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

by James Donovan

  BCAH Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

  TSLA Texas State Library and Archives Commission

  DRT Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library

  GLO Texas General Land Office

  Hansen Todd Hansen, The Alamo Reader

  PTR John H. Jenkins, Papers of the Texas Revolution (ten volumes)

  PROLOGUE

  The account of courier James L. Allen’s ride from the Alamo is based on an article by Robert H. Davis entitled “Bob Davis Uncovers an Untold Story About the Alamo,” published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on February 28, 1932, in which he recounts an interview with attorney F. C. Proctor, who as a boy heard the story of Allen’s ride from Allen himself. Allen’s ride is corroborated by the following sources, whose information was chiefly gleaned from Allen descendants: Memorial and Genealogical Record of Southwest Texas, pp. 402–3; Wright, San Antonio de Béxar, p. 56; and a letter from Viva Crain Schleicher to Samuel Asbury dated December 16, 1934 (box 2, file 52, Samuel Erson Asbury Papers, Cushing Library, Texas A&M University), in which the writer states: “Many years ago I heard an old gentleman, Mr. Jim Allen, tell how as a boy of seventeen, he carried a message from Travis in the Alamo to Fannin at Goliad.” A May 6, 1938, affidavit by Thomas M. Stell, one-time treasurer of DeWitt County, also corroborates Allen’s account. In it, Stell writes: “I first knew Judge Jas. L. Allen in 1868 when I was 12 yrs. old. Some 2 yrs. later I heard his story from his own lips of his connection with the Alamo. As I remember it now, his state[ment] was substantially the same as related by F. C. Proctor [the source for the Davis story cited above]. He said the reason his name had never appeared in history was on account of his own negligence in not taking steps to verify the fact that he delivered Travis’ message to Fannin and remained there one day. When he became convinced Fannin was not going to Travis’ relief he concluded to go to Gonzales and fall in with Houston’s men and he went into the west side of the Guadalupe River, stopping here and there with the settlers to acquaint them [with] the desperate situation at San Antonio…. Judge Allen died in 1901 at the age of 86 yrs., a grave and dignified gentleman not given to boasting…. Judge Allen lived and died believing he was Travis’ last messenger and I believe likewise” (affidavit courtesy of Mildred Duhon, great-granddaughter of James L. Allen; punctuation added).

  ONE: THE HOTSPUR

  The epigraph is from J. H. Kuykendall’s “Sketches of Early Texians,” p. 6, box 3F82, Jonathan Hampton Kuykendall Papers, BCAH.

  Sources for this biography of Travis include McDonald, Travis; Kuykendall, “Sketches of Early Texians”; Mixon, “William Barret Travis, His Life and Letters”; Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo; and Travis’s own diary, edited by Robert E. Davis and published as The Diary of William Barret Travis.

  Travis’s January 28, 1836, letter is reprinted in Chariton, 100 Days in Texas, p. 176, as is the January 29, 1836, letter, pp. 179–80. The quote from his diary can be found in Davis, The Diary of William Barret Travis, March 9, 1834.

  According to Travis’s nephew, Mark Travis, almost all the Stallworths, who were relations on his mother’s side, were redheaded (Mark Travis to Samuel Asbury, October 14, 1924, box 2J83, William Barret Travis Papers, BCAH). As for his height, he was slightly above the average height of the period—most likely approximately 5 feet 10 inches: “tall and manly in appearance” (Amanda Dorsett Scull, quoted in Sowell, Early Settlers, p. 836) ; “Colonel Travis was a fine-looking young man of more than ordinary height” (Rodríguez, Memories of Early Texas, p. 7); “In person Col. Travis was rather above the average height” (Kuykendall, “Sketches of Early Texans,” p. 7); “a tall well-formed handsome man” (Guy M. Bryan to W. W. Fontaine, June 10, 1890, correspondence 1879–1916, box 2D151, W. W. Fontaine Papers, BCAH).

  The quote from Travis’s autobiography, any copy of which no longer exists, appears in Kuykendall, “Sketches of Early Texians” (he claimed to have read it). Though Travis would claim later that there were problems in his marriage, there is little or no evidence that it was in trouble at the time he left Claiborne: “His assurances to me, that he would return to his family or send for them as soon as he could obtain the means to make them comfortable. He continued to write me affectionately and to repeat his assurances of unchanging attachment until my brother Wm [William] took exceptions to his conduct towards me believing as he did that his intention was to abandon me altogether and inspire me with the hope that he would return to us [or] send for me until he could no longer conceal his real designs of abandoning me altogether” (Rosanna Travis to James Dellet, September 6, 1834, box 2R207, William Barret Travis Papers, BCAH). There are many myths and untruths surrounding Travis’s departure for Texas. For an excellently researched, in-depth discussion of the most prominent of these, see Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, p. 635, n. 80.

  Bradburn’s promised promotion is mentioned in Henson, Juan Davis Bradburn, p. 50. The author’s objective (and more sympathetic) reappraisal of the much-maligned Bradburn brings into question his long-standing reputation as an arrogant, even brutish tyrant.

  The quote about the Texas colonists and their pocket constitutions is in Jackson, Texas by Terán, p. 100. The description of the Anahuac prisoners threatened with death is from Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, pp. 38–39; this account of the 1832 Anahuac disturbance also derives from N. D. Labadie, “Narrative of the Anahuac, or Opening Campaign of the Texas Revolution,” in The Texas Almanac for 1859; F. W. Johnson, “Further Account by Col. F. W. Johnson of the First Breaking Out of Hostilities,” in The Texas Almanac for 1859; Looscan, “The Old Fort at Anahuac”; and Henson, Juan Davis Bradburn.

  Details of the steamboat enterprise that Travis was involved in can be found in box 2D157 [papers 1828–29], Benjamin Cromwell Franklin Papers, BCAH.

  There is little solid knowledge about Travis’s slave Joe. Author Ron Jackson graciously told me that Joe was from Kentucky, a fact he unearthed researching his unpublished biography of Joe. A letter from Travis to David G. Burnet, dated February 6, 1835, is quoted in W. A. Philpott, “Unpriced Inventory of Texana” (1969), where the letter is (in part) summarized as follows: “Travis writes, also, that he recently ‘sold My Woman, Matilda’ for $700 in Brazoria. He writes ‘I hired Joe for a year,’ but that he did not know whether or not he ‘will sell him’ ” (box AR507, file 3, Philpott Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections). The description of Joe is taken from an ad offering a reward for Joe after he ran away in April 1837, which ran in the Telegraph and Texas Register from May 26 through August 1837.

  William Fairfax Gray’s Diary, p. 114, notes that Cummings’s Mill Creek place was run by “a woman about thirty” and mentions the “warm fire, good supper and comfortable lodging.”

  The “Victory or Death” countersign is noted in “John W. Moore’s The Capture of Anahuac,” box 2B120, Eugene Campbell Barker Papers, BCAH.

  The August 1835 letter is quoted in Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, p. 458.

  Information about Travis’s ancestors can be found in The Alamo Heroes and Their Revolutionary Ancestors, p. 77.

  The “Huzzah for Texas!” quote is in a letter from Travis to J. W. Moore, reprinted in Looscan, “Harris County, 1822–1845,” pp. 268–69.

  John Forsyth discusses how he has spent all his money on the cavalry company in a letter to the General Council on January 13, 1835, reprinted in PTR 3, p. 504.

  TWO: “O! HE HAS GONE TO TEXAS”

  The epigraph is from James Hatch’s unpublished manuscript “Lest We Forget the Heroes of the Alamo,” James Hatch Papers, BCAH.

  The May 1820 letter from Jefferson to Monroe is quoted in Walraven, The Magnificent Barbarians, p. 25.

  Washington Davis describes the “fine rich land” of Texas in a March 12, 1831, letter to his wife, Rebecca, in Southwestern Historical Quarterly 44, no. 4 (April 1961), p. 508. The letter discussing “every poor man” was written on August 14, 1836, and found in Court of Claims file 1281, GLO. “A vast howli
ng wilderness” is part of the Hatch quotation that begins this chapter.

  The ten thousand Comanche horse soldiers is a median approximation; estimates vary from six and eight thousand to twenty thousand. Ruíz, in 1828, wrote that there were “1000 to 1500 families,” referring to the Comanches, in Texas at that time (Ruíz, Report on the Indian Tribes of Texas in 1828, p. 8). For a lengthier discussion of Comanche population in the mid-nineteenth century, see Noyes, Los Comanches, p. 317, n. 12. Ruíz’s book, p. 11, is also the source for the Lobos pledge.

  The information on Mexico’s peonage system is derived from Knight, “Mexican Peonage,” pp. 44–50.

  Santa Anna’s statement about the Mexican people being unfit for democracy is quoted in Brands, Lone Star Nation, p. 227.

  The account of the battle at Zacatecas chiefly derives from the excellent material in Roberts and Olson, A Line in the Sand, pp. 15–26; details of the attack on foreigners are from the British Foreign Office records, 50/95 f148, R. Ogilvie Auld to J. Backhouse to Foreign Office, Zacatecas, May 20, 1835, courtesy of Joseph Musso. Santa Anna’s quote is from his May 11, 1836, letter reprinted in the Mercurio del Puerto de Matamoros, no. 28 (my translation).

  Austin’s October 1833 letter to the ayuntamiento of Béxar is quoted in Johnson, A History of Texas and Texans, vol. 1, p. 121.

  Austin’s opinion of Santa Anna’s friendship is quoted in Barker, “Stephen F. Austin and the Independence of Texas,” p. 272. Besides Santa Anna’s comparison of himself to Napoleon when introduced to Sam Houston after the Battle of San Jacinto, another source for the claim is in Gilliam, Travels in Mexico, p. 164, where the author writes that Santa Anna declared “it was his intention to march to the city of Washington, and be the Napoleon of America. A gentleman of Zacatecas informed me that he was present, and heard the boasted vaunt of the American Napoleon.”

  THREE: “THE CELEBRATED DESPERADO”

  The chapter title phrase can be found in Davis, “A Fortnight with James Bowie by the Rev. Benjamin Chase,” p. 2; after meeting a helpful stranger, the reverend is told, “That was the celebrated desperado, James Bowie.” The epigraph is from a description of Bowie reprinted in Speer and Brown, The Encyclopedia of the New West, p. 436.

  The account of the Sandbar Fight is based on the following sources: Batson, James Bowie and the Sandbar Fight, which includes most but not all of the participant accounts of the event that appeared in the years following; Edmondson, Mr. Bowie with a Knife, an excellent narrative of the fight that draws from the aforementioned primary sources; Calhoun, “A History of Concordia Parish, Louisiana”; Caiaphas Ham, “Recollections of Col. James Bowie, 1887,” from the John Salmon Ford Papers, BCAH; Thorp, Bowie Knife; a September 20, 1827, letter from Samuel Wells to Josiah Stoddard Johnston, from the Josiah Stoddard Johnston Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; and several primary accounts from various eyewitnesses that appeared in the Natchez Ariel on October 19, 1827.

  The prediction that Bowie was not expected to recover appeared in the Southern Advocate of October 12, 1826, as quoted in Batson, p. 4.

  Bowie’s quote about killing Wright is from Davis, “A Fortnight with James Bowie by the Rev. Benjamin Chase,” p. 4.

  The description of James Bowie’s upbringing and of his mother, Elve Bowie, is from two articles written by Bowie’s oldest brother, John: “The Bowie Family,” in the Washington, Texas, Lone Star of October 23, 1852, and “Early Life in the Southwest—the Bowies,” in the October 1852 De Bow’s Review. Bowie’s eyes are described by his close friend Caiaphas Ham in his “Recollections of Col. James Bowie, 1887,” John Salmon Ford Papers, BCAH. The quote about Bowie’s penchant for settling difficulties quickly is by William H. Sparks, quoted in Ellis, The Life of Colonel David Crockett, p. 214.

  Bowie’s slave trading and land speculation are best described in Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo. The information about his informal adoption of Carlos Espalier derives from Joseph Musso’s “James Bowie’s Freed Slaves” and the Carlos Espalier File, Memorials and Petitions File, TSLA.

  Sources consulted for this account of the San Saba fight include “James Bowie’s Indian Fight” by Rezin Bowie, reprinted in Brown, Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas, pp. 19–23; and James Bowie’s report to the political chief of Béxar, December 10, 1831, Nacogdoches Archives, BCAH, reprinted in Brown, History of Texas vol. 1, pp. 170–75.

  Though there is no hard evidence for any Bowie progeny, at least two people close to him claimed that his wife, Ursula, bore him two children. One of the people making this claim was Bowie’s good friend Caiaphas Ham (Ham, “Recollections of Col. James Bowie, 1887”); the other was his oldest brother, John, who wrote: “Two children sprung from this union died in infancy, followed by the death of their mother in 1833 at Monclova, Mexico” (A. R. Kilpatrick, “Early Life in the Southwest—the Bowies,” De Bow’s Southern and Western Review 1, October 1852). There are no records of baptism for these children, which would be consistent with their dying soon after birth. Bowie’s grief concerning his wife is mentioned in the memoirs of José Antonio Menchaca, in the José Antonio Menchaca Reminiscences, 1807–1836, “Memoirs of A. Menchaca,” p. 14, A. Menchaca Biographical File, BCAH.

  Bowie provides a brief description of his escape from Matamoros in a letter to James B. Miller dated June 22, 1835 (box 2B120 [Transcriptions and Notes, Anahuac, June–August 1835], Eugene Campbell Barker Papers, BCAH).

  FOUR: “THE BURLY IS BEGUN”

  The chapter title phrase is from a letter by James Fannin, quoted in Young, “James Walker Fannin: The West Point Connection,” p. 7. The epigraph is from a letter by Burr Duval to his father, William P. Duval, dated March 9, 1836, and reprinted in PTR 5, p. 35.

  The quoted description of the DeWitt colony area is by Elias R. Wightman, Stephen F. Austin’s official surveyor, and found in Baumgartner, “History of the Alsey Silvanus Miller Homestead and Surrounding Area, 1700/1992,” p. 9.

  The only extant mention of Luna is on a map of Gonzales drawn by early resident David Darst that is reprinted in Rather, “De Witt’s Colony,” and still exists in the Gonzales County Museum. But Adam Zumwalt bought the Luna lot in the town of Gonzales from Benjamin Fuqua in April 1835 (the bill of sale is in the Gonzales County Archives). There was a long tradition of moonshining in the Zumwalt family: another Adam Zumwalt, probably an uncle of Adam Zumwalt of Gonzales, trained as an innkeeper and distiller and set up two still houses in the early 1800s, from which he sold liquor to Black Hawk and other Indians (Bryan and Rose, A History of the Pioneer Families of Missouri, p. 195). According to Gonzales city records, a few years later “John Goss’s tavern stand” stood on the same lot (Zumwalt’s) as Luna had.

  Sources for Gonzales in 1835 include Rather, “De Witt’s Colony”; Lukes, DeWitt Colony of Texas; and the voluminous vertical files of the Gonzales County Records Center and Archives, primarily the vertical files for Gonzales and the individual files of the many early families of the town. The description of the 1834 ball is from a 1912 manuscript by Walker, “Early Life in Gonzales,” pp. 2–3, which derives much of its information from early Gonzales resident David Darst, who also provided the information about Kimble and Dickinson’s hats in an interview in the December 8, 1901, edition of the Houston Daily Post.

  The Gonzales ayuntamiento’s resistance to the independence movement is from Barker, “Stephen F. Austin and the Independence of Texas,” p. 62. Jesse McCoy’s involvement in the Gonzales militia is mentioned in the report of Andrew Ponton to J. B. Miller, chief of the Department of the Brazos, dated July 26, 1835 (Julia Lee Sinks Papers, BCAH). The attack on McCoy is described in an undated letter from Ponton to Ugartechea in the Gonzales ayuntamiento minutes (box 3M11, folder 5, Julia Lee Sinks Papers, BCAH).

  The actions of the Mexican army at Gonzales are described in an October 1, 1835, report from Ugartechea to Cós, reprinted in PTR 2, p. 12, and in several other Mexican reports included in that volume. Texian eyewitness accounts of the battle of Gonzales inc
lude a letter from William DeWees dated December 25, 1835, and reprinted in PTR 3, p. 317, and the report of Andrew Ponton to J. B. Miller (see above). The best recent account is in Hardin, Texian Iliad, pp. 7–13, which is based on several earlier Texas histories.

  Information about Francisco de Castañeda and his house in the Alamo can be found in the Bexar Archives, BCAH, and Lemon, The Illustrated Alamo 1836, p. 46. Castañeda’s admission that he, too, was a federalist is in the DeWees letter mentioned above: “The Mexican made answer, that he was himself in favor of the Constitution of 1824.”

  The number of DeWitt colonists is from Field, Three Years in Texas, p. 14.

  Sources for the battle of Gonzales include Rather, “De Witt’s Colony”; Bennet, “The Battle of Gonzales”; Foote, Texas and the Texans, vol. 2; Ornish, Ehrenberg: Goliad Survivor; DeShields, Tall Men with Long Rifles; Johnson, A History of Texas and Texans, vol. 1; and the other sources listed above. Turner’s hotel as a rallying point is mentioned in the Gonzales Inquirer of August 30, 1879, in an article entitled “Thrilling Scenes of Gonzales in Early Days of Texas.” Castañeda’s report to Ugartechea dated October 3, 1835, in PTR 2, p. 15, mentions the single casualty. The quote concerning the lack of consensus of opinion on Mexico is by Noah Smithwick, from his book Evolution of a State, p. 71.