Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  At seven o’clock the Mexican cannons roared, sending cannonballs arcing toward the Texian camp. But the firing stopped as suddenly as it had begun and, during the quiet that followed, the Mexicans did not charge. Instead, they raised a white flag, indicating not surrender, but a request for parley.

  The Texians responded with a white flag of their own.

  Despite his painful leg wound, Fannin limped to a midpoint on the empty prairie, accompanied by two officers. Met by three of Urrea’s officers, the Texian colonel listened to their terms of surrender. The Mexicans promised the lives of the Texians would be spared, and that those who surrendered would be treated in all respects as prisoners of war consistent with the practice of civilized nations. The victors further promised to return the wounded to Goliad, where they would be properly tended, and the healthy prisoners would, in eight days, be permitted to sail from a nearby port back to the United States. In return, the Texians must lay down their guns and promise not to raise arms against Mexico in future.17

  Houston was too far away to consult, but Fannin, his officers, and his men saw little alternative: They accepted Urrea’s terms. In the face of annihilation, they opted for what they understood would be survival.

  RETREAT UNDER GUARD

  At first, the Mexicans remained true to their word. That afternoon—the date was March 20—they marched the Texian prisoners who were well enough to walk back to Goliad, where they arrived shortly after sunset.

  At Fort Defiance, the Texian force was confined to the church. There wasn’t enough room in the small space for the hundreds of men, many of them wounded, to lie down. They huddled together, with armed Mexican guards occupying the center of the church that had become a prison.

  The next day, carts ferried more wounded, including Colonel Fannin, from the field of battle back to Goliad. Meanwhile, the men shut up in the church received no food or water.

  On Wednesday, the prisoners were permitted to leave their cramped quarters to sleep outdoors, and the Mexicans moved their own wounded men into the shelter of the church. The men breathed a sigh of relief in the open air and were cheered to hear that Colonel Fannin had been sent to the port of Copano to charter a schooner, the William and Francis, for their return.

  While Fannin was gone, the Mexicans marched in more prisoners. Some of those who had gone to Refugio had been captured after their attempt to aid the settlers. The prisoner head count now exceeded four hundred men.

  When he returned on Saturday, Fannin’s good spirits cheered the men. He expressed confidence in their imminent release. Although the William and Francis had sailed, he expected another ship would soon be found to carry them to New Orleans.

  On the Mexican side, however, a different end of the drama at Goliad was being discussed. General Urrea respected Fannin. He recognized that the Texians had surrendered because they trusted him; “under any other circumstances they would have sold their lives dearly, fighting to the last.” Despite being under orders to take no prisoners, he had done so, and now had written to Santa Anna, seeking to use “my influence with the general-in-chief to save them if possible, from being butchered, particularly Fannin.”18

  It seems Santa Anna was not persuaded. On the morning of March 27, the eighth day of captivity, a Mexican officer summoned two of the Texian doctors to his tent, pleasantly located in a peach orchard several hundred yards from the fort. “He was very serious and grave in countenance,” one of the doctors later wrote, “but we took little notice of it at that time.”19 His purpose unclear, the officer left the doctors to wait, though they wished to get back to their patients in the fortress.

  While the doctors waited in puzzlement, the Mexican soldiers, acting under orders from Santa Anna, divided the prisoners into three companies and marched them out of the fort in different directions. Reassured by rumors that a ship awaited them and they were being evacuated for the coast, some of the men departed Fort Defiance singing “Home Sweet Home,” assuming they were going to freedom.

  Flanked on both sides by armed soldiers, the unsuspecting Texians marched perhaps a half mile before being ordered to halt. The Mexicans then formed a line across from them, revealing themselves to be a long and efficient firing squad.

  Before the Texians could react, the soldiers raised their rifles and muskets and shot their prisoners at short range. Mexican lancers and infantrymen armed with bayonets pursued any Texians who managed to survive the gunfire to turn and run.

  Back at the fort, Colonel Fannin was imprisoned in a small room inside the church. He heard the executioners’ volleys and was told that he, too, would be shot. His captors took him into the church courtyard, assisting him in this final walk, as the wound in his right thigh left him lame. Knowing he would soon die, he handed over his watch to the officer in charge, asking that, in return, his body might be buried. He gave the officer all the money he had and asked that the executioners not “place their muskets so near as to scorch his face with powder.” The officer, in broken English, promised that Fannin’s remains would be interred “with all necessary formalities.”

  Seated on a chair because of his leg wound, his own handkerchief covering his eyes, Fannin unbuttoned his shirt, accepting his fate. Yet, once again, the Mexicans broke their word. The firing squad shot him from a distance of two feet, and Fannin’s remains were unceremoniously added to a funeral pyre with other Texians.20

  Two dozen Texians lived, among them orderlies and doctors the Mexicans needed to care for their wounded and a few carpenters and other artisans. Some survived thanks to the intervention of a Mexican woman, Francita Alavez. The wife of a cavalry captain, she used her influence—and the unspoken approval of some Mexican officers disgusted at the needless slaughter of the Texian prisoners—to save some of the soldiers. Having secured their release the previous night, she kept them hidden.21 Alavez would be remembered as the Angel of Goliad: As one survivor put it, “Her name deserves to be recorded in letters of gold.”22 But more than four hundred men had been murdered in cold blood.

  The fortress that was Goliad now belonged to Santa Anna’s army. Another atrocity had been committed in the name of El Presidente. And the ranks of Sam Houston’s already small army had just become significantly smaller.

  TWELVE

  The Texian Exodus

  There was not a man in the Alamo but what, in his death, honored the proud name of an American.

  Let the men of Texas avenge their deaths.

  —SAM HOUSTON TO JAMES COLLINSWORTH, MARCH 17, 1836

  After he had issued his orders to Fannin, Sam Houston, then in Gonzales some sixty miles north, worried and wondered. “I am fearful Goliad is besieged by the enemy,” he confided to a fellow officer.1 It would be weeks before he learned of Fannin’s fate, and in the meantime, more immediate worries occupied his mind.

  In mid-March, with the Alamo gone and the status of Fannin and his men uncertain, Houston understood that the survival of the republic depended on the few men he still had at his command. When Mrs. Dickinson told him of the fall of the Alamo, she warned that as many as five thousand Mexican troops were on the march; with a force of less than a tenth that size, there was no way the Texians, at least for the moment, could afford to face down the enemy. In short, Houston and his troops needed to get out of the reach of Santa Anna’s army. For the moment, at least, there was only one wise strategy: Retreat.

  No time could be wasted. The army would travel light, he decreed, telling his troops to take only what they could carry on their persons. He had the men sink two unwieldy cannons—his only artillery—in the Guadalupe River. Extra clothing and supplies were ordered left behind.

  Left without army protection, the civilians had no choice but to retreat, too. Knowing the Mexicans could not be trusted not to punish civilians, Houston ordered that most of the army’s baggage wagons and oxen be given to the citizens of the town to aid in their escape.

  The caravan
of troops and tagalong civilians, including women and children, was on the march by midnight on Wednesday, March 16. They kept moving through the night; not until near morning did Houston order a halt for an hour’s rest. As his men ate breakfast, they heard explosions from the direction of Gonzales.

  Deaf Smith, along with red-headed Captain Henry Karnes and a handful of other men, had been instructed by Houston that “not a roof large enough to shelter a Mexican’s head was to be left, [along] with everything else that could be of any service to the enemy.” Staying behind, Smith and his men had placed canisters of gunpowder in the houses before lighting the town on fire.

  All of Texas was at stake and Houston didn’t want to leave anything that would be of use to Santa Anna.

  * * *

  • • •

  MARCHING TOWARD THE COLORADO RIVER, which he wanted to put between his army and the Mexicans, General Houston worked hard to keep morale up. He made sure the men saw him, riding slowly from the front to the rear of the column, wagging his forefinger as he went, counting his troops. On the way to the rear of the column, he was heard to say, “We are the rise of eight hundred strong, and with a good position can whip ten to one of the enemy.”2

  By sundown on March 17, the caravan reached the Colorado, and the Army of Texas camped at Burnham Crossing. As the moon rose, Houston sat before a flickering fire. He held a knife in one hand, an oak stick in the other, nervously whittling and talking quietly with an aide, George Washington Hockley, a friend from Tennessee days.

  When he had let his head count be overheard, Houston had exaggerated; his numbers and his confident words, he hoped, would keep spirits up. In fact, his army numbered more like six hundred men, including a hundred-odd new volunteers who’d joined the march that day.

  Houston had also exaggerated when he had said that his Texians were ten times the fighters the Mexicans were. Most of his men were raw recruits. “It would have been madness to have hazarded a contest,” Houston believed. “The first principles of the drill had not been taught the men.”3 He also needed to rein in the overeager men who were outraged at the retreat, those who wanted to fight the enemy at the first opportunity. They wanted revenge for the Alamo; he wanted to win the war. Fighting too soon could risk everything.

  To shape a disciplined fighting force, he needed, above all, time. He needed to establish discipline, to practice formations, to teach his troops how to attack and withdraw. He must rely on speed and mobility—and surprise—and that required practiced coordination. “Our forces must not be shut in forts,” Houston believed.4 Even before Travis and his men had met their end at the Alamo, Houston had learned that lesson at Horseshoe Bend fighting with Andrew Jackson. Even a good fortification is not impregnable.

  In the morning, the river crossing began in a heavy rain; with Mexicans in pursuit, the Texians couldn’t afford to wait for the sky to clear. Families first, Houston ordered, and the fleeing citizens, numbering more than a thousand, carrying what little they could, took turns going aboard the flat-topped vessel to be poled to the Colorado’s east bank. Next Texian troops crowded onto the ferry’s broad deck, which shuttled back and forth all day.

  The rain swelled what was already a wide, deep, and fast-moving watercourse; no Mexican army could get troops and supplies across by crossing the Colorado under these conditions. And Houston, his entourage safely on the river’s left bank, made sure. He ordered the ferry set afire. With its useless remains on the bottom of the Colorado River, he had just bought his army some time.

  THE ENEMY ACROSS THE WATER

  Two days after Houston’s army established camp on the other side of the river, Deaf Smith caught up with Houston. Dressed in his battered hat, ragged shoes, and oversized pantaloons he could hardly have looked less military. But he had done his job and more: While the army’s officers marched and drilled the army, Houston’s little spy company, led by Smith and Henry Karnes, had been on the move, constantly on the lookout for the enemy. When they observed fresh horse tracks in the saturated sandy soil a few miles from the camp, they guessed a band of enemy scouts had passed within the hour.

  After checking their guns, they set off in pursuit. The Mexicans tried to flee, but in an exchange of fire, one enemy rider was killed, a horse was lamed by a pistol shot—and the Texians got themselves a prisoner. The rest of the Mexicans got away, but the Texian scouting party took the dead lancer’s pistols, picked up a pair of saddlebags, and headed back to Beason’s Ford with their captive, his hands tied behind his back.

  Karnes escorted the man to Houston. The Mexican begged for his life and, after being told he would be spared, he spilled his story. He was attached to a force commanded by General Joaquín Ramírez de Sesma, which consisted of “six or eight hundred men” along with a cavalry of sixty or seventy horses and two pieces of artillery. They were camped several miles upstream but on the opposite bank of the Colorado.

  Houston posted detachments at three nearby crossings; when the level of the river fell in the days to come, his army would be able to cross it. Meanwhile, the usual hot-blooded officers were keen to take the offensive. Some men who had eagerly awaited a strong leader to take charge of the army began to doubt whether Houston was the right man after all, and a few quiet voices questioned his bravery, asking aloud whether Houston wasn’t a coward for not immediately engaging Sesma’s force. But cooler heads understood, as one captain put it, that “there are times when it requires more courage to retreat than to stand and fight.”5 A few soldiers deserted in frustration, but, since Houston held the reins, for the next several days his army made no major moves.

  Couriers came and went, bringing disheartening news. To Houston’s shock, he learned that the government of the Texas republic had also retreated. When word of the Alamo debacle reached Washington-on-the-Brazos, some delegates immediately saddled their horses and rode out of town. Others got blind drunk. The good men who stayed got down to business, convening a session of the convention that lasted until 4:00 A.M. the next morning. David G. Burnet, a transplanted New Yorker, emerged as president. Thomas Jefferson Rusk, a veteran of the Come-and-Take-It fight at Gonzales, became secretary of war. Once elected, however, the new officeholders’ first order of business had been to organize a removal eastward to Harrisburg.

  Houston took the government’s decision as a personal insult. “It was a poor compliment to me,” he wrote to Rusk, a sometime legal client of Houston’s back in Nacogdoches, “to suppose I would not advise the convention” when the need arose to move.6 If the nation’s leading officers ran in panic, then wouldn’t every settler do the same? Houston had seen the hardships of the Gonzales families in his party, and now he feared the panic would spread quickly.

  The scenes of civilian retreat varied little, as one witness reported. “The road was filled with carts and wagons loaded with women and children, while other women, for whom there was no room in the wagons, were seen walking, some of them barefoot, some carrying their smaller children in their arms or on their backs, their other children following barefooted; and other women were again seen with but one shoe, having lost the other in the mud; some of the wagons were broken down and others again were bogged in the deep mud. Taken all in all, the sight was the most painful by far, that I ever witnessed.”7

  A Gonzales man brought more ill tidings: Fannin had surrendered. Though the ultimate fate of Goliad’s defenders remained unknown to Houston, he was certain Fannin and his four hundred men could no longer be counted on to fight for Texas, imprisoned as they were in Fort Defiance. That meant not only had his army lost one wing at the Alamo but the other had been captured. Appointed commander in chief of the Armies of the Republic, Houston now had just his own command, some hundreds of men living in the cold without tents, drilling along the Colorado. It had become Texas’s last best hope.

  THIRTEEN

  An Army Assembles

  It were perhaps hyperbolical to say “the eyes of the world
are upon him,” but assuredly the people of Texas . . . regard his present conduct as decisive of the fate of their country.

  —PRESIDENT OF TEXAS DAVID BURNET ON SAM HOUSTON

  You know I am not easily depressed,” Sam Houston admitted in a letter to Secretary of War Rusk, but “I have found the darkest hours of my life! . . . For forty-eight hours, I have not eaten an ounce, nor have I slept.”1

  The widespread fear that swept across Texas did produce one positive result: Houston’s army began to grow rapidly. His considered strategy of retreat was beginning to win converts, as men from the more populated region of East Texas saw the risks expanding toward them; they flocked to save their homes, to fight for their families, and to stand up for the fragile new republic. The Army of Texas camped at Beason’s Ford grew to eleven hundred, then twelve hundred, and the ranks continued to swell. “Men are flocking to camp,” reported Houston. “In a few days my force will be highly respectable.”2

  If his wasn’t yet a true fighting machine, these green volunteers, with a smattering of former American soldiers, did show signs of learning how to obey orders. One night Houston discovered for himself that the training had begun to take.

  After an inspection of the camp perimeter, Houston returned well after dark. An armed sentry spied him in the gloom and demanded, “Who comes there?”