The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (27 page)

E
xpress rider John Johnson arrived in Goliad, ninety-five miles down the San Antonio River, on February 25, two days after leaving Béxar. He exaggerated the size of the enemy force—three thousand or so, he told the men who gathered around him as he entered the presidio—but the news that 156 rebels were holed up in the old Alamo compound stunned the four hundred rebels in the fort. Johnson handed the written plea for help to James Fannin, who was in the middle of penning yet another letter to acting governor James Robinson. The Goliad commander had received other requests for aid from Béxar, but this one the colonel could not ignore.

Fannin’s men had been hard at work fortifying the presidio, and he had been so pleased with the results that two days before, he had conducted a lottery to name the place. “Fort Defiance” won out. When the same day he wrote to Robinson to tell him the news, he again asked to be relieved of his command. “I am a better judge of my military abilities than others,” he wrote, “and if I am qualified to command an Army, I have not found it out.”

“We deem it unnecessary to repeat to a brave officer, who knows his duty, that we call on him for assistance,” read the message from Béxar. Though provisions were scarce, many of his men were dressed in rags, and some were without shoes, Fannin immediately decided that he would respond to the call from the Alamo. One hundred men would stay to garrison the fort; the remainder, about 320 strong, would march north at dawn with four small cannon and several oxcarts of provisions and ammunition. Fannin’s decision overjoyed the New Orleans Greys; for at least a month, since the dissolution of the Matamoros expedition, they had wanted to return to their nineteen comrades at Béxar.

The next morning Fannin and his men set out. Two hundred yards from town, three supply wagons broke down. Only by doubling ox teams, and with the greatest difficulty, did they manage to get the artillery across the San Antonio River. By that time it was almost sunset, and a cold wind was blowing in. They returned to the fort to sleep, leaving the supply wagons on the near side of the river and the cannon on the other. During the night some of the oxen strayed off and could not be found the next morning. Without the oxen they would have no provisions, and only the ammunition they could carry.

In the morning Fannin’s volunteers requested a council of war, which convened on the riverbank. Besides half a tierce (about twenty gallons) of rice, they had almost nothing to eat. They were without beef, save for a small portion of jerky, and it would be impossible to obtain any until they had reached the Seguín ranch, Casa Blanca, seventy miles away—and then only if the Mexicans had not already commandeered it. Word had reached them that Santa Anna had dispatched a column down the Goliad road to intercept them. And then there was the condition of the men and their clothing, or lack of it… and the size of the Mexican army they would likely have to fight their way through to reach the Alamo… and the question of what would happen to the Goliad garrison if it fell into the hands of the enemy—the more they discussed it, the more unwise the expedition appeared, until a unanimous decision was reached: they would remain at Fort Defiance. “It was deemed expedient to return to this post and complete the fortifications, etc., etc.,” wrote Fannin in a letter to Robinson later that day.

Between San Felipe’s resolutions, Fannin’s irresoluteness, and the reluctance of Texians to heed the rallying cries of their leaders, it seemed as if there was no one willing to march immediately to the besieged garrison.

But there were a few such men.

A
NDREW
K
ENT WAS NOT PARTICULARLY LARGE
, nor were his two eldest sons—eighteen-year-old Davy was 5 feet 3 inches, and fifteen-year-old Isaac would be even shorter at full growth—but he was strong, and he knew how to work with wood. Soon after arriving in Green DeWitt’s colony in 1830, with the help of his sons, his relatives, his neighbors, and his extensive collection of tools, he began to build a pioneer mansion: a double log cabin with lofts and a dog run and a brick chimney at each end, forty feet apart.

Back in Callaway County, Missouri, Kent had made do with 160 acres. That was enough for a man, but for those who farmed and ranched to feed themselves, it would not be sufficient for his eight children when they became adults and had families of their own. He had heard of the grants in Texas given to men with dependents—4,428 acres, a full league—and had heard the copious praise of the land and its bounties from those who had settled there. After discussing it with a few neighbors, including the Zumwalts—Andrew’s wife, Elizabeth, was a member of that extensive clan—they made arrangements for several families to move to DeWitt’s colony in Texas. After months of preparations—gathering tools, supplies, and livestock, and building large flatboats—they had made the arduous trip down the Missouri and the Mississippi to New Orleans, and thence by schooner to the mouth of the Lavaca River on the Texas coast. They drove their wagons inland to a choice spot in the bottomlands on the west side of the river, some thirty-five miles southeast of Gonzales. That was in June 1830.

Kent and his sons worked hard on the family homestead, farming cotton, corn, potatoes, yams, and all kinds of vegetables, and raising sheep, hogs, milk cows, and cattle. After a few years he registered his own stock mark and brand. The arrival of two more children meant many mouths to feed, but the land lived up to its legend, and there was enough for everyone, plus extra to barter and sell. Most of their clothes the womenfolk made themselves from cotton and wool spun on their own wheels and woven on their own looms; the family bought little from the stores in Gonzales. It was a hard life but a good one, rewarding honest toil and improving every year.

So upon Santa Anna’s rise to power and his severe curtailment of the Texians’ rights as guaranteed by the Mexican constitution of 1824, Andrew became increasingly active in politics and supportive of independence—his father, after all, had fought in the American Revolution for similar reasons. He would not accept the possibility of losing everything he had worked so hard for. When a secret meeting was called in July 1835 among the citizens living on the Lavaca and Navidad Rivers, Kent rode thirty-five miles to a neighbor’s cotton-gin house to discuss Santa Anna’s policies and debate their response. The farmers present put their names to a declaration calling for armed resistance to military occupation. A few months later Andrew and Davy Kent rode with Stephen Austin’s Army of the People to Béxar. Father and son participated in the long siege and battle there, but made it home for Christmas, Davy with a slight wound in his shoulder.

About a month later, in late January 1836, eleven men led by Captain William Patton rode up the rough trail from the coast and appeared at the Kent farm. They were on their way to reinforce Colonel James Neill’s worn-out garrison at Béxar. The Kents put them up, fed the men and horses, and saw the company on their way the next morning. Patton filled the Kents in on the latest developments and the sorry state of things in Béxar, as reported by Sam Houston. The group’s stay was a grim reminder of the increasing hostilities and the mounting threat of all-out war.

Four weeks later, on Sunday, February 21, Andrew Kent rode into Gonzales intending to stay a day or two and return with supplies—his wife needed material to make clothes. After recovering from his wound, Davy, the oldest boy, had followed Patton’s company, and was now with the garrison at Béxar, commanded jointly by William Barret Travis and James Bowie. He would turn nineteen in two days. Davy was a good hand with cattle, so he had been sent out to scour the countryside for beeves.

The first thing Andrew heard about that Sunday afternoon was the attack on a local family east of town earlier in the day. Comanches had ambushed John Hibbens and his family, who were returning home via the Texas coast after a visit to the States. They had killed Hibbens and his brother-in-law and carried off Sarah Hibbens and her two children, a baby and a six-year-old boy. John Hibbens was the second husband Sarah had lost to Indians. Several men had already galloped off in pursuit.

More colonists than usual were present in town that day, there to hear the full report of the ambush and decide what to do. On Monday, Byrd Lockhart secured additional recruits for the Gonzales Ranging Company of Mounted Volunteers, one of three ranger militia groups along the western frontier called for by the provisional government in San Felipe to guard against Indian depredations. Twenty-three men of DeWitt’s colony had signed up over the previous two weeks, including Andrew Kent, who now added his son Davy’s name and then headed home with several bolts of cloth and news of the Indian attack.

Townspeople were still talking about the Hibbens tragedy two days later, when a pair of exhausted riders from Béxar arrived in town with even more momentous news.

B
Y THE TIME
J
OHN
S
MITH
and John Sutherland reached Gonzales, about four p.m. on Wednesday, February 24, the doctor was in bad shape. His leg had begun to stiffen soon after departure, and at the Salado River, five miles east of Béxar, he had almost turned back. Smith had encouraged him to continue, pointing out that the enemy had probably surrounded the Alamo by this time. They had filled their water gourds and continued on until darkness, and the doctor’s painful injuries, had persuaded them to stop for the night.

Now, as townspeople gathered around them, the two men made known their mission, and delivered Travis’s message to
alcalde
Andrew Ponton. Within two hours he had dispatched several express riders to the neighboring settlements with news of the Mexican army’s arrival and calling for citizens to ride to Gonzales. He also sent messengers to deliver the news throughout DeWitt’s colony.

Word spread to the farms in the area, and men began making their way into town. Most of the local mounted volunteers had been notified; though they had been organized with the Indian threat in mind, an invasion by the Mexican army trumped that concern. Among those mustering recruits was George Kimble, recently elected lieutenant. Kimble was a large man, over 6 feet 2 inches and broad-shouldered. He and his partner, Almeron Dickinson, owned the hat shop on Water Street near the Guadalupe River. His pregnant wife, Prudence, was doing the weekly wash in a creek by the house, their two-year-old son, Charles, nearby, when Kimble walked down to tell her what he had to do. He might not get back, he told her, but he owed his life to his country.

More than a dozen other local colonists arrived in town to muster up. Thomas Miller reported for duty. He owned plenty of land in the area, but ever since his much younger wife, Sidney, had divorced him to marry a handsome boy her own age, nineteen-year-old Johnny Kellogg, he had buried himself in business and council work. Miller had just written out his will. Dolphin Floyd, a farmer in town almost four years, rode in with a fine horse and gun. Floyd was a happy-go-lucky fellow who had left his father’s Carolina farm a decade before, telling them he intended marrying a rich old widow. When he wrote them years later from Texas, it was with the news that he had married a widow, but she was neither very old nor very rich. Dolphin and Esther had a small daughter and another child on the way.

Late on February 25, a rider made it down to the Kent homestead and others on the Lavaca with the news that the Alamo was under siege, and that the Gonzales rangers had been activated. If Santa Anna was not stopped at Béxar, DeWitt’s colony was next, and he would surely come down hard on the town that had started it all.

Kent would have gone anyway, since his boy was working out of Béxar, along with several other DeWitt colonists who were his friends and neighbors. Besides, the men of Gonzales owed a debt they would now repay: many of the Alamo defenders had come to their aid in October, when a hundred
soldados
had arrived on their doorstep and demanded their cannon.

Early the next morning two neighbors, Isaac Millsaps and William Summers, rode up the river and stopped at the Kent place. Summers was a young bachelor, but forty-one-year-old Millsaps, who had fought in the War of 1812 as a teenager, had a blind wife and six children. Andrew Kent said good-bye to Elizabeth and his children and mounted his horse. He turned to the other two men. “This time you may see some blood,” he said as they rode away.

They arrived in Gonzales that afternoon to find the streets and stores full, and blacksmith Andrew Sowell busy fixing rifles and pistols. Several members of the Béxar garrison who had been discharged or furloughed in the last week or two were preparing to return—Captain Robert White of the Béxar Guards infantry company had only spent a week at his Gonzales home. Another furloughed volunteer, William Irwin, was doing a brisk business buying up army service chits for ready cash, a rare commodity thereabouts.

Captain Albert Martin had just arrived from Béxar with another express from William Barret Travis. This message gave many more details, and painted a grim picture. Martin told them he had heard a heavy cannonade throughout the day before as he rode to Gonzales—probably an attack on the fort. Despite entreaties from his father, who believed he would be riding to certain death, Martin immediately began preparing to return: he had promised Travis he would bring help. Lancelot Smither had also arrived from Béxar. He took the Travis letter and loped out of town east toward San Felipe, eighty miles away.

Davy Kent was there, too. He had been sent to one of the Tejano farms down the river to drive some cattle into the Alamo, but upon returning to Béxar he found the town teeming with Mexican soldiers. He had hung around in the hills a day or two until he realized he had no choice but to ride to Gonzales.

Andrew Kent was glad to see Davy, but he had sharp words for him when his son said he wanted to ride back to Béxar with the Gonzales ranging company. Between marauding Indians, renegade volunteers, and wandering Mexican soldiers, an isolated farm a day’s ride from safety was no place for Elizabeth Kent and her children, especially without a man on the premises. Kent told his son to bring them into Gonzales to stay with Elizabeth’s cousin “Red Adam” Zumwalt, who owned a store, a kitchen, and a grog shop in town in addition to a house. After some argument, Davy finally gave in. He would stay. His father would go.