Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  A NARROW ESCAPE

  Santa Anna’s impulsive pursuit of the Texas government wasn’t accomplishing what he’d hoped it would. On Sunday, April 17, he again missed a chance to roll up the rebel officials.

  His advance guard galloped into New Washington just in time to watch a rowboat, with President David Burnet and his party aboard, make for the schooner Flash. Though the retreating Texians remained in rifle range, the chivalrous colonel Juan Almonte, commander of the Mexican cavalrymen on the shore, spotted a woman in the boat—she was Mrs. Burnet—and ordered his men to hold their fire. The Mexican horsemen watched helplessly as the Texians boarded the Flash, a riverboat outfitted as a privateer in service to the newly founded Texas navy. Riding the tide, the little vessel sailed downstream toward Galveston Island.

  When he got the news of Burnet’s escape, Santa Anna chose not to countermarch; he would not rejoin the rest of his army but instead pushed on to New Washington. When they reached the town the next day, most of his men enjoyed the considerable stores in its warehouses, including flour, soap, tobacco, and other goods. Santa Anna would make the Texians pay once more—he planned to burn this town on departing—but first he dispatched a squad of scouts to locate Houston.

  In his mind’s eye, His Excellency saw a new main objective, Houston’s army. If it was within striking distance, he would, he decided, “intercept Houston’s march and . . . destroy with one stroke the armed forces and the hopes of the revolutionists.”8 That goal seemed suddenly close at hand when his scouts returned, bringing word that Houston was less than a day’s march away. With opportunity near, a plan was made.

  Thus, both armies aimed for a point of convergence. Their common destination was a place called Lynchburg, yet another river town. This one overlooked the watery intersection where the Buffalo Bayou joined the San Jacinto River.

  Believing Houston to be in full retreat, Santa Anna expected the Texian commander to make for Lynch’s Ferry, where ferry service connected the open prairie on the west bank of the San Jacinto with Lynchburg and the rest of East Texas; this was Houston’s best and probably only escape route. Santa Anna planned to surprise the Texian army before it crossed and, at last, finish the job of crushing the rebellion.

  Meanwhile, Sam Houston was doing everything in his power to get there first. He, too, hoped for the element of surprise, when his men, now more than ever ready to fight for their freedom, turned and made their stand.

  Just two roads led to Lynch’s landing. With the Texians coming from the west and the Mexicans from the south, the armies were on a collision course. Their now inevitable meeting would decide the future of Texas.

  A CHANCE TO SAVE TEXAS

  General Houston’s orders worked their way down the line. Leave the baggage behind, the men were told; pack just three days’ worth of rations for a quick march. A small contingent of some seventy-five healthy men would be staying in Harrisburg to safeguard the two hundred or so sick and wounded. If attacked, these guards were to shoot the two Mexican prisoners and blow up the ammunition wagon. For everyone else, as one soldier put it, “The long cherished wish of our men to meet the enemy seemed likely to be speedily gratified.”9

  Whatever the skepticism of a few officers and soldiers who still held deep reservations concerning Houston’s leadership, more of his men had warmed to him—and to the cause. On the eve of the battle, they fell into line, ready to face up to the cold cruelty of Santa Anna.

  Before the army broke camp, Houston, seated in the saddle on his tall white horse, addressed his army, which surrounded him in an open square formation. After weeks of revealing little of his strategy, in the speech of a lifetime he told his soldiers that the time to fight now approached. Houston spoke of glory, of a great victory. But as he reached the conclusion of his address, he minced no words.

  “We will meet the enemy. Some of us may be killed and must be killed; but, soldiers, remember the Alamo, the Alamo! The Alamo!”10

  The men heard his passion—and they shared it. “The watchword had no sooner fallen from his mouth, then it was caught up by every man in the army, and one simultaneous shout broke up into the sky—Remember the Alamo.”11 They were ready to fight in memory of their brother Texians, fallen for their cause. As one colonel observed, “After such a speech, but damned few will be taking prisoners—that I know.”12

  A private in Captain Moseley Baker’s company spoke for many, if not all, the soldiers when he remarked, “Had General Houston called upon me to jump into the whirlpool of the Niagara as the only means of saving Texas, I would have made the leap.”13 With a battle imminent, the disgruntled rumblings diminished with the rise of the primal urge to avenge the deaths of Travis’s and Fannin’s forces.

  Privately, Houston was philosophical. As he wrote in a letter to his friend Henry Raguet in Nacogdoches, “This morning we are in preparation to meet Santa Anna. It is the only chance to save Texas. . . . We will only have about seven hundred to march with [and] . . . the odds are greatly against us. I leave the result in the hands of a wise God.”14

  At least his men would proceed with full stomachs. After many meals of half-cooked meat from beeves slaughtered along the route, the men ate corn bread. A flatboat loaded with supplies for the enemy—confiscated from a Tory Texian—provided cornmeal, out of which the men improvised crude dough cakes on sticks, cooked over their open fires. And then they marched.

  Two miles downstream from Harrisburg, they met their first obstacle, but the scouts and the cavalry led the way, swimming their horses across Buffalo Bayou, twenty feet deep and flooding its banks. The infantry followed aboard a leaky ferryboat. Houston went across first and helped rig a makeshift cable of rope “fastened to both sides of the stream, which enabled the boat to make more rapid trips, and kept it from floating down the stream.”15

  Lookouts maintained a vigilant watch: General Cos and the Mexican reinforcements, coming from the rear, could be expected to be following the same route. A delay for repairs to the boat using the floorboards from a nearby house meant the process took much of the day. The men already across took cover in bushes beside the road, but no enemy sightings occurred before Rusk stepped back onto solid ground with the last of the soldiers. He had stood ankle deep in water as the ferry rode lower and lower, but the men, along with the two heavy cannons, the Twin Sisters, were now safely across.

  Reunited on the same side of the Buffalo Bayou, the army resumed its advance, following along the right bank. Only after midnight did Houston call a halt, “for a short time, and without refreshments.”16 The army passed a tense night, sleeping on the cold and soggy ground, rifles within reach.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS THE TEXIANS moved along the Buffalo Bayou, the Mexicans, barely a dozen miles away, set fire to New Washington, torching “a fine warehouse on the wharf, and all the houses in town.” Even as the smoke filled the sky, a messenger arrived in a rush: Houston and his force had been sighted.

  When the news reached Santa Anna, still in the town, he leapt onto his horse. He spurred the animal toward the front of the column. “The enemy are coming!” he yelled. “The enemy are coming.”17

  A column of attack was soon formed, and Santa Anna’s army headed north. The fight for Texas loomed closer yet, now mere hours away.

  A SMALL SKIRMISH

  On April 20, the Texians moved out at daybreak. After crossing a timber bridge over another watercourse, Vince’s Bayou, they filed past the remnants of campfires. The rain-soaked ash was a reminder that Santa Anna’s army recently walked this route, before veering south toward New Washington.

  After two hours of trudging through mud, Houston ordered a halt for breakfast. But before the food could come off the fires, a scouting party brought news that the Mexicans were also within striking distance of Lynch’s Ferry.

  General Houston knew one thing above all: His Texians had to get there first, and foll
owing a flurry of orders, the hungry men, bolting half-cooked meat, hustled on. The morning became a race for strategic ground, and by midmorning, the Army of Texas reached their destination. To the relief of all, no Mexicans were within sight.

  Looking to establish his line of defense, Houston and his officers surveyed the likely battlefield. It consisted of open prairie, two miles wide east to west. Thickets of trees dotted the perimeter, and the field was bounded on three sides by water. The Buffalo Bayou formed the north boundary, the San Jacinto River the east, with the ferry crossing at their joining. A small body of water, Peggy Lake, occupied the southeast corner of the field. After one of the wettest springs in Texas memory, all the shorelines had broadened into swamps.

  Houston selected a grove of live oaks for his army. The immense trees, their branches curtained with low-hanging Spanish moss, would provide ideal cover for his riflemen. Before them lay the broad prairie, covered with tall grasses. Houston posted his cavalry on his right flank, half-hidden by a copse of trees. At the center, the Twin Sisters would anchor the Texian line.

  The men were well fed and their guns stacked when, shortly after midday, the first of Santa Anna’s force came into view. Mexican cavalrymen appeared atop the low rise that divided the prairie, a line of infantrymen in their wake.

  From his vantage a mile away, Santa Anna could see little of Houston’s force, obscured as it was in the shadows of the trees. His scouts advised him that the enemy had two cannons, but that did not deter him. The Mexican leader ordered a company of troops to advance on the rebels while he moved closer and took cover in a stand of trees. He hoped to lure these backwoodsmen from their lair; in the open field, the trained Mexican horsemen would have the enemy at their mercy.

  On the Texian side, the music of blaring trumpets grew audible as a company of Mexican cavalry approached. “Houston showed himself restless and uneasy,” remembered one Texian, “casting his eyes towards the cannon and toward the advancing enemy.”

  The general ordered most of the men to lie flat on the grass; the less Santa Anna knew about the size and arrangement of the Texian force, the better. Then he issued the order all had been waiting for. “Clear the guns and Fire!”18

  His artillerymen had no practice firing the Twin Sisters—they had neither powder nor cannonballs to spare—so the great booms at that moment were the first heard from the Cincinnati cannons. The shots wounded no Mexicans—the angle of fire was too high—but the dragoons halted, then wheeled, reversing their course back to Santa Anna’s ranks.

  Next His Excellency ordered his own cannon brought forward. Once it had been hauled under the cover of a dense wood within range of the Texian camp, the Mexican twelve-pounder opened fire. The first round fired by the brass cannon known as the Golden Standard ripped through the treetops, soaring into the Buffalo Bayou beyond. Only a few branches fell harmlessly among the Texians.

  In response, Houston ordered the Twin Sisters advanced to the edge of the prairie. When the Texian six-pounders resumed firing, their loads of iron balls and scrap drew the first blood of the afternoon. A Mexican captain was badly wounded, his horse and two mules killed. As the exchange of fire continued, the Texians, too, sustained a casualty when a copper ball struck their artillery commander, Lieutenant Colonel Neill, smashing his hip.

  The action slowed, but some of Houston’s officers urged a major attack, arguing they might gain the upper hand if they could seize the single Mexican cannon. The general had his doubts, but at about four o’clock Colonel Sidney Sherman rode up and proposed a mission to capture the Mexicans’ gun. Houston at first resisted. But Sherman, a Kentucky volunteer who had sold his cotton business to come to Texas to join the fight, persisted. He wasn’t alone and, in the face of many men eager to carry the battle to the enemy, Houston agreed to permit one foray onto enemy ground.

  Though Houston authorized only a reconnaissance mission, almost seventy Texian cavalrymen rode out. Deaf Smith and Henry Karnes were among those who joined Sherman’s ranks, as was Mirabeau Lamar, a Georgian who rode a borrowed horse. But in midexecution, the mission changed: Upon seeing the Mexican cannon being withdrawn from its advance position, the Texians charged into a nest of Mexican horsemen.

  A brutal fight ensued. It nearly ended in disaster, since the improvised Texas cavalry—they were merely riflemen on horseback—needed to dismount after discharging their unwieldly long rifles if they wished to reload. But Mexican cavalry, armed with sabers and lances, just kept coming.

  It was a near thing. Secretary of War Rusk had joined in—and he was lucky to survive the episode. Surrounded by enemy lancers, Rusk made it back to the Texian camp only after Private Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar (a future president of Texas) came to his rescue, driving his stallion into a circle of Mexican dragoons about to capture Rusk, creating an opening for both men to escape. The Texians scampered back to their defensive line, having lost several horses and sustained two casualties. With the Twin Sisters firing on them, the Mexicans also retreated.

  Houston wasn’t happy: Even on the eve of what he thought might be the biggest battle of the war, his overeager men only half listened to his orders. Tomorrow, he thought, they would have to do better.

  Like two Texas bull elks circling one another before locking horns, Houston and Santa Anna were each getting the measure of the other, assessing and gauging. They had traded cavalry charges and artillery fire; both sides suffered a few casualties. As darkness fell, neither army occupied an enviable position, with the Texians boxed in by a bayou behind and a bottleneck at the Lynchburg crossing. They had no line of easy retreat. Santa Anna’s camp was no better, situated on a small rise with the San Jacinto River on one flank and Peggy Lake to the rear.

  Yet the terms of battle had been established, as two armies and two commanders regarded each other, separated by fewer than a thousand yards of prairie grass that swayed peacefully in the evening breeze.

  FIFTEEN

  “Remember the Alamo!”

  We are nerved for the contest, and must conquer or perish.

  —SAM HOUSTON, APRIL 19, 1836

  Sam Houston slept late on April 21. For the first time in days, he lay until full daylight, eyes closed, his head on a coil of rope. As he remembered later, he rested “calmly and profoundly,” newly confident that his “soldiers had eaten the last meal they were to eat till they had won their independence.”1 In a report penned the night before to President Burnet, he dubbed their bivouac “Camp Safety.”

  Around the sleeping general, however, “a restless and anxious spirit pervad[ed] the camp.”2 Some men rose at 4:00 A.M., still believing an all-in encounter the day before would have won the day for Houston’s army. That air of discontent heightened when, at eight o’clock, a Texian scout spotted a column of men approaching from the direction of Harrisburg. Karnes and Smith investigated and reported—as the intercepted dispatches had warned them might happen—that Mexican reinforcements had arrived. General Martín Perfecto de Cos, accompanied by some four hundred men and two hundred supply mules, had marched into Santa Anna’s camp to drumrolls and shouts of joy.

  At that moment, Deaf Smith, always a man of few words, spoke for many. “The enemy is increasing,” he said simply. “Today we must fight, or never.”3 The head count of Houston’s Texian force numbered roughly eight hundred.

  As for the enemy across the field, the Texian scouts reported that Santa Anna’s force had not only grown in number but had spent much of the night constructing a breastwork. Their defensive line, set back from the midfield ridge, now had a five-foot-high mass of luggage, crates, barrels of grain, sacks of corn, and hastily cut brush protecting its left side. The breastwork was flanked by cannons and infantrymen on the river side and cavalry on the other.

  As the sun rose toward its zenith, so did the frustrations of the Texian volunteers. By some accounts, every man was ready to fight and impatient of further delay. But Houston was biding his time one la
st time. He dispatched Deaf Smith to estimate the size of the enemy force. Ignoring the bullets that whistled past, Smith held his glass to his eyes, counting. The numbers were not encouraging: By this latest count, Houston’s army consisted of 783 men, the enemy’s more like fifteen hundred.4

  Aware of the impatience in the ranks, Houston called a council of war. He sat beneath an oak tree surrounded by his six field officers. For almost two hours, he listened to their views, but, in the end, one essential question occupied everyone’s attention: Shall we attack the enemy in their position, or shall we await his attack?

  Finally, Houston called for a vote. By a margin of two to one, the decision was to wait.

  Next Houston sent for Deaf Smith. Houston wanted the bridge over Vince’s Bayou destroyed. This region was unfamiliar to him, relying as he did upon his scouts and a crude map now covered with smudged pencil annotations. But the destruction of the bridge that both armies had used might slow or even prevent the arrival of more Mexican troops and it also prevented his men from retreating.

  Smith and six volunteers mounted up and rode out of camp carrying axes. When they returned—the bridge was eight miles away—the master scout reported that cutting a few timbers “made [Vince’s Bridge] fall into the bayou.”5

  In the meantime, General Houston walked among the men, looking to measure their mood just as his mentor General Jackson liked to do. Many of the volunteers were gathered around campfires, some taking a late lunch.

  “[He] asked us if we wanted to fight,” remembered Private James Winters. “We replied with a shout that we were most anxious to do so.”

  Houston’s response was unambiguous. “Very well,” he told them, “get your dinners and I will lead you into the fight, and if you whip them every one of you shall be a captain.”6