The soldados lay with their chests to the ground in the cool morning air, weapons in hand, and waited as silently as possible. Some of those in the front ranks slung their muskets over their shoulders and gripped their ladders—ten ladders in each of the first two columns on the north side. A few in Cós’s column also held axes and crowbars, since there were well-fortified doors and gates and blocked-in windows here and there along the walls that might yield to a determined battering. Each man prayed to his Maker, and thought of his loved ones. Men would die in the assault, everyone knew.
At three a.m., near the cottonwood-lined Alameda to the southeast, the cavalry began saddling up. At four a.m., Santa Anna and Almonte quietly made their way across the river and around the fort to the entrenchment a few hundred yards north of the Alamo. The artillery would not be used—the danger of hitting their own infantry was too high—so the cannon there were pulled back from the embrasures to make room for Santa Anna and his staff to observe the attack. The reserves under Colonel Amat and the battalion bands were positioned nearby.
Sometime after five a.m., Mexican skirmishers crept up to the drowsy rebel pickets stationed in trenches outside the Alamo and dispatched them without alerting the fort’s sentinels. A short time later, at 5:30 a.m., Zapadores bugler José María González lifted his horn to his lips.
Two hundred yards north of the Alamo, Lieutenant Colonel de la Peña waited with Duque’s column. Like most of the men around him, he could not sleep. Inevitably, his thoughts were somber: that many of those around him who were now breathing would soon be dead, and that others, badly wounded, might wait for hours before aid arrived. And he hoped fervently that the anxiety and uncertainty would end, for the blood of their dead comrades, and Mexican honor, deserved vengeance.
But he was exhausted, and suffering from lack of sleep, and his eyes were just closing when he was jolted wide awake by the bugle sounding the charge, and he and the other men around him jumped to their feet and began to run toward the Alamo.
SIXTEEN
“That Terrible Bugle Call of Death”
A horrible carnage took place.
JOSÉ ENRIQUE DE LA PEÑA
The door to Travis’s quarters along the west wall burst open. “Colonel Travis,” shouted officer of the day John Baugh as he ran into the room. “The Mexicans are coming!” There had been no warnings from the pickets stationed outside the fort, and the enemy was advancing upon them as he spoke.
Travis threw his blankets aside and leaped to his feet. He grabbed his double-barreled shotgun and sword, yelled at Joe to take his gun and follow him, and ran out into the Alamo courtyard.
It was just after 5:30 a.m. and still dark. To the east, behind the old convento, the blackness of the horizon was only barely less intense. Men streamed out of the barracks and granary building to join those who had slept at their posts along the walls. Gunners at the batteries pulled off the leather and lead aprons from their cannon and made preparations to fire canister and langrage. Sentinels on the parapets yelled for assistance. Officers bellowed orders at their men. From outside the walls could be heard the rumble of thousands of pounding feet approaching the fort, and beyond that the ominous strains of the Mexican bands playing the tune they had inherited from the Spaniards, who had borrowed it from their Moorish oppressors: the degüello.
Most of the tumult seemed to be coming from the north wall. Travis and Joe ran that way and bounded up the ramp to the battery on the right center of the wall, where three cannon faced the northern approaches. When they reached the parapets and looked out through the darkness and smoke they saw hundreds of soldados moving toward them. The moon was low in the western sky and hidden by clouds, but the flashes of massed muskets firing illuminated the scene, aided by rockets shot up into the sky over the town.
Travis took one look and yelled, “Come on, boys, the Mexicans are upon us, and we’ll give them hell!”
The gunners barely had time to sight their cannon. Then there was a blast from one of the guns and a load of langrage tore into the approaching Mexicans and knocked a score of them to the ground, some screaming, some silent forever. Other guns roared and dozens more fell. But some of the Mexicans had already reached the wall and were under the cannon’s reach, since the gunners could not tilt them low enough. Riflemen reached over the edge of the thick wall and fired down into them, but in so doing made themselves silhouetted targets.
Travis stepped past one of the cannon, leaned over the parapet, pointed his shotgun at the men below, and pulled the trigger. At his side, his servant Joe fired his. Before Travis could pull back and reload there was a salvo of musket fire and a slug slammed into his forehead and knocked him back against the gun carriage, lifeless. His shotgun fell into the crowd outside the wall.
Just moments into the battle, the garrison was stripped of its commander. Joe stood transfixed for a moment, then turned and ran down the ramp and across the courtyard to the stone house they had left just minutes ago. Once inside, he locked the door.
THE THREE HUNDRED SOLDADOS of the Toluca battalion rushed through the grass and brush toward the north wall. Most of them hurdled the three-foot-wide acequia, but in the darkness a few fell into the cold water and then heaved themselves out, staggering to their feet to follow their comrades. Cries of “Viva Santa Anna!” and “Viva la república!” mixed with screams of agony as one of the cannon on the wall roared; meanwhile, jagged pieces of langrage ripped into half a company and rifle fire from the rebels on the walls found its mark. At the front of the column, José Enrique de la Peña found himself surprisingly calm, until a hunk of metal slammed into Colonel Duque’s left thigh and he tumbled to the grass. Even as some of his men trampled over him in their haste to reach the safety of the wall, Duque yelled at them to keep moving forward. Some of them did, but others stopped when they saw their commander fall. In the semidarkness, soldados who had never faced enemy fire panicked; some discharged their muskets from the waist to avoid the gun’s nasty kick and sent their shots too high, while others in the rear ranks found targets in their fellow infantrymen charging ahead of them. There was another cannon blast, and Captain José María Herrera, leading the Toluca cazadores, fell dead, along with half his sharpshooters. In the field outside the north wall lay scores of men. “Our columns left along their path a wide trail of blood, of wounded, and of dead,” recalled de la Peña.
The young officer knelt by Duque’s side a moment, then stood and began making his way through the tangled ranks toward the battery northeast of the fort, where Santa Anna, his staff, and the reserve waited. General Castrillón, Duque’s command replacement, must be summoned, thought de la Peña. He fought his way against the tide of men as cannon fire continued to smash into the column, shredding the Mexican lines.
At the sound of the trumpet General Cós, at the head of his first rank, stood and yelled “Arriba!” and the 350 men in his column got to their feet and in tight formation began to follow him toward the northwest corner of the fort and the battery there. Though they were still out of range, some officers ordered their men to begin shooting, so they started firing their weapons while they were still moving. Not many of them had hurdled the acequia near the wall before a barrage of cannon and rifle fire ripped into the ranks and swept away most of the men in a single musket company of the Aldama battalion. Another volley of grapeshot took a dozen more. But the three lines remained in good order, and some of the soldados reached the wall, stumbling over flattened cannonballs that had crashed into it and fallen to the ground.
The cannoneers and riflemen above them continued to rip into the men in the rear. On Cós’s left flank, stray musket fire from Duque’s column hit some of the soldados there. They were taking too many casualties. Cós ordered an oblique to the right that his men executed smartly, sweeping past the large pecan tree at the corner, and soon they were gathered along the west wall trying to gain entry to the fort. Using picks and axes, they began to bash at the bricks and stones blocking in the windows of the
buildings on the west side, and especially at the doors in the rear of the houses. Above them rebels on the roofs leaned over and fired down at them, but in so doing they presented inviting targets, outlined against the cloudy sky, and some muskets—and the more accurate Baker rifles used by some of the cazadores—found their marks. A few of the ladder bearers reached the wall, threw the ladders up against the stone and adobe, and held them firm while others began climbing. The walls were lower here, less than ten feet.
On the east side of the Alamo, Colonel Romero’s column began advancing against the compound. But the acequia there had overflowed into a wide pond, shallow but mucky, and that combined with point-blank blasts from the cannon atop the rear of the church forced them to veer to the right, past the horse and cattle pens. Rifle fire from the roof of the convento and the small battery in the cattle yard raked their ranks and pushed them toward the northeast corner, where they slammed into Duque’s column and joined the mob of men there. Some soldados had begun to climb the crude timber revetments reinforcing the crumbling north wall, since only one ladder was in use—the others had been lost or broken—but so many tried that they knocked others down. The few who reached the top were met with bayonets and pistol fire and fell back into the crowd below. “Disorder had already begun,” remembered de la Peña. “Officers of all ranks shouted but were hardly heard” over the “Vivas” and cries of “Muerte a los Tejanos!” and the constant rifle fire from the rebels on the parapets above them. The two columns quickly disintegrated into a disorderly mass. Forward progress halted under the wall.
Meanwhile, to the south, Colonels Morales and Miñón led their 125 men up through the Plaza de Valero toward the Alamo’s main gate. But heavy fire from the lunette’s cannon and rifle volleys from the palisade forced them to the left, and they ran through the blackened jacales ruins toward the shelter of the only structure still standing in the area, a stone house near the fort’s southwest corner. Thirty feet away was the large cannon on a platform atop an old building. Morales gathered his skirmishers and prepared to assault the battery. The lunette’s cannon faced east and south, so for the moment they were not under artillery fire.
Safer still, in the darkness a few hundred yards away, a quiet force waited: Ramírez y Sesma’s cavalrymen. Poised in a long arc east and southeast of the fort, they sat on their horses and watched the infantry’s advance, a pageant illuminated by the flash of rifle fire and the flames of the rebel cannon.
CROCKETT AND HIS “TENNESSEE BOYS”—Micajah Autry, Daniel Cloud, and the rest of Captain Harrison’s Tennessee Mounted Volunteers—were assigned to defend the wooden palisade running between the church and the gatehouse. But the deadly fire of their long rifles likely helped deflect the soldados moving up through the Plaza de Valero, and soon there were no more Mexicans in sight. The bulk of the attack was clearly directed toward the weakened north wall. Following Crockett’s lead, most of Harrison’s men left the palisade area and hurried in that direction to aid the defenders there. But there was also activity along the west wall, and Crockett turned that way. Some of his companions followed him. He jumped into the battery outerworks on that side and, using Betsy, began shooting at the troops fighting their way in along the length of the wall, firing, reloading, and firing along with his comrades as fast as he could.
Inside the church sacristy, the women and children huddled in the corners, terrified, praying and comforting each other. From time to time the entire room shook, and they looked up at the arched ceiling above them as dust and loose plaster showered down. They could hear the shrieks of the wounded and dying, the uninterrupted roar of rifles and muskets, and the deafening, constant thunder of the Alamo artillery, especially the three cannon almost directly above them.
With the help of Bonham, Walker, Esparza, and his other gunners, Captain Dickinson kept his three pieces atop the church blasting away until the battalions had moved north toward the animal pens and out of his artillery’s field of fire. Riflemen near them and on the convento roof continued to pour down fire on the soldados as they hurried toward the northeast. Now they could only hear the sounds of slaughter at the north wall. Then the question was, should they stay by their guns, or grab rifles and run to the aid of their comrades? Most of the men remained at their posts.
Somewhere out of sight to the north, the Mexican bands stopped playing, and the notes of another charge blared from a single bugle.
FROM THE ENTRENCHMENT NORTHEAST OF the Alamo, Santa Anna observed the progress of the battle, following events by the bright bursts of rebel artillery and the smaller flashes of firearms. “The scene offered by this engagement was extraordinary,” he wrote later. The coordinated assault had gone off smoothly, the columns attacking more or less at the same time. But the rebels had responded more quickly than expected and put up a stubborn resistance, and now it appeared that the attack was wavering. It was time to send in his elite troops. He gave the order for the reserves to charge, directing his staff to accompany them. The Zapadores led the way, behind Colonel Amat and General Castrillón, followed by the veterans in the five granadero companies.
A blast of shrapnel from a rebel cannon ripped into them, knocking a dozen Zapadores down along with half their officers. But they forged ahead and reached the wall before another load of grapeshot could find them and pushed as close as they could to the earth-and-wood revetment, where the cannon could not touch them. Somehow de la Peña fought his way through the crowd to find General Castrillón and inform him of Colonel Duque’s injury. Meanwhile, some members of Santa Anna’s staff pushed through the mass of men at the northeast corner and worked their way down the wall to its weakest area. Setting an example, the staff officers began climbing the ladderlike timber braces reinforcing the wall. One of the first to reach the top of the twelve-foot wall was fifty-five-year-old General Amador. Close behind him were General Ampudia, Lieutenant Colonel Marcial Aguirre, Colonel Esteban Mora, and Lieutenant Colonel Rómulo Díaz de la Vega, de la Peña’s good friend. Inspired by the sight of their commanders on the ramparts, the soldados rallied and began following them over the wall and overpowering the rebels who remained there.
On the west side, the men of Cós’s column spread along the north end of that wall and continued to batter its vulnerable points—the barricaded windows and embrasures. Those who had tools used them; for those who did not, gun butts served as mallets—anything to open up a breach even one or two of them could squirm through. When they finally broke through one of the wooden doors, men began pouring into the Alamo courtyard.
At the southwest corner, Morales and Miñón led a bold assault on the eighteen-pounder there. The fierce battle at the north wall drew some of the rebels away, leaving a thin line to defend the big gun. After picking off the silhouetted riflemen, cazadores ran up to the wall, threw their two ladders against it, and stormed the battery. Dozens of men followed them—overpowering the rebels on the platform before they could spike the gun to render it useless—ran down the ramp, and fought their way into the courtyard. Some of them rushed the main entrance, overwhelming any resistance there and opening the main gate and the lunette’s timber gate to admit the rest of the column.
Now augmented by the Toluca battalion and the reserves, some of Romero’s men followed over the north wall. Others scaled the low walls of the cattle pen and then the horse corral, smashing through a narrow postern at the north end of the granary building to swarm into the fort.
His Excellency continued to observe the progress of the battle. Never lacking in personal courage, he had planned to lead the reserves into action himself, but now he changed his mind, deciding to remain at the northern battery. There was no doubt anymore that the defenders of the Alamo were about to be obliterated.
FROM BEHIND SANDBAGS, defenders on the convento roof fired through the thick gray smoke into the Mexican troops on the eastern side even after they climbed into the animal pens. But when soldados began streaming into the plaza from every side, those who could left the roof
top to seek shelter below in the second line of defense—the fortified structures along the east side, the granary turned barracks, and the convento—slamming and locking the doors behind them. They began firing through the loopholes and windows into the hundreds of Mexicans entering the courtyard.
Not everyone made it even to such temporary safety. A few chose not to try. As the Mexicans overran every position around the perimeter, one knot of rebels remained in place to make a stand in the outerworks along the west wall: David Crockett and his comrades. And closed doors were no defense for James Bowie. Gasping and too weak to rise from his cot, he had been left alone in his room near the main gate.
A cloud of pungent gray smoke hung over the old mission compound. Rebels and soldados howled and swore as they fought now at close quarters with pistols, knives, and swords. With no time to reload, rifles and muskets became clubs and bayonet-tipped muskets deadly lances as the Mexicans took full possession of the courtyard. Many of the remaining defenders made it into the convento or the church, but some stood their ground and made isolated stands facing the soldados until they were overwhelmed. De la Peña could not help but admire one robust blond norteamericano as he fired, ran back a few steps while loading, turned, and fired again, until he finally fell.
The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation Page 25
