Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  For perhaps five minutes James and Rezin caught their breath, while they all hurried to reload their weapons. Then the whole party of Indians came out of the cover of a small hill about sixty yards away and rushed their position. Surely they would have been overrun but for another stroke of that occasional but dramatic Bowie luck. Theirleader sat on horseback, unperturbed, the buffalo horns and other decoration on his head marking him as a chief. He moved at a walk as he rode along with his men, urging them to valor. James found his own rifle still empty. “Who is loaded?” he yelled. “I am,” came a voice. It was Caiaphas Ham. Bowie told him to bring down the mounted man, and at once Ham fired. His aim was true. The bullet broke the chief's leg and killed his horse, and as he hobbled around on one leg, his rawhide shield raised before him, four of the prospectors finished reloading and sent out a volley that brought him down dead in an instant. When the rest of the war party saw him fall, a number of them rushed to carry him away, only to be shot down, and then more did the same, with like effect.

  For fifteen minutes or more the skirmish raged, the attackers taking more casualties until they retreated to their hill and then began firing flights of arrows at the grove, along with occasional musket shots. About fifteen of them then advanced into yet another cluster of oaks along a creek some sixty yards northwest of the beleaguered explorers, and began a hard sniping fire that severely wounded Doyle in the chest and nicked Coryell. Soon a new leader appeared on horseback, and again James Bowie yelled to find who had a loaded rifle. No one answered, but then the mulatto servant Charles came running up to him carrying Buchanan's rifle. Bowie took it from him, fired, and brought down the rider, and once again the attackers suffered more casualties as they ran out and clustered around their fallen chief. But McCaslan also ran to his fallen comrade, yelling: “Where is the Indian that shot Doyle.” Others screamed to him not to expose himself, that for the foremen on the creek to have hit Doyle they must have rifles rather than muskets. Just then McCaslan saw one of the Caddo arising from the ground, but as he raised his rifle to fire, the enemy moved quicker and shot him in the breast, killing him almost instantly. Armstrong lost his composure, shouted “damn the Indian that shot M'Caslan, where is he?” and then he, too, nearly lost his life when one suddenly appeared before him. He was lucky to escape with a bullet in his rifle stock.

  By this time the balance of the war party had virtually encircled the oak grove where the Bowies, now reduced to ten including the servants, held out. From their cover behind rocks and bushes they poured a steady if ineffective fire in on the besieged Texians, and soon the whites decided that they were too exposed with only the trees to shelter them. They moved, under fire, to the nearby thicket, where they were better concealed, and where the clearing they had made the night before prevented any of the enemy from approaching unseen through the brush. To keep from being spotted by the puffs of smoke from their own muzzles, Bowie and the others immediately moved several paces away after firing, so that the enemy bullets whizzed harmlessly through the bushes. For another two hours, or until around 11 A.M. they continued to hold out, the warriors gaining nothing on them.

  Finally on the western breeze the Bowies smelled smoke, then saw the black clouds and flames in the brush west of them. The enemy had decided to burn them out since they could not shoot them out of their hiding place. Once the blaze took hold, James heard them shouting war whoops behind the barrier of fire, apparently thinking to frighten the whites from their thicket as they advanced behind the wall of flames. The whites frantically scraped away the leaves and dry brush from around their pack animals and their wounded, to prevent the advancing fire from spreading through their position, but then the Bowie fortune held, and when the prairie-grass fire reached the creek and leaped across it, the blaze branched off north and south of their thicket but left them entirely untouched. Meanwhile Charles and Gonzales scrambled around their small perimeter piling rocks and boughs, and even their saddles and packs, into a rude breastwork. Being saved from fire once did not mean they would be again, so when the breastwork was done, the two servants went to work pulling up more dry grass inside the position, and piling rocks around the wounded to shield them from flames as well as arrows and bullets.

  The attackers had withdrawn to their hill when they saw their first fire go out, and for several hours into the afternoon they kept up a desultory sniping that the Bowies and their companions answered as they could. Then around 4 P.M. the wind shifted, affording another opportunity to try to burn them out from a different direction, and a brave warrior stole out to the creek bed and started another prairie fire before Armstrong brought him down with his rifle. This time the fire looked as though it would burn them out in earnest. A wall of flames that Rezin thought reached ten feet high swept toward them, and they knew they could not stop it. As the Bowies saw it approach, they expected the Tawakoni and their confederates to attack, and seeing no prospect of escape, they huddled their band together and concluded that the best thing they could do was to stand in a tight circle around the wounded, place their backs together, and fire a single volley when attacked, then draw their knives and defend themselves as long as they could. Once more that sheath at Big Jim Bowie's belt might hold his life in its grip. If the foe did not attack them, though, they decided to stand as every man for himself until the flames reached their breastwork, and then they would turn all their effort to trying to put out the flames.

  Fortunately the warriors seemed content merely to continue their sniping, and at the same time sent parties in under cover of the fire and smoke to collect their dead and wounded. Then the blaze actually reached the Bowie party. They all frantically pulled up the grass at their feet and used their blankets and bearskins and buffalo robes to beat out the flames. They managed to save most of their packs, but a few animals panicked and broke their tethers, running off into the prairie. They had survived the fire, but it brought down most of the brush that had been their cover, so now they all huddled within the rock breastwork and started building it even higher, using their knives to pry up more stones and even dirt. None had time to look at a pocket watch, but by the setting of the sun James knew it had to be well past 6 P.M. They had been fighting sporadically now for more than ten hours, and were exhausted, their eyes burning from the smoke, their throats parched by the heat of the fire and the tension of their perilous situation. Every one of them felt great relief when they saw the attackers withdraw some distance to camp for the night, obviously abandoning any intention of a further assault that evening. At least that gave them time to continue strengthening their defense, while one or two went out to the creek to fill their water skins. A lone rifle fired at the water party was the only hostile shot that evening, and well into the night the Bowies listened instead to the mournful wailing of the warriors as they sang over their dead. About midnight James heard a single shot in the enemy camp but did not know its meaning. Rezin surmised that, as was supposedly their custom, they were ending the misery of one of their mortally wounded.48

  That evening the Bowies actually planned to attack the Indians in their sleep, thinking that pluck and surprise might overcome the disparity in numbers, but when James looked about and saw only six of them sufficiently fit to fight, and that they would have to leave the wounded completely defenseless, he abandoned the idea, and wisely. They took turns at guard during the night, and when Ham stood his watch he saw one of the panicked pack mules wander back to the camp, and he quickly grabbed and tethered it. Then, an hour or two before daylight, he heard sounds of movement off toward the enemy's camp and immediately woke the rest of his friends. They grabbed their rifles and took their places, each expecting a night attack that probably would be an end to them. What they heard, in fact, was the attackers leaving. They had given up the fight, not uncommon when casualties began to make any gains too costly.

  Sometime after 8 A.M. two of the whites carefully walked out to where the hostiles had been camped and found the site abandoned. Though a dozen of the Taw
akoni or their allies showed themselves a few hours later, they simply withdrew out of sight. Incredibly, it seemed that the Bowies had beaten them. By counting the bloody spots on the grass, they estimated that they had killed about forty and wounded another thirty, a count that was probably somewhat exaggerated. Their own losses were McCaslan killed and Buchanan, Coryell, and Doyle wounded, as well as five of their animals killed. But in fact, not a man among them failed to be touched by an enemy ball or arrow, and some of them bore several superficial wounds, as did other horses and mules. With a certainty, James Bowie knew they were in no condition to try to retrace their steps to Béxar, not knowing where or how many of their foes might be lurking along the trace. Instead they decided to stay put, better fortify their rock breastwork, and hope for help. With a typical show of bold defiance, James Bowie erected a slim pole and actually flew a small flag from its top “to intimidate them and show them that there were still men ready for a fight.” Only James Bowie could think of six men intimidating a hundred.

  There for the next eight days the Bowies and their friends stayed in their fort, sallying out only for water and keeping up a steady rifle fire at intervals in hopes of attracting the attention of any friendly Comanche within hearing. By the evening of November 29 they had seen no one. James personally attended to the wounded, and by this time they felt better and in a condition to move, and the injured animals could walk once more, so they decided it was time to try reaching safety. They rode all that night and into the following afternoon, until they stopped and fortified another likely spot, and halted for two days to rest and recuperate. Buchanan's broken leg by now showed signs of severe infection and possible gangrene, but all they could do for him was to boil some tree bark, thicken the brew with charcoal and ground meal, and stuff a buffalo skin with the poultice and tie it around his leg.

  They traveled on for several more days. By the time they reached the Pedernales River, still sixty miles from San Antonio, they saw dramatic signs of recent Tawakoni activity, and a column of smoke on the river in the distance. That was enough to persuade Bowie to turn away from the trace that provided the most direct route, and instead to swing out to the west. Thereafter they saw no more hostiles. Buchanan's leg showed a dramatic improvement when, after five days, they removed the poultice, and finally on the night of December 6 came the best news of all: In the distance they saw the glimmering lights of San Antonio. Exhausted, most of them walked into the town, leading their weary animals. When someone recognized Bowie or one of the others, he sent up a shout that soon spread from house to house and street to street. Quickly men rushed to the returning prospectors and grasped their hands or hugged them joyfully. Before long Bowie learned that the Comanche they had met on their way to the San Saba had come into Béxar and reported his party attacked and almost surely killed. Lights went up in houses all along the way as shouts of “Bowie's party have returned” carried the news.

  Of course it must have been a special homecoming for James, just like Crockett's after his reported death during his first bout with malaria. Ursula and the Veramendis would have heard the rumors of his death. Her anguish, believing herself a widow after only seven months as a bride, must have been wrenching, a sorrow shared by others. Stephen Bowie reached San Antonio after the expedition left, probably intending to join his brothers, but just as likely hoping to make a new start here after his disaster in Louisiana. It was pointless to go after them, not knowing the way, and then when he heard the Comanche's story of James's and Rezin's deaths, he began trying to raise a company of men to go after the Tawakoni to wreak revenge.49Thus when Stephen and Ursula heard the shouts, or saw him walk through the door, the house on Soledad Street must have echoed mingled cries of gladness and relief.

  James Bowie had been bold, as usual, and awfully fortunate, as usual. Certainly he had nothing to show for the ordeal. He did not find the mine (which of course was not there to be found in any case) and he lost McCaslan, the foreman of his mechanics. That was bound to set back the cotton mill establishment, and the sustained hardship cannot have helped with his old Sandbar wounds, which Ham saw continued to trouble him from time to time. Yet the party had done something that inevitably won the admiration of a frontier people. They had met an aboriginal foe that grossly outnumbered them, yet had killed several dozen—in true frontier fashion the figure steadily rose in the retelling—and wounded many more. Of course, sustained battle on an organized basis was not the Indians' way. The Tawakoni and their friends fought the kind of battle they usually fought, and when it showed signs of becoming too costly for too little gain, they simply walked away from it, as was their custom. But so far as the Bowies and the bexareños were concerned, a party of less than a dozen Americans had defeated odds greater than 10 to 1.

  “The pages of history record few such achievements,” Ham himself boasted of the San Saba fight. “It stands almost alone upon the scenic walls of Fame's grand temple. The valorous men who bared their breasts to the assaults of a savage enemy, in overwhelming numbers, who fought without fear and without hope, and rolled back the tide of barbaric aggression, should be remembered and honored as long as civilization endures, and gratitude has a place in the human heart.” To Ham, as to others, an isolated frontier skirmish became suddenly a milestone victory in the age-old fight against the tide of barbarism. The Bowies and their friends had not just saved themselves, they had seemingly helped to save Texas from some unstated menace. Men forgot the fact that James and the others had gone silver prospecting solely for their own benefit. Somehow Western civilization now owed them gratitude for their selfless stand. It was the way that frontier myths were created.

  More important for James Bowie, it was the kind of episode that turned people into living legends, and thus he made some profit by the expedition after all. Until now he had been Veramendi's son-in-law, a big-talking norteamericano who lived high and had the land hunger and promised much, and about whom there clung some vague stories of dark dealings and a vicious fight east of the Sabine. The San Saba battle transformed him in the eyes of tejanos and Texians alike into a leader of men, someone to look up to and count on in a moment of peril. So far as his future in Texas was concerned, and as pointless in its origins as it may have been preordained in its conclusion, the San Saba scrape made James Bowie.

  13

  CROCKETT

  1831-1834

  Well!—they came to see a bar, and they've seen one—hope they like the performance—it did not cost them any thing any how.

  DAVID CROCKETT, 1834

  “The people of my district were induced to take a stay on me,” said Crockett, using quaint gamblers' slang for deciding not to risk a bet, but he said it two years after his 1831 defeat.1 At the time, though the voters merely decided to keep Crockett in Tennessee for awhile, so far as he was concerned he had been sent to Coventry, and it rankled and festered within him long after the fact of having been beaten sank in. Only in Congress had he been someone of importance. People there paid attention to him and treated him as a man to reckon with, even if many regarded him with hostility. He could even feel flattered at the extraordinary efforts from outside his district to see Fitzgerald win. In election there was more than public victory: It gave him repudiation of that part of himself that he never liked, the humble, ignorant, impoverished failure from the canebrakes. More than anything he hoped to do for his fellow West Tennesseans, Crockett needed victory for himself.

  Before in his life when fate defeated him, he moved away from the bitter memory, whether it was after a failed farm or a flooded mill. Crockett may well have thought of leaving Tennessee in the wake of this defeat, so much worse than those other losses because of the humiliation and resentment he no doubt felt at every encounter with one of the voters. This had been no rejection by nature, but by his people. There was no malice or pity or triumph in nature, but Crockett could imagine these feelings in the faces of his constituents. It must have been very difficult for a time for him to face them. Perhaps the
tears that came so readily to the ruddy-cheeked boy came again to the forty-five-year-old man.

  If Crockett did think of abandoning West Tennessee, he soon found that he could not. “An election costs a man a great deal in my Country,” he told friends, and at the end of his campaign he was once more heavily in debt.2 He had borrowed everywhere he could, including from the Bank of the United States, whose Whig managers were only too happy to help him with his campaign, but now he could not repay his loan and had to ask for an extension, reminding the managers that during his canvass he came out in support of renewal of their charter, and promising to vote on their behalf if he won back his seat in 1833. In the end Nicholas Biddle simply canceled the note.3 If a Jacksonian had taken such a loan and made such promises, Crockett would have seen it as evidence of corruption. If the government had no business using public funds for the private relief of individuals, then surely the government-chartered bank had no business writing off loans that came out of the interest the government allowed it to charge. It simply never occurred to him that he could be doing anything unethical.

  “Times is hard in this country,” he told his bank friends. “I will do the best I can.”4 Sadly, his best would not get him out of debt. Cajoling from a friend a very favorable six-year lease with option to buy on another property on the south fork of the Obion, he moved to the lease tract in January 1832 and began to clear twenty acres there to live on, build a small cabin and smokehouse and cribs for his corn, and plant a small orchard.5 He would stay there for the next two years, trying to build that home and rebuild his personal fortunes, without success. If she ever moved there with him, Elizabeth soon departed again. She had endured enough of Crockett, and moved with the children to Gibson County to live with her Patton family. Relations with David remained amicable but distant. Perhaps it seemed fitting. His constituents had abandoned him, and now so had his wife.6