Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  Another fifty or sixty Texians, looking to retreat but unable to reach either the church or the barracks, had gone over the mission wall to make a run for freedom. Taking cover in a drainage trench, they ran for the Gonzales road. But Santa Anna’s cavalry stood ready, stationed, as instructed, “to scout the country, to prevent the possibility of escape.”18 The skilled horsemen made short work of running down the fleeing men, and none of the defenders survived the slaughter.

  Now only the church remained in Texian hands. The Mexicans once again pivoted the Alamo’s biggest cannon, directing its fire upon the church, barely a hundred yards away. The piles of sandbags that protected the church facade were blasted into a cloud of sand, and Santa Anna’s men shouldered through the entrance doors.

  In those minutes of desperate chaos, Almeron Dickinson fell. Only Crockett and the diminished ranks of his men remained to fight on, but they no longer defended the Alamo; theirs was a matter of survival. As the enemy flooded every space in the Alamo, these last remaining defenders no longer had time to reload their muzzle-loading rifles, and there weren’t enough bowie knives or bayonets to defeat Santa Anna’s hundreds.

  The Mexicans had their orders—none but women and children were to be spared—but the last men standing surrendered to General Castrillón. The Mexican officer respected their honorable plea for mercy, and seven men, led by David Crockett, put down their weapons, trusting the Mexican general would treat them honorably as prisoners of war.

  By 6:30 A.M., a strange half silence fell as the sun rose over the horizon. The firing had ended, permitting the “groans of the wounded and the last breaths of the dying” to be heard.19

  NINE

  Bring Out the Dead

  The gallantry of the few Texans who defended the Alamo was really wondered at by the Mexican army. Even the generals were astonished at their vigorous resistance, and how dearly victory was bought.

  —JOSÉ FRANCISCO RUIZ

  With the fight over, Santa Anna made his way across the field of battle. At a distance of a hundred yards, he saw a few scattered bodies of his soldiers. By the time he reached the Alamo’s main gate, the number of dead Mexicans lying on the ground was shocking.

  Inside the old mission walls, the bloodletting had been even worse. Intermingled on its central plaza were dead Mexicans in blue uniforms and Texians dressed in stained deerskin and filthy homespun.

  Santa Anna, a veteran of many bloody battles, expressed no regrets. “These are the chickens,” he remarked to one of his captains, dismissing the dead. “Much blood has been shed; but the battle is over. It was but a small affair.”1

  His lack of compassion extended to survivors in his own army. No hospital tents or field surgery had been readied, and the lack of adequate medical corps and supplies would, in the days and weeks to come, cost many a wounded Mexican his life.

  Hearing no more than an occasional stray gunshot outside the mission—the dragoons still hunted down the last of the escapees, who hid in gullies and underbrush—Santa Anna wanted only to be able to report with finality his great victory. Before writing to his minister of war, he ordered the dead bodies of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett identified. The first two were easily found: Travis’s remains rested just where he had fallen, on the northwest battery, and Bowie’s body, crudely torn by bayonets, lay in a bloody heap in what had been his sickroom.

  Despite his orders that no quarter be given any Texian fighter, Santa Anna discovered that David Crockett wasn’t dead. When brought before him, Crockett stood tall, unwilling to grovel.

  The man who’d captured him, General Castrillón, counseled generosity toward “Coket,” whom he described as a “venerable old man.”2 But Santa Anna scolded Castrillón for sparing the Texians. “What right have you to disobey my orders? I want no prisoners.”3

  Personally affronted by Crockett’s survival, the indignant Santa Anna chose mercilessness. True to his word, he ordered the immediate execution of Crockett and the handful of survivors.

  After a moment of shocked hesitation—the officers engaged in the previous hour’s action thought such a step dishonorable—Santa Anna’s own staff officers, men who had remained out of the fight, “thrust themselves forward, in order to flatter their commander, and with swords in hand fell upon these unfortunate defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey.”

  Not killed in battle, but murdered, Crockett was thus among the last to die at the Alamo. At least one of the Mexicans, appalled at the dishonorable mutilation of defenseless men, turned away so as not to witness the final annihilation of the Texians.4

  * * *

  • • •

  SANTA ANNA DICTATED his report, addressed to His Excellency the Secretary of War and Navy.

  “Most Excellent Sir—Victory belongs to the army, which, at this very moment, 8 o’clock A.M., achieved a complete and glorious triumph that will render its memory imperishable.”

  Not content to claim victory, Santa Anna went on to improve upon the facts. He exaggerated the strength of the Texians, more than tripling their numbers, to make his success sound all the greater.

  “Among the corpses are those of Bowie and Travis, who styled themselves colonels, and also that of Crockett,” his report said. That much was true, but when he cited Mexican losses—“70 men killed and 309 wounded”—he told less than the truth.5 The Texians had actually killed or wounded 521 Mexicans, wiping out more than a third of Santa Anna’s finest fighters.

  Santa Anna’s claim that the victory was glorious may have fooled his superiors, but his men knew better. As one of his officers remarked, “With another victory such as this, we’ll go to the devil.”6

  MRS. DICKINSON, WITNESS

  Captured and watched over by an armed Mexican guard, the women and children of the Alamo huddled in a corner of the chapel. Susanna Dickinson held her terrified daughter, Angelina, to her breast. When a Mexican officer came looking for the lone Anglo woman in the Alamo, he spoke to her in English.

  “Are you Mrs. Dickinson?”

  Though in shock from the carnage of the preceding hour and mourning her husband, she managed to acknowledge that she was.

  “If you wish to save your life,” the officer commanded, “follow me.”

  She limped along behind him, her leg bleeding from a wound sustained when a bullet fragment ricocheted and struck her calf.

  She would remember that walk the rest of her life. “As we passed through the enclosed ground in front of the church,” she told an interviewer many decades later, “I saw heaps of dead and dying.” One had been her friend, a man “frequently an inmate” in her home.7 That was the great Crockett—and here he was, beside her path, mutilated but recognizable, his “peculiar cap” on the ground beside him. She had enjoyed his fiddling, and just days before, contemplating the coming battle, he had confided in the pretty, black-haired lady. As a man of the great wide open, Crockett never expected his life to end penned up like cattle. “I don’t like being hemmed up,” he told her.8

  The guard escorted her to Santa Anna himself.

  Despite being afraid for her life, she unexpectedly met with something like kindness. The general ordered the woman’s wound dressed while the two spoke through an interpreter. As he asked her mother questions, the fifteen-month-old daughter, blithely unaware of who the dark-eyed man in the uniform was, engaged the hard-hearted general.

  Utterly charmed by the pretty child who climbed onto his lap, Santa Anna decided she should be taken back to Mexico. She would be educated properly, he told her mother. He promised to provide generously for the child; she would be raised like the heir of a nobleman.

  Yet even the shock of all that had happened wasn’t enough to persuade Susanna Dickinson to hand over the care of all she had left in the world to the man responsible for the death of her husband. Though barely into her twenties, having lived the hard life of a frontier settler, she held her head h
igh. She found the courage to refuse and waited to hear how Santa Anna would respond.

  To her surprise, he did not react with the cruelty she’d expected. To the other women, Santa Anna gave a blanket and two silver dollars each before dismissing them.9 But Mrs. Dickinson, who had outright rejected his larger gesture of charity, got different treatment, not violence, but a kind of psychological punishment. Summoning a servant, he ordered him to accompany Susanna Dickinson, taking Angelina with her, to carry a message to her fellow Texians.

  The letter—though addressed to “the inhabitants of Texas,” the true addressee should have been Sam Houston—would justify what his army had done to the “parcel of audacious adventurers” at the Alamo.10 But the messenger herself would underscore his message. Santa Anna forced the widow of a man he had killed to do his bidding, to carry a message justifying his actions.

  BURYING THE DEAD

  That afternoon, Santa Anna dealt with the dead. His men collected the remains of the Mexicans killed in the battle. They would be buried in the Catholic burial ground.

  For the Texians, Santa Anna had in mind only desecration.

  He ordered his cavalrymen to drag the corpses of the defeated defenders away from the Alamo. Taken to the east of the town, they were piled with the remains of the Texian fighters who had attempted to make their escape on the Gonzales road.

  The mayor of San Antonio led a company of dragoons to collect firewood and dry branches from nearby stands of trees. When they returned, the first of the Anglo dead had been dragged into a heap; the freshly collected mesquite and cottonwood was piled on top. Another layer of the dead came next and, on the return of the dragoons with a second load of wood, the pile grew higher as more fuel was added. By the time the job was done, there were three large bonfires containing layers of wood and some sixty bodies each.

  At five o’clock that evening the Mexicans lit the funeral pyres. By Mayor Ruiz’s count, “the men burnt numbered one hundred and eighty-two. I was an eyewitness.”11

  As fire blazed that evening, a small company of cavalrymen escorted Susanna and Angelina, along with the servant, out of San Antonio. From her seat on a mule, Mrs. Dickinson left the ruin of the Alamo behind. The little party passed the pyres and the unmistakable smell of burning flesh. In the wan light of the setting sun, vultures circled overhead.

  TEN

  Houston Hears the News

  The capture of the Alamo . . . gave us a prodigious moral prestige. . . . The attainment of our goal [is] now almost certain.

  —GENERAL ANTONIO LÓPEZ DE SANTA ANNA

  In the year 1836, news traveled across Texas only as quickly as an express rider could carry it. That meant Colonel Travis’s appeal for help, written on Thursday, March 3, arrived in Washington-on-the-Brazos three days later. The courier interrupted breakfast in the newly designated capital on the same Sunday morning that the Alamo had awakened to an overwhelming assault.

  Though the new government of Texas had adjourned until Monday, a special session was immediately called to order to hear what the chair called “a communication of the most important character ever received by any assembly of men.”1

  Travis’s letter was read aloud. “At least two hundred shells have fallen inside of our works. . . . The spirits of my men are still high. . . . We have contended for ten days against an enemy whose numbers are variously estimated from fifteen hundred to six thousand men. . . . I look to the colonies alone for aid . . . unless it arrives soon, I shall have to fight the enemy on its own terms. . . . Our supply of ammunition is limited.”2

  No one in the room knew these lines had been written by a man now dead. But his closing words—“God and Texas—Victory or Death”—inspired delegate Robert Potter to get to his feet. Another second-chance man—a North Carolinian by birth and former U.S. congressman (he had fled west after castrating two men he suspected of consorting with his wife)—Potter made a motion that “the Convention do immediately adjourn, arm, and march to the relief of the Alamo.”3

  The new nation’s commander in chief of the Armies of the Republic, Sam Houston, rose to disagree. Houston’s instincts told him that this moment meant everything: “The next movement made in the Convention,” he believed, “would be likely to decide the fate of Texas.”

  Major General Houston had the floor and, with all eyes on him, he denounced the idea as “madness, worse than treason.” Having just declared Texas independent, he argued, if the convention went to war before setting up a structure for the new country, they would set themselves up for disaster. “There must be a government, and it must have organic form,” he argued; “without it, they would be nothing but outlaws, and could hope neither for the sympathy nor respect of mankind.”

  At his eloquent best, Houston spoke for an hour—and made the men around him a promise. The delegates should “feel no alarm,” he advised. He pledged that he himself would head to Gonzales to rally the militia, that he would defend Texas, and that the enemy would have to march over his “dead body.”4 If Santa Anna wanted to destroy rebel Texas, Houston saw his job as ensuring it survived.

  One hour later, dressed in a Cherokee coat, he mounted his horse, a saber hanging at one side, a flintlock pistol jammed into his belt on the other. Together with his aide-de-camp and three volunteers, Houston headed out on the open prairie. Though he was a general without an army, the fight had just become Sam Houston’s.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN GENERAL HOUSTON arrived in Gonzales, at four o’clock on the afternoon of March 11, he found 374 men, many without guns or ammunition; two usable cannons; and rations for just two days. Before dark the news got worse: Two Mexicans appeared telling a terrible tale, reporting the Alamo captured, its defenders all dead.

  Wanting to avoid panic in the town, Houston publicly dismissed the report and took the two men into custody. But the word had already spread and, on hearing of the slaughter, twenty volunteers deserted. To quell the alarm, Houston ordered his officers to mix with the volunteers and pass the word that the two Mexicans were spies.

  Privately he believed the story to be true. The day before, drawing on his Cherokee training, he had paused to put his ear to the ground on the way to Gonzales. He expected to hear the reverberation of guns, which for days had been “a dull rumbling rumor . . . booming over the prairie like distant thunder.” When he rose from the ground, Houston had heard “not the faintest murmur” from the hard-packed prairie soil.5

  He wrote immediately to Colonel Fannin; if the Alamo was gone, then the only other organized military force of any size was Fannin’s Goliad garrison. Informing Fannin of the reported fate of the Alamo, Houston admitted he worried the “melancholy [report]” was true. He ordered Fannin to retreat, to move his force to the town of Victoria.6

  Houston, on the morning of March 13, dispatched the reliable Deaf Smith, who knew the territory well, to “proceed within sight” of San Antonio. He wanted the facts of what had happened at the Alamo, and Smith, along with Henry Karnes, promised Houston they could make it to San Antonio and back in three days.7

  * * *

  • • •

  ONLY HOURS WERE REQUIRED. Returning at twilight, the entourage led by Deaf Smith made a strange sight emerging from the darkness. He rode in with a child in his arms, a woman riding alongside.

  Just twenty miles west of Gonzales, Smith had met up with Mrs. Dickinson; she was, in Houston’s words, a “stricken and bereaved messenger.” Taken to his private tent, where Houston took her hand, she recounted “her fearful narrative of the butchering and burning.” The earlier reports about the “dark tragedy” at the Alamo were true.8 Houston himself “wept like a child” as he listened to Mrs. Dickinson’s narrative.9

  To the people of Gonzales, the news hit very close to home. Two weeks before, thirty-two village men and boys had gone to the Alamo’s aid; this report of their loss left twenty widows keening and many
children fatherless. As one of Smith’s fellow scouts reported, “Here the public and private grief was alike heavy; it sunk deep into the heart of the rudest soldier.”10

  Santa Anna had succeeded in striking fear in the hearts of those who opposed him. But he had also provoked rage. Not just Texians, but Americans in the states were appalled at the way Mexico had treated not just men fighting for liberty, but also women and children. Many of the dead had been imperfect, yet by dying they became heroes. And people who loved freedom wanted their deaths avenged.

  Santa Anna had overplayed his hand. His brutality at the Alamo hadn’t left Texians shaking in their boots; instead of intimidating the population of Tejas, the news brought to a boil anger and outrage even in Texians reluctant to declare for revolution. He had provided a cause that would unite the undisciplined troops, and had even caused more Americans to flow to the aid of the Texians.

  He hadn’t put out a fire: He had lit one.

  But the fire was going to take some time to reach him, and in the meantime there was more bad news for more than the people of Gonzales. Mrs. Dickinson reported that five thousand men marched toward them. According to very recent “disagreeable intelligence,” Goliad was a primary target of the large Mexican force crossing the Rio Grande. Santa Anna aimed to live up to his sworn promise “to Take Texas or lose Mexico.”11

  With the Alamo no longer an obstacle in Santa Anna’s path, Houston believed the Army of Texas had no choice: They would not march forward to engage the enemy but would retreat, staying alive to fight another day. Fannin’s men at Goliad would have to fend for themselves.