Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (53 page)

Alamo authority Gary S. Zaboly wrote with honesty in early April 2008, revealing the truth of the exodus from the Alamo: “But a sober reflection will allow that, if all seems lost, fighting men aren’t always so disposed to stand in place and just let themselves be killed. For what purpose?The Alamo defenders weren’t all as heroically Byronic as Travis: an escape route seemed open, and there was the chance to live and fight another day. So, many of them took it. A similar thing occurred at Little Big Horn.”
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Roger Borroel, historian and translator of many rare Mexican documents pertaining to the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, concluded in no uncertain terms: “Well over 100 Alamo defenders sought to escape the battle by fleeing for their lives at the height of the struggle . . . they left their buddies [all] alone to die in the Alamo fort [therefore] Sesma’s Dolores Cavalry Regiment [and other horse units] played a major role in the struggle, killing at least 50% of the Alamo garrison as they tried to escape” the Alamo.
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Even the leading role played by the Mexican lancers and dragoons on March 6 has been largely distorted by historians, who assigned Santa Anna’s horsemen solely with the mission of driving the “cowardly” Mexican peasants forward to the attack and “to shoot every man that turned back.”
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Of course this convenient explanation not only reveals cultural and racial arrogance, but has also masked the real and more important role played by Sesma’s cavalry, obscuring the truth about the mass exodus from the Alamo.

In the end, therefore, considerable evidence has revealed that very likely the majority of the Alamo garrison was killed not inside but outside the Alamo’s walls, not by infantrymen but by cavalrymen, not in darkness but in broad daylight, and not only far from the Alamo but even farther from the romance and glory of the mythical last stand. Still haunted by the horrors he had witnessed, an unidentified soldado described the ugly truth of the Alamo in
El Mosquito Mexicano
on April 5, 1836, when he described the battle as “a pitiful but deserved slaughter of the ungrateful colonists, who threw down their weapons and thought to find safety in escape . . . Miserable souls! They no longer exist.”
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Unfortunately, the most popular book yet written about the Alamo—Walter Lord’s
A Time to Stand
, and other respected works on this ever-fascinating topic of heroism and sacrifice have failed to tell the Alamo’s true story, because that chapter simply did not fit neatly into the mythical Alamo, or conform to simplistic American notions of the meaning of heroism. But in truth, a more appropriately descriptive title of what really happened at the Alamo on the morning of March 6 should have been,
A Time to Withdraw.

From the beginning, Mexican reports and firsthand personal accounts presented a story far different than the one later told by legions of American writers, historians, journalists, and filmmakers, who possessed a vested interest, including cultural, emotional, and racial, in creating and then romanticizing the last stand legend. The greatest distortion—a direct corollary of the tenacious last stand with every man selling his life as dearly as possible against an avalanche of attackers—was the gross inflation of Mexican casualties to demonstrate last stand heroics. But the truth of what really happened was far different.

The process of distortion began almost immediately after the battle—and has continued unabated to this day—with newspaper journalists across the United States dramatically inflating both the number of Mexican attackers, and especially their losses. For instance, the editor of the prestigious
New York Herald
on April 12, 1836 wrote: “The loss of the Mexicans in storming the [Alamo] was not less than 1000 killed and mortally wounded, and as many wounded, making their loss in the first assault between 2 and 3000 men.” And two days later, the same newspaper reported how the Alamo garrison of 187 men had been overwhelmed with great difficulty by 40 times their number, or more than 7,000 troops.
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And in the May 12, 1836 issue of the same newspaper, the editor emphatically maintained to his news-starved east coast readers how: “It is also a matter of history that [Santa Anna’s] loss in killed and wounded exceeded one thousand” on March 6.
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One reason why the allegedly high number of Mexican casualties had not been seriously challenged by historians before was because a host of films and Alamo books, and utterly fictionalized paintings only continued the process of creating the myth of a great epic battle and a heroic last stand to the bitter end. The myth of the last stand was born out of the fiction that only a tenacious defense—fortified by “superior” Anglo-Celtic culture, fighting spirit, and character—could have possibly accounted for the supposed high casualties among Santa Anna’s troops. What was also fabricated was the fiction that Alamo garrison members all willingly choose to die rather than surrender to a dictator because of their egalitarian, republican convictions, or American values, that were worth dying for regardless of the odds and no matter how hopeless the situation: the mythical Alamo that automatically ruled out the mere suggestion or thought of any garrison member—except of course the much maligned Rose—escaping the Alamo.

For such reasons, other Texas revolutionary battles—besides the Alamo—also provide evidence of over-exaggeration of Mexican numbers. A recent scholarly study by Allwyn Barr,
Texans in Revolt: The Battle for San Antonio, 1835
, has challenged the battle’s mythology in regard to the exaggeration of Mexican numbers: “The popular view has been that three hundred Texans captured Béxar [San Antonio] from twelve hundred Mexicans. Instead, a reconstruction of the armies shows the Texans to have been slightly more numerous than the Mexicans until late in the fighting.
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However, the example of the Alamo provides, by far, the greatest distortion and exaggeration of both Mexican numbers and casualties. First published not long after the Second World War,
The Alamo
, written by John Myers, represented a classic example of depicting the mythical Alamo. After elaborating on the traditional interpretation of the defender’s heroic self-sacrifice to ensure that Texas would live forever, Myers maintained that “there were about sixteen hundred [Mexican] dead, and there must have been a good few wounded, many of them seriously.”
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The figure was based on evidence from more than a century earlier, as it is the total given by Travis’ slave Joe, who could neither read nor write, and as published in the April 12, 1836 issue of the
Memphis Enquirer
. Joe boasted how “SIXTEEN HUNDRED of the Mexicans [were] killed” at the Alamo.
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Thereafter, this ludicrous figure of 1,600 Mexican killed has been accepted as fact to this day. This distortion began before the battle of San Jacinto, not afterward, as commonly believed by historians. For instance, author Thomas Ricks Lindley speculated that the number of Mexican dead was deliberately exaggerated by Mexican prisoners captured at San Jacinto to patronize the victors and save themselves. Lindley emphasized: “Because the Texians were consumed with the belief that they were far superior soldiers to the soldiers of Mexico, they seem to have accepted the unbelievable figures.”
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However, modern historians have only perpetuated the fairy tale of astoundingly high Mexican casualties. In 1968, an almost pleading T.R. Fehrenbach retold the traditional Alamo story in
Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans
, saying how the battle lasted more than four and a half hours and grossly overstated Mexican losses. He described how during “The five-hour engagement . . . The Battalion of Toluca, the assault shock force of 800 men, had lost 670 killed. The other battalions had lost in each case approximately 25 percent. In all, there were nearly 1,600 Mexican dead. These figures are reliable.”
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And even the notoriously precise and conservative Walter Lord more than doubled the actual number of Mexican casualties in
A Time to Stand,
writing that the “best estimate seems about 600 killed and wounded.”
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But the inflation of Mexican casualties was hardly a feature of 20th century Alamo historiography. The root of such outlandish distortions developed almost immediately after the battle, in part to bestow upon the Alamo defenders—especially Crockett and Bowie—heroic, glorious deaths against all odds. In Smith’s 1836
Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas
, he emphasized not only multiple assaults but also frightful Mexican losses: “The loss of the Mexicans in storming the place was not less than 800 killed and mortally wounded, making their losses since the first assault more than fifteen hundred.”
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Much of the myth of high Mexican casualties developed in part from the traditional interpretation that the defender’s firepower was maximized because each garrison member had many loaded muskets by his side. As Historian William C. Davis explained in his fine book,
Three Roads to the Alamo
: “ . . . every man on the parapets had several loaded rifles, muskets, or pistols at his side, for that was one commodity of which Travis suffered no shortage [because of the] number of captured long arms taken in the surrender of Béxar in December came into his hands [and] As a result, there were 816 rifles, shotguns, pistols and English brown Bess muskets on hand and with his garrison now numbering more than two hundred men, that meant that four apiece.”
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But such a defensive plan to unleash massive volumes of firepower would have been impossible. First, ammunition was of poor quality and in short supply. Indeed, a rare Mexican account from an unidentified officer of the Activo San Luís Potosí Battalion revealed the truth. He scribbled in his journal how the garrison not only “lack[ed] sufficient cannon balls,” but also Mexican troops were only greeted with little more than “pistol fire from the parapets” when they first neared the Alamo’s walls on February 25, before even more ammunition was expended during the next nearly ten days of siege.
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Generations of authors had merely emphasized this traditional story of piles of weapons beside each defender to explain the allegedly high Mexican losses. In truth, and even before the struggle began, two distinct developments had already negated this alleged overabundance of weaponry: the damp and cold winter weather and the complete surprise of Santa Anna’s attack, which made such a scheme unworkable.

By the time of Santa Anna’s attack, many, if not most, defenders’ weapons had been rendered all but useless by the cold, wet weather of late winter. A wide discrepancy between the amount of powder in the church’s two powder rooms—extracted from an estimated 36,000 to 20,000 cartridges, containing inferior Mexican powder, left by Cós— and the actual amount of available good powder explains the mystery of Travis’ seemingly contradictory statements about the lack of ammunition and the large amount of powder found after the Alamo’s fall. On the early morning of March 6, in part due to the phenomena of “rising damp” that compromised powder reserves inside the church, the fragile black powder in muskets, rifles, shotguns, and the flintlock flash pans would have become damp, and thereby ineffective under such conditions. What historians have overlooked is the simple fact that for these weapons to have been operable to meet Santa Anna’s attack, they would of had to have been fired first, or “cleared.”

Defying logic, the enduring image of Texas defenders firing one loaded musket after another, inflicting terrible damage, became one of the long-accepted, time-honored tenants of the mythical last stand. Another myth was that more than twenty Alamo cannon, loaded with homemade canister, inflicted serious damage, cutting down hundreds of attackers, which was simply not true. The vast majority of the Alamo’s artillery was negated by the surprise assault, with most gunners unable to get into position and load their guns in time. Instead of homemade canister, artillery fire from the Alamo did not include canister but cannonballs. For instance, one cannonball took off the arm of an unfortunate Lieutenant Colonel José María Mendoza.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the Alamo’s story, the real truth of exactly how and who really inflicted the most damage upon Mexican troops on the morning of March 6, came not from the defenders, but ironically from the attackers themselves. In fact, according to a number of reliable Mexican accounts, the majority of Santa Anna’s casualties resulted from a widespread fratricide, or friendly fire, in the darkness. Foremost of these accounts was that of General Filisola, who described how “most of our dead and wounded” were caused by fratricide. In perhaps the Alamo’s most haunting irony, Mexican bullets from the English Brown Bess actually caused greater damage than all of the Texas Long Rifles, Bowie knives, shotguns, pistols, sabers, and cannon combined. Such a paradoxical development was all but inevitable in the collision of multiple assault columns, the attack in the darkness, and the fact that the Army of Operations was fighting its first battle.

In his classic work,
Sacrificed at the Alamo
, Richard Bruce Winders, the Alamo’s official historian, wrote of the widespread fratricide when “in the compound [the attackers] soon found themselves in grave danger from their own comrades. Fellow soldiers firing out of the darkness began to kill and wound those who had rushed ahead [and Mexican] officers later attributed the majority of their casualties to friendly fire rather than from the defenders.”
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In his book
Duel of Eagles
, Jeff Long went further, coming even closer to the truth. He reasoned that “fully three-quarters of the Mexican casualties . . . were caused by Mexican bullets” and not defender fire. Even this high estimate can be explained by General Filisola, who wrote how during the attack on the north wall: “Our own men . . . had to suffer all that [fratricide fire] from our men themselves from the opposite sides. Since they attacked in a closed column, all the shots, the direction of which was turned somewhat downward, aimed the bullets towards the backs of those ahead of them. Thus it was that most of our dead and wounded that we suffered were caused by his misfortune.”
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