Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  CROSSING THE LINE

  On Saturday afternoon, the Mexican cannonade went silent two hours before sunset. In the welcome but unfamiliar quiet, William Travis summoned his men to parade in the Alamo’s central plaza. Several soldiers carried Jim Bowie, still on his cot, feverish and on the edge of delirium, from his confinement.

  Travis addressed the garrison.

  “My soldiers, I am going to meet the fate that becomes me. Those who will stand by me, let them remain, but those who desire to go, let them go.”22

  The men cheered his words.

  Travis drew his sword. Using its tip, he scribed a line in the dirt in front of the men in formation. He invited all those who would stand with him, who would die with him, to step across the line.

  As one, the able-bodied men stepped forth; Jim Bowie, despite his fevered state, requested that he be helped across. Just one man remained behind; he was permitted to depart. He would survive to recount this story.23

  Travis and his men worked into the night, further stabilizing the fortifications. Many of the eight hundred muskets and rifles on hand were made ready: With more than one gun per man, the Texians could deliver a rapid initial rate of fire without reloading. The artillerymen had at least five hundred loads of canister and grapeshot.

  The commander made one other parting gesture before retiring for what would prove to be an abbreviated night’s sleep. Visiting the Alamo church, Travis noticed little Angelina Dickinson. From his finger, Travis removed a ring of hammered gold; it was inset with a large agate stone. He strung it on a loop of string, which he then slipped over the head of the fifteen-month-old like a necklace.

  The child’s mother, Susanna, stood nearby. She promised Travis that if anything happened to him she would be sure that the keepsake was delivered to Travis’s son, Charles.

  EIGHT

  The Massacre

  A desperate contest ensued, in which prodigies of valor were wrought by this Spartan band.

  —MARY AUSTIN HOLLEY, Texas

  The Texians’ day began at 5:30 A.M. with the sound of distant shouting. As the sun came up, the Alamo defenders heard calls of Viva Santa Anna! and Viva la republica!

  Blaring bugles then made the attack official, and the Mexican troops, less than two hundred yards away, leapt to their feet. Having lain quietly for two hours, on their stomachs and unseen in their blue uniforms, they hoisted their guns and swords and ran toward the Alamo.

  At last, on Sunday, March 6, 1836, the real fight began.

  For the Alamo’s sleeping commandant, insulated by the adobe brick of his room in the middle of the west wall, his officer of the day put the news plainly. Banging open the door of Travis’s bedchamber, he shouted, “Colonel Travis! The Mexicans are coming!”

  Rising quickly from his bed, Travis grabbed his gun and sword. He ran out into the open plaza, yelling, “Come on boys, the Mexicans are upon us and we’ll give them Hell.”1

  Heading for the gun battery in the Alamo’s northwest corner, he could hear his riflemen atop the walls as they began firing at the oncoming Mexicans. The cannon were not yet booming, though Travis needed the big guns to prevent the much larger Mexican force from reaching the Alamo’s wall. He sprinted up the ramp that rose to the gun emplacement.

  On reaching the top of the rampart, he, too, discharged his shotgun, one barrel first, then the other. Moments later, the cannons at last started firing. Standing nearby, silhouetted by stop-time powder flashes, Travis made a fine target from the darkness below. Some unnamed Mexican sighted in and fired.

  Travis took a hit: A lead ball smashed squarely into his forehead. He went down, his hand still clenching his gun, collapsing into a strangely lifelike sitting position. In the opening minutes of the fight for the Alamo, the Texians lost their battle leader, the man whose words would forever frame the events of the fight that was unfolding around his lifeless form.

  THE FIRST WAVE

  Santa Anna employed Napoléon’s tactics. With his overwhelming manpower advantage and little regard for casualties, he threw the four columns of infantry at the four corners of the Alamo. He remained well back, an observer, astride his fine steed.

  The general had surprise on his side: After weeks of bombardment, in the wee hours of a Sunday, he caught the Texians unawares and unready. His advance guard had overwhelmed the rebels’ pickets on the perimeter, slitting throats or running them through with bayonets before they could sound the alarm.

  Inside the Alamo, the surprised Texians moved to their assigned posts as quickly as they could and began delivering a murderous fire at the attackers approaching the Alamo’s perimeter walls. Their rifles damaged the Mexican wave, “leaving a wide trail of blood, of wounded, and of dead.”2 Each rifleman, having emptied one loaded gun, reached for the next.

  The Texian artillery added to the deafening din of the battle. In the absence of standard-issue canister and grapeshot, Almeron Dickinson and his fellow artillerymen had packed their cannon barrels with metal fragments, such as nails, horseshoe pieces, and chain links; the more jagged the scrap, the better. Powered by superior American-made gunpowder, the hail of deadly debris added to the numbers of fallen men on the field, taking down officers as well as foot soldiers. One stunned Mexican colonel watched as “a single cannon volley did away with half [a] company” of his men.3

  The officer who had surrendered San Antonio back in December, General Martín Perfecto de Cos, ignoring the promise he had made not to return and fight in Texas, led his three hundred infantrymen as they charged Travis’s battery. Having lost once to the Texians, Cos needed to redeem his tarnished reputation in Santa Anna’s eyes. Some four hundred men under Colonel Duque advanced on the other corner of the Alamo’s north wall. Three hundred soldiers commanded by Colonel José María Romero attacked the strong east front, where Captain Dickinson’s three twelve-pound cannons, mounted high on the rear wall of the ruins of the Alamo’s chapel, appeared to its attackers to be “a sort of high fortress.”4 Colonel Juan Morales’s one hundred men moved on the south wall, looking to capture the main entrance and penetrate the palisade guarded by Crockett and his company.

  The “terrible shower” that burst from the Texian cannons opened gaps in the Mexican ranks on all fronts. Colonel Duque went down with a thigh wound, but the swarm of Mexicans kept coming. These were soldiers trained to “scorn life and welcome death,” to seek “honor and glory.”5

  On approach, some light infantrymen had fanned out and, armed with accurate Baker rifles, they targeted the Alamo defenders on the roofs, exposed with no parapets to protect them. At closer range, the short-barreled guns the troops carried—the Texians dismissively called them “blunderbusses”—gained effectiveness yard by yard. The Texians’ earlier advantage of preloaded guns ended; each rifleman had to resort to reloading, costing him precious time.

  On reaching the foot of the wall, however, the attackers discovered that next to none of the scaling ladders had made it across the killing field. Inside the Alamo the thuds of Mexican axes could be heard on the thick wooden doors; some Mexicans wielded crowbars, struggling to pry open the boarded-up windows. But the attackers were suddenly stymied.

  Acutely aware of their losses—according to one Mexican soldier, “it seemed every cannon ball or pistol shot of the enemy embedded itself in the breasts of our men,”6 the north wall attackers wavered. With gunfire still raining down from above—one cannon now raked the attackers in the lee of the wall—Santa Anna’s men fell back.

  From a distance, a noncombatant, José Francisco Ruiz, mayor of San Antonio, called it as he saw it. The Mexican army’s initial assault, he observed, was “repulsed by the deadly fire of Travis’s artillery, which resembled a constant thunder.”7

  The Texians were holding strong.

  HIS EXCELLENCY

  For Santa Anna, no glory could be claimed without bloodshed. Watching the attack on the Alamo, he took grim pl
easure in the dirge-like notes of the “Degüello,” the rhythmic march that, on his orders, accompanied the assault. Sounded by his buglers, it signaled to his men that no quarter would be given.* To their enemy, it was “the music of merciless murder.”8

  Standing with the reserve troops just fifteen minutes into the battle, Santa Anna looked on as dozens and dozens of his own men lay slaughtered after the first assault. His officers, aware that a full attack would result in a “great sacrifice” of men, had wondered at the timing of the attack: Why not wait? The siege was working. More big guns were due any day. But such niceties were wasted on Santa Anna, who remained firm. The generals and colonels had no choice but to obey His Excellency’s orders, “[choosing] silence, knowing that he would not tolerate opposition, his sole pleasure being in hearing what met with his wishes.”9

  Dressed as usual for a campaign—he wore a green frock coat—Santa Anna got his bloody battle. To prevent any Texians from escaping the Alamo, he had taken the precaution of positioning a squadron near the Gonzales road and ordered a veteran cavalry unit to run down any rebels who tried to flee. He wanted to obliterate the defiant Texians, no matter what the cost.

  But the fight wasn’t going as he had hoped. He studied the Alamo, where, in the morning’s first glimmer of daylight, he could still see the bright blasts of flame from the mouths of the Texian cannons. Two of his columns had slowed in the face of the artillery fire; another veered off its course; and the fourth, attacking the main gate, had been forced to take shelter behind a few remaining huts near the Alamo’s southwest corner.

  The initial attack failed to penetrate the Alamo’s defenses.

  His reserves were among the best men in Santa Anna’s army, consisting of four hundred men. Now, he decided, was the time to order them into battle. This second wave would penetrate the wall, he hoped, ending Texian resistance once and for all.

  THE SECOND WAVE

  Inside the Alamo, Travis lay dead. His second in command, Jim Bowie, could not take his place. Weak with disease, sweating feverishly, he lay in his bed, only dimly aware of the firefight. But the Texians kept fighting.

  At the southwest corner of the Alamo enclosure, the biggest of the Alamo’s guns pounded the Mexicans. On the platform at the rear of the church, three smaller cannons looked east. But nowhere were there enough Texians to man all the guns properly. Instead of a usual crew of a half dozen per gun, the Texians depended on skeleton crews half that size.

  The gunners along the north wall aimed at the army of attackers as they regrouped. Despite the losses sustained on the first attack, this force grew larger as the Texians watched. Along with Santa Anna’s reserves, the third column, deflected by the big guns in the chapel, now joined in a full-frontal assault along the length of the northern exposure. This time, on reaching the base of the wall, they took a determined new approach.

  Green Jameson and his men had worked to stiffen the northern defenses, facing a once-crumbling stone and adobe wall with a layer of timber and stone. Though as high as twelve feet in places, the earthworks were not yet finished—and the exposed beams and stacked stones made the wall vulnerable. General Juan Amador grasped the opportunity: He began to climb and ordered his men, their guns slung over their shoulders, to follow. They found footholds and handholds, with one soldier helping the next, despite the continued Texian fire from above. Before long they had breached the Alamo’s walls.

  Some of the agile ones who cleared the wall first met with the bayonets and rifle butts of Texian fighters who stabbed and bludgeoned them. At other places along the expanse of the wall, the appearance of a Mexican head was greeted with lead fired by nearby Texians or riflemen on top of a central building within the Alamo, the Long Barracks. Despite the falling dead and wounded, one Mexican officer reported, “the courage of our soldiers was not diminished . . . and they hurried to occupy their places, . . . climbing over their bleeding bodies.”10

  This time, despite the casualties, there would be no Mexican retreat. “We could hear the Mexican officers shouting to the men to jump over,” the Tejano boy, Enrique Esparza, later remembered.11 That moment—it was a shift in the tide of battle—would stay with him forever. The fall of the Alamo became inevitable when the first uniformed men of Mexico climbed over the wall. The few were followed by the many, as a surge of attackers cleared the parapet and, one by one, dropped to the plaza below.

  This time the Texians were the ones to retreat, withdrawing the soldiers who were at the perimeter wall to the Long Barracks in hopes of one final holdout.

  * * *

  • • •

  CAPTAIN ALMERON DICKINSON manned the chapel’s big guns. Bunked down in the church, he and his gun crew had slept close to their post, and in the early moments of the battle, one of his cannons had been the first to fire. The intimidating cannon had done its work, raking the left flank of the oncoming Mexican third column, causing Colonel Romero’s command to veer away from the church and head northward, seeking a new point of attack unprotected by cannons.

  As the battle continued, however, the artillery captain read the changing situation. With the Mexicans entering the Alamo compound, he knew the Alamo defenders lost ground they couldn’t afford to lose. With the tumult still raging hottest along the north wall, Dickinson left his post, stealing a few moments for words he had to say.

  He managed to find his wife, Susanna, and their daughter, in the family quarters in the sacristy adjacent to the chapel.

  “My dear wife,” Almeron began. “They are coming over the wall.” But that didn’t say it all, and she deserved to know the harsh truth.

  “We are all lost,” he told her.

  More remained to be said, but he needed to return to his post on the scaffold. He made just one parting request of Susanna Dickinson.

  “If they spare you, love our child.” He kissed her in farewell.12

  * * *

  • • •

  WITH THE NORTH WALL BREACHED, the Alamo gunners manning the southwest cannon turned their gun inward to fire on the enemy soldiers flooding the Alamo plaza. But the cannon fire would not halt the swarm of attackers; Santa Anna’s men opened the northern gate, permitting many more Mexican soldiers to rush in. From the west, the Mexicans pried and hacked open the boarded-up openings and climbed through.

  Now members of the fourth column, until then pinned down by the Texians’ southern cannon, charged the south wall. Within moments, they overran the artillery position, killing the gunners and capturing their weapons. With possession of the largest gun, the Mexicans set about turning it on the Texians.

  At the palisade, the riflemen, led by David Crockett, watched the battle turn. They saw no alternative: Crockett and his Tennessee boys withdrew, taking cover in the church.

  Barely a half hour into the battle, the fight had been redefined, the perimeter walls lost and Texian territory reduced to two buildings. The Texians, deprived of most of their cannons, were effectively caged inside the adobe walls of the Long Barracks and the Alamo church.

  THE END

  Many of the Texians, now truly trapped, had no means of escape from the two-story, brick-and-adobe Long Barracks. For the moment they remained safe inside its solid walls and behind the heavy wooden doors. From windows and loopholes, the Texian sharpshooters could pick off Mexican soldiers in the plaza with impunity, forcing the attackers to take cover where they could. But the Mexicans soon pivoted the captured cannons and sent their cannonballs crashing through the adobe walls.

  Once the guns turned, it was only minutes before the first of the Long Barracks doors had been blasted open. Firing as they surged through, the Mexicans met with a hail of gunfire from the Texians. “The tumult was great, the disorder frightful,” according to a Mexican officer. “Different groups of soldiers were firing in all directions, on their comrades and on their officers, so that one was as likely to die by a friend’s hand as by an enemy’s.”13 The
fight became room-by-room as the Mexicans broke down doors. “The struggle,” one Mexican sergeant remembered, “was made up of a number of separate and desperate combats, often hand to hand.”14

  Even the inmates of the so-called hospital—men still recovering from wounds sustained in December or from illness—fought valiantly. Despite being confined to their beds, they shot at the attackers from where they lay. According to one Mexican sergeant, he and his soldiers rolled a small cannon into the hospital doorway and fired canister shot into the room, killing fifteen sick men.

  Although, according to one Mexican sergeant, “the Texians fought like devils,” in just a few more minutes, no Texians were left alive in the barracks.

  Meanwhile, along the south wall, the Mexicans burst into one of the small dwellings. At first, in the near darkness, the Mexicans saw no one. Then they spied something, someone, a human form that lay motionless on a makeshift bed, mostly obscured beneath a blanket. In the heat of the bloody battle, they assumed that, out of terror, the man hid himself beneath the covers “like a woman.”15

  Then he moved. Awakening to a nightmare, Jim Bowie struggled to reach a seated position. But the attackers moved quickly toward him. Though he reached for his notorious knife, for the first time Jim Bowie’s instinct for self-preservation fell short and, before he could defend himself, he was “butchered in bed.”16

  Whether his killers knew the identity of their famous victim isn’t clear, but, later, one of the Mexican generals acknowledged that the troops had skewered “the perverse and boastful James Bowie” with their bayonets.17 The end of his life had been a brutal one: Dying or perhaps already dead, his body had been raised on enemy bayonets and tossed about until his killers’ uniforms were soaked with his blood.