Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  Conserving their powder, the Texians fired back only intermittently.

  From his headquarters, Santa Anna supervised the distribution of shoes. He left the town to scout with a cavalry unit. Then, at ten o’clock that Thursday morning, he ordered a force of more than two hundred Mexicans to march on the Alamo. The uniformed men crossed the shallow river and marched toward the scattering of nearby buildings south of the Alamo’s main gate.

  The Texians held their fire until the enemy arrived “within point blank shot.” Then the Alamo’s defenders opened with a full fusillade, their cannons unleashing grape and cannon shot. The Texians’ long rifles—with David Crockett cheering his boys on—and the artillery took a deadly toll on the approaching fighters. The Mexicans still standing scrambled back into the shelter of the abandoned houses, and the two sides exchanged fire for two hours before the Mexicans finally withdrew. When they retreated, they carted with them at least eight dead and wounded.

  Travis reported on the morning’s action, writing to Major General Sam Houston. Houston was far away, still on his journey to and from the Cherokee, blithely unaware of the turn of events at the Alamo, having ordered its evacuation the month before.

  “Many of the enemy were wounded,” Travis wrote, “while we, on our part, have not lost a man. . . . I take great pleasure in stating that both officers and men have conducted themselves with firmness and bravery.” He cited Captain Dickinson in particular for his gallantry, as well as “the Hon. David Crockett” for “animating the men to do their duty.”

  Proud as he was of the first exchange of fire, Travis remained deeply worried. “Do hasten on aid to me as rapidly as possible, as from the superior number of the enemy, it will be impossible for us to keep them out much longer.”

  Without apology, Travis also spelled out the stakes once more: “If they overpower us, we fall a sacrifice at the shrine of our country.”10

  * * *

  • • •

  TRAVIS’S CALL FOR HELP had reached Colonel James Fannin. Goliad’s commander speedily divided his garrison, ordering all but one hundred of his four-hundred-some men to prepare to march. As they readied for departure, Fannin reported via letter to army headquarters in Washington-on-the-Brazos that he felt a brotherly obligation. “The appeals of Cols. Travis & Bowie cannot . . . pass unnoticed—particularly by troops now on the field—Sanguine, chivalrous volunteers—Much must be risked to relieve the besieged.”11

  Fannin and company headed out for San Antonio, a hundred miles away, that very afternoon. But then, just two hundred yards from Goliad’s gate, they faced their first obstacle. A wagon broke down.

  After a delay, with pairs of yoked oxen pulling each cannon, Fannin and his men managed to cross a nearby river. But, as more wagons failed in the process, their progress slowed again. With darkness falling, the little army made camp for the night, still within sight of the Goliad mission.

  In the morning, Fannin’s officers requested a council of war. They were having second thoughts about their immediate urge to go to the aid of their fellow Texians. The three-hundred-man contingent had no bread or beef and little rice; as Fannin’s aide-de-camp Captain Brooks put it, “We are almost naked and without provisions and very little ammunition.” Fannin himself now doubted whether the artillery could be gotten to the Alamo. Others expressed concern that the hundred men left behind would be unable to defend Goliad, the place they had recently renamed Fort Defiance. And even if Fannin’s contingent made it to the Alamo, wasn’t the mission likely to fail? In Captain Brooks’s words, “We can not therefore calculate very sanguinely upon victory.”12

  Fannin, Brooks, and the other commissioned officers deliberated before reaching a unanimous decision. As Fannin, seeming to forget that he had just said that much should be risked for the sake of the Alamo, soon decided, “It was deemed expedient to return to [Goliad] and complete the fortifications.”13

  Travis’s request that Fannin send men would go unanswered. Fannin’s resolve had wavered and broken; the proposed mission to aid the Alamo had come to nothing.

  * * *

  • • •

  A STRONG WIND came up that evening, but Santa Anna and his men ignored the temperature as it dropped below forty degrees. The Mexican guns not only maintained their fire, but the Texians awoke to the sight of cavalry encamped on the hills east of the Alamo. The enemy was now poised to block a retreat or to intercept reinforcements from Gonzales. The noose was tightening.

  In the night, a small band of Texians had quietly left the Alamo and set fire to the houses close by. The shanties, which had provided the enemy cover during the previous day’s skirmish, went up in smoke. Burned to the ground, the ash and rubble of the humble buildings left an open field for the men with long rifles.

  The terms of the battle grew clearer. From the safety of Fortress Alamo, the Texians could hold off a much larger army, with their artillery and rifles throwing lead at any attackers who approached within two hundred yards. If the enemy chose to make an all-out assault, Travis felt confident that his gunners and riflemen would inflict staggering casualties. Santa Anna might risk such a bloodbath—and with his superior numbers, he could prevail—but surely His Excellency recognized that such a victory would seem more costly than a defeat?

  On the other hand, the Alamo enclosure, Travis knew well, was simply too large for his 150 men to defend indefinitely in the face of constant artillery fire. Not that he had a choice: Until more Texians came to their aid, the Alamo defenders would have to occupy themselves with improving their fort. That wasn’t easy: Moving about the Alamo, they had to be constantly wary, dodging shells and cannonballs that regularly whistled in from the sky.

  LONG DAYS, LONGER NIGHTS

  Travis ordered more sorties to demolish all the remaining shacks near enough to the Alamo to provide enemy cover. In the process, his men salvaged bits and pieces for firewood, an increasingly precious commodity.

  Engineer Green Jameson and his construction detail dug trenches; one shovelful at a time, the excavated earth added to the bulk of the walls and shaped parapets atop them.

  Riflemen found the best spots from which to pick off any Mexican foolish enough to raise his head within range. From the opposite side of the line, a Mexican captain observed one shooter whose flowing hair distinguished him from the rest. The tall man fired from a favored spot, dressed in a buckskin suit and patterned cape.

  “This man,” Rafael Soldana reported, “would kneel or lie down behind the low parapet, rest his long gun and fire, and we all learned to keep at a good distance when he was seen to make ready to shoot. He rarely missed his mark, and when he fired he always rose to his feet and calmly reloaded his gun seemingly indifferent to the shots fired at him by our own men.”

  The independent figure sometimes crowed over his well-aimed shots, taunting the enemy in “a strong, resonant voice.” The Spanish-speaking Mexicans could not understand his words, spoken in English, but would later learn his identity. As they rendered his name, he was “Kwockey.”14 To the Americans, he was the man known as Crockett, who was defending the biggest gap in the Alamo’s perimeter, where, on the south side, the wall ended short of the chapel. Although the space was now lined with a palisade of sharpened stakes angled toward potential attackers, it remained a likely Mexican route of assault.

  General Santa Anna, on the outside looking in, bided his time. He would wait for an oncoming brigade to add to his forces, but he harbored no doubts as to the outcome of the eventual fight.

  “After taking Fort Alamo,” he wrote confidently to his minister of war, “I shall continue my operations against Goliad and the other fortified places, so that before the rains set in, the campaign shall be absolutely terminated up to the Sabine River, which serves as the boundary line between our republic and the one of the North.”15

  He ordered the installation that night of another gun battery, this one near the old
mill. With first light, cannonballs began to rain in from yet another direction, almost due north of the Alamo. When one of his scouts reported, on February 29, that a two-hundred-man Texian force was on the road from the Presidio La Bahía, the fortress at Goliad, Santa Anna ordered one of his generals to lead a force of cavalry and infantry to intercept the Goliad men. When they found no sign of a Texian force, they returned to Santa Anna’s camp at San Antonio.

  Wondering at the whereabouts of Fannin and company, Travis asked Austin’s old friend Juan Seguín, a trusted Tejano, to carry another plea for help to the outside world. Needing a good horse for the mission, he went to ask the bedridden Bowie if he might borrow his.

  Seguín found the aging fighter “so ill that he hardly recognized the borrower.”16 But Bowie agreed to lend his mount, and the messenger left that night through the north gate.

  Nearing the Mexican cavalry camp, he approached at a leisurely pace as if reporting in. He spoke Spanish, lulling the Mexican sentinels into lowering their guard—but, as he neared, he suddenly spurred his horse and dashed past, disappearing into the night before the dragoons could react.

  Back at the Alamo, Travis and his men waited and hoped. Crockett distracted them with his fiddle, accompanied by the droning bagpipes of Scotsman John McGregor. These were evenings of drink, of cards and talk, but little seemed to change except the weather. One night Crockett and McGregor faced off in a musical competition to make the most noise; it was a fine distraction as a brutal norther finally blew past, its bitter cold winds giving way to milder air.17 The Texians welcomed the change—it occurred at a moment when nothing whatever seemed to be going their way.

  DON’T SHOOT!

  In the early morning hours of March 1, the Alamo sentinel shot first. Noises in the dark, nearby but outside the walls, drew his fire—but no one shot back. Instead the lookout heard voices, hissing in English.

  Don’t shoot! We’re friends!

  They were men from Gonzales, the place where, with the second shot heard ’round the world, the war had begun. Their neighbors had come to the aid of Gonzales and, summoned by a Travis alert, they had come here to do the same. Circling north, they had managed to skirt the Mexican dragoons guarding the road.

  Ushered into the Alamo, the reinforcements were welcomed with cheers. But the defenders’ sense of relief at the newcomers’ arrival quickly faded. The company of volunteers, one of them wounded in the foot by the guard’s gun, numbered just thirty-two men. That brought the total to 180 fighters; the Mexicans, depending upon which estimate one believed, numbered fifteen hundred. Or twenty-five hundred. Or even six thousand men.

  For the rest of the defenders, the arrival on March 1 was a sort of anniversary: One week had passed since the appearance of Santa Anna forced them to withdraw into the Alamo. There had been no major attack. The only thing that seemed to change was still the weather, which was turning cold again, but every man understood the situation could explode at most any time.

  WHERE IS SAM HOUSTON?

  While the men in the Alamo waited and worried, the missing general reappeared: Houston had returned from Cherokee country, riding into Washington-on-the-Brazos on February 28. He brought good news: He’d signed a treaty of peace with the Cherokee. On arrival, however, he encountered some very bad news, in a just-arrived dispatch addressed to “Sam Houston, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Texas.”

  The report, written in Colonel Travis’s slanting and hurried hand, was enough to make Houston’s head spin. He learned for the first time of Santa Anna’s early arrival. He read of the initial skirmish between the desperate defenders of the Alamo and the Mexican army. He didn’t have to read the closing line—“Give me help, oh my Country! Victory or Death”—to know Travis and troops were in terrible trouble, trouble they might have avoided had they followed Houston’s earlier instructions to evacuate the mission.

  Houston immediately began planning his response, but before he could take military action, he had to help complete the writing and signing of a Texas declaration of independence, an action that had been a long time in coming.

  On March 1, in a makeshift building overlooking the Brazos River, forty-one delegates to a new convention came to order to reorganize revolutionary Texas into a republic.

  In a simple structure with cotton cloth and animal skins for doors, the delegates suffered in bitter wind and cold, but they produced what they had come for: “The Unanimous Declaration of Independence made by the Delegates of the People of Texas.” One statement summed it up: “We do hereby declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, sovereign, and independent republic.”18

  On March 2, which just happened to be Sam Houston’s forty-third birthday, the delegates signed the declaration. The day after, the delegates designated him commander in chief, this time with full and absolute authority over all the troops, be they volunteer, regular army, or militia.

  Now could he address the task of facing down Santa Anna.

  BACK AT THE ALAMO

  On Thursday, March 3, a lone rider slipped through the ever-tightening enemy perimeter to enter the Alamo. He told of sixty volunteers en route from San Felipe, with another three hundred to follow. To Travis and his officers, the arithmetic looked suddenly better. With these fighters—along with, they hoped, Goliad’s three hundred—Travis’s command could grow to eight hundred men. That would make for a much fairer fight. But before more Texians could arrive, raucous cries of celebration sounded across the river.

  A glance over the west wall revealed the reason. A long ribbon of troops entered San Antonio. There were a thousand or more men marching in from the west, a mix of experienced sappers (military engineers) and fresh conscripts. These new troops raised the total under Santa Anna’s immediate command to at least twenty-five hundred men, a force more than a dozen times greater than that inside the Alamo.

  Travis could wait and hope for help to arrive from somewhere, from anywhere; or he could try writing yet again. This time he addressed the top man, the president of the Texas convention.

  He reported in full, describing the enemy’s gradual encroachment, the arrival of the small Gonzales force, and the near doubling of enemy ranks. Despite the fact that “at least two hundred shells have fallen inside of our works,” Travis reported proudly, “the spirits of my men are still high.” He again appealed for troops, ammunition, and supplies, requesting the immediate dispatch of “at least 500 pounds of cannon powder, 200 rounds of six, nine, twelve, and eighteen-pound balls, ten kegs of rifle powder, and a supply of lead.” If they were better equipped for battle, the fight could be “decisive,” he promised. His men could be trusted to “fight with desperation and that high-souled courage that characterized the patriot, who is willing to fight in defense of his country’s liberty and his own honor.”19 He sealed the letter with wax.

  Within hours, however, Travis’s hopeful house of cards began to collapse when word came of Fannin’s decision to turn back. No help would be forthcoming from Goliad.

  With that news, a fatalistic frame of mind came over William Travis. He understood perhaps better than any in the garrison that, as he ominously admitted, they were probably engaged in their “last struggle.” With the call for outgoing mail announced, the messenger readied to depart with the fall of night. He would carry letters from several Alamo defenders, but Travis at this late hour felt the need to scribble down one more note. This he composed as a private citizen, not a commanding officer. It was a letter to his son’s schoolteacher.

  Take Care of my little boy. If the country should be saved, I may make for him a splendid fortune; but if the country be lost and I should perish, he will have nothing but the proud recollection that he is the son of a man who died for his country.20

  It would be Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis’s last letter.

  MARCHING ORDERS
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br />   As the courier carried his pouch full of letters toward their intended recipients, Santa Anna called a council of war on March 4.

  Some of his officers advised patience: The Texians could go nowhere and, with a pair of twelve-pound cannons only two days out, why not wait and reduce Fortress Alamo to rubble? Other generals expressed eagerness to attack right away.

  Santa Anna himself had grown impatient. He wanted a plan of attack, an immediate plan for ending the rebel resistance with a direct assault. He ordered one be prepared.

  The preliminaries were in place. Just the previous afternoon, the Texians had observed Mexicans, in the plain light of day, sawing and hewing lengths of wood for the legs and rungs of scaling ladders. At varying distances, Santa Anna’s men had dug entrenchments and gun batteries on all sides of Fortress Alamo. The most recent, north of the fort, was closest, now firing from within two hundred yards.

  At two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, March 5, detailed orders from Santa Anna circulated. “The time has come,” they began, “to strike a decisive blow upon the enemy occupying the Fortress of the Alamo.”21 The soldiers were to retire at dark, then, at midnight, form into four columns of foot soldiers, each assigned a point of attack—the northwest and northeast corners, the east wall, and the Alamo’s most evident vulnerability, the palisade in the gap of the south wall. A cavalry regiment deployed to the east would crush any Texians seeking to escape. A fifth column would lie in wait at the new north battery; commanded by Santa Anna, the reserves could be ordered into battle whenever and wherever the need arose. Everything was to be in readiness by four o’clock on Sunday morning.

  Although wholly ignorant of how soon their fate would fall, the Texians would have to endure only one more bitter night, with a wet north wind and temperatures near freezing.