Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  Bowie’s division would stay the night right where they stood, but, recognizing the possibility of attack, Bowie and Fannin established defensive positions. Forty-one soldiers under Bowie’s command made camp on the north side of the roughly semicircular field, while Captain Fannin’s company occupied the south side. Pickets were assigned to keep watch, including a detachment of seven men who occupied the cupola of the nearby mission with its broad view of the surrounding countryside.

  Although the Mexicans lobbed a few cannonballs in the darkness from their camp on the other side of the river in the early evening, the Texians passed a quiet night, and the sentries raised no alarm. Bowie drank his share of a bottle of mescal before lying down to rest. This veteran of many fights had no great fear of what was to come. As one companion reported, “I never saw a man sleep more soundly than he did.”

  Back at the main camp, an anxious Austin waited. When a courier from Bowie finally arrived after dark, the general, already deeply worried about the fate of Bowie and his men, was frustrated. His army divided, he could do nothing until morning. Even then reinforcements would need two hours to reach Mission Concepción. After ordering his officers to prepare for a dawn march, Austin, unlike Bowie, spent a sleepless night, anxiously awaiting morning. He worried that he was about to lose what amounted to a quarter of his army.17

  ACTION!

  Shortly before dawn, Henry Karnes, one of Bowie’s sentinels, heard hoofbeats. Tennessee born, the short, stocky Karnes rarely swore—but at that moment he must have been tempted. In the predawn light, speaking softly in his high-pitched voice, he urged the rifleman at his side to keep silent.

  While Bowie slept, Austin’s worst fear had been realized. General Cos, told by his spies that he outnumbered the ninety or so Americans camping in the horseshoe bend, had ordered one hundred troopers to slip across the river in darkness. Downstream from the Texian camp, the Mexican dragoons had waded ashore undetected, together with several companies of infantrymen and artillery detachments, totaling another two hundred, hauling a pair of field cannons.

  The two Texian sentinels squinted into the mists, looking to see what they had heard. Then, just as Karnes glimpsed the legs of a horse in the middle distance, the report of a musket ripped the watchful silence.

  The Texian rifleman quickly returned fire, and Karnes charged into the gloom, firing his pistol at the dim silhouette. But the Mexican horseman disappeared into the bank of fog, and again they heard the sound of hoofbeats, this time in rapid retreat. With that, the two lookouts fell back to their camp, where the other volunteers, their sleep shattered by the gunfire, leapt into action.

  As the Texians scrambled for their guns, more unseen Mexicans opened fire. For a time, Jim Bowie later reported, they “kept up a constant firing, at a distance, [but] with no other effect than a waste of ammunition of their part.”18 Waiting for the morning fog to clear, the enemy didn’t show themselves, and the firing soon ceased.

  Meanwhile, the Texians prepared for an imminent attack. Some herded the horses to the riverbed below and tethered them to trees. At the edge of the clearing men hacked at bushes and vines with their hunting knives. Along the surrounding banks that descended to the river, they cut footholds, enabling them to step up and shoot before falling back and below the protective embankment, then reload and rise to fire again. Their defensive position, with the left flank angling away from the right, would put Mexicans who charged into the open ground in between and at the mercy of deadly raking fire.

  “Keep under cover, boys,” Bowie ordered, “. . . we haven’t a man to spare.”19

  As the fog burned off, a battle line of Mexicans slowly became visible, two hundred yards away but ready to attack. The uniformed men filled the breadth of the hundred-yard-wide neck that provided the only land access to the horseshoe-shaped field of battle. At the center stood one hundred infantrymen, flanked on both sides by cavalry. Cannoneers brought up the rear. For any Texian considering retreat, a look over his shoulder revealed another two companies of Cos’s dragoons on the opposite shore of the San Antonio River. Though it was a shock to the Texians to realize they were effectively surrounded, a gunsmith and Gonzales veteran named Noah Smithwick no doubt spoke for Bowie and Fannin and the rest when he said, “Retreat formed no part of our programme.”20

  At eight o’clock, a rifle shot signaled the Mexican attack.

  The Mexican infantry marched forward as the field became a blaze of gunfire and billowing smoke. As they had been trained to do, the Mexicans fired their muskets in volleys while the Texians operated as individuals. Bowie’s men fired less often—“but with good aim and deadly effect.”21 The ranks of the oncoming infantry thinned as the Texian marksmen dropped Mexicans, some dead, others wounded, to the ground.

  Ten minutes into the fight, a Mexican cannon boomed. The four-pounder fired canister and grapeshot, which crashed harmlessly into the trees overhead. The only effect upon the crouching Texians was a shower of ripe pecans that rained down from above.

  As the Mexican artillerymen worked to adjust the cannon’s angle of fire, the Texians began shifting their position behind the bluff. After taking his shot each man would, as usual, step back and below the protective embankment to reload. But now, before rising to fire again, he would shift a few steps around the curve of the embankment, working closer to the position of the cannon.

  One by one, the Texian fire brought down the exposed Mexican artillerymen. Although fresh gunners took their places, those, too, became the most-favored target of Bowie’s men. When the second crew fell, a third took their place.

  Slowed by their enemy’s persistent and deadly marksmanship, the Mexican infantry regrouped, preparing to charge again. But Bowie issued his order first. Clambering out from behind their riverbank barricade for the first time, his men surged toward the brass cannon; in a matter of seconds, it was theirs. Finding the gun loaded and ready to fire, Bowie’s men pivoted the weapon and emptied its load of iron at the Mexican infantrymen.

  To their surprise, the cannon fire produced an immediate result. As the Texians observed in delight, the enemy was suddenly in full retreat. Stunned at the losses the Texians had inflicted, the Mexicans turned and fled back to San Antonio. In that moment, the battle was decided.

  The Battle of Concepción ended in another decisive win for the Texians; as they had at Gonzales, the upstart settlers had taken on an impressive uniformed force, and again won a significant fight. Bowie’s division sustained only two casualties, with two men wounded in the fighting. But as the guns went quiet, the screams of a soldier named Richard Andrews echoed across the battlefield.

  Despite Bowie’s orders, Andrews had ventured out from behind the bluff in the heat of the battle. An easy target, he had been quickly cut down when a shot tore into his left side; the iron ball exited his abdomen on the other. One of the first men to reach him had been Noah Smithwick.

  “Dick, are you hurt?”

  Andrews managed to reply to his friend, “Yes, Smith, I’m killed.” Prone, in unbearable pain with his bowels protruding from his wound, Andrews would die hours later.22

  The violent and public passing of their fellow soldier would be a reminder of what was at stake. Every man’s life was on the line in the fight—but in just two hours, the Texians gained a clear victory in their first full-scale battle with Santa Anna’s army.

  “THE BRILLIANCY OF THE VICTORY”

  Thirty minutes after the Mexicans fled, General Austin arrived. On hearing distant gunshots, his army had quick-marched; when the firing had stopped, Austin, still at a distance, feared the worst. But on reaching Concepción, he saw the Mexican rear guard just visible in the distance, bound for San Antonio.

  After being told of the rout of the Mexicans, Austin’s first instinct was to order a pursuit of the fleeing and disorganized enemy: “The army must follow them right into town!”23 Wouldn’t San Antonio itself, with its defenders shoc
ked and in disarray, be vulnerable?

  His officers counseled caution. The town was fortified. According to Bowie’s sources inside San Antonio, at least six cannons had been mounted on the walls of the church, a solid masonry building known as the Alamo. The artillery included an eighteen-pounder, and a handful more defended squares within the town. As for the Texians, their artillery trailed well behind. Attempting a frontal assault would expose Austin’s army to deadly artillery fire and a spray of bullets from riflemen well protected by the adobe walls of the town. To storm San Antonio would put the entire army at risk.

  Reluctantly, Austin contented himself with Bowie’s morning success. Some three hundred Mexicans had surrounded a mere ninety-four Texians, but Bowie and Fannin’s defensive strategy worked. Although the enemy’s advance guard had come within eighty yards of their line, the Texians’ guns had taken a terrible toll; the outnumbered defenders repulsed their attackers. Even without Sam Houston, they had prevailed.

  In contrast to the Texian losses (one wounded, one dying, a few horses lost), downed Mexicans lay across the field of battle. At least sixteen were dead or dying; perhaps twice as many had been wounded. That afternoon, the parish priest arrived from San Antonio, and after a parley with Austin, a long line of wagons and attendants carted the Mexican dead and wounded back to the town. In the evening, the Texians buried Dick Andrews. Over his grave, located at the foot of a pecan tree, they fired a rifle volley, as well as a cannon salute—using the captured Mexican cannon.

  The difference between the kinds of guns used by the two sides had been one deciding factor in the battle. The Mexican smoothbore muskets had an effective range of roughly seventy-five yards; that was perfectly adequate for a European-style battle in which two armies marched toward each other in battle formation on open ground. But General Cos’s infantry had marched on a largely hidden enemy, one armed with long rifles with more than double the effective range of the muskets the Mexicans carried.

  In the hours after the battle, the Texians discovered they had possessed another—and unexpected—strategic advantage. As they helped themselves to the cartridges and cartridge boxes abandoned by fleeing Mexicans on the field, they examined the salvaged ammunition. To their surprise, they found the enemy had been using “by far the poorest powder” they’d ever seen. As one soldier reported, “Compared with the double Dupont, with which we had been furnished, it was evident that we had vastly the advantage over our enemy in this particular. We therefore emptied all the [Mexican] cartridges, and saved only the bullets.”24 The discovery explained why so many enemy musket balls had fallen well short of the Texian line.

  Texian marksmanship and poor Mexican powder helped win the day, but so had their tactics. Having positioned his men wisely, Bowie’s order to attack the Mexican artillery position could not have been better timed.

  Despite his sleepless night and frustration at Bowie’s insubordination, Austin admired the accomplishments of Bowie and Fannin’s band and reported proudly to the conventioneers at San Felipe on the “brilliancy of the victory gained.”25 Perhaps more than anyone else in the Texian camp, Austin also understood the larger military calculus. Whatever their success that Wednesday morning, the rebels remained clear underdogs.

  Yet he and his expatriate Americans also knew precisely what they were fighting for. They were raised on the stories of the revolutionary generation. Austin and his Texians were colonists, too, resentful of taxes and other restrictions imposed by European masters. The success at Concepción only served to boost their confidence.

  If they had to reprise the War of Independence right there in Texas, then so be it.

  FIVE

  A Slow Siege at the Alamo

  This force, it is known to all, is but undisciplined militia and in some respects of very discordant materials.

  —STEPHEN AUSTIN, NOVEMBER 4, 1835

  General Martín Perfecto de Cos possessed what General Stephen F. Austin wanted: The Mexicans occupied the town of San Antonio. Cos had roughly twice the men Austin did plus a dozen-odd cannons with which to defend the town. Quite simply, if Austin wanted San Antonio de Béxar, he would have to come and take it.

  From his encampment north of San Antonio, Austin eyed the village of some two thousand people just downstream on the west bank of the lazy San Antonio River. The provincial capital consisted of a small grid of streets that radiated from the San Fernando church and the Plaza de Armas and Plaza de las Islas, the military and main squares on either side of the church. Stone buildings surrounded the two squares, but quickly gave way to flat-roofed adobe and mud huts. Where the dwellings ended, fertile fields of corn began.

  From his vantage, Austin could also see the single bridge that crossed the shallow and meandering river, linking the town to an array of crumbling structures on the other side. The Mission San Antonio de Valero had been home for much of the previous century to Franciscan missionaries and their Native American converts. More recently, its abandoned church, now occupied by Mexican troops, and a walled courtyard had been armed with cannons now pointing north at Austin and his men. It had also gained the name El Alamo, after the Coahuila town that was home to some of the first soldiers stationed there. It looked like whoever held the Alamo would hold the town.

  When General Cos looked out from San Antonio, he could see the Old White Mill surrounded by the sprawling encampment of Texian troops, roughly a mile away. To the south of San Antonio, Bowie and Fannin remained in place with a smaller force near Mission Concepción.

  From the safety of the Alamo, the Mexicans watched as two hundred fresh volunteers arrived from Nacogdoches, passing within sight of San Antonio; these East Texas “Redlanders,” commanded by a South Carolina–born Texian named Thomas Jefferson Rusk, brought the troop count in Austin’s camp to six hundred. Cos’s spies reported on a dozen supply wagons that arrived from Goliad, carrying much-needed foodstuffs, including forty-three barrels of flour, six sacks of salt, two boxes of sugar, and coffee, as well as soap, candles, and tobacco.1 Another early November delivery added three light artillery to Austin’s small array of cannons.

  Austin’s first gambit that November was to send two colonels under a flag of truce to invite General Cos to surrender. The Mexican commander refused, sending the town priest, Padre Garza, to explain that his orders required him “to defend the place until he died.”2 Any talk of peace, Cos said, was entirely pointless.

  During the early days of the month, the Mexican artillery at the Alamo fired upon the Texian camp; though the Texians fired back, Austin and his gunners soon decided that the effect on the walls of the mission accomplished little beyond sending clouds of dust into the air. Occasional firings would continue throughout the month, but Austin understood that the Texians needed to soften up the town with bigger guns—an eighteen-pounder was on the way—before attempting a land assault.

  Both sides scouted the other, with Austin’s cavalry circling the town daily, and one small skirmish did accomplish something. On November 8, a former militiaman named William Barret Travis rode south at the head of a small company of Texian cavalry. A sometime lawyer who had also founded a newspaper back in the Alabama Territory, Travis had come west after his marriage collapsed; at twenty-one he left his son and cheating wife behind, becoming another of Texas’s second-chance men. On this day, as he and his men rode along the Laredo road, Colonel Travis spotted what he had been looking for: unmistakable evidence of a large herd of horses. These had to be the Mexicans’ surplus animals that, according to a source inside San Antonio, were being driven to the safety of Laredo. General Austin wanted—and needed—these animals for the cavalry, to pull wagons, to position cannons.

  Picking up their pace, Travis and his dozen men set off in pursuit. The trail grew fresher as they found first one, then a second campsite. As they closed on their still unseen target, Travis deployed his men for an attack, but darkness fell rapidly and forced Travis to order a halt. He worr
ied his force might be outnumbered by the enemy and didn’t want to risk stampeding the horses in the dark. With no fire to warm them nor shelter from the cold rain, Travis’s team spent a miserable night waiting for dawn.

  At first light, they made a stealthy approach. Seeing two Mexican riders well away from their camp rounding up stray horses, Travis ordered a charge. The surprised Mexicans, outnumbered by the Texians, surrendered without a shot being fired. Five enemy soldiers were taken prisoner, though the two riders rounding up the horses escaped. But Travis reported a haul that included six muskets, two swords, and “300 head of gentle Spanish horses including ten mules.”3

  Travis’s success was welcome. “I have to thank you and express my approbation of your conduct and that of your men in this affair,” Austin told him. “It has been creditable to yourselves and useful to the service.”4 But the victory proved a small one since the captured horses, underfed and in poor condition, had to be put out to graze before they could be put into daily use.

  November would not be a month of big victories, and Austin struggled to maintain discipline in his camp as he waited for the right moment to attack. Some volunteers, unhappy with the weeks of inaction or worried about their farms and families back home, simply packed up and headed for home. His men’s behavior could be troublesome, especially when they were drinking, Austin admitted, writing to San Felipe and requesting, “In the name of Almighty God . . . send no more ardent spirits to the camp.” The last thing his army needed was more “whysky.”5