When the news of the Alamo garrison’s besiegement reached Washington a few hours after it arrived in San Felipe, Robinson sent a frantic message to Sam Houston, still parleying with the Cherokees and several associated bands of Indians. “Come quickly and organize our countrymen for battle,” the acting governor begged. “Call the militia out en masse…. Say it is done by the order of the Governor & Council & by your own order, and by the unanimous call of Texas.” He sent it by express and addressed it “to Gen. Sam Houston Wherever he may be.” That rider galloped out of town posthaste, but others directed to bear the news to the north and east did not—the government had no money to pay for them. Only when several citizens pitched in were riders found, paid, and dispatched.
The next morning, Saturday, the citizens of San Felipe met to appoint a committee of twelve to prepare an address and draft resolutions. The meeting adjourned for a while, then reconvened later to adopt the measures. One of the resolutions called for the formation of another committee. Another recommended establishing provision depots on the road to Gonzales. There were eight resolutions in all. None called for an immediate march to Béxar, where 150 men were surrounded by ten times their number, though some of the ladies of the town began to gather clothing just in case.
The fledgling country’s severe lack of funds was a chief reason Stephen Austin had been sent, with two other commissioners, to the United States: to drum up support and money. Americans avidly followed the progress of the revolution, and overwhelmingly supported the Texas cause. Most of their information came from newspaper stories, but many learned of the struggle firsthand from Austin and his fellow commissioners, who traveled from New Orleans to Mobile, Nashville, and Louisville on their way to Washington, D.C., speaking of the Texians’ grievances to crowds of hundreds or thousands at every stop. They succeeded in acquiring several private loans from individuals and banks, but Austin knew their chances of gaining financial aid and diplomatic recognition from the United States would be slim: the Texians’ provisional government had not even issued a declaration of independence, much less established a legitimate, functioning government. Without those essentials, Andrew Jackson and his administration would insist on maintaining neutrality—the last thing they wanted was a war with Mexico. Until then, the unofficial state of Texas would have to go it alone, without official U.S. assistance.
EARLY ON FEBRUARY 25, the morning after Travis wrote his defiant letter, while work was begun on a trench on the east side of the river in the near-empty field east of town known as El Potrero (“the pasture”), Santa Anna ordered the artillery to resume bombarding the Alamo. The rebel cannon returned fire. Overnight, two more Mexican batteries had been erected to the west, and their field of fire controlled the fort’s entrance and the road junctions just outside it. His Excellency decided to make use of that advantage—and test the mettle of his troops and of the colonists.
At 9:30 a.m., as the new batteries bombarded the Alamo and Santa Anna watched from nearby, General Castrillón and Colonel Miñón led the Matamoros Battalion and several companies of cazadores, the elite light infantry—about three hundred men in total—up through La Villita to within a hundred yards of the rebels. They took possession of several small adobe huts and jacales bordering Plaza de Valero and opened a heavy fusillade on the fort’s south wall.
A wide ditch almost five feet deep angled out from the main gate’s lunette. A company of rebels in the trench looked over its edge and let loose a hail of well-aimed rifle and musket fire that dropped several attackers. On the walls behind them, more men supplied supporting fire. From the batteries along the south side of the fort and at the lunette, the artillerymen of Captains Almeron Dickinson, Samuel Blair, and William Carey directed a heavy discharge of grapeshot and canister that burst apart and scattered in a wide, deadly arc as they flew from the cannon, much like a massive shotgun. Soldados in the open scrambled for cover behind the scattered structures on the south edge of the plaza. The Mexican batteries responded with balls, grapeshot, and canister of their own, and at least one more organized assault was attempted, again repelled by the rebels. The battle raged for two hours until a full retreat was ordered. The attackers fell back out of rifle range, dragging their dead and wounded with them.
Santa Anna’s force took the worst of it, with two men killed and six wounded. But he had gained the information he needed. The rebels might be an unruly bunch, but they were good shots, as their reputations suggested; they were well entrenched in a superior position; and they could put up a fight. They clearly would not be overwhelmed by a few weary battalions.
Nine days earlier, while at the Rio Grande, His Excellency had written his secretary of war, José María Tornel, to tell him that Béxar would be taken within fifteen days. The town was in Mexican hands once more—that much was true. But that ownership was in name only as long as the rebels held the Alamo. They constituted not only an impediment but a personal embarrassment. The longer the enemies lived, the more the fame and honor of the Mexican army, and Santa Anna himself, were compromised. And his army’s provisions were running out, no new supplies had arrived, and the town had been stripped bare. For more than one reason, he could not afford to remain in Béxar another two weeks.
Santa Anna decided that he could no longer wait for Gaona to arrive with the heavier cannon, which were only twelve-pounders in any case. He dispatched a messenger back down El Camino Real to find the First Infantry Brigade, carrying orders to immediately send Gaona’s three best battalions—the Aldama Permanente, the Toluca Activo, and the crack Zapadores—ahead to Béxar under the command of the senior colonel, Francisco Duque. The weaponry would wait.
After this heavy skirmish His Excellency wrote Tornel again: “Up until now they have shown themselves contemptuous, confident of the strong position that they maintain, and basing their hopes upon the great resources of their colonies and of the United States of the North. However, they shall soon be finally disillusioned.”
In the meantime, he seized upon an unexpected pleasure. During the morning’s fighting, in one of the houses, Castrillón had found the widow of a Mexican soldier and her attractive daughter. The defiant woman told the general that they had no other place to go, and that they were not afraid. Later, when Castrillón told El Presidente of his encounter, Santa Anna expressed a desire to see the girl. Castrillón declined to act as procurer for his commander, but Miñón, untroubled by such scruples, agreed to do it. When he delivered Santa Anna’s message, the woman refused to allow Santa Anna any contact with her daughter unless sanctified by marriage. Miñón reported this to his commander in chief, then told him of a man under his command, a well-educated rascal capable of all sorts of tricks—including the impersonation of a priest. Santa Anna gave the order to proceed. The soldado borrowed vestments from a priest in town, along with everything else necessary to perform a wedding according to the rites of the Catholic Church. The “nuptials” took place in Santa Anna’s quarters on Main Plaza. Afterward, the already married president retired in the company of his young “bride.”
A norther blew in about nine p.m. and increased the misery of the troops erecting two more batteries several hundred yards southeast of the Alamo. The Matamoros Battalion set up camp close by, and the Dolores Cavalry Regiment was posted near the hills further east. That night a fresh group of skirmishers was sent against that side of the fort, but grapeshot and small arms fire sent the soldados back to their entrenchments. By eleven thirty p.m. most of the Mexican army had retired for the evening.
LATER THAT NIGHT, Travis sat in his quarters along the west wall with pen in hand, the beginnings of a letter to Sam Houston in front of him. Throughout the compound rebels wrapped themselves in blankets and huddled around fires or found a place out of the elements to grab what sleep they could. Even worse off were the sentries on the walls and the pickets outside in the ditches, who had to somehow stay awake and alert. There were now more troops surrounding the Alamo than there were the previous day. Trenches
were under construction on the Alameda, to the southeast, and a large force of infantry had moved into them.
Earlier that evening, at a council of war held by the garrison’s officers, it was decided that another messenger would be sent to Fannin at Goliad. No one volunteered, so a vote was taken. Juan Seguín was elected to undertake the dangerous mission. Travis objected—no one in the garrison knew the Spanish language or Mexican customs better, and he might be needed if they were to treat with the Mexican commander again. But his arguments were overruled, and at eight o’clock, after bidding good-bye to his friends and comrades, Seguín sneaked out the main gate and crawled on all fours to the acequia east of the fort, then up the waterway and into Béxar. It had been arranged for one of his Tejano horsemen, Antonio Cruz y Arocha, to meet him with a horse. With any luck Seguín would make his way through the Mexican lines and out of town.
The day had been long and exhausting, but Travis’s men had acquitted themselves well—“Indeed, the whole of the men who were brought into action conducted themselves with such heroism that it would be injustice to discriminate,” he wrote to Houston. But he decided to single out a few, with one receiving the highest praise: “The Hon. David Crockett was seen at all points, animating the men to do their duty.” He mentioned several other defenders, including his aide, Charles Despallier, and rifleman Robert Brown: the two had sallied out the main gate and burned the straw-thatched jacales and houses around the Plaza de Valero, reducing the cover for any assaults from that direction. Not a single man had been lost; the only injuries were a few scratches from flying pieces of rock. But they were still outnumbered ten to one, if only the able-bodied were counted, and the enemy entrenchments were encroaching. It was bitter cold, and they were running out of firewood. The situation called for another stirring appeal. He ended with this:
I have every reason to apprehend an attack from his whole force very soon; but I shall hold out to the last extremity, hoping to secure reinforcements in a day or two. Do hasten on aid to me as rapidly as possible, as from the superior number of the enemy, it will be impossible for us to keep them out much longer. If they overpower us, we fall a sacrifice at the shrine of our country, and we hope posterity and our country will do our memory justice. Give me help, oh my country!
Once more he ended his letter with: “Victory or Death!” The race for reinforcements was on.
THIRTEEN
“This Time You May See Some Blood”
We have provisions for twenty days for the men we have; our supply of ammunition is limited…. If these things are promptly sent and large reinforcements are hastened to this frontier, this neighborhood will be the great and decisive battle ground.
WILLIAM BARRET TRAVIS
Express rider John Johnson arrived in Goliad, ninety-five miles down the San Antonio River, on February 25, two days after leaving Béxar. He exaggerated the size of the enemy force—three thousand or so, he told the men who gathered around him as he entered the presidio—but the news that 156 rebels were holed up in the old Alamo compound stunned the four hundred rebels in the fort. Johnson handed the written plea for help to James Fannin, who was in the middle of penning yet another letter to acting governor James Robinson. The Goliad commander had received other requests for aid from Béxar, but this one the colonel could not ignore.
Fannin’s men had been hard at work fortifying the presidio, and he had been so pleased with the results that two days before, he had conducted a lottery to name the place. “Fort Defiance” won out. When the same day he wrote to Robinson to tell him the news, he again asked to be relieved of his command. “I am a better judge of my military abilities than others,” he wrote, “and if I am qualified to command an Army, I have not found it out.”
“We deem it unnecessary to repeat to a brave officer, who knows his duty, that we call on him for assistance,” read the message from Béxar. Though provisions were scarce, many of his men were dressed in rags, and some were without shoes, Fannin immediately decided that he would respond to the call from the Alamo. One hundred men would stay to garrison the fort; the remainder, about 320 strong, would march north at dawn with four small cannon and several oxcarts of provisions and ammunition. Fannin’s decision overjoyed the New Orleans Greys; for at least a month, since the dissolution of the Matamoros expedition, they had wanted to return to their nineteen comrades at Béxar.
The next morning Fannin and his men set out. Two hundred yards from town, three supply wagons broke down. Only by doubling ox teams, and with the greatest difficulty, did they manage to get the artillery across the San Antonio River. By that time it was almost sunset, and a cold wind was blowing in. They returned to the fort to sleep, leaving the supply wagons on the near side of the river and the cannon on the other. During the night some of the oxen strayed off and could not be found the next morning. Without the oxen they would have no provisions, and only the ammunition they could carry.
In the morning Fannin’s volunteers requested a council of war, which convened on the riverbank. Besides half a tierce (about twenty gallons) of rice, they had almost nothing to eat. They were without beef, save for a small portion of jerky, and it would be impossible to obtain any until they had reached the Seguín ranch, Casa Blanca, seventy miles away—and then only if the Mexicans had not already commandeered it. Word had reached them that Santa Anna had dispatched a column down the Goliad road to intercept them. And then there was the condition of the men and their clothing, or lack of it… and the size of the Mexican army they would likely have to fight their way through to reach the Alamo… and the question of what would happen to the Goliad garrison if it fell into the hands of the enemy—the more they discussed it, the more unwise the expedition appeared, until a unanimous decision was reached: they would remain at Fort Defiance. “It was deemed expedient to return to this post and complete the fortifications, etc., etc.,” wrote Fannin in a letter to Robinson later that day.
Between San Felipe’s resolutions, Fannin’s irresoluteness, and the reluctance of Texians to heed the rallying cries of their leaders, it seemed as if there was no one willing to march immediately to the besieged garrison.
But there were a few such men.
ANDREW KENT WAS NOT PARTICULARLY LARGE, nor were his two eldest sons—eighteen-year-old Davy was 5 feet 3 inches, and fifteen-year-old Isaac would be even shorter at full growth—but he was strong, and he knew how to work with wood. Soon after arriving in Green DeWitt’s colony in 1830, with the help of his sons, his relatives, his neighbors, and his extensive collection of tools, he began to build a pioneer mansion: a double log cabin with lofts and a dog run and a brick chimney at each end, forty feet apart.
Back in Callaway County, Missouri, Kent had made do with 160 acres. That was enough for a man, but for those who farmed and ranched to feed themselves, it would not be sufficient for his eight children when they became adults and had families of their own. He had heard of the grants in Texas given to men with dependents—4,428 acres, a full league—and had heard the copious praise of the land and its bounties from those who had settled there. After discussing it with a few neighbors, including the Zumwalts—Andrew’s wife, Elizabeth, was a member of that extensive clan—they made arrangements for several families to move to DeWitt’s colony in Texas. After months of preparations—gathering tools, supplies, and livestock, and building large flatboats—they had made the arduous trip down the Missouri and the Mississippi to New Orleans, and thence by schooner to the mouth of the Lavaca River on the Texas coast. They drove their wagons inland to a choice spot in the bottomlands on the west side of the river, some thirty-five miles southeast of Gonzales. That was in June 1830.
Kent and his sons worked hard on the family homestead, farming cotton, corn, potatoes, yams, and all kinds of vegetables, and raising sheep, hogs, milk cows, and cattle. After a few years he registered his own stock mark and brand. The arrival of two more children meant many mouths to feed, but the land lived up to its legend, and there was enough for everyone, plus
extra to barter and sell. Most of their clothes the womenfolk made themselves from cotton and wool spun on their own wheels and woven on their own looms; the family bought little from the stores in Gonzales. It was a hard life but a good one, rewarding honest toil and improving every year.
So upon Santa Anna’s rise to power and his severe curtailment of the Texians’ rights as guaranteed by the Mexican constitution of 1824, Andrew became increasingly active in politics and supportive of independence—his father, after all, had fought in the American Revolution for similar reasons. He would not accept the possibility of losing everything he had worked so hard for. When a secret meeting was called in July 1835 among the citizens living on the Lavaca and Navidad Rivers, Kent rode thirty-five miles to a neighbor’s cotton-gin house to discuss Santa Anna’s policies and debate their response. The farmers present put their names to a declaration calling for armed resistance to military occupation. A few months later Andrew and Davy Kent rode with Stephen Austin’s Army of the People to Béxar. Father and son participated in the long siege and battle there, but made it home for Christmas, Davy with a slight wound in his shoulder.
The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation Page 20
