace between the two nations was made days later.

  Young James had little money and few belongings other than his wits and his brawn, but he and his brothers had been raised to be enterprising. Over the next few years, while working in the family timber-cutting business, he slowly acquired free open land or inexpensive tracts for little money down. By the time he was twenty-three, he owned several slaves and a good bit of land. He was also gaining a reputation as a fearless backwoodsman, one whom few men dared to insult. When that happened, the Bowie blood came up, and he would often take matters into his own hands—literally. “It was his habit to settle all difficulties without regard to time or place,” remembered one friend, “and it was the same whether he met one or many.”

  Bowie and his brothers moved into a more profitable business in 1819. The African slave trade had been abolished nine years earlier, but the burgeoning plantation culture in the Deep South and west of the Mississippi created a lucrative market for smuggled slaves. Those captured by the authorities were sold at auction. Like a few other states, Louisiana gave half the auction proceeds to the parties who turned in the slaves or provided information leading to their seizure.