The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (10 page)

But his many ventures had proven unsuccessful, and by 1835 he owned little more than one eleven-league grant. For his various offenses, he had seen the inside of more than one Mexican prison. He had only just escaped from one in Monterrey—a friend arranged a horse and provisions—and made his way hundreds of miles to Texas, somehow reaching Goliad just in time to join the action there. His clothes in tatters, he had donned items taken from the Mexican garrison there, but the pants and sleeves were at least six inches too short on Milam, who was slightly above average in height. A few days later, when he rode into the camp at Gonzales, Austin had made him commander of a mounted spy company.

The former Kentuckian’s right knee was seriously arthritic and his lower back gave him trouble, but he was still well muscled and energetic. Just returned from a long scout toward the Rio Grande, he became furious upon hearing of the plans to fall back to winter quarters. He found General Burleson’s adjutant, the short-tempered Frank Johnson, and filled his ear. Johnson, a longtime resident of Texas and an independence firebrand from the beginning, was persuaded, and the two marched to Burleson’s tent and laid out their plan. Burleson listened and agreed—he had not wanted to call off the previous attack, and told Milam that if he could muster enough volunteers, they could proceed with an assault the next day. Milam walked outside to find hundreds of expectant men. Word had spread that something was up.

One friend of Milam’s remembered his “commanding appearance and fine address,” and Milam drew upon both of those traits now. He took off his slouch hat, waved it above his head, and called out loud and clear, “Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio?”

Scores of volunteers gathered near the tent yelled, “I will!” and “We will!”

Milam stepped across a path that ran in front of the tent—one man later claimed he drew a line in the dirt—and shouted, “Well, if you’re going with me, get on this side of the road!”

The men roared in approval and rushed to fall in line with Milam. By the time they were accounted for, they numbered more than three hundred, including every able-bodied New Orleans Grey. In true democratic fashion, and to no one’s surprise, they chose Milam to lead them. A few captains made speeches against the venture, and some of the men begged their friends not to throw away their lives so foolishly. But after a time was set for early the next morning, the volunteers prepared for the assault. Others continued to mount their horses and head for home.

Bowie had left in late November, most likely fed up with Austin’s indecisiveness and the chaotic mess known as the Army of the People. Austin’s command style had been less than dynamic: his weakly worded orders almost begged to be ignored, and Bowie had taken full advantage—“Contents duly considered,” Bowie had replied to one of Austin’s written directives. After duly considering Austin’s “orders,” he usually did as he thought best.

Bowie had departed, albeit on orders, to oversee the work fortifying Goliad, ninety-five miles down the San Antonio River, which would serve as winter quarters for the Texian forces. Travis left also, about the same time. He had achieved recognition for striking, with just a dozen horsemen, a large herd of Mexican mounts fifty miles south of Béxar. He led a dawn attack straight into the Mexican camp and took the
soldado
escort unit prisoner without a shot fired. When Austin learned of the three hundred captured horses, he praised his young cavalry captain. Travis returned to San Felipe at the end of November and was commended by the General Council there, and news of his fine work appeared in the town newspaper.

Burleson would supervise the operation from camp, where the remaining two hundred or so men would constitute a reserve. Few of them gave the assault force much of a chance against the well-fortified Mexican army.

On the north side of Béxar, half the distance to town, the assault force assembled at three a.m. Only two hundred men, fifteen small companies, showed up—the remainder apparently heeded the attempts to discourage them, including predictions that they would be butchered. A norther was blowing in, knocking down tents and makeshift huts, and the weather had helped persuade others to remain in their warm bedding. Milam’s stalwarts wrapped their woolen blankets about them, shivering, as they waited for the signal. The moon was full and still high in the western sky.

At five o’clock that morning, December 5, a blast split the cool air as a cannonball crashed into the north wall of the Alamo. It was a diversion: earlier, chief artillerist Captain James Neill, who had fired the first cannon shot at Gonzales, had snuck a gun and its crew across the San Antonio River closer to the fort. The roar of the piece was answered by bugles, drums, and artillery fire, as well as the satisfying sight of a horde of Mexican infantrymen moving toward the mission, lit by the flare of rockets set off as alarms. The ruse had worked perfectly.

When Neill’s cannon boomed, Milam’s men dropped their blankets and scampered as quietly as possible the quarter mile south through the barren cornfields and into town—down two parallel streets toward the two northern corners of Main Plaza, with Milam at the head of one column and Frank Johnson leading the other. Two local men guided Johnson’s unit: Samuel Maverick, an enterprising young man from Virginia who had only recently arrived in Béxar, and Erastus “Deaf” Smith, a New York native and scout extraordinaire—despite being hard of hearing—who lived south of town with his Tejana wife and four children. Guiding Milam’s division was John W. Smith, a local carpenter and translator (nicknamed El Colorado for his red hair), and Hendrick Arnold, a free man of color and Deaf Smith’s son-in-law. Johnson’s men skirted a campfire of sentries, then ran into a single vedette as they reached town: Smith quickly shot him dead. But other pickets spread the alarm, and the Mexican artillery opened fire with volleys of grapeshot and canister on the
norteamericanos
in the narrow dirt streets.

Less than a hundred yards from the well-fortified Main Plaza and its seven cannon, the Texians hugged the walls. They broke down the thick wooden doors of a few stone and adobe houses and jumped inside. Several of the buildings were residences occupied by families that had elected to stay in town, and some of the terrified inhabitants ran into the streets in their nightclothes. Other structures were warehouses and businesses where Mexican troops had been quartered, and in these the Texians found themselves in deadly combat involving pistols and Bowie knives, though some
soldados
swiftly dived out the few small windows.

Now both armies were well entrenched, sometimes just yards from each other behind three-foot-thick walls. What followed was a house-to-house and often hand-to-hand struggle that would ultimately last for five grueling days, each one cloudy and frigid. Mexican Brown Bess muskets using weak gunpowder charges were no match for the Texians’ accurate Kentucky long rifles and double-barreled shotguns. But the Mexican forces had the advantage of position. Each house, each garden, and sometimes each room became a fiercely contested battleground, a fort to be taken with great effort and at great peril. Since the strategically placed cannon made the main streets virtual shooting galleries, some Texians took it into their heads to move forward by climbing to the rooftops of the one-story houses, taking cover behind the low parapets around each roof. But the blue-coated
soldados
had beaten them to it, and a dozen or so sharpshooters armed with Baker rifles in the bell tower of the church looming over the plaza found rebel targets and forced them off. To complicate matters, the gusty wind blew the powder out of the Texian rifle pans. A few of the assault parties were forced to hack holes in the ceilings and drop down ten or twelve feet into the houses, some of which contained
soldados
. The Texians battered the outside wall of one building until it fell onto the occupants inside. The rubble nearly buried some women and their families, although, bizarrely, one small
bexareño
emerged into a yard and told the rebels that there would be a fandango held there that night.

From his camp almost half a mile north of Béxar, Burleson kept his cavalry patrolling the outskirts of the town to prevent enemy forces from leaving or entering. Most of the horsemen were Juan Seguín’s rancheros, who also foraged local ranches for beeves and grain, though about forty of them had given up their mounts to join Milam’s assault force. The mounted patrols prevented Cós from sending in some of his presidial units as reinforcements.

The fighting eased up after sundown. A supply party appeared with water, milk, munitions, and barbecued beef. Burleson made his way into town and conferred with the assault leaders, who had finally established communication with each other by digging a trench between the two positions. The resistance had been stronger than they had expected—stories of untrained, convict-heavy Mexican army battalions, and the Texians’ successful skirmishes of the previous two months, had led to overconfidence—and they had suffered eleven casualties, one dead and ten wounded, who were taken back to camp to the makeshift hospital of Drs. Samuel Stivers and Amos Pollard, a staunch abolitionist from Massachusetts. But they refused to give up the territory they had fought so hard to win, and decided to continue the assault. Burleson also brought the news that some of the men who had left the previous day had returned. Milam and his fighters spent the evening cleaning their arms and filling sandbags for protection, then they wrapped themselves in their blankets and slept a few hours.

The next day was colder than the first. General Cós ordered his artillery, both around the plazas and in the Alamo, to open an effective crossfire at dawn. The rebels dug more trenches to facilitate the safer movement of men and artillery. Both sides fought with tenacity and courage. Much of the combat this day was also hand-to-hand, especially after firing from a Texian artillery piece sent the church-tower snipers scattering. Muskets and rifles gave way to pistols, Bowie knives, and bayonets. Progress was slow and tedious, often accompanied by the screaming of women and children. With crowbars, axes, and crude wooden battering rams ten feet long, the rebels would bash holes in the thick walls that made one house look like a “pigeon nursery from whence flame and lead poured out as fast as the men could load and fire,” one Texian recalled. Sometimes the Mexicans would do the same while the attackers reloaded. When the opening was large enough, Milam’s men made their way through and into the house, which might be occupied by
soldados
. Some fought back. Others surrendered and were released on a pledge not to return to Béxar, though not all honored the parole. Occasionally, while occupying either side of a house wall, the two sides would argue the causes and prospects of the battle and the civil war.

By sunset the Texians had moved forward another half block or so. The men were chilly, exhausted, and filthy, and the mortar dust settling on them conferred a ghostly appearance. But they hunkered down that night in the stone buildings, some of them building small fires to ward off the chill.

When the sun rose on the third day of the assault, it revealed a new threat on the Texians’ left flank: to the west, across the river near the old mission, the Mexicans had erected a redoubt that was now full of infantry. Behind them, four cannon just outside the fort’s entrance supported them. But the volunteers’ accurate rifle fire quickly put the
soldados
and the artillerymen to flight. Before the day was over the Mexicans would draw the cannon within the walls by means of lassos.

Inside the town another problem presented itself. The defenders had fortified a house directly in the path of Johnson’s division, and the heavy small arms and artillery fire from it made progress impossible. Only when a six-pounder was wheeled up from the Texian lines outside town and a barrage of cannonballs unloaded did the Mexicans abandon the stronghold. When a Texian officer ordered the cannon into the open street facing the enemy breastworks, two of the gun’s crew were shot dead and three others wounded. The second lieutenant manning the gun, a Virginian named William Carey, continued to load and fire it with two other men. He barely escaped death when a musket ball passed through his hat and creased his skull. Carey was made first lieutenant soon after, when the man he replaced was cashiered for cowardice.

That afternoon, Milam led a final push toward Main Plaza, then made his way through the rubble to confer with Johnson at the large Veramendi house, called by some of the men the Bowie house since it had been owned by the latter’s former father-in-law. Milam suggested a daring plan to capture General Cós, who was issuing commands from a house south of the plazas. Dressed in a white blanket coat, Milam stepped into the courtyard about one p.m. with a small field glass to get a better look at the Mexican command post, and to determine the best route there. A second later he fell to the ground, a bullet through his right temple, and died instantly. A Texian pointed toward the river less than a hundred yards away, where a puff of smoke had appeared in a cypress along the opposite bank. Several men took aim and fired, and a body dropped to the riverbank and rolled into the river. After the battle the Texians would learn the name of the sniper: Felix de la Garza, reputedly one of the best shots in the Mexican army.

The stunned Texians buried their captain in one of the trenches they had dug in the yard, along the east wall, and spent the rest of the day wondering who would replace Milam’s strong leadership and calm under fire. His loss “put a considerable damper on the army,” remembered one attacker. Rumors of a large Mexican reinforcement nearing town were rampant. That evening the Texian officers selected Frank Johnson to oversee the assault. He knew Milam’s plan well and had no desire to change it. About ten o’clock that night, in a chilling drizzle, four companies of volunteers attacked and seized a stone house just north of the church.

The fourth day was more of the same—bracing cold, stiff resistance, and every foot advanced bought in blood and sweat. In the afternoon a furious artillery barrage pinned down a company of rebels behind some flimsy
jacales
and an adobe wall. When a well-aimed load of grapeshot tore down even that poor protection, one infuriated Texian, a tall, redheaded scout named Henry Karnes, who had ventured into Texas as a trapper and decided to stay, yelled for cover and dashed across a street through heavy fire to a stone house bristling with Mexican muskets at every window and on the rooftop. The twenty-three-year-old Tennessean carried a crowbar in one hand and his rifle in the other. He hit the door and began to pry it open while his comrades loosed a steady fire on the soldiers on the roof. By the time he broke the door open and burst into the house, most of the men were right behind him. The bulk of the
soldados,
taken aback by such madness, skedaddled. The rest were taken prisoner.