PART TWO
THE
AFTERMATH
Chapter 11
Remember the Alamo!
ROSE dropped over a dozen feet from the West Wall. Although he alighted on his feet, the momentum of the spring threw him sprawling upon his stomach in a puddle of blood. After several seconds he recovered his breath, arose and picked up his bundle of clothes; it had fallen open and several garments had rolled out upon the blood. He hurriedly thrust them back, without trying to cleanse them of the coagulated blood which adhered to them. Then, throwing the bag of clothes across his shoulders, he walked rapidly away.
The Frenchman took the road which led down the San Antonio river, around the bend to the ford and through the town by the church, where the blood-red flag still signaled No quarter! No surrender! No mercy! San Antonio de Bexar, which he had helped seize three months earlier, appeared as a deserted city. A stillness of death prevailed.
At twilight he crossed the river on a foot-log and directed his course eastwardly towards the Guadalupe River. He carefully avoided the Gonzales road, the likely location of Mexican troops.
It was now late in the evening but the nearly full moon forced him to move slowly, stopping at every sound, hesitating at every imagined movement in the brush. To avoid being observed, he walked in the woods, in the shadows, unseen but unseeing.
Suddenly he was stabbed in the leg. Rose drew his knife yet the assailant was not a soldier but a prickly pear cactus plant, its two inch barbed thorn having pierced his limb. Rose stifled a cry of pain.
Safety required him to continue to stay off the roads and travel in the brush, although he knew there would be many more such “stabbings.” This painful alternative led to an all night travail with little progress, as his way was interrupted by large tracts of cactus, which constantly gored him with their thorns and forced him out of his course. In but a few hours, he was already in a wretched plight for traveling.
His plan was to move only in the dark of night and sleep during daylight. But, before the sun rose that next day – Sunday, March 6, 1836 – while he was still proceeding slowly and cautiously, he heard the blast of a Mexican bugle and then cannon fire. He paused, trying to ascertain where the sounds were coming from – but he knew it was from the Alamo and the assault had begun. Rose almost cried, thinking of his friends. Sadly, he resumed his movements, planning to rest at daybreak.
WHAT ROSE HAD HEARD in the pre-dawn darkness was General Santa Anna’s bugler sounding the first notes of the blood-curdling Deguello, the traditional Spanish march of no quarter, with the promise of a “throat-cutting, merciless death.” With other buglers picking up the music from the troops, four columns of the Mexican Army advanced on the Alamo – each equipped with scaling ladders, axes and crowbars, and, of course, rifles with bayonets at the ready, moving simultaneously at double-quick time.
MOST OF THE TEXANS were barely awake or dozing. By this last night, the enemy had already fired over 300 cannon balls and more than 80 rounds of exploding shells. Because of the day and night cannonade, only when it was dark and safest to go outside the fort did the men shore up the decaying walls of the adobe-mud fort. There was little time to sleep – or even rest because of the continuous explosions and late-night repairs. Travis was aware that his men bordered on collapse.
This last night there was no cannon fire and so the men worked only till midnight, when they slept “the sleep of exhaustion” that Santa Anna had planned for them. The Commander was checking his sentries and seeing for himself that the women and children were huddled in the Chapel (where Travis hoped they might be spared). He then checked the effect of 12 days of bombardment to the walls of the former mission. Finally, he reminded his sentries that the last man alive was to set fire to the magazines of ammunition.
Most were already resting when Travis finally lay his head down in the wee hours, though fully dressed, ready for action. Even the sentries were barely awake and, at 3 am, no one heard the muted hoofbeats, the faint clanking sound of spurs, swords, bayonets and ladders. The attack was quietly beginning.
Two-and-a-half hours passed, while the Mexicans proceeded by stealth to their positions around the Alamo. But, at 5:30 am, the invaders squandered their advantage by shouts of Viva Santa Anna! and the blare of bugles. The Alamo defenders were instantly ready. Travis leaped from his cot, reached for his shotgun and saber, and rushed into darkness, running 70 yards to the North Wall. His slave, Joe, at his side, Travis shouted: “Come on boys, the Mexicans are upon us and we’ll give them hell!” Cós commanded the troops that struck at the North Wall.
The first waves of Mexicans charged the fort and were “cut down by murderous cannon fire from the Alamo’s guns and by the precision marksmanship of the frontiersmen’s long rifles. Cannon loaded with scrap iron mowed down Mexican regulars by the squad.” The Mexicans fell back, regrouped and attacked again. They had to climb the Alamo walls, but attempt after attempt at placing the ladders was thwarted by rifle fire. They died or were severely wounded because their Chief had refused to wait for his larger cannons to arrive to level the fort.
A second charge was equally unsuccessful and costly.
Eventually the small Mexican cannons began to shatter parts of the wall. And the Mexican troops were now under the fire of the Texas cannons. Soon the enemy were climbing their ladders and rushing through small breaches in the North wall – but again the first waves of soldados were shot down as they entered.
When the third charge came as well against the adjacent West Wall, the limited resources of the Texans could not defend both positions simultaneously; the Mexicans “like sheep” began to climb to the top of the two walls.
Travis, standing near a cannon on the North Wall, fired both barrels of his shotgun and then preparing for hand-to-hand combat, drew the sword that had drawn the line in the sand. But before the first of the enemy reached him, he was felled by a single shot to his forehead and collapsed . . . mortally wounded. Delaying death, he pulled himself to a seated position. When the enemy finally climbed over and through the North Wall, a Mexican officer ran towards Travis to bayonet him, but the Alamo Commander, leaning on one arm, managed to thrust up with his sword and slay the officer. As the Mexican died, so did Travis – of the initial gunshot wound, died as he had wished: true to unblemished honor.
Now the Alamo’s huge courtyard was filled with desperate hand-to-hand fighting: Mexicans with bayonets and lances; the Alamo defenders with rifle butts, pistols, Bowie knives, knees and fists.
Overwhelmed by superior numbers, most Texans abandoned the North and West wall sections, but a few remained at a West Wall cannon and turned it upon the Mexicans entering the Alamo from the North Wall. It “did more execution,” a Mexican officer stated afterwards, “than any gun which fired outward.” Two roars of the cannon and then it was silenced as the brave cannoneers fell under a shower of bullets.
Racing to the Long Barracks and other enclosures, the defenders now concentrated in small areas, separated in small rooms, opened fire. “From the doors, windows and loopholes . . . the crack of the rifle and the hiss of the bullet came fierce and fast; as fast the enemy fell and recoiled in his first efforts to charge inside the Alamo. The cannon where Travis fell [and other guns were] now turned [by the Mexicans] against the buildings . . . and shot after shot was sent crashing through the doors and barricades of the several rooms. Each ball was followed by a storm of musketry and a charge.”
In a room near the Chapel, a bedridden Jim Bowie, propped up on his pillows, jealously hoarded the last of his strength for his last moments on earth. With a pistol in each hand, his trusty knife at the ready, Bowie waited. When the door to his little room burst open and two Mexicans squeezed through the small opening, Bowie “emptied his pistols in their faces and killed [the] two of them.” As a third soldier raced towards him, Bowie reached for his famous blade, waited till the Mexican was in range and (as he had done during the Sandbar duel), “plunged his terrible knife into [the soldier].” Then a dozen Mexicans raced into the room and shot him in the head and bayoneted Bowie on the very bed he had ordered lifted across the Travis Line. (“I’ll wager no wounds were found in his back,” his mother later remarked.)
Soon “room after room was carried at the point of a bayonet [as] all within them died fighting to the last.”
Outside, Davy Crockett and his Tennessee Company of Mounted Volunteers still defended the area in front of the Chapel. The tall American with the “long buckskin coat . . . apparently had a charmed life,” wrote a Mexican combatant later. “Of the many [Mexican] soldiers who took deliberate aim at him and fired, not one ever hit him. On the contrary he never missed a shot. He killed at least eight [of the enemy], besides wounding several others.” Out of ammunition and now surrounded, Crockett chose as his final target a lieutenant who had come in over the low wall. “Crockett sprang at him and dealt him a deadly blow with his sword, just above the right eye, which felled him to the ground. [I]n an instant Crockett [’who never surrendered to bear or tiger, Indian or Mexican’] was pierced by not less than 20 bayonets.”
Quickly, the only fighting inside the Alamo was the battle for the Chapel itself. “The inmates of this last stronghold, like the rest, fought to the last, and continued to fire down from the upper works after the enemy occupied the floor.” But they too were overwhelmed by Santa Anna’s troops.
The remaining Texans were literally thrust out of the Alamo: from the cattle pen, from the horse corral, and over the low wall that Crockett had guarded. Sesma sent lancers to ride them down in the brush. Twice the Mexicans were forced to retreat from heavy Texan fire. Finally the lancers killed them one by one.
Santa Anna said of the Alamo defenders: “Not one would surrender.”
The Alamo had fallen!
The action had lasted less than an hour. Almost 250 Texans “by grapeshot, musketshot and the bayonet . . . were all killed at last.” Of the 1,800 Mexicans in the assaulting force, nearly one-third were killed or severely wounded (the wounded included one general and 28 officers) – “the flower of the Mexican Army.” Seventy-five died later, as “[t]he lack of adequate medical attention became an acute and demoralizing reality.”
Another such ’victory’ will ruin us, fumed one of Santa Anna’s officers.
Because the Texans inflicted such a large number of casualties, Santa Anna was forced to remain in San Antonio for an “extended period of time while waiting on reinforcements to replenish his decimated ranks.”
Bowie and Travis had been wrong that they would surely delay Santa Anna – who could have simply bypassed the Alamo altogether. But Santa Anna needed this fight and so the Alamo defenders did delay his thrust into the Texas interior, while inflicting a severe blow to the Mexican Army.
Bowie and Travis had been wrong about buying time for Houston to ready his army. Houston had no army to ready. But the published messages of Travis (“To . . . all Americans in the World”) and word of the fall of the Alamo produced the army that Houston needed. The Alamo did not buy time for the army. The Alamo created that army.
So, Bowie and Travis were right after all.
A WEARY ROSE SLEPT until midday when silence awakened him. Travis had vowed he would fire the 18 pounder three times a day – as long as the Alamo stood; when the great cannon went silent, they would all be dead. Rose correctly assumed his great friends had by now all perished.
Rose knew that the Alamo was no more as he hobbled away, on another nights journey, the thorns in his legs continuing to work deeper into his flesh. As he pushed eastward that night, he saw immense black smoke from a great flame which came from the direction of the Alamo.
SANTA ANNA WAS TRIUMPHANT. He entered through the main gate and asked to see the bodies of Travis and Bowie. The women, children and slaves had been spared, and it was Travis’ slave, Jim, who was ordered to guide Santa Anna. First Joe took him to the gun platform where Travis’ body lay. Then Joe directed him to Bowie, his brains splattered on the wall behind his cot. Santa Anna had never heard of Crockett but when he learned that he was a Colonel – and was the one who almost shot him days earlier – demanded to see him as well.
Then, Santa Anna ordered a large fire to cremate the Texans inside the fort, two small ones for outside. Tejanos carted dry wood and stacked bodies and wood in alternate layers, poured combustible camphene on the pyres and set them alight. What Rose had seen was the smoke of the pyres burning and smoldering for hours and on into the night; the next day, there was a darkened moist ring: fat broiled out of the bodies.
THE NEXT NIGHT, Rose made his way to Gonzales, but instead of a community of allies, he found a community ablaze.