by H. W. Brands
The prisoners and guards had marched less than a mile from the fort when the officer in charge ordered a detour off the road. “On our left there stood a row of mesquite trees, five or six feet high, stretching in a straight line as far as the bank of the San Antonio River, which lay some way off,” Ehrenberg remembered. “The river flowed between banks thirty or forty feet high, which on our side rose almost perpendicularly from the water. We followed the hedge toward the river, wondering why we were being taken in this direction.”
Ehrenberg and his fellows weren’t the only ones with questions. At dawn that day, Barnard, Shackelford, and the others with medical training had been summoned by Colonel Garay, one of the few Mexican officers who spoke English. Garay ordered them to report to his quarters, which lay in an orchard a quarter mile from the fort. “He was very serious and grave in countenance,” Barnard remembered, “but we took but little notice of it at the time.” Barnard and the others assumed they were to treat more of the Mexican soldiers, yet when they reached Garay’s quarters, they saw no wounded men. An enlisted man—a boy, really, named Martínez—who said he had lived in Kentucky engaged them in idle conversation. Barnard and the others grew impatient at this curious performance and said they would return to the fort. Martínez, however, explained that he had orders from Garay to keep them there. The colonel, he said, would appear shortly.
Puzzled and annoyed, the medics were surprised to hear a volley of muskets. They asked Martínez what the shooting was about. He responded vaguely that some of the soldiers must be discharging their weapons to clean them.
“My ears had, however, detected yells and shouts . . . ,” Barnard wrote, “which, although at some distance from us, I recognized as the voices of my countrymen. We started, and turning my head in that direction, I saw through the partial openings in the trees several prisoners running with their utmost speed and directly after them Mexican soldiers in pursuit of them.” Now Colonel Garay appeared. “Keep still, gentlemen, you are safe,” he said. “This is not my orders, nor do I execute them.” He explained that the previous night he had been commanded to shoot all the prisoners, but he had determined to save the surgeons and a few others and would plead that they had been captured without arms.
So Barnard and the others listened as the executions proceeded. “In the course of five or ten minutes, we heard as many as four distinct volleys fired in as many directions, and irregular firing that was kept up an hour or two before it ceased. Our situation and feelings at this time may be imagined, but it is not in the power of language to express them. The sound of every gun that rang on our ears told but too terribly the fate of our brave companions, while their cries that occasionally reached us heightened the horrors of the scene.”
Shackelford, who sat beside Barnard through all this, was in agony. “His company of ‘Red Rovers,’ that he brought out and commanded were young men of the first families in his neighborhood—his particular and esteemed friends,” Barnard recorded. “Besides, two of his nephews who had volunteered with him, and his eldest son, a talented youth, the pride of his father and beloved of his company, were there.” Shackelford could hear them being killed but could do nothing to save them.
Barnard later learned that Fannin had been executed separately from the other prisoners. “When told he was to be shot, he heard it unmoved, but, giving his watch and money to the officer who was to superintend his execution, he requested that he might not be shot in the head and that he might be decently buried.” His request was ignored. “He was shot in the head and his body stripped and tumbled into a pile with the others.”
Barnard discovered that such mercy as the Mexicans displayed was largely the work of a Señora Álvarez—“whose name ought to be perpetuated to the end of time for her virtues,” he declared. This woman, the wife of one of General Urrea’s officers, upon hearing of the execution order, had pleaded with Colonel Garay to save whomever he could. Her entreaties, combined with Garay’s own revulsion at the order, had caused him to pull aside the surgeons and the handful of others. “In consequence,” Barnard wrote, “a few of us were left to tell of that bloody day.”
But not those few alone. By a miracle, Herman Ehrenberg escaped the slaughter. In the line with the others on the bank above the San Antonio River, Ehrenberg became aware of what was in store for the prisoners at about the same time Barnard did. “A command to halt, given in Spanish, struck our ears like the voice of doom, for at that very moment we heard the distant rattle of a volley of musketry.” The officer at hand spoke again, ordering the prisoners to kneel. The Mexican guards moved close and put the muzzles of their guns against the prisoners’ chests.
Briefly Ehrenberg and the others thought the Mexicans were bluffing, that this was a device to get the prisoners to turn coat and join the Mexican army. But they soon realized the dead earnestness of the action. “A second volley of musketry came to our ears from another direction; this time a wail of distress followed it.” Before Ehrenberg had time to absorb the meaning of what was happening, the soldiers with his group opened fire. “Thick clouds of smoke rolled slowly toward the river. The blood of my lieutenant spurted on my clothes, and around me the last convulsions of agony shook the bodies of my friends.”
Somehow the point-blank volley spared Ehrenberg. Though stunned by the mass killing, he retained sufficient presence of mind to dive to the ground, then to scramble beneath the smoke toward the river. A Mexican soldier slashed at him with a sword, but he hurtled forward, plunging down the steep bank into the water. The Mexicans fired at him from the top of the bank, yet between the obscuring effects of the smoke and his repeated dives under the surface, the bullets missed. He reached the other side and pulled out to catch his breath. “I looked back at the place where my friends lay bleeding to death. The enemy was still shooting and yelling, and it was with a sorrowful heart that I listened to these shouts of triumph which in my fancy were mingled with the groans of pain of my dying friends.”
C h a p t e r 1 7
Runaway
Ehrenberg’s safety was hardly ensured when he reached the east bank of the San Antonio River. His miraculous escape from the Goliad slaughter bought him a reprieve from danger but no more than that, for on commencing his flight eastward, away from the Mexican lines, he discovered that he was one of thousands similarly running for their lives. Precisely as Santa Anna intended, word of the Mexican commander’s unsparing treatment of rebels spread before his advancing forces, provoking dismay among the rebels and panic among the populace. “It is said that Santa Anna designs driving all the Americans beyond the Sabine,” John Brooks reported to his father, in one of the last letters he wrote before his execution with the others at Goliad.
This wasn’t Santa Anna’s public position. For the record, the president-general assured all law-abiding Texans that they would be secure. He issued a statement blaming a rebel minority for the current troubles of Texas, and went on to declare, “The inhabitants of this country, let their origin be whatever it may, who should not appear to have been implicated in such iniquitous rebellion, shall be respected in their persons and property. . . . The good will have nothing to fear. Fulfill always your duty as Mexican citizens, and you may expect the protection and benefit of the laws.”
Santa Anna’s private position was quite different. In fact he did intend to drive the Americans out of Texas. Even as he acted to suppress the rebellion on Mexico’s northern frontier, he pondered how to prevent such rebellions from recurring. “I am convinced that we ought not to risk either Anglo-American or European colonists to remain on the frontier,” he told War Secretary Tornel. Even if some Anglo-Americans were not taking part in the rebellion—“a rare coincidence indeed,” he said—their loyalty would always be suspect. For those American colonists of established residence in Texas, Santa Anna recommended removal to the interior of the country, “in order not to expose ourselves, as at present, to the sad experiences of our inadvertence, a lesson that is costing us so dearly.” Yet he
surely realized that many, probably most, of the Americans would return to the United States rather than be compelled to the interior. In either case, Texas would be cleansed of American presence and influence. And, of course, regarding the large number of immigrants who had come illegally: “They should be immediately expelled from Mexican territory.”
By the end of March 1836 Santa Anna had made a promising start on his campaign of expulsion. Each Mexican victory and each advance by Santa Anna’s army launched a new wave of refugees fleeing his wrath. Creed Taylor, the teenager who had helped take San Antonio the previous December, and his brother left the army to assist their mother in the evacuation of the family farm on the Guadalupe. “We reached home about sundown,” Taylor recalled, “and found mother hastily preparing to begin her flight that very night. Some of the neighbor women were there, and all were making haste to get away.” Mrs. Taylor was happy to see her boys, but their arrival didn’t diminish her desire to escape before all were murdered or ravished. Taylor described an incident that illustrated the panic. “Mother had prepared supper, and while at the table just at dark, the discharge of guns not faraway was heard. ‘The Mexicans are on us,’ the younger women shouted, and their alarm for a while was extreme. Later in the night it was learned that some of the men who lived below us on the river, and who were coming home from the army to save their families, had fired their guns merely to announce their arrival.”
The scattered nature of the settlements contributed to the fright and confusion. Rumor traveled on the wind (literally, in the case of the heard gunfire) and often got distorted in the transmission. Listeners imagined the worst and, in the absence of calming evidence, acted on their imagination. Because the colonists lived far apart, each family felt peculiarly exposed. In many cases the men had gone off to fight; those who went to the Alamo and Goliad wouldn’t be coming back, and their families typically had no one to protect them. John Swisher was in Gonzales, the town that had sent the last thirty-two defenders to the Alamo, when the word of the fall of the fortress arrived. “There was not a soul left among the citizens of Gonzales who had not lost a father, husband, brother or son in that terrible massacre. I shall never forget the scene which followed the confirmation of the dreadful news. The mad agony of the widows and the shrieks of the childless and fatherless beggars all description.”
When the interim government appointed Sam Houston commander in chief, it expected that he would shortly lead the Texas troops against Santa Anna. For weeks, however, Houston did everything he could to avoid battle. Upon appointment he headed for Gonzales, with the stated intent of relieving the Alamo. But he took his time getting to Gonzales, requiring five days for a trip that most travelers made in two. What he did on the way has remained a mystery, and it became a bone of contention after the Alamo fell, unrelieved by Houston or anyone else. Some supposed he fell off the wagon again, drinking his way from San Felipe to Gonzales, perhaps out of fear at the magnitude of the task before him. Others, still less charitable, concluded that he wanted the Alamo to fall in order that he could take uncontested control of the army. There is no positive evidence for either charge, nor for the simpler claim that he was a coward, afraid to risk his life for those of Travis and the Alamo garrison.
On the other hand, there is abundant evidence that Houston refused to go to the Alamo because he believed, as commander in chief, that his overriding objective was victory in the war, not victory in a single battle. To race to the Alamo might be emotionally satisfying, but with the small number of troops in his command it wouldn’t prevent a Mexican victory there, and it might well end the war at once—in defeat for Texas. “We could have met the enemy, and avenged some of our wrongs,” Houston asserted upon learning of the Alamo’s fate, “but, detached as we were, without supplies for the men in camp, of either provisions, ammunition, or artillery, and remote from succor, it would have been madness to hazard a contest.” Houston’s army at this point numbered less than four hundred—“without two days’ provisions, many without arms, and others without any ammunition.” They were brave enough; most wanted only a chance to avenge the death of their comrades. But besides their lack of supplies, they knew nothing of organized maneuvers or combat. “They had not been taught the first principles of the drill.” Against Santa Anna’s army, which outnumbered the Texans ten to one, they wouldn’t stand a chance. Nor, even supposing it was possible to retake the Alamo, would holding that fort serve any strategic purpose (which was why Houston had wanted to abandon it in the first place). “Troops pent up in forts are rendered useless.” Santa Anna would simply station a modest number of his own men to maintain a siege and would send the rest to ravage the countryside.
The only hope for Texas lay in retreat. The army would buy time in falling back before Santa Anna’s advance: time to recruit new troops, time to train those recruited. Moreover, in falling back, the Texans would lengthen Santa Anna’s supply lines and render his position more precarious. “By falling back,” Houston explained, “Texas can rally, and defeat any force that can come against her.”
This pragmatic attitude hardly made Houston popular. Creed Taylor still held it against Houston years later. “Sam Houston had at Gonzales 500 men,” Taylor declared, exaggerating in his anger. “Of these at least one half of them had been at Concepción and San Antonio, and he didn’t have a man in his army who didn’t have a blood grievance against the Mexicans and that did not know that he could do as we had done before—whip ten to one of the carrion-eating convicts under Santa Anna.” Taylor asserted that if any of several other men had commanded the army at Gonzales, the war would have ended much sooner. “The historian would have never heard of San Jacinto. Fannin and his men would have been saved, the butchery of Goliad averted and the ‘Napoleon of the West’ would have found his Waterloo somewhere between Bexar and the ‘Lexington’ of Texas [Gonzales]. The comrades who assembled at Gonzales went there to fight, not to run.”
In another army, the scorn of his men might have been a lesser problem. But in the Texas army, where soldiers served at their own discretion and for their own purposes, the disrespect for Houston threatened to sabotage the revolution. A Texas agent at New Orleans cautioned the members of the interim government not to fool themselves about the motives of new recruits. “The declaration of independence will have a very powerful influence in your favor,” he said, “but you will find that nine out of ten who may emigrate to Texas hereafter will go there not to fight its battles, but to profit by its necessities.” The volunteers had brought themselves to Texas, and they might take themselves away from Texas. They treated orders as advice and heeded their commander chiefly when they agreed with his decisions.
If Houston had had the nerve of Andrew Jackson—or if he had been in the United States, a country with laws that could be enforced—he might have had his insubordinates shot. On occasion he threatened to do just that. Two privates were accused of mutiny and desertion; a court-martial convicted and sentenced the pair to death. Houston let the lesson sink in for a while. But then he found reasons to reprieve the two.
Whatever the prudence of retreat, the decision to fall back unnerved the populace, which had been counting on Houston to hold the line at the Guadalupe. Creed Taylor described the sudden change in mood when word got out that Houston wouldn’t fight. For days men had been passing his mother’s house, heading toward Gonzales, where they expected to battle the invaders. They spoke confidently of how they would thrash Santa Anna, and their confidence raised the hopes of the locals. “Then on a day there was a lull, and the tide turned. . . . As they returned they were greatly excited, halting only long enough to shout, ‘The Mexicans are coming! Houston is making for the Trinity, the Sabine! Flee for your lives!’ ”
Things got worse. News arrived of the disaster at the Alamo; this was followed by wild rumors of massacres of men, women, and children along the Guadalupe. Panic seized the entire populace. “The first law of nature, self-preservation, was uppermost in the minds of the se
ttlers,” Taylor wrote. “And thus the great exodus began.”
The exodus was rendered more difficult, and the panic intensified, by the fact that the flight occurred in late winter. One of the attractions of Texas was that farmers didn’t have to feed their livestock during the winter; the horses and cattle could graze year-round. But from the first hard freeze of December or January till spring greened the pastures, the pickings were often slim, and the stock grew gaunt and weak. The strongest animals could pull wagon and carts but not swiftly or far. Beyond this, late winter was the mud season, when roads turned to gumbo, especially under heavy traffic. Finally, many of the settlers lacked efficient wheeled transport; clumsy, homemade carts were common, straining the draft animals all the more.
In the case of the Taylor family, the sole vehicle was an oxcart with solid wheels cut from a log. Mrs. Taylor intended to hitch the cart to two yoke of her best oxen, which were none too good at the time. Creed and his brother talked her out of this plan. “We explained to mother that if we depended on these slow oxen, we could not hope to outrun the Mexican army, and that we might as well stay where we were and take our chances.” She wanted to leave that very night, but they persuaded her to wait till morning, when they would scout the range for the best horses they could find—again, a relative distinction—which they would load with packs for a faster getaway.
Catching the horses took longer than expected, as did packing the family’s few movable possessions—bedding and personal items—onto the horses. The fruit of years of labor had to be abandoned. “There was a little corn left in the crib, a large supply of nicely cured bacon in the smokehouse, and the yard was full of chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks, besides a good stock of hogs. All of these we left to the invaders.” The younger children cried upon leaving the only home they had ever lived in. Mrs. Taylor’s reaction was different. “If mother shed a tear, I never knew it, though there was an unusual huskiness in her voice that day. Mother was brave and resolute, and I heard her say to a lady while crossing the Brazos, under great difficulties, that she was going to teach her boys never to let up on the Mexicans until they got full revenge for all this trouble.”
