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

by James Donovan

  The gunners at one battery on the west wall also refused to leave their post. As the Mexicans poured into the fort, these rebels wheeled their cannon around and managed to twice fire down into the enemy before falling to a fusillade of musket fire.

  On the platform above the church nave, Almeron Dickinson and his gunners took up their rifles and began firing into the enemy soldiers in the main courtyard. Dickinson ran down the ramp and back through the church into the sacristy, where the terrified women and children cowered in corners. Some of the children hid under the hay they had slept on. Dickinson looked for Susanna and Angelina in the dark and finally found them.

  “Great God, Sue, the Mexicans are inside our walls!” he said. “All is lost. If they spare you, save my child.” He embraced and kissed both of them, drew his sword, and ran out the door.

  Moments later, sixteen-year-old Galba Fuqua from Gonzales burst into the room, pale and haggard. He ran up to Mrs. Dickinson and tried to tell her something. But his jaw was shattered and blood was flowing from his mouth, and she could not understand him. He held his jaw with his hands and tried again. She still could not make out what he was trying to tell her. He shook his head in frustration, turned, and left.

  Outside the church doors, more than sixty defenders had retreated into the fortified area behind the low wall and were taking stock of the situation as they continued to fire into the horde of soldados in the courtyard. The fort was clearly lost. A withdrawal into any of the buildings would merely prolong the inevitable. But there were no Mexican troops in sight before the palisade, and the quiet darkness beyond was inviting. Someone opened the two-foot-wide wooden gate at the east end of the palisade, and the men shoved through, forced an opening in the thick branches of the abatis, and ran toward the hills to the east. Gonzales and the colonies lay in that direction. Some of them might make it—past the old powder house on the hill, the brush became thick woods, and the Salado River was just a few miles further.

  THE HORSEMEN OF THE DOLORES regiment and supporting presidiales, almost four hundred strong, had watched and listened to the carnage for half an hour. Now, in the dim morning light, they saw a line of rebels leave the fort through an opening in the abatis fronting the palisade, then jump the acequia and head for the thicker brush up the hill.

  As soon as this was brought to his attention, General Ramírez y Sesma ordered a company of Dolores horsemen after them. Only twelve men in each company carried lances; the remainder brandished sabers. The lancers swooped down on the rebels and “stabbed them to death within moments,” wrote the general. Another group burst through the abatis, and Ramírez y Sesma waved a second company forward. These norteamericanos took refuge in the acequia and put up a good fight, but the general ordered thirty-two more men into the fray. Once the rebels fired their rifles, the lancers were upon them before they could reload; their nine-foot spears made short work of them. One was chased down by two riders. He shot and killed the first, but the second speared him while he attempted to reload. Another managed to find a large bush and burrow under it, out of the reach of a lance. He needed to be shot, and that was quickly done. Within minutes, more than sixty rebel corpses lay scattered in the fields east of the Alamo.

  ONCE INSIDE THE FORT, General Amador led some men to the battery at the northwest corner. The rebels had evacuated the area so quickly that they had forgotten to spike the cannon. The general ordered the gun there dragged down the ramp and swung around to face the buildings across the plaza. Then he cleared everyone out of the way. His makeshift gun crew loaded the cannon and blasted solid shot into the doors one by one. General Ampudia followed suit with another gun. Soldados from the Matamoros and Jiménez battalions, commanded by Colonel Romero, stormed each room, firing through the doorway and then entering bayonet-first, killing every man they came across. Some of the defenders poked their bayonets through a hole or a door with a white cloth to signal surrender—a few even used white socks. When soldiers entered those quarters, other rebels met them with pistol shots and bayonets. Enraged Mexicans killed them all. Amid the chaos, a Tejano named Brigido Guerrero begged for his life, and somehow convinced his captors that he had been held prisoner against his will. He was allowed to live.

  Soldados scrambled up the stone stairwell of the convento and into the hospital, where they dispatched the bedridden rebels there. In a darkened room below, where fifteen more patients lay, some of the ill or injured fired from their pallets. A group of Mexicans hauled a cannon close to the front door, loaded a double charge of grapeshot and canister, and fired twice. They entered to find all fifteen dead.

  On the roof, three Zapadores were killed trying to capture a blue banner waving from a pole atop the convento that read FIRST COMPANY OF TEXAN VOLUNTEERS! FROM NEW-ORLEANS. José María Torres, a determined young Zapador sublieutenant, watched them die and decided he would try to reach the foreign flag. He climbed to the rooftop and ran to the flagpole through thick rifle fire. He managed to lower the banner and raise the red, white, and green of his battalion’s standard before a rebel round found him. He fell, mortally wounded.

  Pandemonium now took over throughout the courtyard as controlled ferocity degenerated into bloodlust. De la Peña was horrified as soldiers “fired their muskets indiscriminately at friend and foe alike,” he wrote later. “It seemed as if the furies had descended upon us; different groups of soldiers were firing in all directions on their comrades and on their officers, so that one was as likely to die by a friendly hand as by an enemy.” Some of Morales’s men jumped into the old, dry acequia ditch to avoid being shot by their comrades. The noise was deafening. Officers shouted orders that were either ignored or not understood. De la Peña found General Cós and advised him to order the men to stop firing. Cós grabbed a Zapador bugler named Tamayo and gave the command. No one paid any attention to the call.

  The last bastion left was the church. A cannon was wheeled around, and solid shell blasted into the facade. The thick stone walls withstood the large cannonballs, but soon the oaken front doors were obliterated. A horde of attackers rushed through. A moment later, a hail of musket fire hit the rebels below and above on the artillery platform. One Tejano defender made it into a side room off the nave before a bayonet ended his run. Dozens of soldados jumped over the sandbags and ran up the long wooden ramp to finish off the rest of the defenders. A tall, black-haired man with a flaming torch in his hand was moving toward the powder magazine at the front, evidently aiming to fire it. He was quickly disposed of. In a matter of minutes every single rebel was shot or stabbed until he was dead, and the floor of the Alamo church was slippery with blood.

  IN A HOUSE AGAINST THE northern end of the west wall, the Navarro sisters remained hidden, occasionally peeping out to gauge how things were going, while the sounds of battle roared outside. When the din abated somewhat, and they realized the Texians had been overwhelmed, Gertrudis carefully opened the door. Soldados ran up and swore at them, ripping Gertrudis’s shawl from her shoulders. Juana stood holding her year-old son tightly to her bosom, fully expecting to be killed any minute. One soldier was demanding her money when a norteamericano she knew only by his last name, Mitchell, ran up and tried to protect her. The soldiers bayoneted him until he fell dead at her feet. A young Tejano defender pursued by several Mexicans grabbed her arm and tried to hide behind her. “His grasp was broken,” she recalled, “and four or five bayonets plunged into his body, and nearly as many balls went through his lifeless corpse.” Then they broke open Mrs. Alsbury’s trunk and made off with her money and clothes, and the watches of Travis and other officers.

  A Mexican officer walked in, asked some rapid questions, and told the women to stay there. Another officer came in and told them to leave before a nearby cannon was fired. Finally Gertrudis’s brother-in-law Don Manuel Pérez arrived and told one of Jim Bowie’s Negro servants, a woman, to take the sisters to their father’s house in Béxar.

  A few doors down, in Travis’s quarters, Joe, too, remained hidden. He
had been firing at the soldados through a porthole in the door, but had stopped when the battle cooled. Now he heard a Mexican call out in English, “Are there any Negroes here?”

  Joe said, “Yes, here’s one,” and opened the door and stepped out into the courtyard and its chaos. Two soldiers ran toward him. One jabbed him in the side with his bayonet and drew blood. The other fired his musket at him, but only a single buckshot ball pierced Joe’s side. Neither wound was serious. The officer who had yelled through the door restrained the soldiers, then escorted Joe to a slender, somewhat tall Mexican in plain black clothes—“like a Methodist preacher,” remembered Joe. It was Santa Anna, ready to survey the site of his victory.

  The general asked him to point out the bodies of Travis and Crockett. Bowie was well known, and others had already identified the big norteamericano. They had found him in the room to the right of the main gate, where he had been killed in his bed. Stories would quickly begin to circulate among the bexareños that he had been armed with loaded pistols and managed to kill two soldados before he was dispatched. It was the sort of legend Bowie attracted, and one that no other version of his death would ever eclipse.

  Joe led the general and some members of his staff between the dead bodies of Mexicans and rebels to where he had left his master on the north wall. Along the way, he noticed a Negro woman lying dead between two cannon—shot accidentally, he guessed, while running across the courtyard. On the north wall platform, Travis lay against one of the cannon there, dead, a hole in his forehead.

  The Honorable David Crockett was located with some of the other Tennessee men in the small lunette midway down the west wall, the bodies of several soldados scattered around them. Crockett’s coat and rough woolen shirt were soaked with blood—either a musket ball or a bayonet had ripped into his chest. He had sold his life dearly, dying in the open air, as he wished—and, as he put it in the final words of his last letter, “among friends.”

  In the church sacristy, the women and children were waiting, fully expecting to die, when Jacob Walker and three other unarmed gunners burst into the room, chased by several Mexican soldiers. The men were shot and stabbed until thoroughly dead. Then a Mexican officer walked in, asking for Mrs. Dickinson. Susanna, clutching Angelina, identified herself.

  In excellent English, the officer said, “If you wish to save your life, follow me.”

  He led them through the church. Near the door she saw the body of Robert Evans, an extinguished torch in his hand, killed in his attempt to fire the powder magazine. Outside, they walked toward the main gate. Before they reached it, there was the report of a gun and Susanna felt a sharp pain in her right calf. A musket ball had pierced her skin there. She made it outside, where the officer—who introduced himself as Colonel Almonte—helped her into a buggy. She and her daughter were taken to the Músquiz house, on Main Plaza, her home before the siege. As Mrs. Músquiz met her at the door and helped her in, Susanna learned how her friend’s visit to Santa Anna had saved her life.

  The other women were told to gather their children and belongings and leave the fort. On their way outside, a soldado watched as Bettie, Bowie’s cook, walked past. All the valuables Juana Alsbury had given her—their jewelry and money, and the watches of their men—she had hidden in her skirt. The soldado saw a watch fob hanging down from Bettie’s clothes. He ripped it away from her. Other soldiers grabbed the remaining valuables. The rest of the women and children followed Mrs. Dickinson to the Músquiz house, where they were given food and coffee.

  More than a thousand Mexicans now crowded the fort. The gunfire finally died down, with only scattered musket shots, as they roamed the courtyard and the buildings, moving among the bodies to gather their wounded and begin reforming in ranks. Those rebels still alive were finished off with a musket shot or a bayonet thrust, and their corpses were stripped of clothing, shoes, and valuables.

  Barely an hour had passed since the first bugle call. As the dense smoke began to lift, and the early morning light illuminated a grisly scene strewn with severed limbs, corpses—some naked, others with the burning remnants of clothes still clinging to them—and blood everywhere, a triumphant Santa Anna made his way to the front of his troops.

  As His Excellency surveyed the carnage, General Castrillón approached him, followed by five rebel prisoners under guard. Castrillón explained that they had been found hiding. “He was reprimanded severely for not having killed them on the spot,” wrote Ramón Caro, Santa Anna’s secretary, who stood nearby. Caro watched as Santa Anna barked a command, then “turned his back on Castrillón while the soldiers stepped out of their ranks and set upon the prisoners until they were all killed.” Several other officers, de la Peña among them, averted their eyes, disgusted by the barbarity of the act.

  “The general then addressed his crippled battalions, lauding their courage and thanking them in the name of their country,” remembered de la Peña. The response of the exhausted soldados, with almost a hundred of their comrades dead and at least three hundred more wounded, was less than enthusiastic. The expected “Vivas” were offered halfheartedly, and an icy silence followed. A disgusted de la Peña stepped up and called for cheers hailing the republic, then more for the valiant cazadores of Aldama, who had paid a heavy toll in the attack on the west wall.

  Santa Anna sent for the acting alcalde of Béxar, Francisco Antonio Ruíz—who had spent the siege under house arrest, suspected of rebel sentiments—and several other prominent citizens. When they arrived, he directed Ruíz to round up some of the townsmen to bring carts and carry the dead soldados to the Campo Santo, the cemetery on the west side of town. Then he told Ruíz to show him the bodies of Travis, Crockett, and Bowie—Joe had identified the first two, but His Excellency desired stronger assurance.

  As the corpses were separated and carried outside, another norteamericano, a small man named Warnell, was found hiding among the dead bodies and brought before Santa Anna. A Mexican staff officer, Captain Marcos Barragan—who had also found Travis’s servant Joe and protected him—interceded. Warnell begged that his life be spared. Santa Anna ordered the American shot, and he was quickly executed.

  After the last surviving enemy was dispatched, and all the Mexican dead and wounded had been carried out, Santa Anna ordered wood brought to burn the bodies of the rebels away from the fort. At three p.m. they began laying the wood in two large piles near the Alameda. The Texian corpses were deposited in alternating layers—a layer of wood, topped by a layer of bodies, then another layer of wood, and another of bodies—until the grisly chore was complete.

  Before the bexareños carted all the dead away, a Béxar presidial made a special request of General Cós. Francisco Esparza had not participated in the battle, but had remained at his home. Now he and his two brothers asked if they could search for their brother Gregorio and give him a Christian burial. Their request was granted. They found him in a room in the church, a musket ball in his breast and a stab wound in his side, and carried him to the Campo Santo, making him the only rebel to be buried and not burned.

  An officer brought a few women he had gathered in town to tend to the dead and dying. They did what they could, bandaging up the wounds of some of the Mexican soldiers and comforting those who had not long to live. The floor of the church “was literally crimson with blood,” recalled one bexareña, who remembered seeing Crockett “as he lay dead by the side of a dying man, whose bloody and powder-stained face I was washing.” Another young Tejana went in and located her dead sweetheart. She wiped the grime from his face, crossed his hands on his chest, and placed a small cross on it. When told to leave, she dipped her handkerchief in his blood, placed it in her bosom, and left.

  Santa Anna returned to his quarters in town, summoned Caro to bring pen and paper, and immediately dictated his official battle report. It was addressed to secretary of war José María Tornel. “Victory belongs to the army,” he began, “which, at this moment, 8 o’clock A.M., achieved a complete and glorious triumph that wil
l render its memory imperishable.” After briefly describing the battle, he summed up the results, albeit with one major embellishment: he tripled the death toll of the enemy to make the victory all the more dramatic, and help to justify his decision to assault the Alamo:

  More than 600 corpses of foreigners were buried in the ditches and entrenchments, and a great many who had escaped the bayonets of the infantry, fell in the vicinity under the sabres of the cavalry…. We lost about 70 men killed and 300 wounded, among whom are 25 officers. The cause for which they fell renders their loss less painful, as it is the duty of the Mexican soldiers to die for the defense of the rights of the nation….

  The bearer takes with him one of the flags of the enemy’s battalions, captured today. The inspection of it will show plainly the true intention of the treacherous colonists, and of their abettors, who came from the ports of the United States of the North.

  The blue banner of the New Orleans Greys was used to prove that American pirates were aiding the Texians, but the rebels’ constitutionalist flag—the Mexican tricolor, with its two stars representing Coahuila and Texas—was destroyed. Such a symbol offered no benefit to Santa Anna, who had dismantled the 1824 constitution and still faced opposition in several Mexican states. He wanted no reminder that the vanquished had considered themselves faithful citizens of their adopted country.

  About five p.m. the two funeral pyres, one on each side of the Alameda, were lighted. The bodies, American, Texian, and Tejano, burned for hours, and the large pillars of smoke could be seen for many miles around. Several bexareños stood and watched. A few Mexican officers did also, transfixed by the somber scene.