The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (17 page)

De la Peña had not received his duty assignment yet, but the more he saw of Santa Anna’s methods of preparation, the more his admiration for His Excellency waned. The cruel conscriptions, the lack of medical services, the inadequate supplies, the dearth of intelligent planning—these and other aspects of the expedition disgusted the young officer. Like many others, he saw little reason for attacking Béxar, which was of no political or military importance. A strike into the heart of the Anglo colonies would have made more sense. Besides, the young officer was a federalist at heart. As for the comparisons to Napoleon, he thought Santa Anna “as distant from him as our planet is from the sun.”

On the last day of January, the main body of the Army of Operations began to leave Saltillo for Monclova, 150 miles to the north, winding its way along El Camino Real, the “Royal Road,” between imposing mountain peaks. Three hundred miles beyond that city—about halfway up the portion of El Camino Real that ran from Mexico City to Nacogdoches in far east Texas—lay Béxar. Santa Anna would lead a five-thousand-man army through the barren semidesert, where there was no forage and little water, in the deepest part of winter, and he would liberate Béxar from the barbarians. He would make an example of them. He knew what had to be done.

If Santa Anna had studied his idol’s career more closely, he might have reconsidered his plan. Napoleon had gained his first victories with an experienced army drilled to perfection, whose men had engaged in frequent target and maneuver practice. But his downfall had come after two disastrous invasions. His Iberian peninsular campaign failed because local guerrilla units had harassed the much larger French armies, which had been unable to live off the land in the poor Spanish countryside. And long supply and communication lines, the pitiless Russian winter, and constant guerrilla attacks by the Cossack cavalry had doomed the ill-fated Russian campaign.

An old acquaintance could also have warned him. José Juan Sánchez had returned with Cós’s column, and accompanied Cós to Saltillo to meet with Santa Anna. The commander in chief expressed surprise that his old classmate was not wearing a lieutenant colonel’s insignia, and granted his request to accompany the campaign. Sánchez would ride with the Second Infantry Brigade, commanded by General Eugenio Tolsa, as General Cós’s adjutant. Unimpressed with the army’s preparations, he questioned Santa Anna’s personal attendance to all matters, no matter how trivial, from grand strategy to quartermaster and commissary duties and muleteer and teamster hirings. Well aware from previous experience of the difficulties of traversing the arid desolation of northern Coahuila and south Texas beyond the Rio Grande, he was especially alarmed. His journey to Béxar with the conscripts had been brutal and costly. The continual rain and cold, combined with their meager food supplies and inadequate shelter, had almost destroyed their already low morale—and that had been two months earlier, in the fall, not the winter. Few of these troops were from northern Mexico, and these soldiers were unused to severe cold and uniformed only for mild weather—no heavy coats or tents were issued. If the weather turned unseasonable, great suffering and untold deaths could result among the ranks, to say nothing of the thousands of women and children following their men.

A potential problem, and another reason for Santa Anna’s haste, was political in nature. If the army did not advance soon, soldiers might be influenced by some of the revolutionary factions then active. The supporters of federalism were numerous and active throughout the country, and in the northern departments in particular. It was not unheard-of for an entire body of troops to desert for political reasons, allying themselves with another party, especially when they were unwilling conscripts with little or no reason to maintain allegiance to centralism.

I
N
L
AREDO
, S
ÁNCHEZ HAD SENSED
condescension on the part of the fresh troops for the hungry, near-naked, miserable
soldados
from Béxar. News of Cós’s surrender there had fostered unofficial accusations of dishonor directed at Cós and his key subalterns, including Sánchez. It was clear these new recruits despised Cós’s men, and to hear them brag enraged the captain. General Ramírez y Sesma added further humiliation when he expressed serious doubt that the rebels could stop just a hundred lancers.

Now, the day before the First Infantry Brigade moved out of Saltillo, Sánchez ran into some old comrades in the street. They asked him if he was one of the “lost” of Béxar, adding insult to injury. Then General Castrillón inquired about the
norteamericanos
.

“Friend,” he said, gesturing toward his troops, “what do you think of these soldiers?”

“That they look good,” Sánchez said.

“This will not be anything more than a military parade,” explained Castrillón. “Do you know that those wretches ran away without even firing a shot?”

Sánchez protested, but after Castrillón accused him of being frightened in Béxar, the captain returned to his quarters, disgusted. He worried that there were soldiers who thought they could defeat a cunning and stubborn enemy with only bravado.

The next day the troops, like a long line of ants, began moving out through the northern reaches of Mexico toward Monclova. Santa Anna had organized his army into five units. Ramírez y Sesma’s Vanguard Brigade of 1,541 men was already at Guerrero on the Rio Grande, having arrived there on January 16. Tolsa’s Second Infantry Brigade, consisting of 1,839 men, had left Saltillo a few days earlier, on January 31; the next day, the sixteen-hundred-man First Infantry Brigade, under the command of General Antonio Gaona, departed. Santa Anna, his staff, and his escort of fifty lancers left the same morning. Last was General Juan Andrade’s Cavalry Brigade of 437 lancers.

General Cós, accompanied by Sánchez, left Saltillo with a small force on February 6. (General José Urrea’s four-hundred-man brigade had set out on January 15 for Matamoros, where 260 Mayan Indian recruits from the warm, humid Yucatán would join him, in response to rumors of a rebel movement toward that city. He would continue up the Atascosito Road, close to the coast, to Goliad and its presidio.) The columns would eventually stretch over hundreds of miles, and face a host of imposing hurdles: inadequate supply lines, desertion, near starvation, extreme weather, dysentery, sickness, savage Indians, plunging morale, and a few corrupt officers who put personal gain above the well-being of their men. Now, as they left the city, they passed a priest, who was blessing them as they filed by.

Fortunately for all concerned, January had been relatively dry, with only the occasional light shower, so the roads between the Rio Grande and Béxar were in good shape—either solid earth, or a mixture of sand and stone that prevented the formation of too much mud when wet. This helped, but if the army was to reach Béxar in decent shape and in decent time, it would largely be due not to the condition of the roads but to the determination and leadership of Antonio López de Santa Anna. Years ago, he had authorized one of his aides to strike him with a pistol if he deviated from his resolve. There would be no need for that now—Santa Anna would surprise the ungrateful Anglo colonists, or many of his men would die trying.

A
LMOST FIVE HUNDRED MILES NORTH
on El Camino Real lay the objective of Santa Anna’s army. Left to defend Béxar was a garrison that by mid-January had dwindled down to eighty men, almost all of them volunteers. Most were dressed in late-summer garb that had worn down to rags after several months of hard fighting and winter weather. The few supplies and clothing sent by the ineffectual government in San Felipe had been rudely appropriated by the Matamoros expedition led by James Grant and Frank Johnson. They had even taken most of the horses, thus preventing effective scouting operations. And though there were plenty of extra muskets appropriated from Cós’s forces, good powder was in short supply.

But the Mexican army was not expected until March at the earliest, when the summer grass would begin emerging, and reinforcements and provisions were on the way. The men fortifying the dilapidated mission across the shallow San Antonio River were sure of it.

NINE

The Backwoodsman

Be always sure you’re right—then go ahead!

D
AVY
C
ROCKETT

I
f anyone in America could be called an amiable cuss, it was the Honorable David Crockett. On that point virtually everyone, friend and foe alike, agreed. There were only a few for whom the cussedness outweighed the amiability—and one of them was President Andrew Jackson. Once, he had been Crockett’s political hero, as well as his commander during the Creek War. But Crockett’s allegiance would always be to his poor constituents of west Tennessee, and he had come to realize that Jackson had become an opportunist whose allegiances shifted with the wind, or at least that is what Crockett believed. Over the past five years or so, the congressman from Tennessee’s near-constant jabs at Jackson—in the press, in session, in company of every kind—had come to infuriate the president. Jackson’s handpicked successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren, was another on Crockett’s blacklist. Crockett loathed him, and let everyone know it. For Jackson and Van Buren, Crockett’s defeat in his bid for a fourth congressional term, and the loss of his bully pulpit, was something to be devoutly thankful for.

Jackson’s followers had helped bring about that defeat, but it was Crockett himself who would ultimately relieve them of the gadfly who had plagued them for so long. He had told his constituents (or so he claimed later) that if they elected his rival, “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” To the surprise of many, he did just that.

E
VERY GENERATION HAS ITS LAND OF MILK
and honey. In 1835, it was Texas, and had been for more than a decade. And Texas lay to the west. Like his father and grandfather before him, and like their forefathers before them, reaching back many hundreds of years—Celtic warriors and their willful women, who had fought in and conquered the lands from middle Europe westward to the sea, and traveled up the English island to Scotland and over the waters again to Ireland, and then made the great journey across the northern Atlantic to the New World—David Crockett had always been bound westward. It was in his blood, his marrow. Like thousands of others, he was hopeful of finding his fortune by following the sunset. He would encounter something very different.

In common with so many early American frontiersmen, Crockett was of primarily Scots-Irish stock (though he preferred to think the Irish dominated). About 1775, his grandfather David Crockett led his family from the Piedmont region of North Carolina west across the Appalachians into Indian territory. Shortly after settling in what would become eastern Tennessee, the elder Crockett and his wife were massacred by Creek Indians, who were justifiably angry at white encroachment into their land. Some of his children were wounded or captured—one, deaf and mute, resided with the Creeks for eighteen years before his brothers found him and bought him from his captors. But the remaining family refused to leave the area, and on August 17, 1786, a new David Crockett, the fifth of nine children, was born to John Crockett and his wife, the former Rebecca Hawkins, in a log cabin in the hill country, on the Nolichucky River near Rogersville.

John Crockett had fought as a citizen soldier in the Revolution, where he and 1,100 other Tennessee volunteers defeated the British in the bloody battle at Kings Mountain. Later he served as county constable for several terms, and attempted various types of employment—land speculation, working in a gristmill, innkeeping—but he and his family never rose much above poverty, and, if anything, fell deeper in debt. Those financial circumstances would never change, even after he moved farther west in 1796, and on the side of a well-traveled road opened a six-room log tavern that also served as their home. It was a crude existence, the inn catering primarily to a rough trade of drovers and wagoners, and all the children did their share. David would remember later that he and his family made their “acquaintance with hard times, and a plenty of them.”

Two years later John Crockett, “being hard run every way,” hired out his twelve-year-old son David (a common practice of the time) to a cattle drover named Jacob Siler to help take a herd 225 miles to Rockbridge County, Virginia. Wary of his father’s hickory-stick discipline, David went along, even though he would have to make the return trip on his own in winter. Upon arriving at their destination two weeks later, Siler tried to force the boy into indentured servitude. David stayed a month, all the time convincing the man and his family of his cooperation, then snuck out of the house late on a cold Sunday night. After walking seven miles through knee-deep snow, he reached a tavern, where he found a group of travelers who, fortunately and coincidentally, knew his father and arranged his passage south. He arrived home a few weeks later.

David had received no schooling up to that point; there was little opportunity for formal education on the frontier. But the people of the community hired a schoolteacher in the fall of 1799—usually the teacher served in exchange for room and board and a small salary—and the Crockett children dutifully began to attend. Only a few days later a disagreement with his drunken father over his education, and a desire to avoid a severe whipping, led David, now thirteen, to leave once more, again not entirely of his own volition. This time, he hired himself out—to another cattle drover on the way to Virginia.

Over the next two and a half years young David took on odd jobs here and there, learning as he went along how to win friends and attain their approval. When he finally returned home in the spring of 1802 to a touching reunion—even his father was glad to see him—he was sixteen, more man than boy, with a seasoning only the road could supply. He worked off some of his father’s debts over the next year, and finally got around to learning his letters by working for a neighboring Quaker in exchange for schooling and board. Six months of four days’ lessons a week would be all he would ever know of classwork, but he gained enough knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic to stand him in good stead.