Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  Austin embraced his new role. Earlier that week he wrote to a friend in San Jacinto, “I hope to see Texas forever free from Mexican domination of any kind.” He said it in a private letter—“it is yet too soon to say this politically,” he admitted—but he could read Texas’s future.23 The radical idea of independence, once held only by Houston and a handful of others, was rapidly becoming the will of the people.

  Austin and his staff identified their next target: San Antonio. General Cos held that town; he had been sent to quell the uprising and, together with the five hundred men who had accompanied him from Mexico, the town’s defenders were thought to number perhaps 650 men. Cos, a veteran soldier who had risen to the rank of brigadier general, headed a band of disciplined soldiers, fully armed professionals wearing matching blue uniforms with white sashes and tall hats. As Santa Anna had ordered, he was to put down the “revolutionists of Texas.”24

  Austin’s officers included Colonel John Moore, commander of the main regiment, which now numbered about three hundred men. The scouts would report to Sam Milam, who had just arrived in Gonzales escorting three prisoners, the Mexican officers captured at Goliad. Responsibility for the artillery fell to Almeron Dickinson. And on October 13, Austin’s band began the seventy-mile march, their heading due west.

  The Texian “army” that marched out of Gonzales wore no official uniforms. The men, most in their twenties and thirties, wore the clothes of frontier settlers. For a typical volunteer that meant buckskin breeches gathered at the knee with Indian garters. Many wore shoes or moccasins and no socks. Almost none wore boots. Homemade buckskin hunting coats were common, worn atop rough linsey-woolsey shirts. A mix of sombreros and coonskin caps covered their heads.

  The weapons included large hunting knives. Not everyone had a gun, but some did, many of them shotguns. The luckiest of them carried deadly accurate Kentucky long rifles. For those with firearms, priming horns and leather bullet pouches hung from their belts.

  As his little army marched, Austin worried about the experienced and well-armed Mexican cavalry; most of the men were on foot, but his small mounted force consisted of men carrying homemade lances riding a mix of American horses, Spanish ponies, and mules. Another Austin worry was the hot-blooded nature of his men. Despite having no formal training and poor equipment, many were so keen to fight, so anxious to get into battle, that Austin wondered at his ability to restrain them until their odds improved. In his first official general orders, he warned them: “Patriotism and firmness will avail but little, without discipline and strict obedience to orders.”25

  The enemy outnumbered them, but the Texians were rising to this desperate occasion. Austin dispatched orders by courier for the soldiers from Goliad to join him en route. Two or three dozen new recruits were said to be arriving each day in San Felipe, and the general sent word that they, too, should join him on the march to San Antonio.

  Austin also hoped to hear from Sam Houston, who was using his fame to help raise an army in East Texas. As reports of the action in central Texas arrived in Nacogdoches, Houston had, in early October, issued a call for volunteers from beyond the Sabine River, in the United States, appealing to men looking for adventure and a new start. Promising “liberal bounties of land,” he implored readers in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky newspapers: “Let each man come with a good rifle, and one hundred rounds of ammunition, and to come soon.” He closed with fighting words: “Our war cry is ‘Liberty or death.’”26 All that high talk was encouraging, but so far Austin had seen nothing of either Houston or his volunteers.

  General Cos, a professional soldier with an experienced army, lay in wait, confident he could crush the upstart Texians whenever he wished. His opponent, the wary Austin, marched slowly toward San Antonio, consolidating his growing force. He would order his men into battle with the formidable Cos only when the time was right. Until then, he knew, everything was at risk.

  FOUR

  Concepción

  The morning of glory is dawning upon us.

  The work of liberty has begun.

  —SAM HOUSTON, Department Orders, OCTOBER 8, 18351

  Austin’s Army of Texas covered only ten miles a day in its seventy-five-mile march to San Antonio, a slow pace that allowed fresh volunteers to catch up with the force. There was an air of optimism among the men, who were ready to fight for something they believed in—and, judging by the first fights, they were more than up to the task.

  Among the new arrivals, together with a handful of his Louisiana friends, was Houston’s friend Colonel Jim Bowie. Austin welcomed any and all fresh recruits, but this man’s appearance in particular cheered the ragtag army. “Bowie’s prowess as a fighter,” remembered one who saw him that day, “made him doubly welcome.”2

  Before meeting Houston, Bowie had lived a rambling life. Childhood had taken him from his birthplace in Kentucky to Missouri and Louisiana; his gambling adulthood was spent in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and finally Texas. He found a home only upon his marriage to Ursula, in 1831, and with the birth the next year of a daughter, Maria Elva, and then a son, James Jr. When Houston first met him in Texas, the wanderer had found happiness with his growing family at home in San Antonio—but the next year, in a September 1833 cholera epidemic, Ursula and the two little ones had died. Overnight, Bowie became a childless widower.*

  As Sam Houston had done after the implosion of his marriage, Bowie had tried to numb his heartbreak with alcohol. He resumed his iterant ways, traveling to New Orleans and Mexico, pursuing his passion for land. But in late September 1835, on his return to Texas from Natchez, Mississippi, he had heard the call to arms. He and his little company came at a gallop.

  Bowie’s willingness to fight for his friends was beyond question. After a recent brawl in San Antonio, he scolded a companion who hadn’t joined the fight. “Why, Jim,” his friend replied, “you were in the wrong.” To Bowie, that was no excuse. “Don’t you suppose I know that as well as you do? That’s just why I needed a friend. If I had been in the right, I would have had plenty of them.”3

  This time Bowie’s cause was in the right, though whether he had enough friends to win in the fight against Mexico remained to be seen. When he caught up with Austin’s forces, he and his men joined them in the march toward San Antonio, where they would find out.

  On reaching Salado Creek, on October 20, Austin ordered a halt to establish temporary headquarters. They were a mere half day’s ride from San Antonio, but Austin wasn’t ready for the Texians to fight.

  Before leaving Gonzales, Austin had issued urgent pleas for supplies. “Send on, without delay, wagons, with what ammunition you can procure,” he wrote to his friends back in San Felipe de Austin, “[and] cannon and small-arms—powder, lead, &c.; and also provisions, meal, beans, sugar and coffee.”4 But delivery was slow and now, after a week’s march, the situation at the encampment looked more dire. “The men here are beginning to suffer greatly for the want of bread &c &c.”5

  Another challenge to Austin was the impending battle itself. He and his officers needed a strategy, a plan of attack. He could no longer count on the element of surprise—General Cos already knew the Texians were nearby since, a few days earlier, Ben Milam’s scouts had engaged in a brief skirmish with a band of Mexican lancers that ended with the enemy force dashing back to San Antonio, carrying the news of the approaching Texians.

  As inexperienced as he was in war, Austin understood he needed to know as much about his enemy as possible. Did they have the rumored eight hundred or more men? He knew too little about the town’s defenses. Where had they deployed their dozen or more cannons? He had a hundred questions and few answers as his men entrenched along the little watercourse.

  Austin needed somebody to venture closer to San Antonio, to look for information, as well as find corn, beans, and foodstuffs. He turned to his newest staff officer, Jim Bowie.

  Austin recognized the way other men
looked up to this fearless man. Having lived for years in San Antonio, Bowie also knew the town and its people very well. Austin assigned a slightly younger man, James Fannin, to be Bowie’s co-commander. As the only one in the camp with any real military training (he’d spent two years at West Point), Fannin might be able to think tactically about the assault. Then, too, he might just offset the impulsive instincts of the scrappy Jim Bowie.

  Bowie began by smuggling a letter into San Antonio. He learned from friends in the town that General Cos and his men (best estimate: six hundred Mexican troops) had fortified San Antonio with “adobe brick, with Port holes for their infantry.” The enemy had mounted at least eight small cannons, some on rooftops. On the other hand, the Mexicans had limited foodstuffs; “in five days,” Bowie was told, “they can be starved out.”6 Bowie, Fannin, and company had also gone on small scouting missions and twice been “attacked by the enimy.” But those skirmishes consisted of little more than brief exchanges of gunfire. Bowie asked Austin for fifty more men to assist him—and recommended that the Army of Texas move on San Antonio. He was confident of success.7

  But Stephen Austin wasn’t ready. He ordered the reconnoiterers back to camp. He wanted this fight to be on his terms, at a time he thought right. He also had to confront an immediate problem of Texian politics.

  THE CONSULTATION

  From a distance, the rider looked like just another volunteer. But as the stranger neared the temporary Texian camp, some thought they knew the identity of the man astride the little Spanish stallion. Soon the happy news began to ripple through the Army of Texas. The tall man on the little yellow horse, his feet almost touching the ground, was General Sam Houston.

  The famous man arrived alone but instantly drew a crowd. Spontaneously, he delivered a speech to the excited men, “urging the necessity of concerted action among the colonists,” as Noah Smithwick remembered it, and, “arguing that it should be for independence.”8 His audience needed no convincing and were thrilled to rally to the charismatic Houston. They cheered, heartened to have the great man on their side.

  Oddly, though, Houston hadn’t come to fight. His purpose was different: The new Texas needed a government. With Santa Anna having dissolved the legislature for the state of Coahuila y Tejas more than a year earlier, no form of representative government existed; in short, Texas was “without a head.”9 And the rebellious Texians needed not only to stick together but to do it in an organized way.

  The timing of Houston’s appearance was no accident. In a matter of days, the Council of Texas, a body consisting of men from far-flung districts, planned to gather to sketch out a plan for governance. Delegates were already gathering in San Felipe de Austin, which had been chosen to take advantage of the just-arrived printing press and the newspaper it produced; the Telegraph and Texas Register could spread the word. But before beginning a formal session, the council needed a quorum. The purpose of Houston’s visit was to corral the men already in the Army of Texas who had been chosen by their friends and neighbors to be delegates to the San Felipe Consultation.

  That put Houston and Stephen Austin in direct conflict. Austin grasped the importance of the council’s work, but he also knew, as general of this little army, he could hardly afford to lose a man. And he worried that the departure of some might lead to the departure of many. Instead of arriving to help in the fight, Houston would rob the army of fighters. Austin wasn’t happy, but, always fair-minded, he looked for a solution.

  On Sunday morning, October 25, he convened a meeting at the encampment. A number of other men spoke their minds, but Austin and Houston anchored the discussion. The central issue: Stay and fight vs. Depart and debate.

  Houston made his case for the Consultation, arguing that they needed to organize a government for Texas and must do it swiftly. Then he spoke his mind about the ragtag band he saw before him. They needed more training, he told the troops. They were ill-equipped and, as Houston saw it, a lack of artillery doomed any assault on the well-barricaded town of San Antonio and its cannons. Rather than battling the well-armed and well-drilled regulars in the Mexican army, Houston told the assembled men, they would serve the cause of Texas better if they withdrew to Gonzales for winter camp, where they could make themselves into a real army.

  These didn’t sound like fighting words, but they were spoken by a fighter who, from harsh experience, knew the importance of prudence—and the costs of foolhardy courage.

  When General Austin in his turn spoke to the crowd, he looked like the sick man he was; as one observer reported, he was “just able to sit on his horse.” But despite the dysentery that caused him intense intestinal distress, he found the energy to deliver a deeply felt plea on behalf of his adopted land.

  While he favored the purpose of the Consultation—yes, certainly Texas needed a functioning government—he passionately disagreed with Houston’s plan to retreat back over hard-won ground; that would simply squander their first successes. The general promised his soldiers that he “would remain as long as 10 men would stick to [me], because the salvation of Texas depends on the army being sustained and at the same time the meeting of the convention.”10

  Houston and Austin, at odds with each other, had made their cases. The jury would be the fighting men, and a vote was taken. The vast majority of the men were angry and eager. They rejected retreat—but also recognized the need for the Consultation. The thorough airing of the matter permitted both a renewed commitment to the fight and an endorsement of a meeting of the council.

  Despite their differences, Houston and Austin put their heads together; honoring the vote, they came to a compromise. Houston would go to San Felipe accompanied by the essential delegates, a total of fewer than twenty men. And he would carry a memorandum from Austin, who, understanding how critical the deliberations would be to the future of the region, wanted his opinions heard.

  The debate in San Felipe would pit the radical faction, which some called the War Party, against the Peace Party, with the key tension between them whether they were fighting, on the one hand, for Texas’s complete independence from Mexico or, on the other, for Mexican statehood and assurances of its citizens’ rights under the Mexican Constitution of 1824, which Santa Anna had violated. In his letter, Austin made the case for remaining a Mexican state. But that would have to be resolved at the Consultation.

  The next morning, Houston rode out the way he’d come, leaving Austin and the army to pursue a fight he thought misguided. As the big man departed, Austin was buoyed by the arrival of more than a hundred Tejano reinforcements, including a contingent of thirty-eight men led by Juan Seguín, the son of Austin’s oldest Mexican friend. The army was growing more diverse, and it no longer looked like an entirely Anglo-versus-Mexican fight, but an uprising by all sorts of settlers resisting Santa Anna’s iron rule.

  With Houston gone, Austin issued the order for his troops, consisting of roughly four hundred effectives, to march west at last, moving closer to San Antonio. He had had enough waiting. As he’d promised the Council of Texas in the letter Houston carried, he would “press the operations as fast as my force will permit.”11

  “THE MOST ELIGIBLE SITUATION”

  Barely a day after Houston left, Jim Bowie headed out toward San Antonio.12 “You will select the best and most secure position that can be had on the river,” General Austin ordered. The army needed a campsite close to San Antonio, one with pasturage for horses that was safe “from night attacks of the enemy.”13 And the general wanted it in time for the Army of Texas to make camp by nightfall.

  Bowie and his division of ninety-two mounted men headed north from their base of operations at Mission San Francisco de la Espada. They picked their way along the tree-lined bank of the San Antonio River and, two miles upstream, inspected Mission San Juan Capistrano. Although the abandoned church overlooked the river, the situation lacked the strategic advantages Austin wanted.

  Three miles on, Bow
ie, together with Captain Fannin, inspected another site, but soon dismissed this one, a church called Mission San José, as indefensible. With the hours passing rapidly and Austin’s words ringing in his ear (“with as little delay as possible”), Bowie urged the men further upstream.14

  They encountered an enemy cavalry patrol, but after a brief skirmish, the outnumbered enemy withdrew. None of the Texians sustained injury, but General Cos would soon hear of their arrival in his immediate neighborhood.

  Finally Bowie found just what he was looking for. Located just a quarter mile from another one-time Spanish mission, Concepción, he happened upon high ground at a U-shaped bend in the meandering river. It was a flat area, surrounded by stands of timber and scrub brush around the water’s edge, behind which the men could take cover. The Mexicans could only advance through a narrow neck, and the nearly enclosed meadow would also provide a perfect field of fire for the Texians’ long rifles. Best of all, the site lay within striking distance of their ultimate objective, just three miles from San Antonio.

  They’d found the right place to camp, but one look at the sky indicated the short October day was drawing to a close.15 There was no way Austin and the main force could reach Mission Concepción by dark, and that left Bowie a hard choice. The safest course would be to hightail it back to the main encampment. The alternative was to camp here to hold this strategic site, but that would be both risky—Bowie and his men would be outnumbered by Cos’s troops, who were closer than the Army of Texas—and counter to Austin’s orders.

  Colonel Bowie, a man possessed of an independent streak wider than the Mississippi, never made decisions out of fear of friend or foe. Back in Louisiana, he’d won a reputation not merely for his knife fighting but as a tamer of wild horses and even for riding alligators. (“The trick was to get on [the alligator’s] back, at the same time grasping his upper jaw firmly while gouging thumbs into his eyes. He couldn’t see to do much and the leverage on his jaw would keep him from ducking under the water with the rider.”)16 He decided to ignore Austin’s command.