by H. W. Brands
Crockett’s presence buoyed the entire garrison. Antonio Menchaca remembered Travis calling a halt to the labors on the fortress specifically to celebrate the arrival of the famous man. “Let us dance tonight, and tomorrow we will make provisions for our defense,” Travis said. Crockett’s personality leavened the atmosphere of a company surrounded and outnumbered. He regaled the men with stories, doubtless of his exploits against Indians, against the bear population of Kentucky, and against the ruling classes of Washington City. He challenged his new comrades to contests with the rifle and the fiddle. Travis and Bowie inevitably included him in their strategy sessions; his sense of humor took the edge off the competition between the two younger men.
As the days passed, Crockett’s experience assumed added importance. Bowie became ill, mildly at first but then debilitatingly. The source of the illness was some infectious agent, perhaps from the water supply, although this was the wrong season for cholera or typhoid. Other men fell ill, but there was no epidemic, as would have been expected with a water-borne pathogen. The surviving accounts are unclear as to Bowie’s symptoms; certain versions suggest pneumonia or tuberculosis. Whatever the nature of his illness, the consequence was that within days after Santa Anna’s arrival, he was unable to function in any command capacity. Travis had effective control of the entire garrison, with Crockett assuming the role Bowie had played among the volunteers but clearly and willingly subordinate to Travis.
In one of their last joint statements, written February 23, Travis and Bowie appealed to James Fannin at Goliad for help. “We have removed all our men into the Alamo, where we will make such resistance as is due to our honor, and that of the country, until we can get assistance from you, which we expect you to forward immediately,” they said. “In this extremity, we hope you will send all the men you can spare promptly.” If either Travis or Bowie, upon seeing the size of Santa Anna’s force, had had second thoughts about remaining at the Alamo, these were now banished. “We have one hundred and forty-six men, who are determined never to retreat. We have but little provisions, but enough to serve us till you and your men arrive. We deem it unnecessary to repeat to a brave officer, who knows his duty, that we call on him for assistance.”
As the burden of command fell on Travis, he grew into his authority in a way that must have surprised those who had known him chiefly as a bellicose young buck. He had been glib; now he became eloquent. He had been headstrong; now he was heroic. A letter written on February 24, just a day after the joint appeal to Fannin, revealed the change that was coming over the beleaguered commandant. Addressed not to his fellow soldiers but to a far broader audience—and, one suspects, to posterity—the frontier lawyer and failed journalist scribbled a message that stirred the heart of everyone who read it.
To the People of Texas and all Americans in the world:
Fellow Citizens and Compatriots—I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna. I have sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours and have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion; otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat.
Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism and every thing dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all dispatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due his own honor and that of his country. VICTORY or DEATH.
William Barret Travis
Lt. Col. Comdt.
P.S.
The Lord is on our side. When the enemy appeared in sight we had not three bushels of corn. We have since found in deserted houses 80 to 90 bushels and got into the walls 20 or 30 head of beeves.
Travis entrusted this letter to Albert Martin, a volunteer from Gonzales who had taken part in the first battle of the revolution, the fight over the disputed cannon. Martin slipped between the Mexican forces under cover of darkness and galloped the seventy miles to Gonzales, where he relayed Travis’s message to the world. While Martin was still on the road, and long before Travis could expect to know whether his plea had any effect, the rebel colonel penned another message, more informative and only slightly less exhortatory, to Sam Houston. Travis explained how he had rejected Santa Anna’s surrender demand and how Mexican cannons had begun bombarding the Alamo shortly after that initial parley and continued till the present. He described the latest developments: “Today at 10 o’clock A.M., some two or three hundred Mexicans crossed the river below and came up under cover of the houses until they reached point blank range, when we opened a heavy discharge of grape and canister on them, together with a well directed fire from small arms which forced them to halt and take shelter in the houses about 90 or 100 yards from our batteries. The action continued to rage about two hours, when the enemy retreated in confusion, dragging off many of their dead and wounded.”
Travis commended the performance of the garrison. “I take great pleasure in stating that both officers and men have conducted themselves with firmness and bravely.” He mentioned several by name, ending with one Houston knew well: “The Hon. David Crockett was seen at all points, animating the men to do their duty.” Travis added, “The whole of the men who were brought into action conducted themselves with such undaunted heroism that it would be injustice to discriminate.”
As before, he pleaded for help. “Our numbers are few, and the enemy still continues to approximate his works to ours. 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.” Yet, relieved or not, the garrison would do its duty. “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.” He prayed, however, that things wouldn’t come to that. “Give me help, oh my Country!” He closed, defiant as ever: “Victory or Death!”
If Travis had known what little effect his messages were having on his fellow rebels, he might have saved his ink (and quite possibly reconsidered his decision to defend the Alamo). Houston spent the six weeks after mid-January doing nothing very constructive. Having failed to talk the expedition to Matamoros out of continuing, he attempted to sabotage the project politically. “Who is Dr. Grant?” he asked Henry Smith derisively. “Is he not a Scotchman, who has resided in Mexico for the last ten years? Does he not own large possessions in the interior? Has he ever taken the oath to support the organic law? Is he not deeply interested in the hundred-league claims of land which hang like a murky cloud over the people of Texas?” Was he not the man who, to further his chimerical project, had usurped authority to strip the defenses of San Antonio, “leaving the sick and wounded destitute of needful comforts?” Was he not, in short, a person with interests other than those of Texas at heart? “Yet this is the man whose outrages and oppressions upon the rights of the people of Texas are sustained and justified by the acts and conduct of the general council!”
Houston judged Grant’s co-conspirators in the Matamoros campaign to be hardly better. James Fannin was a colonel in the regular army, having switched over from the volunteers. “By his oath he was subject to the orders of the commander-in-chief, and, as a subaltern, could not, without an act of mutiny, interfere with the general command of the forces of Texas,” Houston said. Yet Fannin had taken it upon himself, against the clear wishes of his commander, to raise a regiment to ride south. Morever, Fannin had utterly discredited the expedition to Matamoros—or, rather, showed its true nature—by promising that the soldiers would be paid from the spoils of war. This statement revealed the merc
enary motives of the expedition and divested it “of any character save that of a piratical or predatory war.” It also guaranteed the campaign’s failure, as the people of Matamoros, far from rising in support of the Texans’ resistance to Santa Anna, would unite in opposition. “They will look upon them as they would look upon Mexican mercenaries, and resist them as such.”
Houston’s complaints availed little. To many among the rebels he was a sodden old soldier who had lost the will to fight. Every victory thus far had come through the efforts of such go-ahead types as Travis and Bowie and Ben Milam (rest his brave soul) and Frank Johnson and James Grant. If the prospect of booty was required to motivate the men, so be it. Wasn’t Texas itself a great prize?
Muttering (and probably drinking), Houston wandered off toward Nacogdoches. His own officers and soldiers wouldn’t listen to him, but perhaps his old friends the Cherokees would. During most of February, while Travis and Bowie and Crockett were preparing the Alamo for its final defense and Travis was daily pleading for help, Houston was hundreds of miles away, sharing a pipe with Chief Tewulle. His efforts produced a treaty of friendship with the Cherokees and their forest-Indian allies, an agreement that had scant connection to the current crisis in the war against Santa Anna.
Fannin came closer than Houston to answering Travis’s pleas. John Brooks was Fannin’s aide-de-camp at Goliad; on February 25 he scribbled a letter to his sister: “From the hurry of a preparation to march, I have stolen a moment to write you. An express from San Antonio de Bexar received here, a few moments since, with intelligence that the Mexican Army under Santa Anna were in sight of that place and preparing to attack it. He heard the firing of cannon after he had gained some distance toward us. He estimated their strength at from three to five thousand. Bexar has a garrison of 156. They have retired to the Alamo, determined to hold out to the last, and have solicited reinforcements from us.” Brooks explained that the Texan army as a whole was woefully undermanned—and that nearly all those who were in the army weren’t even Texans. “The only troops in the field at this time are volunteers from the United States, and they probably do not exceed 800.” The garrison at Goliad comprised 420 men, who were busy strengthening what they had called Fort Defiance. Fannin, in response to Travis’s request for reinforcements, decided to leave 100 at Goliad and take the rest to Béxar. “With a forlorn hope of 320 men,” Brooks related, “we will start tonight or tomorrow morning at the dawn of day in order to relieve the gallant little garrison, who have so nobly resolved to sustain themselves until our arrival.”
In this letter to his sister, Brooks suggested that the rescue mission might—just might—succeed. “Our force is small compared with that of the enemy,” he acknowledged. “It is a desperate resort.” But it was worth the try. “If by forced marches we can reach Bexar, a distance of more than a hundred miles, and cut our way through the enemy’s lines to our friends in the fort, our united force thus advantageously posted may perhaps be sufficient to hold out until the militia can be collected to reinforce us.” Heaven had blessed the brave before, and it might do so again. “We hope the God of Battles will be with us—that victory will again perch on the bright little banner of Texian liberty.”
Yet in a second letter, written to his father that night, Brooks conceded that the relief party was probably riding to its death. “We have less than 350 men; the force of the enemy is possibly 3000—a vast disparity. We are almost naked and without provisions, and very little ammunition. We are undisciplined in a great measure; they are regulars, the elite of Santa Anna’s army: well fed, well clothed, and well appointed and accompanied by a formidable battery of heavy field and battering pieces. We have a few pieces but not experienced artillerists and but a few rounds of fixed ammunition, and perhaps less of loose powder and balls.” Only a miracle would prevent annihilation. “My dear Father, I frankly confess that without the interposition of Providence, we can not rationally anticipate any other result to our Quixotic expedition than total defeat.” Nonetheless, Brooks was willing to go. “If we perish, Texas and our friends will remember that we have done our duty.”
Fannin was willing to go, too—at first. The relief column set out from Goliad hauling four small artillery pieces in ox-drawn wagons. But only two hundred yards beyond the gates one of the wagons broke down. Then the crossing of the San Antonio River proved difficult and slow, disabusing the rescuers of any idea that they might reach Béxar quickly. If they got there at all, it would be by painful march. Indeed, the odds were against even reaching the town. “Not a particle of bread stuff, with the exception of half a tierce of rice, with us,” Fannin informed the provisional council. “No beef, with the exception of a small portion which had been dried, and not a head of cattle, except those used to draw the artillery, the ammunition, etc., and it was impossible to obtain any until we should arrive at Seguín’s rancho, seventy miles from this place.”
These remarks were Fannin’s preface to a message saying that the relief mission had been aborted. He explained that after the unpromising start the officers had requested a council, which he duly convened. “The Council of War consisted of all the commissioned officers of the command,” Fannin said, “and it was by them unanimously determined that, inasmuch as a proper supply of provisions and means of transportation could not be had; and, as it was impossible, with our present means, to carry the artillery with us; and as, by leaving Fort Defiance without a proper garrison, it might fall into the hands of the enemy . . . it was deemed expedient to return to this post and complete the fortifications.”
There was reason, if not much courage, in Fannin’s decision. If the Alamo was doomed, and if the relief column couldn’t alter that fate, there was no point sacrificing three hundred men who might yet save Goliad—which, Fannin belatedly came to believe, was more important than San Antonio.
Whatever the logic of Fannin’s decision, it was no comfort to Travis and the defenders of the Alamo, who in fact never learned that Fannin wasn’t coming. Day after day they scanned the prairie to the southeast of the Alamo; night after night they strained to hear the shots that would signal that reinforcements were fighting their way through Santa Anna’s siege lines.
Their hopes were rewarded but almost simultaneously disappointed in the hours after midnight of February 29. A mounted volunteer unit from Gonzales had looped to the northeast to evade the dragoons of General Joaquín Ramírez y Sesma, who guarded the road from Goliad. The first opposition the Gonzales volunteers encountered came from the Alamo itself, as guards there heard movement in the dark under the walls and fired on the presumed attackers. They hit one rebel volunteer before the others hissed out, in English, to stop shooting, for God’s sake: these were friends. The defenders rushed to help them in, their delight diminishing only—and sharply—when they counted the newcomers and discovered a mere thirty-two.
The day of their arrival—March 1—was the day the long-awaited convention on independence was scheduled to begin at Washington-on-the-Brazos. Travis couldn’t know that a quorum in fact had been achieved, but, assuming that it had, he wrote to the president of the convention, whoever that might be. An unmistakable bitterness informed his opening sentence: “In the present confusion of the political authorities, and in the absence of the commander-in-chief, I beg leave to communicate to you the situation of this garrison.” For six days the enemy had maintained a steady bombardment with howitzers and long guns, the latter from across the river, beyond the answering reach of anything within the Alamo. Meanwhile, enemy infantry and sappers had been encircling the fort with trenches; these were nearly complete, although they hadn’t prevented the arrival of the volunteers from Gonzales. Travis explained that his own men had been active, too. “I have fortified this place, so that the walls are generally proof against cannon balls; and I shall continue to entrench on the inside, and strengthen the walls by throwing up dirt.” He was pleased to report that his men had inflicted more damage than they had incurred. “At least two hundred shells h
ave fallen inside of our works without having injured a single man; indeed, we have been so fortunate as not to lose a man from any cause, and we have killed many of the enemy.” The spirits of the men remained high, “although they have had much to depress them.” Travis estimated the Mexican forces at between fifteen hundred and six thousand, with more arriving daily. “The reinforcements will probably amount to two or three thousand.”
Travis reminded the convention how often he had requested aid, and he wondered why, with the exception of the company from Gonzales, none had appeared. “Col. Fannin is said to be on the march to this place with reinforcements, but I fear it is not true, as I have repeatedly sent to him for aid without receiving any.” Travis detailed what was needed: five hundred pounds of cannon powder, two hundred rounds of cannonballs of various sizes, ten kegs of rifle powder and a commensurate quantity of bullet lead, and as many men as could be spared. “If these things are promptly sent and large reinforcements are hastened to this frontier, this neighborhood will be the great and decisive ground. The power of Santa Anna is to be met here or in the colonies; we had better meet them here than to suffer a war of devastation to rage in our settlements.” If relief didn’t arrive soon, Travis would have no choice. “I shall have to fight the enemy on his own terms.”
It was war to the death. “A blood red banner waves from the church of Bejar, and in the camp above us, in token that the war is one of vengeance against rebels. They have declared us as such, demanded that we should surrender at discretion, or that this garrison should be put to the sword.” Travis and his fellows didn’t mind the danger. “Their threats have no influence on me or my men”—except “to make all fight with desperation and that high-souled courage that characterizes the patriot, who is willing to die in defense of his country’s liberty and his own honor.” Travis renewed his vow to battle till the end, and he promised similar resolve from his subordinates. “I feel confident that the determined valor and desperate courage heretofore exhibited by my men will not fail them in the last struggle; and although they may be sacrificed to the vengeance of a Gothic enemy, the victory will cost the enemy so dear that it will be worse for him than defeat.” Travis’s closing was as defiant as ever: “God and Texas—Victory or Death.”
