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

by James Donovan

  Most of the men of the garrison, all save Travis’s mounted company and a few others, were true volunteers who had remained in Béxar after everyone else had left. They had acknowledged Neill as commander because he had been there from the first, and had proven himself worthy of their respect after four long months of battle and hardship. Bowie, their inspirational leader, also acknowledged his command. They had no such basis of trust with Travis, however. True, he had led a spy company during the siege of Béxar, but he had left after only a month or so. They had not left, and neither had Neill, as their ragged clothing would attest. Besides, Travis was only twenty-six, and not an easy man to warm to. And he was a newly commissioned cavalry officer, with no experience commanding a fort and a formidable array of artillery.

  The final sticking point was one the volunteers had been touchy about since the beginning. Travis was a regular army officer, and they had repeatedly made it clear that they would only obey a commander they had elected themselves. As a result, only one of the volunteer companies agreed to serve under him. Some of the men went to Crockett to see if he was interested in taking command. Crockett refused—he was there, he explained, to assist Travis. “Me and my Tennessee boys have come to help Texas as privates,” he reiterated.

  Travis, appreciative of his “truly awkward and delicate” position, wrote Smith the day after Neill’s departure requesting orders. But a reply, if it ever came, would be a week away at best, so on the same day, he issued an order for an election. Only the volunteers voted, naming Bowie as their choice.

  Like most men of the time, Jim Bowie imbibed occasionally, but he had never been known as a heavy drinker, as had his friend Sam Houston. Now, though, Bowie responded to his election in an uncharacteristic and spectacularly unfortunate manner. Perhaps the grief in his heart since his wife’s death had reached a spillover point as a result of his quartering at the Veramendi house, where they had lived as newlyweds and where the reminders of her presence were constant. The cumulative aches of decades of serious injuries, illness, and wear to his body, or even the pressure of gaining authority, may have led to the snap. In any case, he proceeded to go on a massive drinking bout, accompanied by unseemly behavior.

  During his embarrassing two-day rampage, Bowie remained roaring drunk. Out of control, though in command, he told his men to stop the carts of families on their way out of town and prevent them from leaving. He ordered the release from prison of a Mexican convicted of theft by a twelve-man jury—of which he had been a member. He also freed one of Travis’s cavalrymen found guilty of mutiny, to loud cheers from the volunteers. For good measure, he set at liberty all prisoners, Tejano or Anglo, who had been placed on work details. When Juan Seguín, acting as the town judge, threw one convict back into jail, a furious Bowie confronted him and demanded the prisoner’s release. When Seguín refused, Bowie sent to the Alamo for troops, many of whom were also drunk. The soldiers paraded around Main Plaza under arms—those who had them; some had sold their guns for alcohol—“in a tumultuous and disorderly manner,” as Adjutant Baugh put it in a letter to Governor Smith two days later, which expressed his support for Travis. “Things… have become intolerable,” he wrote. Travis threatened to move his few loyal troops out of town.

  Just when the garrison needed strong leadership—spies rode into town that day with another report of a thousand Mexican soldiers on the Rio Grande poised to invade Texas—a serious schism had erupted. Travis wrote Smith again begging to be relieved of command: “If I did not feel my honor & that of my country compromised I would leave here instantly for some other point with the troops under my command as I am unwilling to be responsible for the drunken irregularities of any man…. I do not solicit the command of this Post,” he continued. “I will do it if it be your orders for a time until an artillery officer can be sent here.” Fannin’s commission was in the artillery, and he was only ninety-five miles away, with more than four hundred men. The solution seemed obvious.

  Travis went on to request more troops—regulars, to be specific—and he revealed that, despite his disagreements with Bowie, Béxar and its makeshift mission fortress had got into his bones also. “It is more important to occupy this Post than I imagined when I last saw you,” he told Smith. “It is the key of Texas from the Interior without a footing here the enemy can do nothing against us in the Colonies.”

  But before Travis could complete the move of his troops away from town, Bowie sobered up and made amends for his behavior, and the two came to an agreement. The express rider carrying the previous day’s letters from Travis and Baugh was detained until he could be given another dispatch, again requesting money and reinforcements, and ending with this pronouncement:

  By an understanding of today, Col. J. Bowie has the command of the volunteers of the Garrison, & Col. W.B. Travis, of the Regulars & Volunteer cavalry.

  All general orders, and correspondence, will hence forth be signed by both, until Col. Neill’s return—

  The letter was in Travis’s hand but signed by both men—Travis as commandant of cavalry and Bowie as commandant of volunteers. The crisis was averted, at least for now.

  Save for one scrawled signature a week hence, Bowie would not sign any more official correspondence. Some sickness had invaded his body—respiratory, it seems, from the descriptions given later by those who knew him and cared for him—and would soon render him bedridden. Sutherland would later describe the illness as “being of a peculiar nature… not to be cured by an ordinary course of treatment.” Other witnesses would describe it as typhoid fever, typhoid pneumonia, or consumption—tuberculosis. Whatever the diagnosis, or lack of one, the final result was an incapacitated Jim Bowie, confined to his bed in the Veramendi house, suffering from an illness that might prove fatal. His sister-in-law Juana Alsbury began to minister to him.

  So Travis gradually took over the duties of running the garrison. This time there was little resistance from the volunteers, so vociferous just a few days ago, and there was no election. Bowie, the man they had elected, had agreed to a cocommandancy, and now he was increasingly incapacitated and unable to rise to the demands of the position. Willingly or not, he ceded authority to the young lieutenant colonel.

  One of Bowie’s last acts as commander involved the near-constant stream of messengers to the east. One morning in mid-February, Crockett and Robert Evans, the tall, black-haired ordnance chief, along with a couple of young volunteers, made their way to the high ground east of town, where many of the horses grazed. They met up with two other soldiers, who asked Crockett if he thought there was any chance of a fight—if not, they were going home. Crockett pointed out that men were leaving as fast as others came in, and remarked that “if he were in command, he would have given them shit long ago,” remembered a recent arrival to Béxar named David Harman. They needed someone to “carry orders back to hurry up the drafted men and all soldiers at home,” said Crockett. Harman, a stripling of only a hundred pounds, volunteered for the mission. Back in town, Crockett brought him to Bowie, who remarked that Harman looked awfully young to be a soldier. Harman insisted he could handle the job, and Bowie gave him dispatches for the recruiting officers at San Felipe and other towns and sent him on his way.

  Under Travis, the work details continued—most important, the shoring up of the adobe walls of the mission, particularly the badly damaged north wall. Jameson had devised a cribbing of log braces along the entire extent, and instructed his men to pack earth between the wall and the wooden supports and bank earth against the exterior. It was nowhere near finished, but a good start had been made on the northeast end. The men dismantled Antonio Saez’s blacksmith shop, in La Villita, near the Alamo’s south gate, and carried the materials into the compound; old Saez had been repairing their guns since the battle of Béxar, and lately he had been busy preparing langrage and canister shot for the artillery. And sixty-five head of cattle were bought from a local rancher at twelve dollars a head. Travis, lacking funds, could only give the man a signed cl
aim for his $780.

  Few of the men had any money, but occasionally they scraped together a few coins. Anna Esparza, the wife of Gregorio Esparza, one of Juan Seguín’s men, and her oldest son, eleven-year-old Enrique, carried earthen jars full of food over the San Antonio River footbridge to the Alamo. While his mother sold the Americans tamales and beans, they taught the boy a ditty, and laughed and gave him centavos when he sang:

  We are the boys so handy,

  We’ll teach Santa Anna to fear

  Our Yankee Doodle Dandy.

  Every morning Travis walked from his quarters on Main Plaza to the footbridge across the shallow river and into the Alamo. The last house before the river belonged to Ambrosio Rodríguez, who was friendly to the rebel cause and another of Juan Seguín’s horsemen. Travis often stopped to talk to Rodríguez and his wife. Years later the couple’s son would recall the tall American. “Colonel Travis was a fine man of more than ordinary height,” he remembered. “He was a very popular man and was well liked by everyone.” When the elder Rodríguez heard a report that Santa Anna was on the way to Béxar with a well-organized army of seven thousand men, he told Travis and advised him to abandon the town and retreat into the interior of Texas. Travis refused to believe it. Cós had been defeated just two months before. There was no way Santa Anna could have organized such a large force in so short a time.

  The scarcity of horses complicated the scouting duties, but Travis kept as many spies out in the field as he could. Most of them were Juan Seguín’s Tejanos, who continued to bring in reports of a large Mexican army on the Rio Grande. Some of Seguín’s men requested permission to help move their families out of town, and on February 21 a dozen or so received discharges—a gracious move, but one that further compromised scouting. The reliable Erastus “Deaf” Smith, recently recovered from an injury sustained in the December assault on Béxar, had ranged to a point a few miles from the river, where he spotted Santa Anna’s Vanguard Brigade preparing to march north. But Smith rode out of town on February 15 to assist his family, who had departed for the East months earlier, and few non-Tejanos were familiar enough with the area to scout very far from town.

  On his way, Deaf Smith agreed to stop in San Felipe first to see Henry Smith and apprise him of the situation in Béxar. But Governor Smith, who had no control over the other two Texian forces—Fannin’s at Goliad, and what remained of the Matamoros expedition, commanded by Grant and Johnson—offered no resources, given his almost nonexistent authority. And acting governor Robinson was nearly as hamstrung: the General Council, which had not mustered a quorum since January 18, had substituted an advisory committee of several men that made recommendations to the governor. That board dwindled to two men by mid-February. Some of their suggestions were implemented, some not, but by the end of January, the committee had come to the conclusion that there were enough men at Béxar (likely misunderstanding Neill’s request of January 14 that a hundred men be transferred to his command from Goliad or somewhere else), and told Robinson so. The word went out to recruiting agents throughout Texas to stop directing volunteers there.

  AT BÉXAR, small groups of men came and went. Eleven volunteers tired of garrison duty left to scout the area east around Cibolo Creek for their bounty land. A few days later, the garrison’s two elected delegates to the convention, Jesse Badgett and Samuel Maverick, prepared to depart for Washington. Badgett left first, but Maverick, who had moved to Béxar a few months before the siege, remained in town to buy another tract of land—his fifth since the rebels had taken command of the city—and did not leave until February 19. John Sutherland continued to assist Dr. Amos Pollard with the two dozen or so sick and wounded men as Pollard moved all of them into the second story of the old convento building, where the hospital was located—and found to his surprise that most of the necessary medical instruments were already there.

  Among the arrivals were three brothers named Taylor, all in their early twenties, who showed up ready to fight; they had been picking cotton on a farm more than two hundred miles east near the coast when the cry for volunteers reached them. They finished the job, then marched to Béxar. Captain Albert Martin returned from Gonzales, where he operated a store. Martin had been one of the first to join the Army of the People. A native of Providence, Rhode Island, he was a graduate of a respected military academy that emphasized a rigorous physical regimen. He had followed his father and brothers to Texas in early 1835. There Martin lost no time in aligning himself with the independence movement party, and organized a local militia, the Gonzales Ranging Company of Mounted Volunteers. During the siege of Béxar he had somehow cut his foot with an ax and had been forced to return home to heal. Now he was back.

  Travis continued to dispatch couriers almost daily with requests for men, ammunition, and provisions. On February 17 he sent James Bonham to Goliad, beseeching James Fannin once more to move all or most of his command to Béxar. Bonham also carried Jameson’s latest report on the Alamo’s condition, which he would deliver to Governor Smith in San Felipe.

  Colonel Fannin, though, would be of no help. Soon after reaching Goliad with his four hundred men on February 12, he began to experience a crisis of confidence. The old Spanish presidio there sat on a rocky hill on the south side of the San Antonio River, overlooking a strategic ford. Its grounds encompassed about three acres, and its ten-foot-high wall was much better fortified than the Alamo; it had been designed as a stronghold from the beginning. But while his men worked to strengthen the old fort, Fannin began to dither. On February 15, he finally received official word from the General Council to abandon the Matamoros plan and “occupy such points as you may in your opinion deem most advantageous,” along with a few additional vaguely worded suggestions. “Fortify & defend Goliad and Bexar if any opportunity fairly offers,” he was advised. “Now obey any orders you may deem Expedient.” Robinson and the council gave him free rein to command—indeed, the acting governor decreed that “all former orders given by my predecessor, Gen. Houston, or myself, are so far countermanded,” and even went further: he co-opted Houston’s authority by signing the letter “Acting Governor and Commander in Chief of the Army of Texas.” Just a few days before, Fannin had been chomping at the bit to assume such power. Now he had second thoughts. He immediately dashed off a reply to Robinson. “I do not desire any command, and particularly that of chief,” he wrote.

  I feel, I know, if you and the council do not, that I am incompetent. Fortune, and brave soldiers, may favour me and save the State, and establish for me a reputation far beyond my deserts. I do not covet, and I do earnestly ask of you, and any real friend, to relieve me, and make a selection of one possessing all the requisites of a Commander…. I would feel truly happy to be in the bosom of my family, and rid of the burden imposed on me.

  Two days later Fannin requested approval to make his headquarters at Béxar per Travis’s suggestion. But Robinson and his two-man advisory board did not approve his plan, and Fannin had no choice but to remain at Goliad and redouble his fortification efforts.

  While Fannin’s self-confidence—and the confidence of his men in their commander—dwindled, Travis continued to send riders out of Béxar in search of aid. On February 19, he dispatched Captain James L. Vaughan, a veteran of the battle of Béxar, on a risky recruiting trip to the Rio Grande area. Vaughan’s mission was to visit several towns south of the river from Guerrero all the way down to Matamoros, which he hoped would be in rebel hands by then. James Grant and others had spread stories of unrest in the region, and Vaughan was directed to sign up as many recruits as possible and send them to Béxar. Travis also sent two Gonzales men, Byrd Lockhart and Andrew Sowell, to their hometown for provisions.

  Late in the evening of Saturday, February 20, a young Tejano named Blas Herrera rode into town from the southwest and reported to his cousin, Juan Seguín. Herrera had left the Rio Grande two and a half days before, riding steadily through 145 miles of semidesert. Seguín went straight to Travis when he heard Herrera’s re
port. Assured of the young man’s reliability, Travis immediately called a council of war in his room. Before the garrison’s officer corps and a few others, Herrera told them what he had seen: a large army, including many mounted men, crossing the Rio Grande. As far as he could tell, the cavalry planned to force-march to Béxar to take the garrison by surprise.

  Herrera’s report led to much discussion. Some thought it the most authentic intelligence yet received. And it was clear that Seguín believed him. But the opinion of the men was divided. Most labeled this just another wild rumor, like those that reached Béxar almost every day—just one more Tejano false alarm. The meeting broke up before a clear decision could be made. But Travis sent out riders to gather up men on furlough in the area, such as David Cummings, a young surveyor who, with several others, was encamped on Cibolo Creek, staking out a land claim. And though some of the Americans were not convinced by Herrera’s story, his relatives were; the Seguín family left town the next morning. Other bexareños followed.

  The work continued through a wet and overcast Monday, February 22—a day special to the American-born rebels. The date marked the birth of George Washington, the patron saint of the republic to the north, who was just as popular and inspiring to these “sons of ’76” in view of their current enterprise. Despite intermittent thunderstorms throughout the day, the men would be attending a fandango in town that evening, and planned to celebrate the occasion properly—and so did the three dozen or so volunteers originally from the British Isles, who had no intention of letting history get in the way of a good time. If the reports of Santa Anna’s army were true, it might be the last chance they would have to let loose for a long time.