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

by James Donovan

  And while they may have been on Mexican soil, the men were constantly reminded that the region more properly belonged to someone else. One day they marched past a camp of five hundred Lipan Apaches that lay alongside the road. The Lipans were at peace with the Mexicans, but that did not prevent them from stealing mules and horses as the army marched by. Far more dangerous were the Comanches. They could often be seen in the distance, to the rear and on the flanks of the columns, biding their time until they could fall on stragglers and deserters, killing soldiers and soldaderas indiscriminately. The Comanches also stole caches of food that had been placed at small ranches along El Camino Real. Improperly packed cases of hardtack soaked by rain went bad and reduced the soldiers’ meager rations. Eventually the road north from Monclova was strewn with the detritus of an army in trouble—more like a defeated one in retreat than one advancing.

  With the combined effects of malnutrition, disease, Indian attacks, and the elements, the Army of Operations would lose between four hundred and five hundred men on the march to Béxar, and twice as many women and children. Only the weather had so far been largely on their side, delivering cool evenings and pleasant days with only the occasional shower to alleviate the choking dust and ease the noontime heat. That changed on February 13.

  The thirteenth dawned cold and wet, and by seven that evening the rain turned to sleet, then thick snow. The Cavalry Brigade promptly got lost in a huge thicket of mesquite. General Andrade ordered a halt in the woods: other units doubled back on the trail. The countermarch quickly degenerated into chaos. Several women and boys attached themselves to one young officer’s party, and they all gathered together as he vainly tried to start a fire. Around other flames huddled shivering groups of officers, enlisted men, women, and children, many of them cursing in desperation and anger. Few of the troops were from northern Mexico, and many had never seen snow before. By sunrise, the snow was knee deep and covered everything in sight. Splotches of blood marked where dead horses and mules had expired trying to rip themselves away from their loads. Others had frozen to death or suffocated under the snow.

  The snow continued until five o’clock on the fourteenth. Somehow the regiment, and the rest of the Cavalry Brigade, managed to pull itself together and limp on toward the north, but significant damage had been done. Though no snowfall hit Santa Anna’s entourage at Guerrero on the Rio Grande, or the Vanguard Brigade, two marches north of the river, Gaona’s First Infantry Brigade lost fifty oxen and a large quantity of provisions. Throughout the column, many soldiers, women, and children had died—Santa Anna would later write that four hundred men died in twenty-four hours. Morale plunged with the temperature. Desertions increased, particularly wagon drivers fed up with the grueling conditions and insufficient compensation. Inexperienced soldiers took their places. Their lack of care and a tendency to overwork the slow-moving beasts—the amateur drivers jabbed them from behind with their bayonets and swords in a fruitless attempt to make them go faster—resulted in more problems, further slowing the pace.

  Santa Anna remained in Guerrero until the storm was over, firing off what had become a typical barrage of orders and communiqués to his five far-flung brigades. On February 16 he and his staff, and his fifty-man escort of lancers, crossed the Rio Grande and raced after the Vanguard Brigade.

  This was, all things considered, a less arduous trek. Though the nights were cold, the simple trail that constituted El Camino Real in south Texas was in good shape; there had been little rain lately, and most of the surface was firm and dry. The towering mountains below the Rio Grande had been left behind, and the road mostly followed a long line of gentle hills. And though much of the range grass had been burned off, and the new shoots had yet to appear, they found enough mesquite grass, a delicacy to mules and horses that matured earlier in the year, for the stock to survive on. But good water was scarce. The wells and pools along the way barely supplied enough for men and livestock, and some were muddy or contaminated by dead animals. So three days later, when the command finally overtook the Vanguard Brigade at the clear Frio River (which, along with the Nueces, was one of only two rivers that ran all year long), there was much rejoicing. They found Ramírez y Sesma’s men constructing a new bridge, since the rebels had torn down the old one.

  Two days later, just before two o’clock on a cloudy but warm February 21—His Excellency’s forty-second birthday—the combined force reached the south side of the Medina River, the official boundary between Texas and Coahuila, a small stream whose banks were lined with pecan trees. Just a few miles away and almost twenty-three years before, a young Santa Anna had gained the first glory of his storied career as a young officer in Arredondo’s army. Twenty-two miles to the east lay Béxar. Though the rest of his force was scattered almost three hundred miles behind him, Santa Anna had somehow managed to cross more than five hundred miles of inhospitable terrain in minimal time and was now poised to surprise an enemy who did not expect him for several more weeks.

  While the weary soldados pitched camp, nursed their blistered feet, and rested, their commander and his staff deliberated. Santa Anna’s spies in Béxar had kept him well posted, and the next day several more sympathetic informers came into camp. One was a priest. Another was Angel Navarro, father of Juana and Gertrudis, who rode out to meet his old friend and apprise him of the situation in town. Santa Anna had become acquainted with the family in 1813 as a young lieutenant with Arredondo’s conquering army, and Navarro, unlike his brothers, had remained loyal to Mexico.

  The chief reason Santa Anna had chosen Béxar as his base of operations was the loyal citizenry he expected to find. That was not the case, he now discovered. While there were townspeople faithful to the Mexican government, many of Béxar’s leading families—the Veramendis, Ruizes, Seguíns, even most of the other Navarros—were aiding the rebels, and a good portion of the populace had followed suit. But Navarro revealed that the Americans would be at a fandango that night, and could be easily taken while they drank and danced.

  Santa Anna’s instincts warned him better than his spies of the need to hit hard and fast. The Alamo, into which the rebels would doubtless retreat, was no longer a flimsy ruin. Cós had made extensive improvements during his two months in Béxar, and the colonists had spent two more months fortifying it. The old mission was now taking on the look of a credible redoubt.

  Here was a golden opportunity. Santa Anna summoned Ramírez y Sesma and ordered him to take 160 lancers of the Dolores Cavalry Regiment and ride into town to surprise the garrison before they could retreat into the Alamo. A singular lack of good pasture had left many of the Dolores cavalry with spent horses, so Santa Anna ordered the infantry officers to give up their fresher mounts. Under a slight drizzle, the cavalry began preparations to march. With any luck, the Mexican tricolor would fly over Béxar the next morning.

  ON FEBRUARY 3, William Barret Travis arrived in Béxar to find a bedraggled but determined bunch of volunteers. The decision by Bowie and Colonel Neill to remain, coupled with the recent reports of Mexican troops on the Rio Grande, had infused the undersupplied garrison with a sense of purpose previously lacking. Bowie’s letter to beleaguered governor Henry Smith the day before, stating their intention to stay and fight, had motivated the men more than any appeal to patriotism could.

  After reporting to Neill, Travis and his twenty-one-year-old slave, Joe, established quarters in town, on Main Plaza. Travis spent several days getting to know the officers, the soldiers, and the situation. A few years previously, he had successfully sued Green Jameson on behalf of a client and won a $50 judgment. Now he found his one-time opponent transformed into a military engineer of near-visionary capability whose ambitious plans to strengthen the mission compound across the river—or Fortress Alamo, as Jameson called it, perhaps in jest—were curbed only by lack of manpower. (Neill needed soldiers for, among other things, scouting the countryside; when Captain John Forsyth and Travis’s undermanned legion rode into town two days after Travis did, Nei
ll immediately sent them out.) Even so, Jameson had done his best with what was at hand. Travis would undoubtedly have been impressed.

  Jameson’s top priority was the battered north wall. During the seven-week siege a few months earlier, Neill’s artillery had done significant damage, even though he had not commanded the large cannon necessary for effective siege warfare. When he could muster the men, Jameson kept his crews busy there and elsewhere, fortifying walls, digging outside trenches, and using the dug-up earth to erect banquettes. Some of his other plans—strengthening cannon emplacements, building redoubts, digging deep moats and filling them with water, building sturdy drawbridges over them, and generally expanding on Cós’s works—were attended to less assiduously.

  The old mission would never become a superior example of a proper fort able to indefinitely withstand a determined and well-equipped army. The compound had not been planned or built with that in mind; it had been built only to protect its inhabitants from Indian attacks, not field artillery. True, the walls connecting the several flat-roofed stone houses erected along the rectangular perimeter were six to nine feet high and almost three feet thick—four feet in the old stone church, the strongest building—but most of the walls were composed of adobe, not stone, and would not withstand heavy bombardment. The north wall had originally been made of limestone, and needed no assistance from artillery to crumble.

  The Alamo lacked other features requisite to a proper fortress. There were no parapets atop the walls or banquettes behind them from which defenders could fire their guns without exposure, and there were few defensive positions providing cover for riflemen and artillerists, such as embrasures and portholes. In many sections of the perimeter, defenders attempting to fire on their attackers would be visible targets. There were no outerworks, such as moats, mines, and pitfalls, and no protected posts, such as bastions (projections from walls) and bartizans (turrets jutting out from a parapet)—these last two enabling defenders to utilize enfilade, or flanking fire, along the length of an attacking column.

  And the space on the north side of the church, behind the two-story barracks, presented special problems of defense. Once used as the monks’ cloister, it was now employed as a horse corral; a low wall separated it from a similarly sized cattle pen on its north side that had once been a courtyard. Stone walls surrounded each area, but the cattle pen’s was only four and a half feet high and appeared especially vulnerable, though a large field of mud and standing water just to the east might temporarily inhibit an infantry attack.

  The previous fall, while besieged by Austin’s army, General Cós’s men had fortified the compound in certain key places. The main gate was now protected by a strong, well-designed lunette, an outer enclosure surrounded by an outside ditch and a six-foot earthen embankment crowned by a palisade of upright wooden posts. Embrasures had been notched on the east and south sides, through which two smaller cannon could fire. If manned by experienced gun crews, the lunette could be a formidable defensive position. In the church, the stone arches of the unfinished roof had been torn down, and the resulting rubble now constituted a strong base upon which a wooden ramp had been erected, running almost from the front door up to a gun platform above the altar. With great difficulty and without proper tools, Jameson’s men had dragged three of the cannon up to the top of the church and positioned them to cover the east and south. The Mexicans had also constructed an elevated wooden tower on the southwest corner of the church, from which a commanding view of all points could be had. And from niches on either side of the doors, the statues of four saints—Francis, Dominic, Ferdinand, and Anthony—gazed down at the activities with apparent indifference.

  Along the weakest area of the perimeter—the 115-foot open space between the southwest corner of the church and the two-story building that housed the jail and the kitchen on either side of the porte cochere at the main entrance—Cós’s men had constructed a strong palisade of eight-foot-high cedar timbers six feet apart, with an unfinished trench on the outside and a two-foot-high firing step on the inside. About halfway along the palisade was a wooden platform on which Jameson placed a small cannon positioned to fire through an embrasure in the wooden barrier. Just beyond the outer trench, Jameson had fortified the position with an abatis, a barrier of felled trees, their heavy branches sharpened and pointed toward the enemy. Such a fortification had proven effective against attacking infantry in several battles of the Revolutionary War and, more recently, during the War of 1812, when a Canadian force in the Battle of Châteauguay had successfully defended its position against an American army almost twice its size.

  The entire compound covered almost three acres; a sufficient defensive force would likely number close to a thousand men—or at least five hundred. The rebels were nowhere near that number, nor were they likely to be. The small groups that made their way into Béxar in late January and early February—Philip Dimitt and a few men, William Patton leading eleven more, then Travis with his two dozen—cheered the garrison somewhat but satisfied no one. Near-constant rumors and reports of a large Mexican army on its way into Texas continued to reach Béxar. One of Bowie’s Tejano spies had just returned on February 2, fresh from a scout down to the Rio Grande, and brought news of two thousand troops at Guerrero, the presidio across the river, and five thousand more on the march there. One hundred and fifty men, no matter how sure of shot and resolute in conviction, could not hold out long against an army that large and well equipped—especially considering the meager provisions and powder available to them. Yet now they had official orders to do just that. On the recommendation of his advisory committee, acting governor James Robinson wrote Neill on February 2, directing him to remain in Béxar and strengthen the reinforcements.

  In the days after his arrival, Travis renewed acquaintances with Bowie, Neill, and others. Bowie he knew well enough—he had handled some minor legal work for him, and had written him to discuss the revolution. But the two were not close friends, due as much to the difference in their interests, ages (Bowie was fourteen years older), temperaments, and overall unfamiliarity with each other as to anything else. Though Travis did not lack for personal bravery, it was of a different sort from Bowie’s imposing physicality. While he was far from an uncouth backwoodsman, Bowie owned a reputation as a knife fighter second to none. Travis’s nature was more refined, as evidenced in his choice in friends and literature. Both, however, had come to share a single vision of an independent Texas.

  FOUR OR FIVE DAYS LATER, another party of volunteers rode into town. It was a small group, but the presence of one of them—a tall fellow in a coonskin cap—was cause for celebration. Jim Bowie might be a living legend along the southwest frontier, but David Crockett’s renown was national—indeed, only a handful of Americans were more famous. He arrived with a few of the Tennessee Mounted Volunteers; the rest, led by Captain William Harrison and including Micajah Autry and Daniel Cloud, would join the garrison several days later. Crockett was greeted warmly when he reached Main Plaza. Someone called for a speech, and the crowd took up the cry. Crockett mounted a wooden crate to enthusiastic cheers. He spoke of the new country of Texas, and patriotism, and told several of his tried and tested anecdotes to frequent applause. He alluded to his career as a congressman, and delivered his “go to hell” story, now a staple of all his public utterances. He concluded with words to this effect, wisely chosen for his audience and remembered by John Sutherland:

  And fellow citizens, I am among you. I have come to your country, though not, I hope, through any selfish motive whatever. I have come to aid you all I can in your noble cause. I shall identify myself with your interests, and all the honor that I desire is defending as a high private, in common with my fellow citizens, the liberties of our common country.

  “This made many a man who had not known him before Colonel Crockett’s friend,” remembered Dr. Sutherland.

  Crockett lodged at the large stone house of Ramón Músquiz, on Main Plaza, where the doctor and the Dickinsons wer
e staying. His arrival brought some material benefits as well as a boost to morale: Susanna was able to make some money doing the laundry of Crockett and other volunteers.

  A few days later, Neill received news by express of an illness in his family at Bastrop. His two boys, Samuel and George, were serving in one of Robert Williamson’s ranging companies, but his wife, Harriett, and daughter, Mary, were alone at their homestead. He decided to take a furlough to attend to the problem, promising to be back in twenty days at most. At least one man suspected another motive for Neill’s departure: Dr. Sutherland believed he was riding to San Felipe to obtain part of the rumored $5,000 loan to Texas for the Alamo garrison’s use. True or not, Neill left knowing the post was in much better shape than when he had inherited it—reinforcements had begun to arrive, Jameson and his crews had made the Alamo more defensible, and strong leaders such as Bowie, Crockett, and Travis were on hand.

  Before he left, Neill signed discharges for more than a dozen volunteers who had decided to leave in the next few days—for most of them, their two months was up, and they had received no pay, clothes, or provisions. He also transferred command of the regulars to Travis, the ranking officer at Béxar. Travis also inherited John Baugh as adjutant. The thirty-three-year-old Virginian had been elected lieutenant by his fellow New Orleans Greys, and after the fierce fight for Béxar, Neill had chosen him as his executive officer and promoted him to captain. He was a reliable and loyal man, and not a Bowie acolyte—possibly one of the reasons a problem of command arose.