Three Roads to the Alamo
Page 67
Travis was right about another attack, for that evening there came noises and then shots in the dark, but it was only a feint on the east side, no doubt to test his strength there. A few loads of grapeshot drove them back, and at the same time let Santa Anna know that the Texians had cannon on that wall, too. Off in the distance Travis may have heard the sound of cavalry riding out to a position on the Gonzales road. Seguín had left just in time, it seemed. Along the river Travis either heard or saw two more batteries being erected, and perhaps to give himself a clear field of fire in any future engagement, he sent out another party in the darkness to set ablaze more of the huts and some piles of straw near the fort.41 It was evident that the Maxicans were slowly trying to surround them, and almost leisurely getting things ready for the inevitable assault.
Off to the east Travis's and Bowie's first please finally reached San Felipe and Goliad, the couriers stopping frequently along the way to pass on the news. “The appeal of Cols. Travis & Bowie cannot however pass unnoticed,” Fannin wrote today. “Much has to be risked to relieve the besieged.” In San Felipe, Governor Smith immediately printed a broadside publishing Travis and Bowie's first February 23 appeal, exactly what Travis hoped would happen, and exhorted the people to “fly” to their aid. “The campaign has commenced,” Smith proclaimed. Texians must not let their brothers be “massacred by a mercenary foe.” At once a company of volunteers began to form in San Felipe, and no doubt Smith sent a dispatch back to Travis to tell him to hold on, they were coming.42
The next two days brought little change for either Travis or Crockett. It was cold and windy, with morning frost in the compound. On February 26 Travis answered some Mexican cavalry that came in to skirmish on the east side of the fort, no doubt just to test further the strength of his defenses. The cannonade from Santa Anna's batteries continued all day, and now and then Travis allowed his gunners to answer, though with some of his powder neing of poor quality, he could not afford to waste what he had. Fortunately most of the Mexican pieces were of the same caliber as his own, and solid shot that landed inside the parade ground could actually be picked up and fired back. Travis ordered two more sallies during the day, one for wood and water, even though he had a well, and the other to burn more of the huts down along the San Antonio that might give shelter to the foe. Rain the next day eased the water problem—and also dampened the ardor of the Mexicans, for they relaxed their bombardment—and Travis took advantage of the lull to send a party to repair some of his damaged outer wall, especially on the north. In a hard north wind, he sent Bonham out with another plea for reinforcements, giving him Bowie's horse for the ride. Bowie would not be needing it now.43
Bowie's illness became dramatically worse, and his sister-in-law Juana Alsbury had no doubt whatever that it was typhoid. Bowie believed so as well, and knowing the disease to be contagious, he insisted on leaving her quarters rather than endanger her and her sister. Being herself a tejana, she no doubt feared some of the men in the garrison who might not distinguish between her and the enemy, and as well had to fear the Mexicans on the other side of the wall. Bowie had been her protector in San Antonio and now here, and the prospect of losing him frightened her. He summoned two soldiers to come and help him away, but before he left he tried to comfort Juana. “Sister, do not be afraid,” he told her. “I leave you with Col. Travis, Col. Crockett, and other friends. They are gentlemen, and will treat you kindly.” He promised to come back to see her occasionally, but she was not to go to his sickroom for fear of contagion. With the help of the soldiers, the weakening shell of a once mighty man made his way to a small room immediately to the left of the main gate, next to the officers' quarters, and there he would wait to see which of his twin enemies he must meet first, death from his fever or the Mexicans. But then, not everyone with typhoid died. About half recovered, though the disease took up to three weeks to run its course. He had neaten death before more than once, and no foe ever cowed Big Jim Bowie. Surely the man of the Sandbar and the San Saba could beat a few becteria.44
Crockett, meanwhile, may have come close to visiting death on another of the more noted men in the vicinity. He had already engaged in target practice during the day, as Mexican artillerymen set up and then operated their forward battery in the bend of the San Antonio that came near the fort. The people in town became convinced that he killed the very first soldado to fall, with a two-hundred-yard shot from his long rifle.45 Then, on the afternoon of February 27, Santa Anna himself rode forward to one of his batteries, only to be fired on by Texians from the Alamo, and the tejanos in Béxar swore that one of the bullets that sent him scurrying back to safety came from Crockett's rifle.46
Travis took a chance that night and sent a volunteer out of the fort to reconnoiter, probably because he heard the sound of enemy hoses riding off on the Gonzales road. Could they be going out to meet advancing Texian reinforcements? Whatever else the scout found, he encountered and killed one soldado before he returned. At least there was still ample opportunity to get couriers through the Mexican forces, especially to the east. The next day the thunder of the bombardment started again early on a cold, drizzling morning, but there was no news of reinforcements on the way.47 In fact Travis's heart would have sunk if he knew what was not happening back in the settlements. “The vile rabble here cannot be moved,” a man in Washington complained.48 A committee in San Felipe voted to print and distribute copies of his February 24 “All Americans in the World” letter, and passed resolutions calling on the men of Texas to arise from their lethargy and enlist, otherwise “Texas, and her citizens, and her liberties, and her hopes, are gone forever.”49 The message was clear that if the Alamo fell, Travis and his men would all die, and down in Goliad, Fannin expressed his fears that Santa Anna would get to make good his threat. “Hopping for the best, being prepared for the worst, I am in a devil of a bad humor,” he said. But neither he nor anyone else seemed to make positive steps to relieve the garrison.50
This 1836 was a leap year, but for Travis, Crockett, and a now desperately ill Bowie, there was nothing special about February 29, just more bombardment and a little break in the cold after a hard west wind in the night pushed a warming front through. Travis saw more Mexican reinforcements arrive and take a position on the east of the fort.51 He got another courier or two out, with more of the same urgent requests for assistance, and at the same time a message from Santa Anna somehow managed to get into the compound. In fact, for the First few days of the siege, some tejanos passed back and forth almost at will, and Seguín actually had his meals brought to him from town before he left.52 Now Santa Anna wisely let it be known that he would offer amnesty to any tejanos in the fort who came out and made no further resistance. He could take the position that perhaps they had been coerced, or were simple misguided, but however he viewed them, their departure would weaken Travis. The Mexian commander offered them three days to decide.
That evening or the next day several tejanos, including his old friend Menchaca, came to Bowie. Weak as he was, they all still looked up to this man out of habit. They had known him for several years, and he had always seemed so much a larger-than-life figure in Béxar. Though he could scarcely rise to meet them, they wanted his advice. Bowie acted this time after consulting Travis. The tejanos were not soldiers. None of those before him had enlisted or taken an oath. They had families in San Antonio. “All of you who desire to leave here may go in safety,” he told them from his cot. Travis approved as well. In the next few hours some of them would start to filter out as they came to their decisions, including Menchaca, who took his family south toward the Seguín ranch.53 It was a miserable night. A terrible thunderstorm came out of the north, bringing lightning, hail, and heavy winds and rain, and driving the temperature down to thirty-three degrees by the morning of March 1.54 But it could not dampen Travis's spirits, for something else came in the night, this time from the east. About 3 A.M. a sentinel awakened him, if he was not himself standing watch, and brought him to the main gate
in time to see “El Colorado,” John Smith, bring thirty-two men from Gonzales into the fort. By good fortune Ramírez y Sesma and much of the cavalry had been out of position looking for men reported elsewhere by false rumor, and that gave smith the opening to get through.55 At last the reinforcements were coming.
With daylight Travis could possibly see the Mexican cavalry returning to its former position to the east, near an abandoned powderhouse, and later in the day could not help but see a group of Mexicans at a mill northwest of him. Santa Anna was reconnoitering yet another position for a battery. Perhaps to celebrate the arrival of the Gonzales contingent, Travis gave the order for two of his twelve-pounders to be fired a toward a building believed to be Santa Anna's headquarters, and one actually struck it, causing some damage but missing the absent general.56 Even Bowie may have been buoyed by the reinforcements, for he had himself carried out of his sickroom on his cot by a couple of soldiers, and met with Juana and her sister for a time, and perhaps talked with some of the Gonzales men.57 Yet there were also subtractions from the garrison, for that day more of the tejanos left, and there was every likelihood that others might go on the morrow before the deadline expired.58
In the outside world it seemed that Travis's appeals were finally going to bear fruit. This same day one Texian predicted: “A general and immediate turnout of a great majority of out citizens,” while the next day one fellow with Fannin gloried in the news from Travis that two Mexican sallies had been repulsed, joking that “probably Davy Crockett ‘grinned’ them off.”59 On March 2 Travis's “Victory or Death” letter appeared in the Brazoria Texas Republican, just as he had expected, and he had to count on it impelling more men to follow those brave thirty-two from Gonzales.
But Travis would have been stunned if he could have seen into the mind of Sam Houston, who had done nothing to relieve the garrison. He arrived in Washington on February 29 for the convention to meet the next day, and almost immediately started a grand spree, chiefly on eggnog. He slept most of the daylight hours, and when confronted with Travis's frantic pleas for help, actually convinced some people that “a fraud had been practiced upon the people by the officers of the frontier, for party purposes; that there was not an enemy on our borders.” Houston suspected that either Travis or Fannin or both wanted to take his command away form him by politicking. Certainly Fannin had challenged him in the Matamoros affair, and now Houston, his mind clouded by drink, may have seen in Travis's melodramatic letters, obviously intended for publication, a none-too-subtle attempt to draw attention to himself. A few days later he actually told one man that Travis's report of being besieged was “a damned lie, and that all those reports from Travis & Fannin were lies, for there were no Mexican forces there and that he believed that it was only electioneering schemed [by] Travis & Fannin to sustain their popularity.”60 Certainly Houston knew that Travis was an Austin man, and that worked against him, Houston may even have sent a message to Bonham, when he learned that Travis's messenger had reached Gonzales and was enlisting men to go to the aid of the Alamo. He wanted Bonham to urge Travis to abandon the post, and retire to unite with the main army, and by assuming that Travis could withdraw, he must have believed that there was no Mexican army in Béxar.61 Meanwhile Houston continued to tell other delegates at the convention that Travis was exaggerating his appeals, and that they were really political grandstanding, and some even began to question whether Travis himself was writing them. They might, after all, be false reports sent by Mexicans to disrupt the convention or lure Houston and his small but growing army into who-knew-what.62 While the ceaseless ferment of politics under-cut the Alamo garrison in San Felipe, Travis and his men faced March 2 with more hope thanks to the recent reinforcement. He saw another Mexican battalion take a forward position in a slightly protected spot almost within pistol shot of the fort, and that night sent out another sally of his own toward the new battery being established at the mill, but the Mexicans drove his men back.63 Travis was doing exactly the right thing. He could hardly leave his fort and attack the Mexicans. But he could send out small parties in the dark to try to undo some of the enemy's daylight work, uncover their protected position, and at least try to keep Santa Anna uncertain of his intentions. He had to expect that the enemy knew his strength, now close to 180, and really more than that including the sick and the remaining tejano men. Loyal Mexicans in San Antonio would have told him that. He also had to assume that Santa Anna knew of the Gonzales contingent's arrival, and could hope that Santa Anna might not know their number, or even assume that they were but one of several reinforcements. Thus a little show of bravado with these nightly sallies made good sense, and they also helped to sustain the morale of the men, for whom the tedium of siege could otherwise be demoralizing.
March 3 came in clear and slightly warmer, a few degrees above freezing. As soon as the men were roused, he sent them back to the work that had occupied them the past several days, chiefly now the reinforcement of their walls with earth and timber abutments to shore up weak spots and openings created by the enemy bombardment. He also put them to digging shallow trenches inside the compound, some of them outside the doors to the houses. Already he envisioned the possibility that if the Mexicans attacked and broke through the outer defenses, he and his men might have to fall back into those rooms and meet the foe at the windows and doorways. That such a pass might come seemed increasingly a possibility, for no more reinforcements had arrived after the Gonzales company, and meanwhile that morning the whole garrison could see a large addition to the Mexican army arrive as three new battalions approached from the southwest.64
But at 11 A.M. the shout of a sentry announced the coming of a rider, the familiar shape of James Butler Bonham. In broad daylight they saw him riding unmolested from the east, between the powderhouse and an enemy battery.65 He brought some encouragement. From his saddlebag he took a letter from Three-Legged Willie Williamson, written in San Felipe two days before, and it breathed encouragement and promise. He spoke of 60 volunteers leaving San Felipe, hoping they might have arrived by this time. Moreover, Williamson told Travis that Fannin was at last on the march, with 300 men and a battery of four cannon, and having left Goliad on February 28, he should be approaching any day nor. At least 300 more volunteers were due to reach San Felipe the evening of March 1, and would be sent on their way as quickly as possible. “For God's sake hold out until we can assist you,” Williamson pleaded. He would be coming soon himself.
That was the kind of news Travis had waited for. Undoubtedly he shared it with the entire garrison, for it offered the first positive encouragement in many days. With the 60 men now due, the 300 more with Fannin, and the promised additional 300 from San Felipe, if Santa Anna did not attack and overrun them in the next three or four days, the Texians could have more the 850 men and at least twenty-two serviceable cannon including the eighteen them working in the fort.66 With that they could easily hold off twice their numbers and more to allow an even larger army to gather. But then Bonham handed Travis another letter dated March 1, and probably also told him of the urging from Houston to evacuate and join him to the east. Williamson had read this second missive, and made it clear that he regarded it as politically motivated. “Let it pass,” he advised. “You will know what it meant; if the multitude gets hold of it, let them figure it out.” It was probably either from Houston, reiterating what he had told Bonham, or from Governor Smith, detailing his continuing battle with the council and Robinson to maintain control. Robinson, too, sent a letter by Bonham, no doubt offering a mixture of encouragement, promises, and justification of his side of the squabble in San Felipe, especially now that he knew the garrison had come down squarely on the side of Smith.67 Travis could be forgiven if the two other letters raised his ire. Here he and his men stood day after day, with nothing but a mud wall between them and Mexican bayonets, and the petty politicians in San Felipe and Washington—including Houston, it seemed—could only think to treat the Alamo as a constituency to be wooed, and per
haps even as a ball to kick back and forth between them, each using it to score his own points.
Thus Bonham's arrival brought him mingled hope and despair, and it came atop the discovery that more of the tejanos had gone out. Of the forty or more who had come into the fort on February 23, only a handful remained, and some of those were children.68 Was everyone to abandon him? Thankfully the Texians in the garrison remained firm in their resolve, and the Williamson letter certainly must have given them encouragement that they would yet prevail, or at least survive. Travis kept the other two letters to himself, and perhaps even destroyed them, but he put Williamson's letter in his pocket, no doubt to show as a reminder to any who might waver in the next day or two.
The ease with which Bonham got through suggested that now was a good time for Travis to send out another courier himself. He took half an hour or so and composed something to address the several constituencies who now seemed to look to the Alamo, governors, wouldbe governors, councils, conventions, even generals. And he had no qualms about opening with a direct reference to “the present confusion of the political authorities of the country.” Naturally he gave them a report of condition in the Alamo since his last dispatch, glad to be able to report still the loss of not a single man. That in spite of at least two hundred shot and shells falling inside the compound. By now he faced an enemy reported to number between sixteen hundred and six thousand, though he mistakenly thought Santa Anna was not actually with them yet, and that Ramírez y Sesma commanded.