Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  Houston thought the plan was bad, but he now saw the motivations were even worse: Grant’s main interest was to use the volunteer army to fight for his personal land claims south of the Rio Grande. Plus the proposed invasion of Matamoros, now discussed publicly for a month, was no longer a Texas secret. “The Mexicans,” as one soldier in the little army noted, “aware of our plans, were strengthening the defenses of their city and every day making it more nearly impregnable.”10 And Santa Anna and his men, though still far away in central Mexico, were mile by mile making their way north.

  Two decades before, Houston had selflessly thrown himself into battle, risking his life at Horseshoe Bend. For that, he paid dearly, sustaining devastating wounds to his shoulder and upper thigh that still tormented him more than twenty years later. This time, Houston counseled caution.

  He spent several days with the army as it marched to Mission Refugio, listening, getting to know the men, and getting known by them. As they talked, Houston, older and wiser at age forty-three than most of the troops, made a lawyerly case for holding back. Then, on arrival in Refugio, he addressed the assembled troops. After years spent under Andrew Jackson’s tutelage, he knew how to work a crowd of soldiers.

  “We must act together,” he told the Army of Texas—“United we stand divided we fall.”

  He argued that to invade Mexico was pure folly. “[Though] I praise your courage,” he told them candidly, “my friends, I do not approve of your plans.”11

  Houston believed the Texian army might be destroyed in such a fight. Just two hundred men, marching two hundred miles through strange and potentially unfriendly territory? “A city containing twelve thousand souls,” he believed, “will not be taken by a handful of men who have marched twenty-two days without bread-stuffs, or necessary supplies for an army. If there ever was a time when Matamoras could have been taken by a few men, that time has passed by.”12 With that, Houston again mounted his horse and rode away. As head of the regular army, he could not order these militiamen; he could only plant doubts in their minds.

  But he departed disheartened. He worried about the cause of Texas and, seeing him lost in thought, Houston’s staff left him to his thoughts as they headed north.

  That night and the next day, Houston pondered. He later admitted he considered “withdraw[ing] once more from the treacheries and persecutions of the world” to return to the Cherokee to “bury [myself] deep in the solitude of nature, and pass a life of communion with the Great Spirit.”13 And, very likely, once again drink deeply from the “flowing bowl.”

  When Houston and company reached San Felipe de Austin, Governor Smith, trying vainly to hold on to power, granted the unhappy Houston a few weeks’ furlough to carry out an assignment. The task would take him back to the Cherokee, but very much in service to the Texian cause. Houston would become an ambassador for Texas. He would stay true to the cause, since Governor Smith wanted to be sure that a large band of some four hundred Cherokee in East Texas remained peaceable—the last thing the Texians needed was a second formidable enemy. Houston headed east to make peace at the council fire of Chief Bowl, warlord of the Texas Cherokee, hoping to return with a treaty in time for the next gathering of delegates. With a new duty, he again aimed his gaze “with enthusiasm upon the future prospects of Texas.”14

  During Houston’s weeks of absence, the Texian plan to move on Matamoros collapsed, in part because Houston’s words had persuaded many soldiers such an attack would be a fool’s errand. Instead, the next Texian fight would unfold back in San Antonio. Only this time, the roles were reversed: The Texians, now inside the Alamo, would face a siege by the Mexican army now making its way north.

  FIGHT OR FLIGHT?

  On January 18, Jim Bowie rode hard for the Alamo. After a long day in the saddle—he and his thirty men covered more than seventy miles—he saw a bittersweet sight. In the middle distance he spied the silhouettes of the mission and the bell tower of the San Fernando church. They would never fail to bring to mind his wife and children, now more than two years dead.

  For Bowie, San Antonio de Béxar remained a place of homecoming, but this time he arrived with a purpose. Sam Houston admired the man’s “promptitude and manliness” and respected his “forecast, prudence and valor.”15 Just the day before, freshly back from his mission to the Cherokee, he’d entrusted Bowie with orders for the garrison at San Antonio.

  In recent weeks, the Texian commandant in San Antonio, Lieutenant Colonel James Clinton Neill, had written repeatedly to the government, pleading for reinforcements. Like Houston, he had fought and been wounded in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Like the men around him, he saw this fight as an extension of his father’s and grandfather’s fight back in North Carolina in the Revolution.

  On arrival, Bowie saw an undernourished, ill-clad, and unpaid garrison. In the new year, Neill’s company had continued to dwindle, falling to 114 men, three dozen of them sick or recovering from wounds. And this contingent was supposed to fight off a thousand-man Mexican force that, according to Neill, was already “destined for this place” from central Mexico?16

  Yet morale remained surprisingly high, further buoyed by the sight of braveheart Bowie and his men. But the situation was not as it at first seemed to Colonel Neill. When he read Houston’s written directive, Neill found Bowie hadn’t come to fight Mexicans: Houston’s orders called for dismantling the San Antonio outpost. The commander in chief instructed that the barricades in the streets of San Antonio be destroyed; the Alamo blown up, demolished, rendered unusable; and the artillery and stores removed to Gonzales. He didn’t want to lose good men fighting to hold a fort he believed they couldn’t defend.

  Colonel Neill had requested relief—and this notion of abandoning and obliterating San Antonio was something else altogether. Like Ben Milam’s back in December, Neill’s first instinct was to rebel.

  He was an artillery officer by training, and together with one of his junior officers, Lieutenant Almeron Dickinson, Neill had fired the first cannon at Gonzales. As they absorbed Houston’s orders, Neill and Dickinson quickly realized that removing the artillery and ammunition simply was not possible. When Dr. Grant departed in December with the bulk of the troops, he had taken virtually all the horses and wagons; without draft animals, the array of captured cannons, many of which were in good firing condition, were going nowhere. To the cannoneers, the notion of abandoning the guns, the largest array of Texian artillery, made no sense at all.

  Houston’s orders arrived without President Smith’s authorization, so the men in Neill’s command decided to carry on with the work of stiffening the defenses at the Alamo; they would await confirmation. As he waited, Bowie began to weaken in his commitment to Houston. After all, Bowie recognized a good defensive position when he saw one, and here was a town that had been his home and that was defended by men whose bravery and commitment were contagious. Unable to resist helping, Bowie pitched in with the rebuilding, “laboring night and day.”

  Bowie soon communicated his change of mind to the Texian government. “I cannot eulogise the conduct & character of Col Neill too highly,” he wrote to Governor Smith two weeks after his return to San Antonio. “No other man in the army could have kept men at this post, under the neglect they have experienced.”17

  Jim Bowie, widower and wheeler-dealer, fortune hunter and fighter, also confided how much the forthcoming fight at the Alamo now meant to him. An uncomplicated man, Bowie, together with Neill, had reached a joint resolution.

  He wished to help the people of San Antonio. “We will rather die in these ditches than give it up to the enemy.”18

  But if they were going to keep the Alamo in Texian hands, they were going to need more help.

  WILLIAM BARRET TRAVIS

  For a man of twenty-six, Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis brought wide experience to the fight for Texas. A teacher, lawyer, and militia officer, he appeared to many as a fine man an
d good citizen, despite rumors of a checkered past. Travis was said to have blown up his promising law career when at age twenty-one he suspected his wife of infidelity and murdered the man he thought was her lover.

  Having settled in Texas in 1831, Travis officially became a landowner and Texas settler, making a new home in the land of men looking for second chances. He practiced law in San Felipe de Austin and lived alone in a rooming house. His success permitted him to hire a law clerk and own several horses. A literate man, he read widely, noting in his diary the borrowed books of Greek and English history, as well as fiction.

  By 1835, he wanted a more settled life. He had found a woman he wished to make his second wife, and to make that possible, a formal divorce from his first wife was begun. Travis also addressed the matter of the children left behind in Alabama when, in May 1835, he signed his last will and testament. He designated Charles Edward, five years of age, and Susan Isabella, the daughter he had never seen, as his sole heirs.19

  When the Texas rebellion began, Travis immediately committed himself to the fight. He remained with Austin during the siege at San Antonio, proving himself both as a scout and as a field commander in the skirmish where he and his men captured the Mexican horses in November 1835. He offered detailed advice to the governor and the council, giving them recommendations regarding the organization of the new army. His reward, on December 21, 1835, was elevation to the rank of lieutenant colonel, commandant of the cavalry.

  Then, on February 3, 1836, Lieutenant Colonel Travis, dressed in homemade Texas jeans (a formal uniform he’d ordered hadn’t arrived), crossed the San Antonio River. In response to Neill’s repeated pleas for help from San Antonio, the governor had ordered Travis to the town’s defense.

  Along with his platoon of thirty men, Travis brought the total defenders to barely 150.

  FORTRESS ALAMO

  “You can plainly see,” observed Ensign Green B. Jameson, “that the Alamo never was built by a military for a fortress.”20 Jameson, the chief engineer at the Alamo, spoke truly as the mission, established in 1718 and after, began as a place of faith, where Franciscan friars taught Native Americans the tenets of Roman Catholicism.

  The Franciscans chose the site of their church with care. The little community required a reliable source of water, fuel for warmth and cooking, and surrounding acreage for grazing and cultivation. Over the decades, the church with its enclosed village developed, rectangular in shape, with tall walls of rough stone that bounded an open plaza on three sides. Lining the enclosure were rambling adobe living quarters for Indians, soldiers, and servants, as well as kitchens and shops, all of which faced into the courtyard.

  Green Jameson wanted to transform the rambling structures into what he thought of as “Fortress Alamo.” He hadn’t trained as an engineer—just weeks earlier he had been practicing law in San Felipe de Austin—but he drew a rough plan of the Alamo. The church had been secularized in 1793, and the mission had become barracks for the Spanish, then the Mexican military. The previous autumn General Cos and his men had begun fortifying the Alamo.

  Cos recognized that, though a ruin, the former church, with its four-foot-thick walls, could be adapted for military purposes, with a gunpowder magazine, officers’ quarters, and a storehouse. The Mexicans had also erected a ramp of rubble that extended nearly the length of the church nave, rising from the entrance to a platform over the chancel, which became an improvised gun emplacement.

  Now, however, Jameson faced the daunting task of completing the fortifications and doing it with limited manpower. Near the church was a yawning fifty-yard gap in the mission wall that needed to be closed. There were no parapets atop the walls, and the Mexicans had left several unfinished semicircular earthen batteries at intervals around the exterior walls. Jameson wanted perimeter ditches dug, too, one with a drawbridge across it. Most important, there were cannons to install “so as to command the Town and the country around.”21

  Even with limited time and labor, Jameson was bullish on the prospect of making the Alamo defensible. The rumored “1000 to 1500 men of the enemy being on their march to this place” left him undaunted. If they continued their work of fortifying the Alamo, Jameson felt confident that the Texians would “whip [the Mexicans] 10 to 1 with our artillery.”22 Confidence (or was it overconfidence?) rose as the work continued, despite the fact that no one knew the whereabouts of the enemy, near or far. Nor did the Texians know they were about to get a much needed boost to their morale.

  COLONEL CROCKETT

  Back in early November, a Tennessean in a coonskin cap headed for Texas. For the next three months, walking all the way, David Crockett got the lay of the land in rebellious Texas.

  He was another of the many lured by the fight for liberty. Word of the conflict had reached Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Crowds gathered in Mobile, Macon, New Orleans, and Nashville to raise their voices and raise money for the cause. Men from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Louisiana, inspired by rousing speeches, went west. Like many who had gone to Texas in previous years, these volunteers could be called second-chance men. Certainly Crockett, not so many months from his fiftieth birthday, was looking to start again.

  Born on the Virginia frontier in 1786, he spent most of his teenage years away from his perennially penniless family (he had eight siblings), sometimes to avoid his father’s beatings, at other times to work off his father’s debts.23 Married at nineteen, David soon fathered three children of his own and migrated west, reaching West Tennessee. He built a log cabin and set out to make a life for himself and his family.

  With the outbreak of the War of 1812, he joined up to fight the Creek Indians, serving as a scout for Andrew Jackson. Though a mere private, he once met with the general in person and left the encounter impressed. On witnessing Old Hickory’s resolution of a dispute, Crockett adapted Jackson’s words, which became the frontiersman’s motto: “Be always sure you are right then Go, ahead.”24

  The necessities of backwoods life made hunters of many men, but Crockett “got to be mighty fond of the rifle” and gained superb skills as a marksman and tracker.25 He regularly won shooting matches and at times made his living as a hunter. Once he shot forty-seven bears in a single month; he killed another on a moonless night by stabbing the animal in the heart. People said he could “whip his weight in wildcats, and was so tough he could climb a thorn tree with a panther under each arm.”26 By his own account his eyes were “as keen as a lizard’s.”27

  When his first wife died, he remarried and moved to Tennessee’s Alabama border. Likable and entertaining, Crockett leveraged his local popularity into an appointment to serve as magistrate, a position where he continued to display the homespun humor and straightforwardness for which he was beloved. In executing his judicial responsibilities, he said, “I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense . . . for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life.”

  His neighbors approved, sending him to the Tennessee General Assembly, where he displayed a deep distrust of “ready money men.” These speculators, with cash in their pockets, would buy lands that Crockett thought ought to be distributed to “poor people” who would establish homesteads.28 Helping people with very little was a theme he would return to throughout his political life and, whatever his circumstances—over the next decade his fortunes rose and fell—Crockett always thought of himself as “a poor man.” That status brought with it a sympathy for others in need. “Whenever I had any thing,” he would write late in his life, “and saw a fellow being suffering, I was more anxious to relieve him than to benefit myself. . . . It is my way.”29

  By December 1827, he was on his way to Washington City, where he served for three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Despite an unremarkable record as a legislator, he emerged as a national character. More than a few politicians resented his candor, sharp to
ngue, and independence. One of those was Andrew Jackson, and Crockett, defying both President Jackson and his party, lost his reelection campaign in 1831, only to regain his seat in 1833. Then, in 1835, when he faced another close race—and the very determined opposition of Jackson—he offered a plainspoken platform. “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”30 After losing by 252 votes, Crockett, true to his word, lit out on the Southwest Trail.

  On his trek across Texas, the famous hunter, raconteur, congressman, and author had been fêted at every stop. Cannons were fired in his honor; he was toasted at banquets.

  He was a folksy man of the people who spoke truth to power but on leaving home the previous November, he claimed no commitment to the cause of Texas, saying only, “I want to explore the Texes well before I return.”31 But by January, he reported, “I must say that as to what I have seen of Texas it is the garden spot of the world [with] . . . the best land and best prospects of health I ever saw.” And he ended his letter with a few words of reassurance. “Do not be uneasy about me,” he wrote. “I am among friends.”32

  When Crockett came through the Alamo gates, on February 8, 1836, he led a merry band of a dozen soldiers. He called them the Tennessee Company of Mounted Volunteers, although just three of them had begun the trip with him back in Tennessee. The men in the old mission certainly welcomed any and all volunteers—but a man like Crockett doubly so.

  Crockett’s fame preceded him and the defenders of the Alamo called upon the new arrival to give a speech. Climbing atop a wooden box, Crockett happily obliged the cheering crowd. As one Texan lad recalled, Crockett, at age forty-nine, remained “stout and muscular, about six feet in height, and weighing 180 to 200 pounds.” Though his florid complexion suggested his fondness for drink, he “had an ease and grace about him which . . . rendered him irresistible.”33