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

by James Donovan

  Last Rites

  They preferred to die a thousand times rather than submit to the tyrant’s yoke.

  JUAN SEGUÍN, APRIL 25, 1837

  On June 4, 1836, Captain Juan Seguín rode down from Powder House Hill at the head of a company of twenty-two Tejano horsemen and approached the outskirts of Béxar. Seven long weeks had passed since their valorous service at San Jacinto, and they were pleased to see the San Antonio River and their town beyond, no matter how battered its structures. All the Alamo’s single walls had been torn down and now lay in heaps of rubble. Only the old church, the convento, the main gatehouse, and a few of the houses along the perimeter still stood. Seguín halted his men before entering the city and sent one of his troops in with a message ordering any Mexican forces to evacuate.

  The Tejanos had spent most of May in the saddle, observing the Mexican army’s arduous retreat from Texas. They had been tasked with the unpleasant duty of making sure the soldados took no private property with them, including slaves. Worse, they soon found themselves forced to care for the sick and wounded soldados and soldaderas who could not keep up. Seguín’s next orders had been to take possession of Béxar and raise a battalion there to defend the frontier. Comanches were still an ever-present threat, and some believed that the Mexicans would be back.

  General Andrade had departed with his thousand men on May 24, headed for Goliad to rendezvous with the remainder of the Army of Operations. Almost a hundred soldados stayed in the hospital; the remaining two hundred wounded, some of them on crutches, accompanied him. In the week before leaving, Andrade had overseen the demolition of the Alamo per orders from General Filisola—an especially disheartening task, since his men had spent much of the previous two months improving the fort after the March 6 battle. Behind him he had left a small garrison of eighteen presidiales of the Alamo company. Their commanding officer was Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda, the officer sent to Gonzales to seize the colonists’ small cannon the previous September—what seemed a lifetime ago.

  Castañeda had lived in Béxar for a dozen years, the last few in his house along the west wall of the Alamo, and he and Seguín had known each other that long. Now Castañeda told him that he could enter the town without opposition. Two days later, the lieutenant and his men left town, bound for Mexico. Several centralist sympathizers and their families departed in the same direction.

  The new commandant of Béxar found his family ranch ruined, many of the area fields laid waste, and houses throughout the city little more than rubble—and a citizenry largely unconvinced that the hostilities were at an end. They were thus reluctant to cooperate or assist him in any way, whether it was to join his battalion or just herd cattle to a safer place. A rumor circulated that the Mexican troops had stopped their retreat and were preparing to return. Unable to raise any recruits, Seguín left less than three weeks after his arrival. He returned in November as a lieutenant colonel leading an eighty-man battalion.

  Early in January 1837, the Texas high command decided that Béxar would be better off evacuated and destroyed to avoid a second battle of the Alamo if the Mexican army came back. Seguín protested vigorously, and recently elected president Sam Houston reassured his old comrade that the orders would be withdrawn. But difficulties in provisioning, mounting, and paying his men forced Seguín to fall back to Gonzales, whose citizens were only now beginning to return from the east. Before he left, he performed one more important duty.

  He ordered a coffin built and covered in black, and placed some of the ashes of the Alamo dead in it; the names of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett were engraved on the inside lid. At four o’clock on the afternoon of February 25, church bells tolled as soldiers carried the coffin to the Church of San Fernando. Accompanied by a procession of other troops, civil authorities, clergy, mourners, relatives, citizens, and a band, they bore it down Potrero Street and across the river. Near the Alameda, at what remained of the largest mound of ashes, three musket volleys were discharged by the entire battalion and the coffin buried with full military honors. In his address, Juan Seguín paid his respects to his fallen comrades. “There are your brothers,” he said, “Travis, Bowie, and Crockett, and others whose valor places them in the rank of my heroes.”

  INSTEAD OF RETURNING TO THE charred ruins of her house in Gonzales, Susanna Dickinson had settled in a new town twelve miles up Buffalo Bayou from San Jacinto, named after the man who had led the Texians to victory—Houston. She was illiterate and destitute, and caring for a small child, so she requested a $500 government donation. After some debate, the measure was voted down. In 1837 she married a man named Williams. He became abusive to her and her young daughter, Angelina, and after five months the union ended unhappily. So did her next marriage, to a man named Frank Herring, who died of drink, and the next, to Peter Bellows, who accused her of abandonment and adultery. Only after she moved to Lockhart in 1857 to set up a boardinghouse there, and met and married one of her boarders—the much younger Joseph Hannig, a gifted cabinetmaker from Germany—did she finally find happiness. They moved to Austin and lived there contentedly in a beautiful home on a bluff overlooking the city.

  Susanna did not return to San Antonio de Béxar—which quickly became better known as San Antonio—until almost half a century had passed, and by then the once sleepy little town was a bustling city of twenty thousand. In April 1881, forty-five years after departing on a horse with her daughter clutched to her breast, she returned there and visited the remains of the Alamo with two young nieces, a party of dignitaries, a newspaperman, and the grandniece of Deaf Smith, the man who had found her on the prairie and brought her back to Gonzales. When she walked into the dark room she had occupied during the battle, she cried. The experience released a flood of memories, and she gave the reporter the most detailed account of her ordeal ever made public. She talked of her husband, and the line traced by Travis, and some of the horrors she had witnessed. Then she and her companions retired to the saloon next door, where she soothed her nerves with a glass of wine. After a long illness, she died on October 1, 1883, at the age of sixty-eight.

  Angelina Dickinson’s life mirrored her mother’s in many ways—except for the happy ending. She grew up to be a fun-loving, pretty young woman. After bearing four children by two husbands, she left her children to relatives and took to a life of drifting. The “Babe of the Alamo” turned to prostitution and died of a uterine hemorrhage in Galveston. She was only thirty-four.

  AFTER LEAVING GONZALES ON MARCH 13, Susanna’s partner in survival, Joe, traveled to the home of plantation owner Jared Groce, on the Brazos River, where a week later he gave a full account of the Alamo battle to an audience that included Texas president David Burnet and his cabinet. Travis’s slave was eventually returned to his owner’s estate and taken into the possession of John Rice Jones, Travis’s executor. On April 21, 1837, exactly one year after the Battle of San Jacinto, Joe and a Mexican working for Jones at his farm near Columbia took two horses and saddles and lit out for another territory—presumably Mexico, which would have meant freedom for both of them. Years later, stories would circulate that Joe had journeyed to the Travis family home in Alabama to relate his master’s fate, and in 1875 an Austin newspaper editor would claim to know of his presence near that city. That was the last the public ever heard of Joe.

  AFTER LEAVING THE ALAMO ON March 5, Moses Rose traveled only at night, and one evening ran into a thicket of prickly pear cactus that left him with dozens of thorns in his legs. A few weeks and more than two hundred miles later, when he staggered up to the door of a friend’s house on Lake Creek, some sixty miles northwest of San Felipe, he could hardly walk. His friend’s family took him in and tended to his badly infected wounds, using forceps to extract the thorns from his legs. He stayed there for a couple of weeks, recuperating, then left for his hometown of Nacogdoches. He operated a meat market for a while, and kept to himself. When someone would ask him why he hadn’t stayed in the Alamo, his invariable response was, “By God, I
wasn’t ready to die.”

  Sometime in the early 1840s, Rose left Nacogdoches and drifted east. Eventually he hired on at the Logansport, Louisiana, plantation of Aaron Ferguson, who allowed him to live in the family home. After a few years, he became bedridden because of his cactus wounds, which had never healed properly. At his request, the Ferguson family moved him from their house to a small wooden shed nearby, where he lived out the last months of his life. They cared for him until he died, and buried him in the family cemetery. More than a century later, an 1813 French coin with an image of Napoleon, the old Frenchman’s idol, was found nearby.

  ALTHOUGH SUSANNA DICKINSON did not return to Gonzales, most of its surviving residents did, beginning in the spring of 1837. The Runaway Scrape had been especially hard on Gonzaleans. They had no wagons and not enough horses to ride, so most walked and led pack animals. Two of the younger Kent children, seventeen-month-old Phinette and three-year-old Andrew Jackson, died from exposure on the chaotic journey east to Nacogdoches. The oldest three Kent boys, David, Isaac, and thirteen-year-old Bosman, returned before the rest of the family to find their pioneer mansion burned to the ground: only the two large chimneys marked its place. Their stock was dispersed or slaughtered, and all their possessions were taken save for some of their father’s tools, a pot, an oven, and a table that had been dragged into the yard. The boys began to plant crops and build another house in preparation for the return of their mother and siblings.

  A year later, most of their DeWitt neighbors had made it back to their ruined homesteads—including the widows of Wash Cottle and George Kimble, who had both given birth to twins—and they, too, had begun rebuilding. On the Fourth of July, 1838, the colonists gathered in what was left of their town, now reduced to ashes save for Adam Zumwalt’s kitchen, Andrew Ponton’s smokehouse, and a few newly erected structures, and observed the holiday with all the festivities they could muster. There was still the threat of another Mexican army returning to claim Texas, and the Comanches continued to be a constant danger. The Texians’ lives would be hard for a long time. But they would survive, and, in time, even thrive.

  WHEN DAVID CROCKETT HAD LEFT HIS HOME in Tennessee to “explore the Texes,” he hoped to return for his wife and family. In 1854, Elizabeth Crockett finally made that journey, with two of her children by David—their son Robert and daughter Rebecca—as well as her son from her previous marriage, George Patton, and his wife. Two years later they settled on a 320-acre tract near Granbury in north Texas, land granted to Elizabeth for her husband’s sacrifice. The men built her a home, and Robert farmed the land and cared for his mother, who joined the nearby Methodist Episcopal Church and always appeared in public in her black widow’s weeds. She died on January 31, 1860, at the age of seventy-four, after her customary before-breakfast walk, and was buried nearby. Years later a monument was erected at her grave with a statue of her atop it. The pose, her family claimed, was a familiar one on their porch every evening in Tennessee after David left. Her hand shading her brow, she looks toward the west, watching for his return—the west, where men like David Crockett had always gone in search of those things dear to them, such as liberty, freedom, and fortune. It was inevitable that they would. It was in their blood.

  AFTERWORD

  Moses Rose and the Line

  Mrs. Dickinson… says that she did not know Rose personally, but recollects that a man escaped at the time mentioned; that the troops were drawn up in line and addressed by Col. Travis. Between the time of Rose’s escape and the fall of the Alamo, she heard the men speak of the escape, but none believed that he would get away alive.

  FRANK JOHNSON

  Questions abound concerning the siege and battle of the Alamo—the dearth of reliable firsthand accounts guaranteed that. Particularly since every member of the garrison present on the morning of March 6, 1836, died, and since the accounts of survivors Joe, Susanna Dickinson, and others were limited—not only in what they saw (after Travis was killed minutes into the battle, Joe returned to their room and remained there, and the women and children stayed in the church until the battle was over), but in the details they supplied—little is known of what occurred and who actually did it, especially in those last few days after Travis’s final message of March 3. No one, it appeared, essayed a proper debriefing of the survivors. (The Mexican after-action reports that have survived—or at least those we know of—are terse and almost completely devoid of the details we crave of who did what, since it was quite dark and none of them knew any of the defenders by sight anyway.) This may seem puzzling to us now, in our media-saturated age—why wasn’t every one of the survivors and anyone within a mile of the battle interviewed in depth until every detail had been extracted?—but as historian Walter Lord, author of the best narrative of the battle, wrote in 1968: “The best explanation seems to be the nature of the frontier. People were busy. Research and reporting were civilized luxuries. Who had the time—or even a pencil?”

  Without a doubt, the most interesting question—and the one that has been most hotly debated since the nineteenth century—is this one: Did Travis really draw a line a few days previous to the battle and ask those who wished to stay and fight with him to cross it? Since it was first made public in late 1872, reactions to the story, from serious historians as well as the general public, have ranged from enthusiastic acceptance to blind condemnation and every opinion in between. As with much of the Alamo narrative, historians see many limitations, as noted above, to the existing sources of this incident. Still, the image of the line in the dust is extraordinarily vivid and thrilling in what it represents—in this case, life or death, and a willful choice between the two—and thus it has become iconic in popular literature, culture, and phraseology. In the memorable words of historian J. Frank Dobie, “It is a Grand Canyon cut into the bedrock of human emotions and heroical impulses…. Nobody forgets the line. It is drawn too deep and straight.”

  To answer the question—or attempt to—we must first consider the evidence pertaining to the life of a man named Louis “Moses” Rose, for his name is inextricably linked with the line.

  FROM ITS INCEPTION IN 1857, the annual Texas Almanac has included historical and biographical sketches of the Texas Revolution, often written by the participants themselves. In its 1873 edition there appeared an article entitled “An Escape from the Alamo” by a veteran of that conflict named William Physick Zuber. The five-page account related the story of Moses Rose, a Frenchman from Nacogdoches who escaped from the Alamo a few days before the predawn assault on March 6. Zuber claimed that Rose walked to his (Zuber’s) parents’ house—two hundred miles away, on Lake Creek, some twenty miles northeast of Washington, Texas, on the Brazos River.

  Aside from Rose’s escape, the most interesting part of the story involves William Barret Travis, the commander of the fort. Two hours before sunset on March 3, he purportedly called his men together and delivered an inspiring speech, imploring them “to remain in this fort, to resist every assault, and to sell our lives as dearly as possible.” Then he offered each man the choice of staying or attempting an escape: “Col. Travis then drew his sword, and with its point traced a line upon the ground, extending from the right to the left of the file. Then, resuming his position in front of the centre, he said, ‘I now want every man who is determined to stay here and die with me to come across this line. Who will be first? March!’ ”

  Every man who was able to do so crossed, until only a few were left. James Bowie, sick and prostrate on a cot, asked for help across; four men carried him over. The remaining sick were assisted across, leaving only one man—Rose.

  When asked why he would not cross, Rose replied that he was not prepared to die. Soon after, he climbed the wall and made his way down the river three miles before heading east. That night he traveled through a thicket of prickly pear cactus, resulting in many thorns in his legs. He continued to head east, avoiding roads for fear of encountering Mexican scouts, and arrived at the home of the Zubers, longtime fri
ends, a few weeks later, lame and in much pain. He rested and recuperated there for a few weeks, the Zubers doing what they could to heal his legs by pulling the thorns out and applying salve to his injuries. During his stay, he retold his story several times until they knew it almost by heart.

  William Zuber was fifteen at the time and serving with Sam Houston’s army, but when he returned home months later, he heard Rose’s account from his parents, Mary Ann and Abraham Zuber—or so he claimed.

  Thirty-five years later, in 1871, Zuber set down the story, aided by his aged mother’s phenomenal memory. The account appeared in late 1872, upon publication of the 1873 Texas Almanac. Zuber’s article ended with a signed statement from his mother endorsing it and concluding with the following words: “The part which purports to be Rose’s statement of what he saw and heard in the Alamo, of his escape, and of what befell him afterwards is precisely the substance of what Rose stated to my husband and myself.”

  Reaction to the story was varied then and since. Some believed it, others have not. Three years after its first appearance, Rufus Grimes, brother of Alamo defender Albert Grimes and a neighbor of the Zubers, wrote to Texas governor E. M. Pease to express his support and corroborate the account: “This account is entitled to full credit…. This Wm. P. Zuber is a man of undoubted veracity and when Rose escaped from the Alamo he made his way to the house of Abram Zuber an old friend and acquaintance then living in Roans Prairie in this county (Grimes) where he staid until his feet got well enough to travel again (his feet & legs were full of the cactus thorns), traveling in the night—Zuber tells me of many other interesting statements made by Rose besides what is stated in the sketch.” Over the next few decades some Texas historians incorporated parts of Zuber’s story into their writings—barely a year after its first publication, James M. Morphis’s History of Texas (1874) repeated Zuber’s account of Travis’s speech, the line, and Rose’s escape verbatim, though he added: “The writer takes this account of Mr. Rose, cum grano salis, though it may be true.” Homer S. Thrall, in his A History of Texas (1876), also incorporated most of the story into its text as history. And Mrs. Anna Pennybacker included a brief version of Zuber’s article in her 1888 publication A New History of Texas, which was subsequently adopted for use in Texas classrooms. In her revised edition of 1895, the story was given more space, and Zuber at her request added some details.