March 6, 1836

Eight score and sixteen years ago, our fathers brought forth in this state a new republic, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and are not subject to the dictates of despots.

Sound familiar?

Though it is a poor pedestrian paraphrasing of Lincoln’s historic and unforgettable Gettysburg Address, it addresses the fact that on March 6 one hundred and seventy-six years ago, a diverse band of 189 determined patriots died in an effort to free Texas from the iron grip of the dictator, Santa Anna.

Now, everyone knows of William Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett, but what about the others? Just how diverse was this ragtag army?

General scholarship erroneously suggests the defenders were professional soldiers and Anglos resentful of Santa Anna.

Not so according to Richard Lindley III of the University of Texas. In fact, most of the men at the Alamo were farmers in their twenties. Not all were Anglos. Some were from the Hispanic population of San Antonio and Laredo. Many were from other states. In addition to Crockett’s Tennesseans, some came from as far away as New York and Pennsylvania.

I’d often wondered just why a New Yorker or Pennsylvanian would journey so far to take part in something that did not affect him, but Lindley explained that perhaps the revolution in Texas evoked feelings much like that of the War for Independence had only fifty years earlier in the east.

The largest group of defenders, not counting those from Texas, hailed from Louisiana. Then came Crockett’s Tennesseans and their next-door neighbors from Kentucky.

Of the ninety-five Texans at the Alamo, forty came from Gonzales, thirty-two of whom boldly rode through the Mexican lines under cover of darkness after the siege had begun.

Eleven of the defenders came from San Antonio, among them James Bowie, who had become a Mexican citizen a few years earlier upon marrying the daughter of the vice=governor of the province. Nacogdoches and Brazoria Counties were each represented by ten patriots.

According to Dr. Lindley, the Alamo defenders were not mercenaries, but a legitimate army with assigned ranks made up of men desiring freedom from a dictatorial ruler who had declared martial law and abolished all power of the states of Mexico. The small man commanded such immense power that he single-handedly struck down the democracy of Mexico and replaced it with his dictatorship.

The fuse that would ignite the Alamo had been set almost fifteen years earlier when Moses Austin approached Spanish authorities for a large tract of Texas land to sell to American pioneers.

Only 3,500 native Mexicans had so far settled in Texas, which at the time was northern part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas.

The Spanish government welcomed the idea for two reasons; to provide a buffer against illegal U.S. settlers who were creating problems in East Texas and to help develop the land.

Mexico placed two conditions on land ownership: settlers had to become Mexican citizens, and they had to convert to Roman Catholicism. Americans eager for land had no compunction or conscience in accepting the conditions.

By 1830, 16,000 Americans had settled in Texas, forming a 4-to-1 majority in the northern section of Coahuila y Tejas. As the Anglo population grew, Mexican authorities became concerned over the American presence. Differences in language and culture created problems between the settlers and the native citizens.

Colonists refused to learn Spanish; they maintained their own schools; they conducted most of their trade with the United States. This streak of independence worried the Mexican government, so in an effort to reassert its authority over Texas, the government reiterated its stand against slavery; set up a chain of military posts occupied by convict soldiers; restricted trade with the U.S.; and decreed an end to further American immigration.

Colonists tolerated the domination, much as U.S. colonists had so many decades earlier tolerated Britain’s iron rule. Eventually, it became too oppressive, so in 1835, the settlers adopted a constitution and organized a temporary government, but they voted dramatically against declaring independence.

They hoped to depose Santa Anna peacefully using legal means and restore power to the state governments per the Mexican constitution of 1824. Perhaps, they hoped, even achieving a separate state of Texas.

But time had run out. In the autumn of 1835, Texas riflemen captured Mexico’s military headquarter in San Antonio. The revolution had begun.

Word reached Santa Anna, and soon rumors spread through Texas that the dictator was on the move with 7,000 soldiers, a wildly inflated number.

His army was made up of fresh recruits and Indian troops the latter of whom spoke or understood little Spanish. When Houston learned Santa Anna was headed for San Antonio, he ordered the city abandoned.

One hundred-fifty rebels disobeyed, deciding instead to defend the city from the protection of the Alamo. Travis, Bowie, and Crockett led them.

Santa Anna lay siege on the presidio. One night, thirty-two men from Gonzales slipped through the Mexican lines.

The story goes that on March 5, Travis drew a line in the sand with his sword and announced only those willing to die for Texas independence cross the line. All except one crossed. Bowie, confined to his bunk, insisted on being carried across.

At 5 a.m. next morning, Mexican troops hurled a massive attack at the garrison. By 8 a.m., all defenders lay dead. Rumor says seven defenders surrendered but were immediately executed. Twelve to fifteen women and children survived.

Mexican troops soaked the dead in oil, stacked them like cordwood, and burned them.

The number of Mexican troops slain varies widely from 250 to 1500. The former number is the Mexican count, the last, the Texian count.

Though a defeat, the Alamo gave the Texas army a psychological boost as did the treacherous murders at Goliad on Palm Sunday a few weeks later.

‘Remember the Alamo’ and ‘Remember Goliad’ were battle cries that lifted men from diverse walks of life and various cultures to achieve the shocking defeat of Santa Anna a few weeks later at San Jacinto.





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Was Bowie the Last to Die at the Alamo?

One hundred and seventy-five years ago, last Saturday, March 6, around 1500 (by most counts) Mexican soldiers overran the Alamo, killing every combatant.

Most accounts of the battle place Bowie in a back room of the low barracks, sprawled on his bunk with two pistols in his hand and his knife between his teeth.

Battering rams slam into the door to his room, smashing it open. Mexican soldiers, teeth bared in feral savagery, charge him, bayonets gleaming.
He kills two with his pistols, another with his knife before dozens of bayonets penetrate him.

Sound familiar?

Whether the story is true or not is uncertain, just as many of the legends that surrounded Bowie and his famous knife, which incidentally was designed by his brother, Rezin.

The Bowie brothers wore many guises, among them land speculators, slavers, gamblers, and devil-may-care ruffians, caught up in adventures from the Sand Bar Fight to the Alamo.

This thirst for adventure probably came from their Scot ancestry and their most famous ancestor, Rob Roy. Jim’s Pa, Rezin Sr, according to Jeff Lee, rode with Swamp fox Francis Marion’s dragoons during the Revolutionary war.

Bowie settled in Mexico in 1828, married, and became a respected citizen of the community despite some shady dealings. In 1830, he answered the call for Texas Volunteers.

When the siege of the Alamo began, Bowie was forty, a seasoned frontiersman and Indian fighter. As researcher Jeff Lee states, Bowie was absolutely fearless. He commanded the volunteers in the Alamo.

Twenty-six-year-old Travis, sometimes moody, commanded the regulars with stern discipline

The difference in their ages and philosophy of discipline portended angry and violent disagreements concerning command of the garrison.

That he was bed-ridden that last day is fact, but what brought about the incapacitation is still argued.

One story is that while helping construct a gun garrison, he fell off the scaffold and broke either his hip or leg.

Others have called this story ‘hogwash’ says Mister Lee.

Some say he suffered from tuberculosis, diphtheria or typhoid-pneumonia.
He went to his sick bed around February 22 or 23 in the Low Barracks.

One fact on which most agree is that he was killed in his bunk except for his nurse, Madame Candelaria. She claimed he died the day before the final onslaught. However, years later in a newspaper interview, she contradicted her initial story when she showed two wounds on her back, swearing she received when she threw herself over Bowie to shield him from the Mexicans.

Bowie, most agree, must have lived until the end of the battle because the Low Barracks was the last to fall. Was he killed in his bunk? Most believe so.

But, according to Jeff Lee, one of the most chilling reports “claimed that as the funeral pyres blazed high and soldiers heaped dead Texans on the pile, some soldiers carried out a man on a cot, a man the captain of the detail identified as "no other than the infamous Bowie." Although the man was still alive, Santa Anna ordered him thrown into the fire along with the rest.”

Would Santa Anna be so cruel?

Probably, if the man were a Mexican citizen fighting in the Texan army. And Jim Bowie was a Mexican citizen, having married nineteen-year-old Ursula Veramendi in April 1831, the daughter of Don Juan Veramendi, the vice-governor of Coahuila-Texas.
In Santa Anna’s eye, Jim Bowie was a traitor. And as such deserved no mercy.

And for most of us, his place as the last to die at the Alamo is firmly entrenched in our beliefs.

Legends of the Alamo

One hundred and seventy-five years ago as you read this, Santa Anna was assaulting the walls of the Alamo in the sleepy village of San Antonio, back then sometimes called Bexar.

Not too many actual facts exist regarding the battle. We know the Mexican army assailed the walls for thirteen days. We know the Alamo fell. We know over one hundred and eighty defenders perished. We know that neither Travis, Bowie, nor Crockett walked away from the battle. We know the bodies were burned.

Other than those few absolutes, the rest of the story is based upon hearsay.
One interesting facet of the story is that the wheels for the battle were set in motion twenty-three years earlier.

According to Lee Paul, on April 6, 1813, Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara spoke to an impassioned crowd of Mexican citizens tired of Spain’s oppression and planted the seed of revolt that led to Mexico’s independence from the tyrant country in 1821, some eight years later.

Upon gaining her freedom, Mexico unknowingly gained another tyrant, Santa Anna, a self proclaimed President and Dictator of all Mexico.

Santa Anna swore to rid Mexico of all intruders, including emigrants from the United States living in Texas. After fifteen years, the dictator still had not rid the country of those he deemed unfit. When he learned his brother-in-law, General Cos had been defeated in San Antonio in December of 1835, he exploded. He swore revenge, and began his arduous trek into Texas.

In his way, stood a rundown church called the Alamo. Behind its wall stood 183 (189) men from dozens of states, all determined that the ‘Napoleon of the West’ should not succeed.

The most well known combatant was Davy Crockett who raced in with seventeen men only a few yards ahead of a Mexican patrol of lancers hot on their tail.

Innumerable stories have been told of his death. None can be verified. So, take your pick from some of the more widely claimed assertions. The truth is, no one will very know how he died.

When news of the massacre spread, rumors raced rampant across the country. One claimed he had not died with his men. Another claimed he along with two others survived but were put to death by the enraged Santa Anna.

Another story has it that Santa Anna instructed Alcalde Francisco Ruis to identify the bodies of the dead Texans, especially the leaders. The mayor said, “Toward the west end, we found the body of Colonel Crockett.”

But, from his prison cell in Anahuac after San Jacinto, General Cos told his doctor that Crockett survived by locking himself in a room, then asking for mercy, but Santa Anna refused.

Four years later, word spread around the country that Crockett had survived the siege and was serving a prison sentence in the Salinas Mine near Guadalajara, says Lee Paul who researched the issue.

Forty-two years later, Joseph Conn Guild claimed Crockett and five others survived. They surrendered to General Manuel Castrillon under promise of his protection, a promise rendered worthless by Santa Anna.

According to Guild, “Crockett fell with a dozen swords sheathed in his breast.”
Probably the most believable story came from the lips of Susanna Dickinson, wife of Almeron Dickinson, Travis’s lieutenant. She knew Crockett on sight. She stated in her memoirs that she saw Crockett and a handful of others lying mangled and mutilated between the "church and the two-story barrack building. She even remembered seeing his peculiar cap by his side as she was led from the scene by a Mexican officer.

So what is the truth?

We’ll never know.

What most of us will always believe the truth is the rendering of the heroic figure in the painting that hung on the north wall of the chapel for years. It portrayed Crockett standing in the thickest of the fighting, using his flintlock like a club until Mexican bayonets and bullets cut him down.

That’s how I see him, a John Wayne hurling a torch into the powder room as lances
slam into his body.

So maybe legend has supplanted fact.

I can live with that.

The True Hero of the Alamo

The True Hero of the Alamo

I remember seeing an interview with a Medal of Honor recipient who denied being a hero. He did what he had to because there was no choice. The act was thrust upon him.

When people talk about the Alamo, the names of the heroes that first leap to mind are Crockett, Bowie, and Travis. Usually in that order. And they were heroes, but not the only ones. The other hundred and eighty who died there also deserve the honor.

To me, the major player in the saga of the Alamo was Travis, William Barret Travis,
age 26.

Much has been written of him by those much more capable than I. I’ve researched him a great deal, and I found him to be a typical American male, possessing an all-consuming drive for the prominence and recognition that comes with success. That drive took him to Texas for a fresh start. This ambition ultimately landed him in an untenable position from which his pride and sense of duty would not permit him to flee.

Travis practiced law in Alabama, then moved to Texas, deliberately settling in Anahuac where he would be the only lawyer, which he knew would result in a profitable practice. He became involved in politics and eventually, the revolution.
Santa Anna set up a Custom House at Anahuac and staffed it with a hard and unforgiving officer to collect the exorbitant tariffs levied on the Texicans.

Travis promptly raised a company of twenty-five men and marched on the Custom House, taking it over and arresting the officer.

By now, there was no escaping his fate. Eventually, Houston sent him to the Alamo with orders for Bowie and Colonel Neill, the garrison commander, to destroy the church and retreat.

Of course, Bowie was well known throughout the country as was Crockett, who, fresh from losing the election that would send him back to Congress, set out to find a new conquest to regain his glory. “You can all go to hell,” he had exclaimed. “I’m going to Texas.”

And he did, along with fifteen or sixteen Tennesseans. At the Alamo, he took the rank of private.

Ill with consumption, Bowie was nothing like ‘the most dangerous man alive’ label that had been pinned on him. He spent the last eleven days in his sick bed.
Travis wasn’t supposed to remain at the Alamo.

Before he arrived, Colonel Neill and Bowie had already decided to disobey any orders to destroy the church. Being the impetuous risk-taker, upon his arrival, Travis jumped into the affairs of the Alamo with enthusiasm.

Colonel Neill took an unexpected leave of absence, and Bowie took a turn for the worse. Travis was left in command, a command he had not sought, nor particularly wanted, but one he would fulfill to his dying breath.

So there the twenty-six year old South Carolinean stood, leader of a pitifully small force with which he hoped to derail a juggernaut called the Mexican army.

He knew Houston needed time to raise an army. He hoped to hold Santa Anna at the Alamo.

Santa Anna was a cruel tyrant. Had he been a better tactician, he would have bypassed the Alamo and caught the entire rebel congress on the banks of the Brazos.

Instead, in his obsession to make the rebels pay, he did what Travis hoped. For thirteen days, the dictator battled the defenders of the Alamo, thirteen days that gave Congress time to sign a Declaration of Independence, draw up a Constitution and provide Houston precious days to begin raising an army.

Travis’s gamble paid off. Although he died early in the final battle at the North Battery from a bullet in his forehead, he died a hero. He had been faced with a situation thrust upon him, and he committed all he possessed to the task.

And, as in all stories, there are many ‘what if’s’. One is what might have happened if the horse belonging to Trinidad Coy, one of Travis’s scouts, had not eaten locoweek. But, that’s another story for another time.