Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (28 page)

Most of all, by early 1836, Travis, Bowie, and their men had badly misjudged their opponent. They should have learned from the bloody lesson of what Santa Anna had done to fellow Mexican citizens at Zacatecas, crushing a huge, well-organized force of militiamen who were defending its own homeland with ease. But more important, so far in this late winter campaign deep in Texas, Santa Anna had indeed lived up to his reputation as the “Napoleon of the West.” To the generalissimo’s thinking, “Zacatecas was only the beginning,” and the Alamo would be next.
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Caught by surprise of the Mexican onslaught like everyone else, Captain Carey very likely no longer believed his confident boast on January 12, 1836, of how: “ . . . I think a small number of us can whip an army of Mexicans.” Ironically, as the young artillery commander and bachelor of the “Invincibles,” and from Washington-on-the-Brazos, Captain Carey now understood the ridiculousness of such words.
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The cocky Texian’s confidence—mirroring that of the Alamo garrison—was revealed in the pages of a newspaper: “Our enemies have a well appointed cavalry–raised by voluntary enlistment. We do not fear their infantry; it is composed of convicts, forced into the army as a punishment for their crimes.”
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Bragging to an amused Little Rock, Arkansas, newspaperman back when the future looked so much brighter, Crockett had boasted that he would “have Santa Anna’s head” before the war was over.
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Now at long last, a new sense of reality had come to the ill-prepared Alamo garrison. Meanwhile, Santa Anna had the Anglo-Celts exactly where he wanted them: trapped in an all but indefensible position. Therefore, he felt great relief to discover that his opponent had made the fatal mistake of attempting to defend the Alamo instead of retiring to the more formidable Mission Concepcion. And, unfortunately for the young men and boys of the Alamo garrison,Travis and Bowie followed Neill’s folly of defending the Alamo “to the last” and deciding not to surrender, regardless of the circumstances to sound the death knell for the Alamo garrison.
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Indeed, no one was more responsible for the decision to both make a stand at the Alamo and never surrender than Colonel Neill, whose persuasive influence had proved decisive on others, including Bowie, Governor Smith, and other Council members. However, by this time, Neill was no longer the Alamo’s commander. In fact, he was no longer at either the Alamo or San Antonio.

On February 11, the colonel, older than most of the men at the Alamo, had calmly mounted his beloved Tennessee Walker. He then rode away from his command, never to return or be seen by them again. He simply rode home, galloping away from the deathtrap that was in large part his own making. The excuse given was that family members were ill, stricken by some unknown aliment. The man most responsible for setting the stage for the Alamo disaster took himself out of harm’s way. Before riding away from the Alamo and leaving the 26-year-old Travis in command, Neill told his men that he would return in twenty days. But by that time, garrison members would have only three days of life remaining in this world. In attempting to gather provisions for the garrison, Neill was delayed past his promised twenty days, until after the Alamo’s fall. This former second in command of Fannin’s First Regiment of Texas Artillery would be nowhere in sight, like his West Point-educated commander, when Santa Anna and his army reached San Antonio.
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Even more ironic, as artillery commander of the “Army of the People,” Neill’s guns had played a role in pounding the Alamo and Cós’ garrison into submission in December 1835, inflicting the damage upon the walls that would later compromise the Alamo’s defense on March 6. Therefore, the man largely responsible for damaging the Alamo’s walls and demonstrating that the compound was a deathtrap, especially for a small garrison, was also the same individual who played the leading role in convincing influential others, both military men and politicians, that yet another defensive stand should be made at exactly the same place where the enemy had been so recently defeated. He left behind a new Alamo commander, who had begged the governor for a “recall” from the San Antonio assignment, and who knew so little about artillery that he had declined an appointment as the “first Major in the Artillery Regt.” Ironically, as penned in a February 12 letter, William Barret Travis believed that Neill would be gone only “for a short time.” Again, Travis was wrong.
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Ironically, in view of what was to come, an old Anglo proverb of early Texas that focused solely on the balmy weather, warm breezes, and healthy benefits—especially appropriate for the San Antonio area—proclaimed: “If a man wants to die there he must go somewhere else.”
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In reality, nothing could be further from the truth in regard to the little Tejano town of Béxar. San Antonio was the graveyard of generations of Mexican, Tejano, and Texas revolutionaries and rebels, especially Anglo-Celts, who foolishly challenged Mexico City’s authority. In fact, the very name Béxar had long been synonymous with revolution— and accompanying disaster—sparked by “foreigners” and outside agitators, especially from the United States.

Writing in 1848, General Filisola, Santa Anna’s second in command during the 1836 campaign, was right on target when he summarized the grim reality for so many Anglo-Celtic revolutionaries, who had been seduced by the alluring dream of an independent Texas from Spanish and then Mexican control. The systematic crushing of each new revolt came with so much bloody ease, that it almost seemed to be “a sign perhaps that Providence destined for all the entrepreneurs in Texas a disastrous end, and that the occupation of Texas was to be the cause of the horrible and damaging bloody scenes that have occurred following the treaty of 1819.”
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The harsh reality facing the revolutionaries in San Antonio was fully appreciated by a bemused Jon Whitefield Scott Dancy. In his March 27, 1837 diary entry he wrote an undeniable truth: “It is a little strange that San Antonio and its vicinity, one of the most beautiful places upon earth, a place where a man might so easily enjoy as many of the bless ings of life as this world can yield; it is strange that this place so lovely, should be the scene of more bloodshed, than any other perhaps on the American continent.”
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But in fact, it had always been precisely this strange, irresistible appeal that had made San Antonio a bone of contention and one of the great killing grounds in all the southwest. In regard specifically to the Alamo garrison’s eventual fate at Santa Anna’s hands, a much more accurate, but grim, adage was offered from the pages of the
Troy Daily Whig
: “The course of Texas is plainly marked out. She shall drive every Mexican soldier beyond her limits, or the people of Texas will leave San Antonio the bones of their bodies.”
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By February 23, everything had changed for the Alamo’s soldiers with a blinding swiftness that had sent them reeling. With Santa Anna reaching San Antonio before the people of Texas expected, the surprise had been complete, changing the destinies of the Alamo men forever. Compared with only a few months ago, the war that these men had previously known—the intoxicating 1835 campaign that reaped easy victories and caused celebrations across Texas—had morphed under Santa Anna into a far more dangerous undertaking.

Unlike in the recent past, this war was now more serious, and a more deadly business than ever before. The war’s character had changed completely from the time when the victors had naively allowed General Cós’ vanquished Mexican troops to march out of San Antonio with the promise—a chivalric 18th-century gesture—that they would not return to Texas. Now, of course, General Cós and his soldiers filled Santa Anna’s ranks: Seguin’s warning had gone unheeded. Even worse for the Alamo garrison, Santa Anna and his troops were especially eager to avenge their humiliation at having lost San Antonio. One soldier, Jesse Benton at Nacogdoches, Texas, already sensed as much, writing in a February 22, 1836 letter how: “Colonel Cós and his troops we are informed have broken their parole and are returning against us [therefore] The country on the Rio Grande is given up to a brutal soldiery.”

Bolstered with too much optimism and complacency, the Alamo’s amateur soldiers had continued to play by the same old rules while garrisoning San Antonio until it was too late. Santa Anna had now brought a new type of warfare to Texas, involving ancient ways of dealing with revolutionaries, as the Alamo garrison would learn. The red flag of no quarter that Santa Anna raised from the bell tower of the San Fernando Church represented this brutal new reality. This banner proclaimed that there would be no mercy, no prisoners in this war. Travis and his soldiers had been caught off guard by the sudden transformation. This new reality was secured when Travis penned his famous February 24 dispatch to “The People of Texas and all Americans in the world,” in which he stated: “I shall never surrender or retreat. . . . I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country—Victory or Death.” With such defiance, punctuated by a cannon shot on February 23, he had sealed the doom of both himself and the garrison.

For his part, Santa Anna’s desire was to make an example of the Alamo men for political purposes, as a lesson to other Texians and Tejanos in arms. Therefore, he needed to reap a victory that was as thorough as it was swift. One example of how the Alamo defenders were caught amid a raging Mexican civil war was the fact that Mexican families were so divided by the conflict that sons served on opposing sides at the Alamo. What has been often overlooked about the Alamo’s story was that the Tejano people had been revolutionaries long before the arrival of Houston, Travis, Bowie, and Crockett in Texas. Like America’s own “brother’s war” from 1861–65, the current civil war pitted Mexican family members against one another. A defender of the Alamo, for instance, was Tejano artilleryman Jose Gregorio Esparza, yet his brother, Francisco Esparza, sided with Santa Anna, serving under General Cós at the Alamo during the 1835 campaign.
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Not only Francisco, as a proud member of the unit, but also the entire Tejano militia company, Leal Presidios Company of Béxar, had been reactivated to join Santa Anna’s army when it first reached San Antonio. As if Santa Anna did not already have sufficient numbers of troops, he gained additional soldiers from the militia company and from the Tejano population, making good his losses on the lengthy winter march to San Antonio.
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The young men of the Alamo knew nothing of the horrors of Mexico’s civil war, and had forgotten, or never learned, of the nightmare of America’s own civil war in the South during the American Revolution, which was “a fierce war of extermination.” No one had told them of the rape of Zacatecas, the slaughter of unarmed militiamen, the killing of the wounded and the execution of survivors by Santa Anna. If the generalissimo treated Mexican rebels in such a savage manner, then he was certainly about to treat the Anglo-Celts worse, especially because he wanted to make a lasting example out of them.

For the band of defenders, the Alamo siege would be a race against time. Only one hope remained for the entrapped garrison: the possibility that sufficient Texan reinforcements might arrive in time. Santa Anna’s vanguard had arrived in San Antonio with less than 1,500 men, many of whom were cavalry who could not assault fortress walls; but as the rest of the Mexican army and its artillery closed up, the odds would eventually be overwhelming. Only reinforcements from the rest of Texas could ensure that even at full strength Santa Anna’s army would suffer a bloody repulse. As February neared its end there was still time for Texas to support the Alamo garrison, but that window of opportunity was quickly closing.

Instead of rallying support to reinforce the Alamo, however, the Virginia-born Houston did “nothing very constructive.” Instead of rallying support, he made an Indian treaty with the Cherokee and their allies, that had no effect or strategic consequences in regard to stemming Santa Anna’s invasion. At this time, many people across Texas already viewed Houston as an old soldier “who had lost the will to fight.”

And in fact, Houston remained drunk much of the time in Washington-on-the-Brazos after his arrival on February 29, and during the constitutional convention sessions that would issue the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, which was also his 43rd birthday. He had already earned the nickname of “Big Drunk” from the Cherokee. At Washington-on-the-Brazos, instead of focusing on saving the Alamo garrison, Houston exhibited a strong penchant for a liquorlaced eggnog at the busy grog shops, getting considerably intoxicated, and probably also partook in opium. On one occasion, friends carried a passed out Houston to his bed. Then another time, after an all-night revelry, Houston stayed most of the next day in bed out of necessity. Instead of deserving renown as the “Father of Texas,” as endlessly promoted by Texas and American historians, Houston should have been denounced as the “Father of the Alamo disaster,” because of his apathy toward the Alamo’s fate.
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Even when the March 2
Brazoria Texas Republican
published Travis’ stirring appeal for assistance, Houston still did nothing to rally reinforcements for the Alamo. Instead, with “his mind fogged by alcohol,” he concluded that Mexicans troops were nowhere near San Antonio, and brushed off Travis’ words as a crass political attempt to grandstand and gain popularity across Texas by way of “a damned lie.”
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Since reading Travis’ first missive, Houston saw nothing but sinister personal politics at work. He stated: “A fraud had been practiced upon the people by the officers of the frontier, for party purposes.”
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Ever apathetic, Houston failed to assist the Alamo in part because he was concerned that “Travis might be just as ambitious [as Fannin, who coveted Houston’s position as commander-in-chief], perhaps seeing holding on to Béxar as the means to become a hero in Texas and ride that to power. Thus, Houston dismissed both men’s pleas [Travis and Fannin] for help at the Alamo.” Even in the first days of March, when the convention met to vote on Texas’ independence, Houston remained dismissive of the fate of Travis and his men. He even informed fellow delegates that “Travis exaggerated his position and only sought to aggrandize himself.”
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Ironically, Fannin, who faced the advance of Santa Anna’s right wing under General José Urrea, the pincer movement north into Texas that had moved up the coastal road from Matamoros, has taken the most blame from historians for losing the Alamo.
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But in fact, it was the smug politicians and even the people of Texas who had turned their backs on the Alamo garrison during its hour of need. Then, on March 3, unknown to the Alamo’s defenders, the Declaration of Independence was officially signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos, resulting in the birth of the Republic of Texas. On the following day, Houston, of all people, was named commander-in-chief: an ironic appointment for Texas, because he had done so little to gather support to reinforce San Antonio. It was almost as if Houston had been rewarded for allowing the Alamo garrison to be wiped off the face of the earth.
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Clearly, it was already much too late for the Alamo men, who had become victims of a “pure and simple betrayal of the worst kind.”
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This realization that they had been abandoned by the people of Texas had come relatively early to some Alamo garrison members. As Captain Carey penned in a January 12, 1836 letter to his brother and sister, the “Old Texians” only “came at the eleventh hour and remained in camps expecting us all to be killed and they men of property in this country and have their all in Texas did they come forward to protect the place. No. They pilfered us of our blankets and clothes and horses and went home [after capturing San Antonio] telling how they whipt the Spaniards reaping the laurels of a few.”
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But not everyone in Texas had turned their back on the Alamo. At 3:00 a.m., in the cold darkness on March 1, the arrival of Pennsylvaniaborn Lieutenant George C. Kimbell, age 33, and his 32 men of the Gonzales Ranging Company of Mounted Volunteers from Gonzales, the westernmost Anglo community in Texas and the only one west of the Colorado River, were the only reinforcement to the beleaguered Alamo garrison, only four days after Santa Anna reached San Antonio. Led by carpenter-turned-guide John W. Smith, who was nicknamed “El Colorado” by the Tejanos because of his flaming red hair, these Gonzales boys consisted of the town’s “best citizens.” With a determination to assist their comrades, Kimbell’s men had ridden away from the Gonzales town square on February 27, never to see their families again.
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When Santa Anna was informed of the tiny reinforcement, he was more amused than anything else. To him, these Gonzales cavalrymen who had conveniently arrived at the Alamo would enable him to slaughter more rebels as part of his overall plan to purge Texas of colonists.
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Meanwhile, the siege of the Alamo progressed day after day. After inching forward to get within closer range, Mexican artillerymen in colorful uniforms blasted away with their light guns, hoping that a lucky shot might knock a hole in the walls for the unleashing of an infantry assault. But the Mexican cannons were not only antiquated, but much too light to knock down the strong limestone and abode walls. A notoriously impatient Santa Anna had begun the siege without waiting for the arrival of his heavier artillery, two 12-pounders. This dilemma was not unlike that faced by the ragtag “People’s Army of Texas” in assaulting San Antonio before the arrival of their largest gun, the 18-pounder, which was now poised at the Alamo’s southwest corner.
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On February 25, Santa Anna launched a probe against the Alamo’s southern side, consisting of two or three hundred men. Launched in broad daylight, the defenders were waiting and sent the Mexicans reeling back with cannon and rifle fire, inflicting at least half a dozen dead and wounded. Afterward, garrison members sallied out to burn some huts where Mexicans were taking shelter, and also to bring in some of their materials for firewood. Meantime, as more Mexican artillery arrived, Santa Anna set up batteries on all sides of the Alamo.

Clearly not anticipating serious resistance, Santa Anna already knew that victory over the Alamo garrison was near. He was already thinking ahead, even bragging in a February 27 report to Mexico City: “After taking the fortress of the Alamo, I will continue my operations” in Texas.
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