Though Crockett was not the official commander of the self-styled Tennessee Mounted Volunteers, he clearly assumed some leadership duties of the group, or a portion of them, and was considered its leader by the members. Confirmation of this fact includes the following: (1) a volunteer named Charles Lewis Brown stated in an affidavit years later that he “served under Colonel David Crockett” (Brown pension claim, reel 205, frame 59, ROT [Republic of Texas] Claims, TSLA); (2) in a letter to the editor of the Austin City Gazette signed by a “Volunteer of 1836,” published in the April 14, 1836, issue of that newspaper, the anonymous author claimed he had left Nacogdoches in February 1836 with a company of “about sixteen men under the command of Col. Crockett”; (3) in an audited claim signed by Sam Houston, a volunteer named Peter Harper wrote that on January 8 he “commenced at Nacogdoches under Col. Crocket” (reel 41, frame 350, ROT [Republic of Texas] Claims, TSLA); and (4) one volunteer who rode with Crockett and died in the Alamo, B. Archer M. Thomas, signed a receipt in Washington as “one of D Crocketts Com[mand]” (Chariton, 100 Days in Texas, p. 171).
Sutherland’s unpublished narrative is the only source for Crockett’s assigned position in the Alamo (reprinted in Hansen, p. 176).
Thomas Ricks Lindley discusses the Mexican wounded left behind in his well-researched three-part article “Mexican Casualties at Bexar.”
In a series of handwritten revisions and additions made to the original text of his 1860 pamphlet “The Fall of the Alamo,” Reuben Potter made the sources for his version of some of the events clearer: “When Mr. [Nat] Lewis visited the Alamo, the town was in possession of the enemy, the confusion which prevailed there beggared description. Bowie with a detachment was engaged in breaking open deserted houses in the neighborhood and gathering corn. Another squad was driving some cattle into the inclosure… East of the Long Barrack.”
Juan Seguín’s June 7, 1890, letter, in which he describes the women lining the streets as the men left Béxar for the Alamo, is reprinted in Matovina, The Alamo Remembered, p. 91.
Nat Lewis’s background as a whaling man from near Nantucket is noted in his obituary in the San Antonio Daily Express of October 23, 1872.
The source for the information on Carlos Espalier is Musso, “Col. Bowie’s Freed Slaves,” and the Antonio Menchaca affidavit, Carlos Espalier File, Memorials and Petitions File, TSLA.
Nat Lewis’s memories of the morning—including recollections about William Ward, and the profanity—are in Potter, “The Fall of the Alamo,” p. 7, and Potter’s notes to it, cited above.
Some later accounts claim that Alsbury was in Béxar on February 23, went into the Alamo with his wife, and rode out later as a courier. But Mrs. Alsbury told a later interviewer: “When the news of Santa Anna’s approach, at the head of a considerable force, was verified in San Antonio, Dr. Alsbury proceeded to the Brazos river to procure means to remove his family, expecting to return before Santa Anna could reach the city. He failed to do so; and his wife went into the Alamo where her protector was, when the Mexican troops were near by” (Hansen, p. 87). And an August 1, 1888, Dallas Morning News story about Mrs. Alsbury published soon after she died quotes from a story published in the Hempstead Advance-Guard, “edited by a nephew of Horace A. Alsbury”: “When she was within the walls of the Alamo, she was Mrs. Alsbury, wife of Dr. Horace A. Alsbury, who had placed her under the protection of Col. James Bowie when San Antonio was expecting the invasion of Santa Anna.” Additionally, there is this comment written by Dr. Joseph Barnard in his journal (Barnard was saved by a Mexican officer from the Goliad massacre and then moved to Béxar to assist with the wounded there): “Tuesday, [April] 17th,—Dr. Alsbury came into town to-day from General Filisola, now commander in chief, with a pass. He (Dr. Alsbury) is son-in-law to Angelo Navarro, with whom I live. His wife and sister, together with a Negro of Bowie’s, were in the Alamo when it was stormed. He has come in order to look after his family and take them off” (quoted in Hansen, p. 612). Finally, John Sutherland writes in an early draft of his account written soon after 1860: “On Sunday morning [February 28, 1836] the writer in Company of Dr Alsbury & ten other Americans crossed the Guardaloup River at Gonazales & fell in with and waited on Capt John N Seguin” (Hansen, p. 179). It is clear from these accounts that Alsbury was not in the Alamo or Béxar on February 23.
That there were several black servants inside the Alamo, enslaved or otherwise, seems fairly certain. Joe, in his first account to the convention on March 20, 1836, was quoted by a reliable witness as relating that “the negroes, for there were several negroes and women in the fort, were spared. Only one woman was killed, and Joe supposes she was shot accidentally, while attempting to cross the Alamo. She was found lying between two guns” (Hansen, p. 78). Mary Maverick, the wife of Samuel Maverick and a resident of San Antonio soon after the battle, wrote: “The survivors were… 2 negro servants of Bowie,” and then identified her source: “This present writer visited the site [of pyres] with Dr. and Mrs. Allsbury in Fall of 1838” (“Fall of the Alamo,” an account by Mary A. Maverick “compiled from H. Yoakum and Oral Testimony,” in Green, Samuel Maverick, Texan, p. 55). A doctor stationed in Goliad and sent to Béxar after Fannin’s surrender wrote: “Tuesday, [May] 17th—Dr. Alsberry came in to town to-day…. His wife and sister, together with a Negro, [of] Bowie’s, were in the Alamo when it was stormed” (Joseph H. Barnard, in Huson, Dr. J. H. Barnard’s Journal, p. 42). And according to Juana Alsbury, after the battle, “Don Manuel placed them in charge of a colored woman belong to Col. Bowie, and the party reached the house of Don Angel Navarro in safety” (Hansen, p. 88). Finally, Sam Houston, in a letter from Gonzales penned soon after information was received of the Alamo’s fall, wrote: “Three negroes and Mrs. Dickinson were all in the fort, who [es]caped Massacre as reported!” (Houston to Raguet, March 13, 1836, reprinted in Hansen, p. 518).
The scene of the Alamo defenders jeering at the fleeing merchants is related in a July 29, 1876, letter from Reuben Potter to William Steele (AGO Attorney General Office File, TSLA).
The details of the Esparza family’s movements are from a 1902 interview of Enrique Esparza, reprinted in Hansen, p. 97.
The brief negotiations between the Texians and Santa Anna are described in Santa Anna’s February 27, 1836, report, reprinted in Hansen, pp. 332–33, and Reuben Potter’s 1878 article, “The Fall of the Alamo,” reprinted in part in Hansen, p. 697.
Juan Díaz, whose father was the church custodian, remembered his mother preparing meals for the Mexican officers; his interview is reprinted in Matovina, The Alamo Remembered, p. 94. Details of the Mexican officers’ boarding arrangements are in Asbury, “The Private Journal of Juan Nepomuceno Almonte,” p. 17.
TWELVE: “I AM BESIEGED”
The chapter title is a phrase in W. B. Travis’s public pronouncement of February 24, 1836, reprinted in Hansen, p. 32. The Smither quote is from a note he appended to the letter, reprinted in Chariton, 100 Days in Texas, p. 269.
The artillery emplacement locations are derived from Asbury, “The Private Journal of Juan Nepomuceno Almonte,” pp. 17–18, and Labadie, La Villita Earthworks.
The various hardships suffered by bexareños are described in various San Antonio newspaper articles reprinted in Matovina, The Alamo Remembered, pp. 91, 54, 100, 34.
Travis’s February 24, 1836, public pronouncement “to the people of Texas and all Americans in the world” has been reprinted countless times. The copy in my collection was supplied courtesy of the TSLA.
Williamson’s activities during the early days of the siege are related in Robinson, Judge Robert McAlpin Williamson, p. 129.
The quote regarding the panic in San Felipe is from William Fairfax Gray’s diary, reprinted in Chariton, 100 Days in Texas, p. 277. Robinson’s February 26, 1836, letter to Houston is reprinted in the same volume, p. 278. The San Felipe citizens committee report is also reprinted in that volume, pp. 281–82. The March 5, 1836, Telegraph and Texas Register reported: “Many other ladies are
doing every thing in their power in providing clothing, and articles of equipment for those going to the field.”
The various sources for the February 25 skirmish are summarized in Huffines, Blood of Noble Men, pp. 50–54, and also in an extensive illustration caption by Gary Zaboly in the same volume, p. 53. The ditches are mentioned by Santa Anna’s secretary, Ramón Caro, in his account of the Texas campaign published in 1837: “Around the fortress there were ditches which were used by the enemy to fire upon our troops, while our soldiers, in order to carry out their orders to fire, were obliged to abandon the protection that the walls afforded them, and suffered the loss of one or two men, either killed or at least wounded, in each attempt to advance” (quoted in Castañeda, The Mexican Side of the Texan Revolution, pp. 101–2). Another source is General Ampudia’s report of May 6, 1836 (Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional, Archivo Historico Militar Mexicano, Expediente 1655, pp. 58–61, translated by Tom Kailbourn).
Santa Anna’s report to Tornel is reprinted in Filisola, Memorias, vol. 2, p. 168.
Sources testifying to Santa Anna’s “marriage” include Francisco Becerra (reprinted in Hansen, pp. 459–60), Maria de Jesus Buquor (San Antonio Daily Express, July 19, 1907), and Juana Alsbury (reprinted in Hansen, p. 88). Caro also refers to it—somewhat obliquely, in a reference to someone departing for Mexico in Santa Anna’s carriage, with this titillating footnote: “Decency and respect for public morals do not permit further details to be given”—in his account of the campaign; see Castañeda, The Mexican Side of the Texan Revolution, p. 108.
There are many versions of the manner in which Seguín left the Alamo and escaped from Béxar. His own account, translated and included in de la Teja, A Revolution Remembered, is one of the least reliable. See also Huffines, Blood of Noble Men, pp. 60–61; and Hansen, pp. 192–200, 699–700.
Travis’s letter to Houston of February 25, 1836, is reprinted in Chariton, 100 Days in Texas, p. 271.
THIRTEEN: “THIS TIME YOU MAY SEE SOME BLOOD”
The chapter title phrase was uttered by Andrew Kent just before riding off to the Alamo with the Gonzales Ranging Company of Mounted Volunteers, as remembered by his eight-year-old daughter, Mary Ann, who passed her reminiscences down to her descendants. See the Kent Family Biographical Files, Gonzales County Archives; also see “Remembers Bloody Days of Texas Republic,” San Antonio Light, August 13, 1911. The epigraph, from Travis’s letter to the president of the convention dated March 3, 1836, is reprinted in Hansen, p. 36.
Fannin’s February 22, 1836, letter to Robinson is quoted in Hansen, p. 251.
The message from Béxar was the letter to Fannin from Travis and Bowie, reprinted in Foote, Texas and the Texans, vol. 2, p. 224.
The Greys’ desire to reunite with their comrades at Béxar is mentioned by New Orleans Grey Herman Ehrenberg in Ornish, Ehrenberg: Goliad Survivor, pp. 195, 205–6.
Fannin’s February 26, 1836, letter to Robinson is reprinted in PTR 4, pp. 443–44.
Details of Andrew Kent’s story were obtained from Kent Family Biographical Files, Gonzales County Archives, and the dedicated research of Chester Wilkes, husband of Doris Wilkes, Andrew Kent’s great-great-granddaughter, particularly his article “Mary Ann Kent Byas Chambers Morriss,” revised in July of 1994, a copy of which is in my collection. Wilkes based details of the Andrew and David Kent story on an interview he conducted in the early 1960s with Oliver Byas, who related the story as told by his grandmother Mary Ann Kent Byas, who was Andrew Kent’s daughter.
The Patton company’s stay at the Kent homestead is testified to in John Sutherland’s audited claim of 1836 (reel 102, frames 300–311, ROT [Republic of Texas] Claims, TSLA). For the date of January 25, there is the following entry: “for cash paid at Kents for the use of Troop to reinforce Col. Neil at the Alamo—P [paid] 13.50.” The going rate at that time and place for room, board, and corn for one man’s horse was a dollar, so this payment jibes with Sutherland’s statement that Patton led him and ten other men to the Alamo. The next two entries are also for similar services in the Gonzales area—one at John McCoy’s on January 25, and the next for “Gonzales—corn & Bord at Hensleys—P 16.25.”
In mid-February, thirteen Comanches killed John Hibbens and his brother-in-law George Creath, and took Sarah (Creath) Hibbens and her two children (one a baby and one six years old, the latter from her previous husband, who was also killed by Indians) to the Comanche encampment six miles above the village of Sweet Home—which was within fifteen miles of the Hibbens home, on the east side of the Guadalupe River near the present town of Concrete. The attack occurred near Rocky Creek, and the Comanches moved northwest. On the second day in camp, the Comanches brained the infant on a tree when it would not stop crying. A few weeks later, Mrs. Hibbens escaped near the future site of Austin, leaving her six-year-old son, John McSherry, with the Indians. He was later rescued. (See Brown, Indian Wars and Pioneers, p. 89; Telegraph and Texas Register, February 27, 1836.)
Details about George Kimble and his statement to his wife are related in the Seguin Enterprise of October 15, 1937. Thomas Miller’s will is mentioned in Baumgartner, “History of the Alsey Silvanus Miller Homestead,” p. 21.
The audited claim for Lewis Boatwright (audited claim 2163, reel 138, frame 156, ROT [Republic of Texas] Claims, TSLA) places White in Gonzales from February 18 through February 24, solidifying the probability that he left for the Alamo with the Gonzales relief force a few days later.
Several Republic of Texas claims attest to William Irwin’s purchasing the chits of other soldiers, among them Lewis Boatwright (audited claim 2163, reel 138, frame 156, ROT Claims, TSLA), Jabez Fitch (reel 153, frame 062, ROT Claims, TSLA), and John Harris (reel 159, frame 495, ROT Claims, TSLA).
Recently, some researchers (chief among them the late Thomas Ricks Lindley) have suggested that about sixty men left Gonzales on February 27 in this group, which comprised two separate companies, and that only half of them made it into the Alamo. Offered as evidence are two documents. The first is Robert Williamson’s March 1 letter to Travis (translated from the Spanish-language version in a Mexican newspaper, though the original has not been found), in which he states that “sixty men have set out from this municipality and in all human probability they are with you at this date” (reprinted in Hansen, p. 601). But Williamson did not specify that the sixty men set out together, a point that will pertain later in this endnote. The other source is a July 1836 obituary for Albert Martin printed in the Manufacturers and Farmers Journal and the New Orleans True American, which states of Martin: “He had left the fortress and returned to his residence, where he was apprized of the perilous situation in which his late comrades were placed. His determination was instantly taken. In reply to the passionate entreaties of his father, who besought him not to rush into certain destruction, he said, ‘This is no time for considerations. I have passed my word to Colonel Trav[is] that I would return, nor can I forfeit a pledge thus given.’ In pursuance of this high resolve he raised a company of sixty-two men and started on his way back. During the route, the company, apprized of the desperate situation of affairs, became diminished, by desertions, to thirty-two. With this gallant band, he gained the fort and the reinforcement, small as it was, revived the drooping spirits of the garrison” (as quoted in Moore, “Texas Rangers at the Battle of the Alamo,” p. 16, although no source for these statements is given). The evidence for two separate companies, detailed in Moore’s excellently researched article, is convincing and I accept that conclusion. But save for the two questionable documents just mentioned, there is no evidence or indication that sixty men, and not about half that number, around thirty—as mentioned twice by Travis in letters written on March 3—left the town of Gonzales on February 27 in response to Travis’s request for help. (Enrique de la Peña wrote that “about sixty men did enter one night” [de la Peña, With Santa Anna in Texas, p. 41], but since he was not present in Béxar at the time, and does not specify the date of the reinforcement, he was al
most surely repeating, much later, the information from Williamson’s letter, which was printed in a Mexican newspaper; de la Peña collected many other Mexican newspaper stories about the Texas campaign and likely was aware of this one.) The supporting evidence for the number of men being twenty-five to thirty-two, on the other hand, is convincing. In the earliest extant draft of his account, John Sutherland (who was in Gonzales at the time) writes in two places of twenty-five men leaving: “John W Smith left Gonzales on Saturday, with the 25 men before named” (Hansen, p. 179), and then relates: “On Sunday morning the writer in Company of Dr Alsbury & ten other Americans crossed the Guardaloup River at Gonzales & fell in with and waited on Capt John Seguin, who with twenty-four of his men were getting ready to go on to meet Col Fannins division, but Capt Seguins men detained so long in getting ready that we failed overtaking Smith with the 25 men alluded to before at the Cibolo crossing” (Hansen, pp. 179–80); he repeats this information, with the same numbers, in slightly different language, a few paragraphs later (Hansen, pp. 180–81). The total here is sixty-three, very close to Williamson’s sixty, and exactly the total in Martin’s obituary. Appearing to support Sutherland’s account is the fact that Juan Seguín claimed, in one dictated account: “I arrived safely in the town of Gonzalez, and obtained at [once] a reinforcement of thirty men, who were sent to the Alamo, and I proceeded to meet Sam Houston” (Hansen, p. 198). However, the phrasing of the next sentence in Seguín’s letter appears to indicate that he may have been referring to the men led into the Alamo by John Smith, which is highly unlikely, if not impossible, and unsupported by any other account: “When the notice of the arrival of the thirty men was given to Santana, it is said, he gave orders, to allow them entrance stating that he would only have that many more to kill.” Since the letter was written on June 7, 1890, fifty-four years after the fact, it is more likely that the eighty-three-year-old Seguín’s memory was faulty. Also, other accounts by men in Gonzales or the vicinity around the same time are unanimous in mentioning a similar number of men—about thirty—leaving Gonzales with Smith. John Jenkins, for instance, who arrived in Gonzales on March 3 or 4, about a week after the force had departed town, writes: “While at Gonzales awaiting recruits, tidings came to us of the fall of The Alamo on the 6th of March, and of the terrible loss of 180 men, besides the band of 27 Texans, who during the siege made their way into the Fort and were all slain” (“Personal Reminiscences,” box 2R65, John Carmichael Jenkins Family Papers, BCAH). Colonist John Swisher related: “We arrived at Gonzales on the fifth of March and found about two hundred volunteers from the Colorado and the more contiguous points already there…. Only a few days previous thirty-two men, residents of that place, in fact the very flower of its male citizens, had gone to the relief of the besieged fort at San Antonio” (Swisher, The Swisher Memoirs, pp. 29–30). Another colonist, Robert Hancock Hunter, wrote a narrative in about 1860 based on a diary he kept. In late February or early March he joined Captain Bird’s company at San Felipe and rode west. He related: “There was a company of 32 men made up from Gonzales. The first of March they got in the Alamo, threw the enemy safe to Travis” (Hunter, Narrative of Robert Hancock Hunter, p. 14). In a March 6, 1836, letter to James Fannin, acting governor James Robinson wrote: “This moment information has been given that about 30 men has thrown themselves into Bears for its relief from Gonzales,” almost surely referring to the group Smith guided into the Alamo; this is information possibly gleaned from Smith himself after his return to Gonzales on March 4 (the letter appears in PTR 5, pp. 5, 10). More corroboration is found in a June 9, 1836, letter written by Dr. John H. Barnard, who was with Fannin in Goliad but was spared due to his medical training and later sent to Béxar to help treat the Mexican wounded in the Alamo battle. Barnard remained in Béxar for five weeks, and as historian Kevin Young points out, “stayed in the home of Angelo Navarro and interacted frequently with the Navarro family and that of Dr. Horace Alsbury”—which included Alsbury’s wife, Juana Navarro Alsbury, who was not only Navarro’s daughter but also in the Alamo during the siege and would have known of the Gonzales reinforcement. In the letter, Barnard writes: “The Texian force here was 120 men—30 more fought their way in, after a few days; making 150 in all” (Young, “Joseph Henry Barnard Letter”). In the August 18, 1912, San Antonio Light, in a story entitled “Frontier Days of Texas,” Andrew J. Sowell wrote of Travis’s first written request for aid: “A gallant response met the appeal, and soon thirty-two men and boys of DeWitt’s colony were ready to start…. David Darst, one of the Colonists, told the writer that he was a boy at the time, saw them start, and that they were under the command of Capt. George C. Kimble. All of the men, women and children in the town were present, bidding farewell to loved ones.” Darst’s father, Jacob Darst, was among the group; David, who was fifteen at the time, would surely have known if anywhere near sixty men left Gonzales. Further, in the March 12, 1836, issue of the Telegraph and Texas Register, published in San Felipe, this information was published: “We also learn, by letter, that John W. Smith, who previously conducted 30 men into the Alamo, would be entreated with the hazardous enterprise of conducting 50 more”—the “30 men” clearly referring to the group Smith led out of Gonzales on Saturday, February 27. At least one man, John T. Ballard, claimed later that he had been a member of Thomas Jackson’s company, but had been run off by Mexican cavalry near the Alamo, and a few others may have had the same thing happen. But Sutherland received his information about the entrance of the “Gonzales Thirty-Two” into the Alamo from John W. Smith, and it seems reasonable to believe that Smith would have told Sutherland if anything like sixty men had approached the Alamo but only half had made it in. Finally, in the Texas Collection at Baylor University, there is a March 8, 1907, clipping from a newspaper (possibly published in Houston) containing a story under the headline “The Real Alamo,” which consists primarily of a letter from A. C. Gray, a one-time resident of San Antonio. He writes: “On March 3, after the investment of the Alamo by Santa Anna, Travis sent out his famous last appeal for relief, and because of his success in bringing in a party of thirty-two men on the 1st, Travis selected Captain John W. Smith to take this last appeal and letters to Washington on the Brazos, where the convention was in session. Smith did so unwillingly, and having performed his mission hurried back with additional men; but the assault took place sooner than was expected, and his aid came too late. I got this information from Captain Smith himself, who was a very quiet, unpretentious gentleman, loath to talk for publication, but always willing to entertain his friends with reminiscences. If he were alive now and knew I was quoting him, he would not thank me…. Captain Smith had been a resident of San Antonio since before the Texas revolution, and had married a Mexican lady. They had a son and daughter, with whom I became acquainted and through them with their father.” Thus the overwhelming evidence available supports a group of between twenty-five and thirty men leaving Gonzales on February 27, in two companies headed by George Kimble and Thomas Jackson.
The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation Page 40
