Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (52 page)

Not surprisingly, the flurries of isolated fighting outside of the Alamo continued for some time. But, of course, it was a one-sided contest outside the walls from beginning to end. It took time for the Mexican cavalrymen and lancers to locate survivors in gullies and aqueducts and amid underbrush, and to kill all of those who fled outside the walls. The slaughter was accelerated by the fact that the cavalrymen’s horses were in good shape and relatively fresh, having been confiscated from haciendas on the long push north to replace their broken down animals that had carried their riders hundreds of miles.

Ironically, the slaughter outside the Alamo’s walls lasted for hours, while the fighting inside the Alamo lasted less than a half hour. Moreover, those dying outside were the only garrison members killed in broad daylight. Alamo nurse Juana Navarro de Alsbury, the daughter of a Mexican officer who had married Dr. Horace Alsbury, an Alamo garrison member luckily dispatched on a scouting mission when Santa Anna laid siege (though destined to be killed in the Mexican-American War of 1846), recalled that scattered firing continued till mid-day.
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In his first March 6 battle report, written at 8:00 a.m. and before the slaughter had ended, a smug Santa Anna merely summarized how: “Victory goes with the Mexican Army [and] a great many who had escaped the bayonet of the infantry fell in the vicinity under the sabres of the cavalry.” What was most revealing was the fact that he emphasized how “a great many” Alamo defenders escaped to die outside the Alamo’s walls and “in the vicinity,” which meant the Alameda area along the Gonzales Road.
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Another translation of Santa Anna’s first report was also illuminating: “And in the immediate areas [outside of the Alamo compound] there was a large number that still has not been able to engage and hoping to escape the bayonets of the infantry, fell under the sabers of the cavalry that was placed in that position just for this purpose.”
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Along with General Sesma, Santa Anna had viewed the three flights from a good vantage point on the Alameda, taking satisfaction in his well-conceived plan. However, Santa Anna’s most revealing words have been both overlooked and dismissed by historians who have so strongly embraced the mythical Alamo.

And in a most revealing March 23, 1836 circular to the people of Vera Cruz by Department Governor Joaquín de Muñoz y Muñoz, he expressed pride in the chasing down and slaughter of so many Alamo escapees, including by lancers from his own proud city: “The invincible eagles of the Republic have been placed once again in the fortress of the Alamo. And the glorious national colors wave triumphant on the wall which was the hope of some rebel colonists [who were] pursued and destroyed in all directions” on the bloody morning of March 6.
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Alamo historian and premier artist Gary S. Zaboly summarized how: “A substantial number of Alamo defenders—perhaps as many as one hundred—attempted to escape [and the] skirmishes that followed between the fleeing Texans and the Mexican cavalry comprised an entirely separate phase of the Alamo battle, but one no less vicious than the action taking place within the compound.”
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Again, the soldiers who fled the Alamo for their lives were anything but cowards. Most of all, they were ordinary men—more farmers, clerks, and merchants than either frontiersmen or trained soldiers. They had died for their adopted homeland, Texas, serving to the bitter end, when they could have, and probably should have, earlier deserted and just gone home. But they did not go. Instead these men who participated in the desperate breakouts died just like their comrades inside the Alamo. By fleeing from the Alamo, these escapees had only vacated a doomed position in the hope of surviving to fight another day on better terms.

Finally, the last outbursts of fighting outside the Alamo sputtered to an end long after the slaughter inside had concluded. And the fondest wishes of countless Mexican officials and military leaders had been realized with Santa Anna’s resounding victory. They had long prayed “that these perverse [revolutionaries] will be destroyed” to the last man.
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All Mexico would celebrate Santa Anna and his Alamo success. For instance, an editor in the March 22 issue of
El Mosquito Mexicano
boasted: “We congratulate the world for the bandits Mexico has forever laid to rest” on the cold, misty morning of March 6.
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And in the March 22, 1836 issue of the
La Lima de Vulcano
, Mexico City, the editor trumpeted the Alamo victory, proclaiming, “The rebel standard [the New Orleans Greys’ flag] lies prostrate before our national flag; they have bitten the earth they profaned [and thanks to] the fire and steel of our valiant men, their black souls have expired.”
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Santa Anna never felt more confident of future success. Another victory had been reaped over the Anglo-Celts at San Antonio, as when he had been a teenage soldier under Arredondo. A land he loved, all of Texas now loomed before him, seemingly for the taking. Texas resistance had been wiped out at the Alamo, and any place where these illstarred revolutionaries could be found. Basking in his victory, Santa Anna now perhaps thought of “the beauty of this country,” which “surpasses all description,” that had been all but regained for Mexico—or so it seemed, after the last rebel defender of the Alamo had been killed not inside but outside the Alamo’s walls.
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8

From the beginning, no Alamo myth has been more time-honored than the belief that all the Alamo defenders willingly sacrificed themselves for the greater good, ensuring the birth of a new Texas republic, and buying time for Houston to create an army. But in the insightful words of historian Bill Groneman, “The traditional and incorrect view of the Alamo battle is that every man there made a conscious choice to die gloriously in its defense. Any scenario which deviated from that preconceived notion, such as the willing surrender of any of its defenders, has hardly been tolerated over the years.”
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Groneman also argued against an enduring controversy of the Alamo story, Crockett’s supposed execution, which the author refuted in his 1994 book,
Defense of a Legend: Crockett and the de la Pena Diary
. But in fact, the most groundbreaking aspect of the Alamo’s story should never have been the manner of Crockett’s death—in itself unimportant—but the fact that such a large percentage of the garrison attempted to escape the Alamo only to meet their deaths outside the walls. Indeed, historians, scholars, and the public have missed the point in regard to the real importance of the de la Pena account, focusing mostly on how a single garrison member died instead of the more important story, about so many “of the enemy who attempted to escape.”

The escape attempts by a majority of the Alamo garrison—more than 100 and perhaps as many as 120 men—has been revealed by more than half a dozen reliable Mexican sources, especially General Sesma’s March 11, 1836 report, and the San Luis Battalion logbook. While the mythological Alamo has long romanticized that these men all died will

302 ingly in a heroic example of self-sacrifice so that Texas would live, the historical reality of what actually happened on March 6 was the exact opposite. Indeed, Texas had a better chance to live if the Alamo garrison had escaped and survived to fight another day, when the odds were better and the tactical situation was more favorable.

At the Alamo, therefore, it perhaps took more real courage—and certainly more sense—to escape from a deathtrap than to die for no gain, advantage, or purpose. Attempting to escape the Alamo instead of dying in vain for abstract, rhetorical principles of “a borrowed cause,” since so few garrison members were native Texians, was only a natural response for these unfortunate men, who had been abandoned by Texas and her people. In addition, the flight of Alamo defenders might well be explained by the fact that ammunition was low or largely unusable. Toward the battle’s end, some men fought until ammunition had been expended before bolting from the Alamo. Such factors would further demonstrate the wisdom of flight rather than fight. After all, the Alamo garrison lacked adequate amounts of both powder and bullets from the beginning, and especially after thirteen days of siege.
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Along with other accounts and Travis’ own words, Enrique Esparza recorded that the ammunition “of many was entirely spent” by the time the Mexicans poured over the walls, indicating that solid resistance was all but impossible, and that flight rather than fight presented a sound alternative.
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Given such realities, perhaps the most lofty example of defender heroism on March 6 was the fact that most Alamo garrison members waited until almost the final moment before attempting to break out of a deathtrap instead of days before. Indeed, the greatest heroism was not in struggling in vain to the death, but that fact that these men of such diverse backgrounds had united at all in a common decision to defend the Alamo in the first place. In this regard, the defenders were truly heroic, living up to the idealized and romantic image of the mythical Alamo, and leaving an inspiring moral example.

In the words of historian Wallace O. Chariton, “The truth is, it’s a miracle the men stayed as long as they did. They were tired, hungry, frustrated over the poor conditions and the lack of promised pay, and bewildered because the people of Texas did not turn out in mass to come to their aid. . . . There was little to do but watch and wait for the end. For the besieged Texans there was no longer any doubt about what the end would be; the only question was when would it come, today, tomorrow, or the day after. The fact that the men did not run until the final assault was underway and all hope was literally gone is testimony to their grit and gallantry.”
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Ironically, the truth of what really happened on March 6 can be seen in a fact that has been most often overlooked by historians. Like in regard to so many other traditional aspects of the Alamo’s story, historians have never questioned or investigated why the bodies of Alamo garrison members were burned so far away from the Alamo. Why would Santa Anna’s men have taken so much trouble and effort in hauling so many bodies some 300–400 yards up the gradual slope to the relative high ground of the Alameda, when battlefield dead were almost always buried where they were slain? Quite simply, the long-overlooked answer to this Alamo mystery was the fact that Santa Anna’s men never dragged the vast majority of bodies from the Alamo compound as so long assumed.

When the fighting ended, the bodies of most Alamo garrison members were lying not inside the Alamo’s walls, but around and near the Alameda, because of the multiple escape attempts. For health reasons, the bodies of the relatively few men killed inside the Alamo were hauled out of the fort by Santa Anna’s cavalrymen to the Alameda—an unpleasant, but relatively easy exercise because they represented the minority of defenders.

Indeed, perhaps the best physical evidence of the mass exodus that streamed out of the Alamo was the fact that most bodies lay so far beyond the Alamo’s walls. Such placement of the slain can explain why Santa Anna ordered the bodies gathered and placed into three funeral pyres on either side of the double rows of cottonwood trees along the Alameda.
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Other solid evidence—equally ignored—of the large-scale flights of so many defenders from the Alamo, was that more men than previously believed actually escaped the slaughter of the Mexican lancers and cavalrymen. Collaborating what Sesma recorded in his March 11 report and other Mexican accounts, even Santa Anna alluded as much when he described how among the “large number” of men who escaped the Alamo compound in making a dash for life, “I am, then able to guarantee that very few will have gone to notify their companions of the outcome” of the Alamo.
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An unknown number of escapees hid under cover on the prairie or in the irrigation ditch, praying for darkness when they could slip away undetected. Some of these men were discovered. We have already seen how Sergeant Loranca of the Dolores Cavalry described one soldier who had “ensconced himself under a bush” and nearly escaped detection, until finally discovered and dispatched without mercy.
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Another account has revealed that six garrison members who escaped the Alamo were discovered hiding under the small wooden bridge where the Gonzales Road crossed the San Antonio River, southwest of the Alamo. These escapees—most likely from the west wall lunette—had run around 220 yards undetected to find shelter under the bridge, located just west of the Alameda on the road to Gonzales. In keeping with Santa Anna’s orders, these men were all killed out-of-hand by the first soldados who spied them.
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The Alamo’s most famous escapee was the French Napoleonic veteran, Louis (or Moses) Rose. Like the mythical line supposedly drawn in the sand by Travis, so the story of Rose’s departure from the Alamo has been shrouded in legend. Alamo mythology, which unfairly branded him as a coward and even a turncoat for not dying in the mythical last stand, strongly hints of anti-Semitism. The legend has been long espoused that Rose left the Alamo and deserted his more heroic nonJewish comrades—who willingly chose to die in an example of heroic self-sacrifice—on the night before the attack. In this sense, Rose served as a convenient scapegoat—a Frenchman and a Jew, a double handicap, who were so often lampooned and hated in this period—so as to diminish any idea that true-blooded Anglo-Celts might have tried to escape the Alamo. In truth, Rose was most likely a member of the three groups of escapees who fled the Alamo, and survived to tell the tale.

In the view of historian Bill Groneman, Rose “probably escaped during the predawn battle itself, rather than after a solemn line drawing ceremony. . . . However, men escaping from the Alamo just because they did not want to be shot and stabbed to pieces did not exactly fit the story, so it is possible that [William P.] Zuber may have jumped into the breach and invented the [Travis] line drawing scene.”
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Another lucky soul who escaped the Alamo massacre was Henry Warnell, a rather slick horse trader, a bit of a con artist, and somewhat of a “rouge and an outlaw”—ideal characteristics for a survivor of one of the most infamous slaughters in American history. Warnell was a wheeler-dealer, who made a living outsmarting less worldly customers, including selling stolen horses. In and around the little Texas town of Bastrop, where he migrated in 1835, he was called “jockey,” as he was also known among garrison members, not only because of his small size but also because of his easy way with temperamental horses.

Warnell manned one of the two or three cannon inside the ovalshaped lunette that protected the main gate near the south wall’s center. One of the self-styled “Invincibles” of Captain Carey’s artillery company, Warnell was almost certainly among the second group of escapees from the “center” lunette who survived the infamous “massacre at the Alamo.” The hope of seeing his wife, Ludie Ragsdale, and their infant son, born in November 1834, and his beloved Red River country fueled the race for his life outside the Alamo’s walls. Warnell barely made it, but succeeded in getting away. He was wounded by Mexican cavalrymen, who killed so many garrison members around the Alameda area. Defying the odds, he eventually reached the safety of the low-lying gulf coast. But this spunky soldier died of his wounds at Port Lavaca on the gulf less than three months after the Alamo’s capture.
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On March 8, 1869, Susanna Dickinson, now remarried after her husband’s death, gave a disposition on behalf of Warnell’s heirs. She recalled a statement from Warnell that reflected the sentiment of so many garrison members, and which he fulfilled by somehow managing to escape the Alamo and survive the onslaught of hundreds of Mexican lancers and cavalry: “I recollect having heard him remark that he had much rather be out in the open prairie, than to be pent up in that manner” inside the Alamo.
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Later, as revealed in the March 29, 1836 edition of Little Rock’s
Arkansas Gazette
, two other fortunate survivors, who had also escaped General Sesma’s vengeful horsemen, reached the town of Nacogdoches, Texas, northeast of San Antonio. One of the men was seriously wounded and likely soon died of his injuries. Here, to the horrified town folk, they brought the first news of the “massacre” at the Alamo. Indeed, the two dirty, ragged survivors “said San Antonio had been retaken by the Mexicans, the garrison put to the sword—that if any others escaped the general massacre besides themselves, they was not aware of it.”
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But because so many garrison members had fled the Alamo in what could only be described as a mass exodus, the odds of escaping the Mexican cavalry poised outside the Alamo was much greater than previously realized by those who had embraced the romance of the mythical last stand. A veteran of San Antonio’s 1835 capture and the battle of San Jacinto, William C. Murphy, who presented an amazingly accurate version of both the exodus and a higher number of survivors than previously believed, stated to a reporter that when the garrison was “compelled to abandon [the Alamo] only eight men escaped alive.”
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Most likely, these fortunate survivors were among those who fled from the main gate, having the best chance for survival because Sesma’s men had been focused on chasing down and slaughtering the first group of 62 escapees before turning on the second group. Murphy’s revealing statement coincided with the first battle report written by Santa Anna at 8:00 a.m., when his cavalry was yet engaged in hunting down and slaughtering escapees on the open prairie, revealing that these men continued to fight back, hide, and evade their pursuers. Disgusted by the slaughter and Santa Anna’s no-quarter order, or just tired of killing, some compassionate Mexican cavalrymen might even have allowed hiding or fleeing men to survive.
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Another long-overlooked lucky escapee who somehow dodged Mexican sabers, bullets, and lances this bloody morning was young William James Cannon. Indeed, “There was a survivor [at the Alamo and he was] A boy [who] by some miracle escaped the universal slaughter. It was William James Cannon, ‘the child of the Alamo’.” Perhaps his fluency in Spanish and familiarity with Tejano ways and culture had assisted Cannon, one of the youngest garrison members, in escaping the bloodbath.
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But despite the many collaborating primary Mexican sources, the truth of what really happened at the Alamo—the exodus—has been overlooked by historians, scholars, and writers since 1836. One of the few American historians who has even dared to hint—and even then ever so carefully—at the scale of the exodus from the Alamo was the respected author of
Blood of Noble Men: The Alamo, Siege and Battle
(1999), Alan C. Huffines, who later served with distinction as a U.S. Army colonel in Iraq. However, he only dealt with this most controversial aspect of the Alamo’s story in a footnote, reasoning like a detective in attempting to uncover a central mystery of the Alamo’s story: “It appears that near the end of the battle a large group of Texian defenders attempted a withdrawal. This is absolutely contrary to current Alamo interpretation, but [more than half a dozen Mexican, both officers and enlisted men] witnessed it. . . . How would the cavalry have taken casualties several hundred yards away from the battle? Why did the Texian gunners [under Captain Dickinson] on the church fire on the cavalry. . . . The answer is simple: A large body of Texians made a break for it, going in the only direction they knew, toward Gonzales.”
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