Rumors had circulated for years that Houston was in Texas to procure the territory for his former mentor, President Jackson—Old Hickory’s desire to possess the area was well known, and he had authorized more than one botched attempt to purchase the Mexican province. (He was not alone: over the previous decade, his presidential predecessors had made three proposals to the Mexican government for the purchase of all or part of Texas.) Houston, a striking figure in his greasy buckskins and colorful Mexican blanket, had recently been elected the Nacogdoches delegate to the Consultation. He advocated American annexation in private, and it appears he was indeed scouting the territory for Jackson—at least after his initial plan, to buy up the remaining land of an entire colony, fell through when another empresario beat him to it.
There were those who distrusted Houston’s motives, and disapproved of his rambunctious and sometimes scandalous ways—he could outdrink and outswear any man he met, and his fiery temper made him almost as many enemies as friends. But there were few men who could match his military experience and towering presence, so he was given command of a 1,120-man army that had yet to officially sign up a single soldier. Besides commanding them, Houston was also charged with raising all military forces, regular, auxiliary, or otherwise—an imposing task in itself, even without the handicap of having no staff. Indeed, the aversion of old settlers and new volunteers to the rigors and restrictions of the regular army would result in few recruitments—at the height of the hostilities four months later, they would total a hundred men at most. But volunteers by the hundreds responded to the proclamation he boldly issued on October 8—a month before he was appointed commander in chief—calling for help of a more informal nature:
Volunteers are invited to our standard. Liberal bounties of land will be given to all who will join our ranks with a good rifle and one hundred rounds of ammunition…. The morning of glory is dawning upon us. The work of liberty has begun. Our actions are to become a part of the history of mankind.
Lofty sentiments aside, there was no lack of problems for Austin’s army. The weather was turning nasty—the first norther blew into the area at the end of October, and another dropped temperatures a week later. Food, gunpowder, and other basics were in short supply. Discipline was virtually nonexistent: copies of the standard texts of the day—Scott’s Infantry Tactics, von Steuben’s Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, and Cooper and Macomb’s Cooper’s Volunteer’s Manual—were requisitioned by the General Council in late November, though they would never arrive. “There was little time for military tactics,” recalled one volunteer, “but it was necessary that we learn to act in concert, the most important maneuver being to fire by platoons and fall back to reload.” If they mastered that maneuver and had a chance to display it, no one ever remembered later. The Army of the People was, at this point, little more than a well-intentioned mob. Indeed, these American-born Texians had a habit of insisting on elections rather than merely obeying their elected superiors, who as a result often had to word their orders in the form of requests. “Everyone acted as he pleased and the officers were so far obeyed, as suited the whims and caprices of the men,” recalled a member of the New Orleans Greys, two companies of which were raised, outfitted, armed, and sent to Texas by businessmen in the Crescent City upon news of the outbreak of hostilities. (All 118 of the newcomers wore gray clothing bought there just before leaving, usually including a snug-fitting waist-length jacket with a high collar, possibly military surplus from the War of 1812; many also wore soft, long-visored sealskin hunting caps.) Another Grey recalled that after breakfast, “we then broke into small groups if there was nothing to fear from the Indians or large groups of the enemy and galloped away as we pleased.” For entertainment, some men eager for action made their way to an artillery entrenchment thrown up south of camp, about a thousand yards from town, where they would take turns blasting cannon shots at the Alamo and place bets on their accuracy. Other militiamen amused themselves by chasing down the brass cannonballs that the Mexicans in the fort shot at the Texian camp.
Others, once their terms of volunteer service expired, drifted off steadily; one night an entire company melted away after dark. Many left to return home—they had marched to Béxar to fight, not sit around idly and indefinitely while the Mexican garrison was starved out. Word had spread that a large cannon had landed at Velasco, and when a man wished to leave, he would declare that he “was going after that cannon.” Some remained only when the General Council announced that those who stayed until the fall of the town would receive twenty dollars a month.
While Travis’s mounted force, augmented by Captain Seguín’s vaqueros, scoured the countryside and burned much of the grass on the road south to the Rio Grande to hinder the advance of any other troops from Mexico, the rest of the eight-hundred-man force conducted itself much less militarily. Drunkenness was so common that Austin, in consternation, sent a plainly worded message to the General Council: “In the name of Almighty God, send no more ardent spirits to this camp—if any is on the road, turn it around or have the head knocked out.” Drunks wandered through the campsite, firing their guns randomly, wasting ammunition, while others spent much of their day gambling and cockfighting. One man murdered another and was strung up from a pecan tree the next day. Winter was setting in, and most of the men were without warm clothing. When it rained, the army in its ramshackle camp of tents and huts was especially miserable, and the unsanitary conditions and lack of proper doctoring or medical supplies resulted in much sickness, no doubt exacerbated by the camp’s proximity to a field where cattle were slaughtered. (After visiting the camp, Houston expressed worry that an epidemic might break out.) Great flocks of vultures grazed among the hundreds of carcasses, heads, and skins, most of them picked clean. Even a few wolves and coyotes roamed there, for the most part undisturbed. In a very real sense, it was not clear which side was under siege and which was better off.
The boredom was relieved only by an occasional brushup, such as the skirmish that came to be known as the Grass Fight. An enemy column of one hundred cavalry and as many mules was sighted south of town on the morning of November 26, and a rumor spread that the pack train conveyed silver intended to pay the Mexican garrison. Bowie was dispatched to reconnoiter. He recruited several of the best marksmen and galloped out of camp, quickly followed by most of the volunteers, eager to share in the booty. About a mile outside Béxar, Bowie’s force charged into the mule train. After a flurry of exchanged gunfire, the Mexican dragoons abandoned the mules and made for safety. The Texians pursued them to within three hundred yards of town. Cós sent a column of reinforcements, who persuaded the men to turn back. Instead of silver, the mule packs contained freshly cut grass for the garrison’s starving cavalry mounts.
A further blow to the army’s hopes came in mid-November, when the General Council relieved Stephen Austin of command in order to send him to the United States to garner support for Texas. Austin, so frail and weak that he needed to be helped onto his horse, had requested the move: “I believe that my wornout constitution is not adapted to a military command, neither have I ever pretended to be a military man.” Before he left, on November 22, Austin ordered an assault on Béxar to begin the next day at dawn. The weather was damp and very cold, and late that night, his two divisional commanders informed him that the majority of the men were reluctant to participate. Stunned, Austin called off the attack. He left for San Felipe two days later. His men, aware of his devotion to the Texian cause, shook hands with him in silence.
Elected general in Austin’s stead was Edward Burleson, a veteran Indian fighter from Bastrop. As a fourteen-year-old private in his father’s company during the War of 1812, Burleson had shot a Creek chief, and he had fought many other Indians since arriving in Texas in 1830. He was known to be fearless in battle. His father, James, now sixty years old, had also joined the Texian army, and had participated in the Grass Fight.
A week later the army had dwi
ndled to about seven hundred men, and seemed close to dissolution. Money was scarce, supplies were running out, and the perseverance necessary to maintain a months-long siege had all but evaporated. Most of the Texian colonists had returned home, replaced by fresh arrivals from east Texas and beyond, the first of the volunteers from the United States, most of them young single men responding to news of the Texian revolt and eager to join the fight for freedom—and free land. Upon receiving intelligence of the Mexicans’ weakened state and meager provisions, Burleson issued another attack order on December 1. When his officers reported, yet again, of the unwillingness of officers and men, Burleson canceled the assault. Two days later he announced that the siege would be abandoned. What was left of the army would retreat to the east side of the Guadalupe, to Gonzales or Goliad, there to wait out the winter. The revolution, if it was to continue, would have to wait until spring.
Hundreds of men left, and the rest prepared to break camp. Some of the volunteers, particularly the New Orleans Greys, had been eager for action, and expressed their discontent. Discord spread, until it appeared as if the disorderly troops might fight among themselves and ignore the enemy below the river.
Then, late one afternoon, a Mexican officer rode out of town and surrendered to the rebels. When he spoke of the poor morale of the Mexican troops, the argument for an attack was renewed. A leader was needed, someone to champion an attack, to rally the men before they all left. Into the midst of this confusion of packing, leaving, and vociferous discussion rode the man who would do just that.
SIX
The Battle of Béxar
I am of opinion it Will be a Serious one unless we are aided a mediatly Send us help and we never will quit the field until we can Enjoy our Constituanal rites.
EDWARD BURLESON
Ben Milam had already packed several lifetimes into his forty-seven years. He was a longtime Texian, sometime empresario, and full-time adventurer. Though barely literate, he could claim as much military experience as anyone in camp. He had fought in the War of 1812, engaged a few years later in a filibustering expedition into Mexico with the notorious James Long, battled Karankawa cannibals near the coast, and in 1821 served as a colonel in the army of the new Republic of Mexico for a time. When Agustín de Iturbide had assumed the imperial crown, Milam had resigned his commission, declaring that “he would never serve a king.” By order of that monarch, he had been pursued, arrested, and imprisoned for a short time, until the republicans took over in March 1823. He had received a large land grant above DeWitt’s in 1826, though six years later he had only introduced fifty-two families into his colony, and his license was not renewed. At one time he held claim to twenty-two Mexican mines. Such a life held little room for a woman, and the only one he had ever been engaged to had given up waiting for Milam and married someone else.
But his many ventures had proven unsuccessful, and by 1835 he owned little more than one eleven-league grant. For his various offenses, he had seen the inside of more than one Mexican prison. He had only just escaped from one in Monterrey—a friend arranged a horse and provisions—and made his way hundreds of miles to Texas, somehow reaching Goliad just in time to join the action there. His clothes in tatters, he had donned items taken from the Mexican garrison there, but the pants and sleeves were at least six inches too short on Milam, who was slightly above average in height. A few days later, when he rode into the camp at Gonzales, Austin had made him commander of a mounted spy company.
The former Kentuckian’s right knee was seriously arthritic and his lower back gave him trouble, but he was still well muscled and energetic. Just returned from a long scout toward the Rio Grande, he became furious upon hearing of the plans to fall back to winter quarters. He found General Burleson’s adjutant, the short-tempered Frank Johnson, and filled his ear. Johnson, a longtime resident of Texas and an independence firebrand from the beginning, was persuaded, and the two marched to Burleson’s tent and laid out their plan. Burleson listened and agreed—he had not wanted to call off the previous attack, and told Milam that if he could muster enough volunteers, they could proceed with an assault the next day. Milam walked outside to find hundreds of expectant men. Word had spread that something was up.
One friend of Milam’s remembered his “commanding appearance and fine address,” and Milam drew upon both of those traits now. He took off his slouch hat, waved it above his head, and called out loud and clear, “Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio?”
Scores of volunteers gathered near the tent yelled, “I will!” and “We will!”
Milam stepped across a path that ran in front of the tent—one man later claimed he drew a line in the dirt—and shouted, “Well, if you’re going with me, get on this side of the road!”
The men roared in approval and rushed to fall in line with Milam. By the time they were accounted for, they numbered more than three hundred, including every able-bodied New Orleans Grey. In true democratic fashion, and to no one’s surprise, they chose Milam to lead them. A few captains made speeches against the venture, and some of the men begged their friends not to throw away their lives so foolishly. But after a time was set for early the next morning, the volunteers prepared for the assault. Others continued to mount their horses and head for home.
Bowie had left in late November, most likely fed up with Austin’s indecisiveness and the chaotic mess known as the Army of the People. Austin’s command style had been less than dynamic: his weakly worded orders almost begged to be ignored, and Bowie had taken full advantage—“Contents duly considered,” Bowie had replied to one of Austin’s written directives. After duly considering Austin’s “orders,” he usually did as he thought best.
Bowie had departed, albeit on orders, to oversee the work fortifying Goliad, ninety-five miles down the San Antonio River, which would serve as winter quarters for the Texian forces. Travis left also, about the same time. He had achieved recognition for striking, with just a dozen horsemen, a large herd of Mexican mounts fifty miles south of Béxar. He led a dawn attack straight into the Mexican camp and took the soldado escort unit prisoner without a shot fired. When Austin learned of the three hundred captured horses, he praised his young cavalry captain. Travis returned to San Felipe at the end of November and was commended by the General Council there, and news of his fine work appeared in the town newspaper.
Burleson would supervise the operation from camp, where the remaining two hundred or so men would constitute a reserve. Few of them gave the assault force much of a chance against the well-fortified Mexican army.
On the north side of Béxar, half the distance to town, the assault force assembled at three a.m. Only two hundred men, fifteen small companies, showed up—the remainder apparently heeded the attempts to discourage them, including predictions that they would be butchered. A norther was blowing in, knocking down tents and makeshift huts, and the weather had helped persuade others to remain in their warm bedding. Milam’s stalwarts wrapped their woolen blankets about them, shivering, as they waited for the signal. The moon was full and still high in the western sky.
At five o’clock that morning, December 5, a blast split the cool air as a cannonball crashed into the north wall of the Alamo. It was a diversion: earlier, chief artillerist Captain James Neill, who had fired the first cannon shot at Gonzales, had snuck a gun and its crew across the San Antonio River closer to the fort. The roar of the piece was answered by bugles, drums, and artillery fire, as well as the satisfying sight of a horde of Mexican infantrymen moving toward the mission, lit by the flare of rockets set off as alarms. The ruse had worked perfectly.
When Neill’s cannon boomed, Milam’s men dropped their blankets and scampered as quietly as possible the quarter mile south through the barren cornfields and into town—down two parallel streets toward the two northern corners of Main Plaza, with Milam at the head of one column and Frank Johnson leading the other. Two local men guided Johnson’s unit: Samuel Maverick, an enterprising young man from Virginia who had
only recently arrived in Béxar, and Erastus “Deaf” Smith, a New York native and scout extraordinaire—despite being hard of hearing—who lived south of town with his Tejana wife and four children. Guiding Milam’s division was John W. Smith, a local carpenter and translator (nicknamed El Colorado for his red hair), and Hendrick Arnold, a free man of color and Deaf Smith’s son-in-law. Johnson’s men skirted a campfire of sentries, then ran into a single vedette as they reached town: Smith quickly shot him dead. But other pickets spread the alarm, and the Mexican artillery opened fire with volleys of grapeshot and canister on the norteamericanos in the narrow dirt streets.
Less than a hundred yards from the well-fortified Main Plaza and its seven cannon, the Texians hugged the walls. They broke down the thick wooden doors of a few stone and adobe houses and jumped inside. Several of the buildings were residences occupied by families that had elected to stay in town, and some of the terrified inhabitants ran into the streets in their nightclothes. Other structures were warehouses and businesses where Mexican troops had been quartered, and in these the Texians found themselves in deadly combat involving pistols and Bowie knives, though some soldados swiftly dived out the few small windows.
The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation Page 7
