Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  ELEVEN

  Fort Defiance

  [Fannin] is an ill-fated man.

  —SAM HOUSTON TO THOMAS J. RUSK, MARCH 23, 1836

  On Saturday, March 12, James Fannin, commander of Goliad, received General Sam Houston’s order to withdraw. The young colonel had a mixed past, having come to Texas to escape debts and the shame of flunking out of West Point. But he wanted to redeem himself, and after his success with Bowie at Concepción, he had worked hard to get what he called this “post of danger.”1 To Fannin, this reversal of plans came as a surprise.

  Only a month before, he’d been instructed to fortify Goliad against the Mexicans and, at first, all had gone well. He and his men shored up the defenses of the old Spanish fort, built on the highest hill in the vicinity. Three-foot-thick stone walls, standing eight to ten feet in height, enclosed some three and a half acres that held a church, a barracks, and a handful of other buildings. They rebuilt the fort’s gate and secured its water supply. The Mexicans had called it La Bahía, but the Texians renamed it Fort Defiance, and here Fannin martialed the men who had marched from all over the United States to fight for Texas, happy to consider himself the main obstacle to the Mexicans.

  But things had gone wrong, too. First, there had been the indecision at helping the men trapped in the Alamo. When Travis had called for help (“In this extremity, we hope you will send us all the men you can spare promptly”), Fannin’s immediate instinct had been to go to the rescue of his brothers-in-arms.2 Then the march to San Antonio had ended prematurely, just one day in, with wagon failures and a vote by Fannin’s officers to abandon the mission. They had returned to Fort Defiance in the freezing rain, leaving Travis and his men to prepare to fight their own battle.

  Soon after, Fannin began to run out of supplies. He spent many hours writing long letters to the new government. Like Travis, he begged for promised supplies. He reported his men were hungry and ill clothed, but got little response. He had difficulties disciplining his men—some refused to obey him. But he put the best face on things when he wrote to his sometime business partner, on the last day of February, immediately after the aborted rescue trip to the Alamo. “I will never give up the ship,” he wrote. “If I am whipped, it will be well done—and you may never expect to see me. . . . I am too mad . . . to do—any thing but fight.”3

  Now, as Fannin read Houston’s orders—and as Mexican general Urrea and his army approached—he harbored doubts. Humbled and now hesitant, Fannin wondered if perhaps his strengths “[do] not constitute me a commander.”4 The man who had sworn never to leave his post was now ready to retreat, but there was a practical obstacle.

  RETREAT

  Houston expected him to move, but the previous day, Fannin had sent a small force of two dozen men, along with most of Fort Defiance’s wagons, to Refugio, a village thirty miles away, to help evacuate settlers before the Mexicans arrived. Concerned for his men and settlers, Fannin decided the soldiers at Goliad would have to wait for the party’s return.

  Then two more couriers arrived from Gonzales. Exhausted from their thirty-hour ride, they handed over another letter from Sam Houston, informing Fannin that the Alamo had fallen.

  Reading that “the bodies of the Americans were burned after the massacre” was a body blow.5 He had failed to help Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and the rest. He had done nothing and now some of Texas’s greatest fighters were dead.

  Just after midnight on Sunday morning, March 13, still another messenger interrupted the quiet night, this one from Refugio. He brought more bad news: The wagons full of retreating settlers had run into Urrea’s advance cavalry. Though they’d managed to escape capture and take shelter in an old church, they were trapped and desperately needed reinforcements. Before daylight, at Fannin’s order, reinforcements galloped south to help.

  They did their job well, driving off the outnumbered Mexicans by three o’clock that afternoon. But Fannin, back at Fort Defiance, could only watch the horizon, seeing no messenger with news of his troops’ fate. And a second travel day was lost, one that might have been spent obeying Houston’s orders to move what had become a key part of his army out of harm’s way.

  On Monday, Fannin sent a scout to Refugio to learn the fate of the men he’d sent. What he couldn’t know was that, defying Fannin’s order to return, one of his officers had chosen to attack a nearby encampment of Spanish settlers rumored to be spies. All Fannin knew was that his courier did not return and, with the setting sun, three days had passed since the order to retreat.

  Tuesday brought no news so, on Wednesday, now four days after receiving Houston’s order, Fannin sent one last messenger, this one a Captain Frazer, who pledged that, given “a good horse . . . if alive, [I will] return in twenty-four hours, with intelligence.” True to his word, Captain Frazer reappeared at four o’clock the following day—with the worst news possible. Their powder soaked by an attempt to cross the river, a contingent of Fannin’s men had surrendered. The Mexicans, ignoring the rules of war, did as they had at the Alamo, massacring the captives on the open prairie.

  In the absence of commanding general Houston, Fannin held a council with his officers. They had no clear sense of their enemy—were they facing two hundred or four hundred or a thousand men? Now that their pointless wait for the return of the others was over, they decided the best course was to evacuate Fort Defiance the next day, an action, in looking back, he probably should have taken in the first place.

  But, as they prepared to head out the next morning, Fannin delayed yet again. After spotting a Mexican cavalry patrol, a cat-and-mouse fight unfolded with Texians and Mexicans playing a deadly and time-consuming game of pursuit-and-retreat. The result was another day lost.

  Finally, at nine o’clock on Saturday, March 19, after a full week’s delay in following orders, a line of three hundred troops marched out of Fort Defiance. Oxen pulled heavily loaded wagons and carts carrying baggage and the sick, as well as a half dozen cannons, a brass howitzer, and hundreds of spare muskets. As a parting gesture, the Texians put the torch to the town, leaving “the half-destroyed buildings of the fort, still overhung with dark clouds of smoke from the smouldering flames.”6

  RETREAT FROM GOLIAD

  The San Antonio River presented the first obstacle to the fleeing Texians. The horsemen and infantry crossed the shallow water easily. But some of the draft animals balked at climbing the muddy east bank, and one of the largest of the cannons tumbled into the river.

  The Alabama Red Rovers in the vanguard turned back. Putting down their guns, they waded into the water; putting their shoulders to the wheels, they helped push the rest of the cannons up the steep and slippery slope. But forward progress slowed to a halt and the men’s determination flagged—just as had happened on the aborted mission to the Alamo weeks earlier.

  Despite the delay, advance scouts reported that the due-east escape route was still clear. General Urrea apparently remained unaware of the Texian evacuation. On clearing the river, the Texians trudged on. But men and officers alike recognized that the large quantities of goods they carried held them back and began to jettison their supplies. “Before we had gone half a mile,” reported one of the New Orleans Greys, “our track was marked by objects of various kinds scattered about the road, and several carts had broken down or been left behind.”7

  Six miles on, Colonel Fannin decided to rest the oxen, which showed signs of becoming “wild and contrary.”8 While the animals grazed on a patch of green grass, the men rested—and the officers argued.

  Several took exception to Fannin’s order to halt the line of march in the middle of open prairie. Coleto Creek lay less than five miles away, its banks lined with trees, which offered a defensive situation quite like that at Concepción. Better there than here, some thought. We should press on. One Alabama captain, Jack Shackelford, argued vehemently for “the necessity of getting under the protection of timber” as soon as possible.9 But Fannin
rejected Shackelford’s pleas. Having prevailed once in a fight with the Mexicans, he clung to the desperate belief that he could beat them again. Shackelford was overruled, and an hour elapsed before the march resumed at one o’clock.

  Fannin’s little army crossed another stream, the Manahuilla Creek, and three miles further on, with the tree line at Coleto Creek now in plain view, several soldiers in the rear guard noticed “something that resembled a man on horseback.”

  When the silhouette remained motionless, the scouts decided the object “must be a tree or some other inanimate object.”10

  Some minutes later, they squinted hard at a barely distinguishable thin black line along the horizon. Again the lookouts decided there was nothing to fear, maybe just a herd of cattle. But soon a black mass, growing larger by the moment, took on the unmistakable shape of men on horseback. It was Urrea’s cavalry.

  Fannin reacted immediately, ordering artillerymen with a six-pound cannon to move to the rear of the column and fire on what the Texians could now see were two companies of Mexican cavalry and one of infantry. The cannon fire fell short, and Fannin, convinced the Mexicans planned only to skirmish and plunder the Texian supplies, ordered his men to keep marching toward the cover offered by the wooded riverbank, now less than two miles ahead. As ordered, the Texians “marched onward, cool and deliberately,” so as not to spook the oxen.11

  Once again, however—this time for the last time—an equipment failure brought Fannin’s column to a standstill. An ammunition cart broke down, and with no time for repairs, Fannin saw no alternative. The fight would have to happen here.

  He tried to make the best of a bad situation, and he ordered his men to establish a perimeter. Unable to move to higher ground, the Texians occupied a small depression, several feet lower in altitude than the surrounding prairie. Stands of trees were within sight but unreachable.

  The Texian defense took the shape of a hollow square. Needing cover, they arranged piles of cargo and the wagons around its perimeter, then shot some of the oxen, using the carcasses to fill some of the gaps in an improvised breastwork. Fannin had cannons positioned in the corners of the square, manned by four artillery companies. They finished setting up their improvised defense not a moment too soon; by this time a second Mexican force was in sight to the north, maneuvering into a position to prevent the Texians from reaching the creek.

  Left outside the defenses were several hospital wagons full of wounded. Frightened by the oncoming army, Mexican wagon drivers, who had been working for the Texians, had abandoned their carts and headed for the Mexican line, leaving the frightened steers to run where they would. Now the wagons were stranded, about fifty yards outside the defensive square, vulnerable to the approaching Mexicans.

  There was no time to bring them back, but one of the orderlies assigned to caring for the wounded, Abel Morgan, refused to abandon them. He got himself a musket from a munitions wagon inside the defensive square and sprinted back to his wagon, along with four other volunteers. They positioned themselves to defend the wounded in the fight that, everyone knew, was only minutes away.

  In the moments before the battle began, the Texians gazed out on an intimidating array of the enemy, which now virtually surrounded their improvised defensive position. The rules of engagement had changed in one major way: With many of their oxen now dead, the Texians were going nowhere. They had no choice but to make their stand.

  THE BATTLE OF THE PRAIRIE

  As the Mexican army approached, Colonel Fannin ordered his troops to hold their fire. He didn’t want to hear the report of a Texian rifle until the enemy was in point-blank range—there was no ammunition to spare.

  The first of General Urrea’s men moved on what had been the front of the advancing Texian column. Mexican cavalrymen, now dismounted, marched forward and, from a distance of some two hundred yards, unleashed their first volley. No men fell, but the Mexicans continued to advance. When their second volley went “whizzing over our heads,” Captain Shackelford ordered his men to sit down for cover. The third volley drew blood, with several Texians hit by musket balls.

  Fannin issued “orders . . . in a calm and decided manner,” despite the tension.12 As he stood just behind the front line, reminding his men to hold their fire, he narrowly missed death. A musket ball blasted away the hammer of his rifle, disabling the gun but leaving him unhurt.

  At a distance of a hundred yards, the enemy halted to reload their guns. Fannin saw his moment: At last, he ordered his men to open fire.

  Despite a hail of bullets, balls, and cannonballs, the Mexicans, some of whom had fought at the Alamo, charged. With their officers prodding and directing, they advanced in the face of the musketry and the crack of the Texian rifles. Many Mexicans fell, dead and wounded, but to the Texians, uncertain of how many attackers there were—some thought five hundred, others a thousand or more—the tide of Mexicans never seemed to stop.

  The firing took a toll on the Texian defenders, too. A ball struck Fannin in the thigh; though it missed the bone, it opened a serious flesh wound. But he remained standing, issuing orders.

  To the rear, a second front opened when an even larger body of Mexican infantry swarmed forward to fire their first volley. Once the smoke cleared, the Texians defending the rear fired back with both rifles and cannons, “mowing [the enemy] down with tremendous slaughter.”13 The Mexican infantrymen left standing went down on their bellies, rising only to shoot at—and be shot at by—the defender’s marksmen.

  The orderly Abel Morgan found himself in the middle of the intense fight “where balls were whizzing about like bees swarming.” Of the four men who’d joined him at the hospital wagons, one took a musket to the skull; it opened a hole in the man’s head but didn’t kill him on the spot; he handed his rifle to Morgan. Another rifleman went down, a bone in his upper leg smashed by a musket ball. One of the doctors, Joseph Barnard, came from inside Fannin’s square to help defend the hospital wagons, and with his help the men held off the Mexicans.

  A cavalry charge to the Texians’ rear came next. More than two hundred strong, the Mexicans raced forward, lances gleaming, issuing war cries as they came. At a distance of sixty yards, they met with a barrage of rifle fire. Two loads of canister fire ripped into their ranks, and the survivors who could retreated. It would be the last cavalry charge of the day. “Many were the Mexicans I saw leave their horses that day,” remembered one Texian, “who never were to mount them again.”14

  But the Texians couldn’t maintain their fire. Mexican sharpshooters had targeted the artillerymen, and many lay dead or wounded. The cannons grew overheated; with no source of water to cool and swab them, their touchholes clogged. The artillery gradually went silent, leaving the Texians to rely on muskets and rifles alone.

  The Mexicans made repeated charges; in the face of Texian gunfire, still doing damage without the cannons, they retreated each time. Only when darkness began to fall, more than two hours into the fighting, did the firing cease. The Mexicans withdrew, making camp in the trees at Coleto Creek a mile away.

  Men and horses, wounded and dead, lay on a battlefield littered with abandoned guns and other weapons. The outmanned Texians, even without natural cover, had made the Mexicans pay dearly.

  SURRENDER

  With the quieting of the guns, the terrible aftersounds of battle grew audible, with the groans of the dying accompanying the cries of the wounded calling for water. There was no water to be had in the middle of the prairie, and, as one doctor reported of the injured, their “misery was greatly aggravated” by the lack of water.15 Then the word went around there was no food. In the rush to render Goliad unusable, the food supplies had accidentally been burned in Fort Defiance.

  The wounded Fannin, barely able to stand, took the counsel of his officers. There were nine Texians dead and more than fifty wounded. Many of the oxen had wandered off and others shot by Texians and Mexicans. There were simply too
few teams to transport the wounded disabled by their injuries. That made a full retreat impossible.

  One option called for abandoning the wounded, spiking the guns, and taking the fight directly to the Mexican line, hoping to break through, find cover in the woods beyond, and eventually gain the road to Victoria. “Better to sacrifice a part than the whole,” the argument went, better to avoid “plac[ing] ourselves at the mercy of a foe in whose honour and humanity no trust could be reposed.”16 The massacre at the Alamo taught them that.

  But Fannin and most of his officers rejected the desperate plan. They refused to leave the wounded, men whose lives might be saved; if left behind, he was certain, they would face only death by bayonet. Instead, they decided, the Texians would dig in and fight on.

  Fannin ordered his men to make a trench around the perimeter, and for hours men wielding shovels worked to dig a two-foot-deep ditch around the one-acre Texian camp. The carts and more animal carcasses were rearranged to provide better cover. And then the men attempted to sleep, though the night was cold, the blankets few.

  The long and starless night also offered the Mexicans cover, and they could be heard retrieving the dead and wounded; their casualties far exceeded Texian losses. But the Mexicans also busied themselves in other ways. They peppered the Texian camp with occasional sniper shot from what seemed like every direction. Buglers accompanying patrols played Mexican battle songs to disrupt the sleep—and the nerves—of the Texians. General Urrea wanted to rattle his enemy.

  At daylight, the Mexicans presented a new and impressive military front. Reinforcements had arrived, bringing with them two four-pound cannons and a howitzer. The artillery now stood poised, ready to fire, two hundred yards away between the Texians and the timberline, fronting a long line of Mexican troops. Fannin and his men had known they were greatly outnumbered, but this display led some to estimate the disparity was seven to one, or more, now that the Texians’ effective force had been reduced to some two hundred men.