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

by James Donovan

  Castañeda moved his company upriver in search of a crossing. That night, to the howling of a distant wolf pack, the Texians crossed the Guadalupe with the six-pounder, now mounted on a pair of oxcart wheels. They decided to take the offensive. At four the next morning, in a dense fog, a skirmish broke out when the Mexican pickets fired on the Texian advance guard. After a parley that produced nothing, James C. Neill, a Bastrop man who had served under Andrew Jackson against the Creek Indians, fired the first cannon shot of the resistance. The Texians opened fire and charged. The Mexicans, who had been instructed to retire if the opposing force was superior, wheeled around and fled, having already lost one soldier.

  Over the next week, men continued to arrive in Gonzales, until about three hundred colonists, embracing a dozen or so militia companies from various settlements, were gathered there. Turner’s two-story hotel continued to serve as the rallying point. Each company elected its own captain, but none recognized a commander in chief. There was no consensus of opinion regarding Mexico: “Some were for independence; some for the constitution of 1824; and some for anything, just so it was a row,” remembered one volunteer. The one thing they agreed on was the need to march to Béxar and finish the job. General Martín Perfecto de Cós, commander of the Eastern Interior Provinces, was probably there by now, with seven hundred troops or so. The son of a doctor, Cós was a small, elegant man—he wore gold earrings and traveled with gold candlesticks—and a longtime supporter of Santa Anna. Most believed he would march to Gonzales to take care of the problem himself. But save for their effective cavalry and the recently arrived Morelos Battalion, a regular army unit of two hundred veteran infantrymen, the Texians were unimpressed with the Mexicans’ show of force. Many troops sent to the northern border states were convicts given the thorny choice of prison or Texas, and the Mexican army in general was underfed, underpaid, undersupplied, and unmotivated to fight a war few of them understood.

  It was vital to whip Cós before he received reinforcements. The officers sent a rider with an express message to Stephen Austin in San Felipe, imploring him to come lead the Army of the People, as they now called themselves. Just a few weeks earlier, Austin had been told that Mexican troops would march into the colonies and take care of the rabble-rousers whether things calmed down or not. That had prompted him to write a broadside on September 19 that was circulated throughout Texas, in which he said, “Nothing was to be gained by further conciliatory measures…. War is our only resource.” In private letters he had expressed his feelings even more strongly. “The country has a cause; and a just and glorious cause to defend,” he wrote a friend on October 5. “From this time forward those who are not for the cause ought to be treated as enemies—there is no middle ground.” Mexico’s most loyal colonist had finally concluded that independence was the only answer.

  The forty-year-old empresario was in poor health, and his military experience consisted of seven uneventful weeks in the Missouri militia and a few raids he had led against the Indians; he knew his limitations better than anyone. But he was the one man all the colonists respected, and upon his arrival in Gonzales on October 11, he was unanimously elected commanding general of the Texian forces. The ragtag army, including nearly every able-bodied man in DeWitt’s colony, began a slow march westward the next day, following the rudimentary road laid out several years earlier by Byrd Lockhart, the colony surveyor. (For his considerable efforts in clearing a path from Béxar to San Felipe wide enough for an oxcart, Lockhart had asked for and received four choice leagues of land.)

  Most of the three hundred men were landowning farmers, with a few merchants and mechanics, as skilled craftsmen were called, mixed in. A handful of them owned slaves; the rest were too poor for such luxuries. The majority of them had wives and families at home. Few of them had professional military training, but many had served with small militia units against Indians or in earlier skirmishes against Mexican garrisons. Not every man had a gun—and some of their weapons were held together with “buckskin string and spit,” remembered one volunteer—but those who did were proficient with them, whether they carried a Kentucky long rifle accurate at more than two hundred yards, less accurate but sturdy muskets, or short-barreled shotguns for close action. Some carried flintlock pistols, and almost every man wore a large knife in a sheath attached to his belt. A leather shot pouch suspended by a broad strap that went over the shoulder held rifle balls, bullet molds, “bullet patchin’,” gun wipes, and an extra flint or two; attached to this pouch was a powder horn.

  The group bore little resemblance to an army—at least not to “the army of my childhood dreams,” remembered Noah Smithwick, a blacksmith. “Buckskin breeches were the nearest approach to a uniform, and there was wide diversity even there, some being new and soft and yellow, while others, from long familiarity with rain and grease and dirt, had become hard and black and shiny…. Boots being an unknown quantity, some wore shoes and some moccasins.” Some sported broad-brimmed sombreros, others military headgear or top hats, or the occasional coonskin cap with the tail hanging down behind. Most wore hunting shirts or jackets with homespun blouses underneath, though an occasional buffalo robe could be seen. They rode large American horses and small Spanish ponies, half-broke mustangs and methodical mules. Few had canteens; most carried a Spanish gourd or two full of water.

  DeWitt’s colony had contributed more than its share of personnel: left behind were only a dozen men, most of them invalids, and hundreds of women and children. Altogether, Austin’s Army of the People was a disparate and rowdy lot, with only one thing in common, at least as they saw it: the desire and willingness to fight for their freedom from a tyrant’s oppression. Their chance would not be long in coming.

  FIVE

  The Army of the People

  All are united, our frontier is attacked & who says now that we shall not fight? Let us go at it heart & hand—stand up like men & have nothing to fear.

  WILLIAM BARRET TRAVIS

  The rebels followed Byrd Lockhart’s blazed trail westward. Through the forests, large trees bore carved numerals denoting the number of miles from Béxar, and wooden posts did the same on the prairie, where the men kept an especially close watch—no one wanted to get caught in the open by the Mexican lancers, whose reputation as well-trained warriors preceded them.

  The Texians were an army of irregular riflemen, and it was to their advantage to keep to the woods. About fifteen miles west of Gonzales they camped on Sandies Creek, near John Castleman’s place, the farthest outpost of Anglo settlement. The desolate location required constant vigilance against roving Indian parties, and each evening Castleman’s family retreated into their house, enclosed by strong palisades. A cold rain rendered the army’s bivouac highly uncomfortable, since few men had brought tents or shelters.

  Another day or two through miles of sandy soil and forests of mesquite and oak brought the army to Cibolo Creek, twenty miles from the provincial capital. The steadily flowing waters, combined with a shallow ford at a bend where the road crossed the creek, made it a popular paraje, or resting stop. They remained there a few days while more reinforcements arrived, then moved to the Salado River, just three or four miles from Béxar. Overhead, Halley’s Comet was visible in the night sky, and the men argued over whether it was a good omen or bad. When the news arrived that, on October 10, a group of Texians had taken control of the Presidio La Bahía near Goliad and its fifty-four Mexican troops, every man knew what that meant: the last Mexican soldiers in Texas lay ahead of them.

  One of the new arrivals was James Bowie, recently returned to Texas from another visit to Louisiana and Mississippi. He rode into camp with a group of friends and followers and immediately sent a courier into town conveying his compliments to the people of Béxar. Stephen Austin, grateful for Bowie’s veteran presence, gave him command of a large company and sent him toward the string of missions stretching a few miles downriver below the town, to reconnoiter and forage for corn or other stores for the hungry comm
and. Bowie’s connections in Béxar proved invaluable, and he supplied Austin with much-needed intelligence—for instance, that Cós’s army numbered six hundred men at most.

  William Barret Travis was there also. He had joined a militia company in San Felipe just before the Gonzales incident, but a bout of influenza had prevented him from riding there immediately. When he finally arrived in Gonzales it was as an elected lieutenant. He was also a delegate to the Consultation, now rescheduled to meet in San Felipe on November 1, but he and several other representatives decided to remain with the army and march to Béxar.

  Another valuable addition was twenty-eight-year-old Juan Seguín, whose father, Erasmo, was a good friend of Stephen Austin’s and a former Béxar alcalde. Erasmo Seguín was one of the town’s most prominent citizens, and he had raised his children in a cultured, liberal atmosphere; both men were staunch federalists, and Juan had recently returned from skirmishing with centralist troops near Monclova. The Seguín family owned one of the largest ranches in the area, a nine-thousand-acre tract thirty miles downriver, where Erasmo had built a fortified compound known as Casa Blanca. General Cós, upon his arrival in Béxar, and upon learning of Juan’s siding with the rebels, had booted the elderly Erasmo out of town without a horse. He walked the thirty miles downriver to his ranch.

  The handsome young Seguín brought with him a company of thirty-seven other mounted Tejanos. Many of them were recruited from the ranches on the lower San Antonio River, though at least fourteen were deserters from the Alamo presidial garrison. From the town of Victoria to the southeast, alcalde Plácido Benavides arrived with another twenty-six Tejano volunteers, and at least forty more from the ranches south of Béxar rode into camp over the next several days led by Seguín’s brother-in-law, Salvador Flores. A total of 135 Mexican Texians would sign up, all declaring themselves loyal to the Mexican constitution of 1824. They would provide valuable scouting and foraging services, and also serve as fighters, in the months to come.

  San Antonio de Béxar lay in a valley of rolling prairie land between two parallel streams: San Pedro Creek on the west and the San Antonio River on the east. The area surrounding these waterways, nestled between low hills on either side and favored with large oaks and pecans, had attracted men for thousands of years, perhaps more; its beauty was such that many proclaimed it the prettiest spot in Texas. Between them was a town of some sixteen hundred souls, only a few of them Anglos—though many bexareños had fled their dwellings for the ranches along the river to the south. Thick-walled stone and mortar buildings crowded the broad dirt streets around the two squares, the Plaza de las Islas (Main Plaza), nearer to the river, and the Plaza de Armas (Military Plaza), to the west; between them stood the Church of San Fernando and its bell tower. Beyond the few blocks of downtown began a spread of log houses and even cruder habitations, the mud-and-stick shacks called jacales. Above and below Béxar, fields of corn were watered by acequias, man-made irrigation ditches that flowed through and around the town. A few miles to the west lay a range of limestone hills.

  To the east, across the sixty-foot-wide river lined with cypresses, acequias also flowed on either side of the former mission originally named San Antonio de Valero but now called the Alamo, after a presidial company once garrisoned there from Alamo de Parras, Mexico. Built more than a hundred years before, the crumbling compound had been one of five missions in the area; the ruins of the other four lay along the river to the south. Beginning with the Alamo in 1793, all had been secularized when the numbers of Indian converts had dwindled. The compound had been a military post for more than thirty years. A thick adobe wall surrounded most of the Alamo’s buildings. Several hundred of Cós’s men were there, fortifying the makeshift redoubt with several artillery pieces, a few of the larger ones being placed in the roofless church. The front of the structure had been piled high with dirt and rubble, and a crude ramp enabled cannon to be dragged to the top, albeit with great difficulty.

  The fortifications in town were even more impressive. Log and earth barricades, some of them twelve feet high, blocked the main streets and reinforced the doors to several of the larger buildings, and nine cannon on swivels protected the town squares and the roads leading to them. At the entrance of every street, a ditch was dug ten feet wide and five feet deep. Over this was a breastwork of upright posts built with portholes for muskets and a large one in the center for cannon.

  On October 27, while the Texians were still camped on the Salado, five miles outside of town, Austin authorized Travis, the owner of several fine horses, to raise a cavalry command of fifty or so volunteers, each to be armed with a double-barreled shotgun and a brace of pistols. Travis wasted no time in doing so, and the next morning, his horsemen were in the saddle and on the road toward Béxar. They had just crossed the San Antonio River when they heard gunfire up ahead.

  The day before, Austin had sent Bowie and James Fannin—an ambitious young Georgia slave trader who had attended West Point for two years before moving his family to Velasco in 1834—to the mission closest to Béxar, Concepción, to lead a scouting party in search of an acceptable bivouac for the army. Juan Seguín accompanied them as guide. They were to return by dark. The detail of ninety-two men reached the abandoned mission, and the river a quarter mile beyond, just about noon. They promptly engaged in a skirmish with a small force of Mexican cavalry, which galloped back to town. Bowie decided the position was too good to risk losing, regardless of Austin’s orders to return by nightfall. He carefully placed his men near a bend in the river just west of the mission, on a broad river bottom six feet below the rolling prairie, and settled in for the night.

  Early the next morning a dense fog covered the ground. A Texian picket saw a Mexican cavalry scout, took a shot at him, and rifle and musket fire promptly erupted from both sides. General Cós had learned of the detachment and sent out four hundred men to cut off and destroy it; they quickly surrounded the outnumbered Texians. The colonists were backed up to a body of water that, while preventing an attack from the rear, made retrograde movement difficult and invited attack on the flanks.

  Fortunately for Bowie and his men, the Mexicans neglected such tactics and made a direct assault. As they did so, Bowie shifted his two wings to a more favorable position. As Mexican infantry and artillery advanced across the prairie, he shouted to his men, “Keep under cover, boys, and reserve your fire; we haven’t a man to spare.” A scatterload of canister (a tin cylinder filled with lead or iron balls) from two Mexican cannon ripped through the trees above the Texians, and pecans rained down on the ground. Some men ate them in between the Mexican infantry charges, which their accurate long-rifle fire repelled. After the third charge, Bowie ordered his men up and over the riverbank and into the enemy lines. They captured one of the cannon, turned it around, and blasted a load of canister into the Mexicans, who retreated to Béxar. The triumph was small but significant. The rebels had suffered only two casualties, one wounded and one dead. The Mexican losses were fifty, with at least twenty killed.

  The clash at Concepción—another instance of Bowie directing a severely outmanned contingent to victory—immediately raised the spirits of the Texians. The battle also demonstrated the effectiveness of well-aimed rifle fire against a larger attacking force, even one supported by cavalry and artillery.

  Austin’s rebels rushed to the sound of the guns from their camp six miles south at Mission San Francisco de la Espada, the last in the chain of abandoned missions. He was initially eager to pursue the Mexicans into Béxar with a full-fledged assault. But after Bowie and other leaders objected, pointing to the town’s fortifications, its many artillery pieces, and Cós’s ample and well-trained force, he pulled his troops back. A few days later, after further consultation with his officers, Austin’s army settled down for a siege. The Mexicans were low on supplies, and in this case discretion, not valor, seemed the wiser path. Austin took his men to a position almost a mile north of town, near an abandoned sugar mill, leaving Bowie and Fannin at Conce
pción.

  On November 1, a few days after the Concepción battle, Austin put the question to a council of his officers: Attack or siege? The majority voted against storming Béxar, and the army settled into siege mode. The next five weeks tested the mettle and determination of the Army of the People in more ways than one.

  In San Felipe, meanwhile, the Consultation laid the groundwork for a working government by establishing a provisional authority, the General Council, and electing a governor—while at the same time voting 33–14 against a declaration of independence from Mexico and in favor of the Mexican constitution of 1824. Officially, at least for now, Texas considered itself a state of Mexico, separate from Coahuila—and its citizens considered themselves loyal to their adopted country. But they were virtually without funds, provisions, or a regular army, though they unanimously elected a commander in chief of the nonexistent forces: Sam Houston, the former governor of Tennessee and apparently the only man in San Felipe interested in the job.

  A hero of the War of 1812 and one-time protégé of Andrew Jackson, the hard-drinking, charismatic Houston had resigned his governorship after a disastrous six-week marriage apparently doomed from the start: she had loved another, and was pressed into the socially advantageous union by her family. He went to live with his friends in the Cherokee Nation for three years, where his 6-feet-2-inch frame and fondness for the bottle earned him the Indian name Big Drunk; more than once his common-law Cherokee wife, Tiana Rogers, had to fetch Houston and throw him over his horse to get him home. He had partially vindicated himself, though, with a triumphant appearance in Washington, D.C. While in town as head of a Cherokee delegation, he caned a congressman who had insulted him on the House floor; put on trial, he defended himself with a fiery speech that convinced the legislative body to issue him only a slight reprimand. His stirring oratory was reprinted far and wide, and thrust him back into the national spotlight. In 1832 he moved to Nacogdoches, where he started a law practice. In December of that year, while in San Felipe on business, he met Jim Bowie, and the two shared a Christmas dinner there. Bowie also escorted Houston to Béxar, where he introduced him to the town’s upper-crust citizens, such as the Veramendis, Bowie’s in-laws.