The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation

by James Donovan

  The resourceful Bowie brothers—they all stuck close together, particularly James and Rezin—quickly learned the ropes. They did much business with the man who dominated slave smuggling in the area, Jean Laffite—who, along with Andrew Jackson, was credited with saving New Orleans from the British. The Bowies added a brilliant twist to the scam: after they turned in the “found” slaves to the authorities, they would outbid other buyers at auction. Pocketing their reward of half the proceeds, they would in effect pay only half the final price and receive clear title to their chattels to boot.

  Two years of this netted the brothers Bowie a small fortune, but their scheme was a delicate one, with a finite profit potential, and they got out before officials became too suspicious of the brothers’ knack for finding their source of bounty. Next up for the Bowies was an even more lucrative business: land speculation on a grand scale.

  In itself, the buying of uninhabited land, sometimes on credit or on easy terms, reselling it at a higher price, and then paying off the original note—thus making a tidy profit with little capital ventured—was not illegal. Many men were involved in similar schemes in the young country’s new territories, and Arkansas and Louisiana were rife with opportunity: they had changed hands more than once, and the confusing lack of clear title and multiple sovereignties created a muddled and wide-open market for fraud and forgery. Over the next decade, the Bowies jumped in feetfirst, none more enthusiastically than the brother some now referred to as Big Jim Bowie. Before the end of the decade, he engineered more than one hundred forged land claims and titles comprising eighty thousand acres in Arkansas and almost as many in Louisiana—enough to make him the largest landowner in the region if and when the claims were patented and thus legitimized.

  But the Bowies’ massive land schemes caught the attention of the U.S. attorney general, who instigated a thorough investigation that canceled almost all the fraudulent transactions—the audacity, method, and scale of which led these and similar claims to be known as Bowie claims. The attorney general also threatened legal action and possible criminal charges. Though neither of the brothers would ever be officially charged, and though the widespread knowledge of the scams did not prevent the election of Rezin Bowie to the Louisiana legislature three times, brother James had worn out his welcome.

  But Big Jim had already set his sights westward, on an area even more wide open and promising: Texas, whose abundant land and rumored silver deposits seemed ripe for the Bowie touch.

  He had made his first trip to the Mexican province in 1828, riding first to Stephen F. Austin’s San Felipe, where he talked of building a much-needed cotton mill, then westward 150 miles to San Antonio de Béxar. There he introduced himself to the town’s leading citizen, Don Juan Martín de Veramendi, soon to be vice governor of Texas—and his lovely daughter, sixteen-year-old Ursula. He made a few more trips over the next few years, and became much better acquainted with Texas and Ursula. By early 1831, he moved there for good. He became a Mexican citizen, fluent in Spanish, and the tentative owner of almost a million acres of land, largely through the engineered—but legal—purchase of more than a dozen eleven-league grant leases, available only to Mexican citizens.

  That was also the year Bowie engineered another advantageous acquisition. In April, he married Ursula Veramendi in Béxar’s Church of San Fernando. The groom was thirty-five, his bride nineteen, but it appeared to be a love match for both. Bowie was now related to one of the most powerful families in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas.

  After living in a few different rented houses, in early 1832 the couple moved into the modest Veramendi mansion in town. Over the next few years Bowie spent more time on the road than he did at home, working in various mercantile activities and nursing his land grants along toward confirmation, always after a bigger score. He had heard stories of the fabled silver mines in the San Saba hills to the northwest, and in November 1831, accompanied by his brother Rezin and nine other men, traveled one hundred miles to the area of the mines. He took with him a thirteen-year-old boy named Carlos Espalier, a mulatto orphan that he and Ursula had informally adopted into their home.

  Six weeks after leaving, the party was attacked by a band of 124 Indians. Over the course of ten hours, besieged in a grove of trees behind a makeshift breastwork of saddles, packs, and rocks, the men withstood a furious series of assaults. When the Indians finally left the area, one of Bowie’s men lay dead and three others were wounded. They estimated thirty Indians killed and forty injured, and even if these numbers were exaggerated, the losses Bowie’s men inflicted were impressive. A small band of Texians in a crude fort had withstood odds better than ten to one.

  As word spread of the battle, James Bowie’s reputation as a fighter and a leader of men increased. He was a man to be reckoned with, one who could impose his will on a situation, no matter how dire. If the Sandbar Fight had made him famous, this clash made him a Texian to whom others looked for direction and leadership.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, Bowie seemed always to be on the move. His peregrinations encompassed business dealings in Saltillo, the state capital; far-ranging expeditions into the wilderness in search of hostile Indians—and gold and silver; and on to San Felipe, Brazoria, and other points farther east, such as New Orleans. And of course, he made trips back to his kin in Louisiana, where he found most of his holdings gone. In addition, an 1833 U.S. Supreme Court ruling would negate the Bowie claims in Arkansas, further depleting his assets.

  As events in his new country edged it closer toward outright rebellion, Bowie followed suit. After the Travis-instigated takeover at Anahuac in the spring of 1832, similar disturbances erupted at Nacogdoches and the port city of Matamoros. In July, when Stephen Austin needed a man he could count on, he asked Bowie to ride with all due haste to Nacogdoches to defuse a volatile situation involving, again, a confrontation between a fed-up citizenry and a Mexican garrison: the military commander there had demanded that the locals surrender their arms. Their refusal to do so was predictable and justified, since they would have been left with no defense against Indians. Bowie arrived in town one day too late to prevent a skirmish between the two hundred soldiers and three hundred Texians, but when the Mexicans evacuated that night, Bowie took control. He chose twenty men to accompany him in pursuit of the garrison troops. After some clever tactical maneuvering, he returned the next day with two hundred prisoners, who were escorted to Béxar and eventually returned to Mexico.

  Bowie spent little time with his young bride, but she bore him two children, who died soon after birth. When an outbreak of cholera spread across the Mississippi Valley and then farther west into Texas, he was bedridden in Natchez with a bout of malaria. He was still recuperating early in November when he received news of Ursula’s death in Monclova, where her family had fled from the cholera. Ursula, her mother, her father, and her adopted brother all died from the disease within days of reaching the city. The Bowies had been married for only two and a half years.

  The news almost destroyed the weakened Bowie, and although he made a complete recovery, at least physically, more than one man would detect tears in his eyes when his late wife’s name was mentioned. When he was able, he left Natchez and returned to Béxar in early 1834. After a months-long expedition into far north Texas, in June he traveled to Monclova, the new capital of Coahuila y Tejas, where he eventually amassed—legally, though aided by a few corrupt politicians—more than half a million acres of Texas land. If the Mexican immigration laws loosened up, Bowie could make a fortune in sales to immigrants, even without the eleven-league leases. He spent almost a year in Monclova, wheeling and dealing with several other speculators.

  When Santa Anna, now virtually a dictator, got wind of the massive land grabs effected by Bowie and other speculators, he had their claims annulled, and Bowie and several others were arrested in late May 1835 and taken to Matamoros. A couple of weeks later Bowie and his friend Blas Despallier escaped when their captors relaxed their guard. They made thei
r way overland to Texas, eventually reaching Nacogdoches in October.

  Bowie’s treatment at the hands of the Mexican authorities—and, undoubtedly, the loss of his potential fortune—pushed him further toward those clamoring for war and independence. Santa Anna’s decision to reopen the customs houses in Texas and enforce the collection of import duties had been unpopular with a populace increasingly at odds with their Mexican hosts. After Travis seized the Anahuac garrison, Texian settlements large and small began to organize local militias in preparation for a major confrontation that appeared increasingly inevitable. Within days of Bowie’s arrival in Nacogdoches, a hundred men gathered in the town square and elected Bowie “colonel” of their hastily formed militia, an honorary rank often bestowed upon a leader of a group of armed men in the South—and a recognition of a man’s leadership, charisma, and popularity, qualities Bowie possessed in spades.

  He and his men marched to a warehouse the Mexicans used as an armory and broke in, arming themselves with muskets. Nothing came of it; the majority of the locals seemed less than excited about the idea of armed revolt. But a week or so later, Bowie learned of the whereabouts of dispatches directed to the Mexican consul in New Orleans. He engineered the packet’s seizure, then read the letters aloud before a town meeting in the Nacogdoches public square. Besides arrest orders for Travis and his cohorts, the dispatch discussed the possibility of a military occupation of Texas—news that pushed the enraged townsmen closer to action.

  By late summer Bowie was on the road again, this time eastward, to his old stomping grounds in Louisiana. After several weeks spent visiting friends and talking up investment schemes, he returned to east Texas by early October with some associates. He had been there barely a week or two, tying up loose business ends, when the news arrived of an outbreak of hostilities in Gonzales, and a Texian army mobilizing for action. That was all Jim Bowie needed. He and his companions saddled up and rode west.

  FOUR

  “The Burly Is Begun”

  Nothing but the certainty of hard fighting, and that shortly, could have kept us together so long.

  BURR DUVAL

  The settlers of empresario Green DeWitt’s colony, immediately west of Austin’s colony, and DeWitt’s only town, Gonzales, were an especially hardy breed. They had to be, for as the westernmost Anglo settlement in the province, DeWitt’s colony made a tempting target for predatory Indian tribes such as the Tawakonis, the Wacos, and the largest and fiercest, the Comanches. And because it was the settlement farthest from the coast, its store of supplies, both essential and nonessential, was sparse. But the land in the grant, stretching northwest along the Guadalupe River, was as fine and fertile as any in Texas. “It is a remarkably healthy and pleasant country, well watered… with valuable streams for mills and a forest of pine timber,” observed an early visitor. “All the hills and dales, woods, and prairies, abound with buffalo, deer and turkey and occasionally black cattle for milk and work, and mustangs for riding.”

  The town of Gonzales had been laid out a decade earlier, on the west bank of the Guadalupe River, about seventy-six miles east of Béxar and eighty miles west of San Felipe. The first few years of its existence were tenuous ones. There were frequent Indian attacks, and most of the colony’s early settlers came in from their fields at the end of the day and remained overnight with their families in the small fort near the river constructed for just that purpose. But a decade of steady immigration and enterprise had transformed Gonzales, and though Indians were still a constant threat, flocking to the fort was no longer a nightly ritual. By 1835 the village comprised more than thirty structures, including two small hotels, a kitchen, two blacksmith shops, a few mercantile establishments, and the requisite grogshop or two—one, named Luna, was just a few yards behind a small kitchen and restaurant owned by erstwhile moonshiner Adam Zumwalt, known as Red Adam. Most were only crude one-story log buildings, but Gonzales was beginning to look like a town. A large schoolhouse was under construction, and there was even a hat factory opened by New Yorker George Kimble and his business partner, Almeron Dickinson, a blacksmith from Tennessee whose comely young wife, Susanna, had recently given birth to a daughter they named Angelina. The hats were made of wool and rabbit fur—“not very handsome, but serviceable,” remembered one DeWitt colonist.

  There were other signs of civilization. Early the previous summer, the town’s first ball had been held in the small inn owned by Thomas Miller, considered the richest man in town. Folks came from forty miles around, many of them displaying admission cards that read: ADMIT MR. ______ AND SWEETHEART TO BALL AT MILLER HOTEL. Women wore fancy white dresses for the first time in years. In the large dining area serving as the ballroom, candles on boards stuck in the walls cast a warm glow as George Washington “Wash” Cottle and Dr. John Tinsley fiddled away, Cottle calling the sets of Virginia reels, cotillions, and other dances and singing:

  We’ll dance all night

  Till broad daylight

  And go home with the gals in the morning.

  Everyone, young and old, danced. The floor was so crowded that the dancers had to take the floor in two shifts. The ball went on until eight the next morning. Everyone left saying they’d had the time of their lives.

  Until the fall of 1835, DeWitt colonists had condemned previous revolutionary acts of the pro-independence War Dog party. Their ayuntamiento had refused to attend the 1832 convention for fear that the citizens might be associated with the independence movement. They had even passed a resolution of loyalty to Mexico in July. Their sentiments began to change in September, though, after twenty-five Mexican soldiers brazenly appropriated Zumwalt’s store to quarter for the night; for no apparent reason, a Mexican soldier used his musket to bloody the head of colonist Jesse McCoy—recently elected second lieutenant of the Gonzales militia—as the young Tennessean attempted to make his way into Zumwalt’s storeroom. That act, combined with news of Santa Anna’s dictatorial takeover and brutal subjugation of the rebellious state of Zacatecas in May—news that was gleaned from occasional newspaper accounts and a steady stream of stories from riders along the Béxar–San Felipe road—considerably jaundiced the colonists’ views.

  Thus, in late September, when a Mexican corporal and five soldiers rode from Béxar to Gonzales with an empty oxcart and appeared at the river’s edge opposite town, requesting the return of their cannon, the townspeople were not as eager as they might have been to hand it over. The gun in question was only a six-pounder, and was crudely mounted on a makeshift wooden caisson. Green DeWitt had requested it in 1831 to help defend his town against Indian attacks. It was an old piece of artillery, showing visible damage and evidence of crude repairs, and was good for little more than a loud noise and a large belch of smoke—the better, it was hoped, to scare off the Indians. But the Texians knew that the authorities in Béxar had no need of it; there were several larger cannon at the Alamo, the old Franciscan mission east of town now home to a presidial unit charged primarily with protecting the locals against Comanche raids.

  Their position was made known when the corporal and his men were disarmed by a dozen townsmen and taken prisoner, then paroled back to Béxar. The townspeople quickly called a meeting at which they discussed the ramifications of their actions. They knew more soldiers, many more, would return, and soon. But they voted to continue their resistance; only three citizens were in favor of returning the six-pounder. The colonists began to prepare for the ensuing troubles, and most of those on the west side of the Guadalupe moved across the river into town, or into the woods or upriver to hide.

  A few days later Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea, the military commander in Béxar, sent one hundred dragoons under Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda to secure the piece. The lieutenant had been stationed at Béxar for more than a dozen years, and had commanded the Alamo presidial company for fourteen months—he owned two small houses on the northwest corner of the old mission, where he lived with his wife and family. But he had never been ordered to co
mmandeer a cannon. Besides, he was a federalist himself. Nevertheless, he led his troop out of the compound and toward the small Anglo settlement two good days’ ride east.

  Though about a hundred colonists and their families lived in the area, only eighteen were on hand when the lieutenant arrived at the banks of the rain-swollen Guadalupe on September 29. They had hidden all the canoes and the ferryboat on the east side of the river. When Castañeda yelled across the river and demanded the cannon, the Texians, to gain time, told him the alcalde was not at home, but would return the next evening. The presidiales fell back and bivouacked a half mile from the river.

  While this small force prevented Castañeda and his men from crossing the Guadalupe and entering town, express riders galloped north and east, requesting reinforcements. Militiamen from Bastrop (which had been renamed Mina in 1834; its name would officially become Bastrop again in 1837), located on the upper Colorado River, along with militiamen from San Felipe, Washington, and other settlements on the Brazos, quickly organized and rode to Gonzales. When the colonists had initially confronted the small group of soldiers who had come for the cannon, they had sent the soldiers back to Béxar with a message intended to confuse the Mexican commanders about the situation. This had bought some precious time, and now more such delaying action by the town’s leaders gained them another day. By September 30, a hundred men had gathered in the settlement, most of them congregating at Winslow Turner’s double log hotel; the next day, there were 168 men. Green DeWitt’s daughter Naomi offered up her wedding dress for a proper flag—a white banner bearing the words COME AND TAKE IT above the outline of an unmounted cannon.