The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (32 page)

Accompanied by Colonel Almonte, Santa Anna had spent several late hours overseeing the troop movements and preparations for the assault. It was almost three a.m. when the two returned to His Excellency’s quarters. The general was in a foul mood, and threatened to run Almonte’s cook, Ben Harris, through with a sword if he did not bring some coffee quickly. Ben was a dapper five-feet-tall gentleman whose services Almonte had taken on in New York two years before. He had been a steward on board several American vessels, and had participated in his share of frontier adventures, but he had never served a president before, and he stepped lively.

A
S THE SUN WENT DOWN
and the Mexican bombardment ceased, Travis called for his men to assemble in the main courtyard.

During the previous night, the Mexican battery to the northeast had advanced down the
acequia,
to within two hundred yards or so. The artillery at that position, although not consisting of large siege guns, was now close enough to inflict devastating damage to the north wall. Cannonballs consistently crashed through the timber-and-earth-reinforced adobe, and no amount of hasty repairs would have much effect.

In the last few days the situation had become even more critical. Several factors indicated an impending attack. Thursday’s reinforcements had almost doubled the Mexican army surrounding them. And the inexorable forward movement of the northern battery, and its relentless pounding, meant a breach could not long be delayed. The men could even make out
soldados
constructing ladders, a sure sign of assault if there ever was one.

Inside the fort, conditions had worsened. The supply of beef was almost gone: feeding two hundred people twice a day required a great deal of meat. That would leave a good supply of corn, but an undernourishing diet. The lack of medical supplies left Dr. Pollard helpless in the face of the various illnesses afflicting the men in the hospital. The poor sanitation—the proximity of the outdoor latrines and the cattle and horse pens, the inadequate facilities for washing and cleaning, and cooking food thoroughly—had no doubt increased the cases of diarrhea, dysentery, and typhoid.

Still, the garrison’s spirits were higher than might have been expected—Crockett continued to work hard at keeping them so. Sometimes he would visit the women and children, huddled around their fire, and warm his hands and attempt a few words in Spanish. Bowie, however, was in bad shape, and no longer had himself carried out to visit his men. In one of his better moments he again reminded his men to consider Travis their commander. But most of his hours were spent in delirium, his great chest heaving with the effort to breathe between racking coughs.

The entire garrison was exhausted by the almost constant bombardment during the day and the constant vigilance dictated by the surprise sallies, musket volleys, and music performed by the Mexican battalion bands during the night. Fortunately, the cannon fire had stopped that afternoon. But there was still no sign of help, or word of it. It appeared that the men in the Alamo had been forgotten by the nation they were fighting for.

Travis stood before the men and laid out the situation candidly. He expressed his disappointment that no relief force save the thirty-two men from Gonzales had arrived, though messages received over the past several weeks had promised reinforcements and predicted their timely arrival. He admitted the slim chance that any such forces would reach them before the Mexican attack. He expressed his desire to die for his country rather than surrender—the red flag waving over Béxar made clear the fate of any prisoners—and to sell his life as dearly as possible.

He drew his sword and with its point traced a line in the dirt before him. Then he told them that each could make his own decision, but that he wished every man who would stay and die with him to step across the line. Ben Milam had designated a similar line in rallying the Texian troops before the assault on Béxar.

The first man to do so was one of Captain William Carey’s gunners, twenty-five-year-old Tapley Holland, whose father had been one of Stephen Austin’s first settlers. Others followed him, even the sick and wounded who had made it down from the hospital. Bowie, on a cot, asked some of the men to carry him across. Four men did so.

Only one remained—Louis Rose, a swarthy old Frenchman from Nacogdoches, where he had lived since 1826, supporting himself through various jobs, such as log cutter and hauler. He had never married, and lived a mostly solitary life, sometimes drinking whiskey to excess, occasionally finding comfort with a woman. When the talk of revolution heated up, he had heeded his old soldier-of-fortune spirit and headed west in October 1835. After the taking of Béxar, he had stayed behind with Neill when Grant and Johnson had led most of the men south toward Matamoros.

Some called the fifty-year-old Rose “Moses,” for his age. As a young man, he had fought under his idol, Napoleon, and survived the brutal retreat from Moscow in the icy Russian winter. But he was not ready to die now. He could speak Spanish decently—better than his broken English—and his skin was dark enough to pass for a Mexican. He might be able to escape, with some luck, if he left before the near-full moon rose about nine. He did not cross the line.

Upon full darkness, he scaled the low wall of the cattle pen, carrying only a satchel with his few belongings. He stealthily made his way along the north wall to the
acequia
that ran south near the west wall and followed it to the gently flowing San Antonio River. He waded across the shallow water and walked through the quiet town—to any passing
soldados,
just an old, ragged
bexareño
—and crossed the river again at the ford at the southern side of the loop. He followed the river south out of town for about three miles. Then he struck out east toward the colonies.

That evening, Travis decided on one more desperate attempt to reach Fannin and persuade him to come to their aid. When word spread that he needed another courier, several men volunteered. Travis selected a slight young man with a fleet mare: twenty-one-year-old James Lemuel Allen. He was a graduate of Marion College, near Philadelphia, Missouri, which served as a training school for Presbyterian ministers, the students paying their way by working on the school farm. With a few classmates, Allen had heeded the call for help from the Texian colonies. Upon his arrival in Texas he had volunteered for military service and been sent to Béxar.

There was no need of a written communiqué. The message was simple: Hasten to the aid of your countrymen.

And so, after nightfall, but before moonrise, Allen said good-bye to friends and comrades and mounted his horse bareback, the mare wearing only a bridle—he would need every advantage possible to outrun the Mexican patrols, including the absence of excess weight. After one last look at the Alamo courtyard, he guided his mare through the main gate and out the lunette, leaned down to hug the animal’s neck, and at a full gallop man and mount thundered through the Mexican lines and headed southwest, along the San Antonio River, toward Goliad and its four hundred troops.

No one had followed Rose over the walls, but some of the Alamo defenders shared his assessment of their chances. That night, Crockett asked for those of his clothes that the women had recently washed—he expected to be killed the next day, he said, and wished to die in clean clothes in order that he might be given a decent burial. Crockett may have been joking—sometimes it was hard to tell with his dry delivery—but many of the men entrusted their valuables, mostly watches and jewelry, to the women for safekeeping. Juana Alsbury decided to give her share to Bowie’s cook, Bettie, in hopes that the
soldados
would be less likely to search her. That night, for the first time, Bettie had been permitted to stay with the other women and children in the sacristy.

While making his rounds, Travis stepped into the sacristy and visited with Susanna Dickinson and her daughter. From his finger he took a gold ring embedded with a black cat’s-eye stone, put it on a string, and placed it around the neck of little Angelina. And he directed Robert Evans, the tall, merry, Irish-born master of ordnance, to undertake a desperate task: if and when the fort was overrun, he should light the large store of Mexican powder in the front room of the church. With any luck they would take many more of the enemy with them when they were gone.

Jameson’s work crews labored late into the night doing what they could to repair and strengthen the crumbling north wall, which in some places was irreparable. Some of the men took advantage of the lull in bombardment to snatch a much-needed break from their stations. James Bonham shared some tea with Captain Almeron Dickinson, his wife, and the other gunners in Dickinson’s mess. Gregorio Esparza turned away from the convivial gathering to seek out his wife—God only knew when he might see her again. That night the couple slept in each other’s arms.

Sometime after midnight, most of the exhausted men lay down at their posts and wrapped themselves in their blankets. It was cool but not frigid, and they quickly dropped off to sleep. All but a few fires died out. There was little movement in the fort, and few but the sentinels on the walls and the three pickets in the trenches outside made much of an effort to remain awake.

A few hours before dawn, Captain John Baugh, officer of the day, started on his rounds. The night was quiet—too early in the season for crickets. Along the walls, at each defender’s position, lay three or four rifles and Brown Besses primed and ready. The muskets were part of the haul confiscated in December upon Cós’s surrender. Some of them came with bayonets, potentially as valuable as their firepower in the fight to come. The moon, almost full, was still high in the sky, but a cloud cover obscured most of its light.

E
ARLIER THAT NIGHT
, Mexican sergeants, with their
bastones
(wooden staffs), had moved among the enlisted men, poking them awake, ordering them to form in ranks. At three a.m. the shivering
soldados
quietly moved through the darkness toward the old mission. They crossed the river and made their way to their designated positions. They were ordered to make no noise, refrain from smoking, and leave their overcoats and blankets in camp lest they impede their own movement. Their chin straps were buckled tight—a properly secured shako could prevent one from getting his head caved in by a blow from a musket or sword. General Cós led his troops to an area about two hundred yards from the Alamo’s northwest corner and the battery there. He positioned his eight line companies—since there were only four
fusilero
companies of the San Luis Potosí battalion present, both he and Colonel Duque would each assume command of two, in addition to their full battalions—close to three hundred men, in three parallel lines, each a hundred feet long and two ranks deep. The marksmen of the Aldama
cazador
company would support them as skirmishers. The other columns were deployed in a similar manner to the north, the east, and the south of the fort. The reserves under Colonel Amat waited at the north battery with His Excellency, his staff, and the battalion musicians. General Ramírez y Sesma’s cavalrymen and
presidiales,
several hundred yards southeast of the fort, had spread out to encircle it from north to south, outside of rifle distance.

The
soldados
lay with their chests to the ground in the cool morning air, weapons in hand, and waited as silently as possible. Some of those in the front ranks slung their muskets over their shoulders and gripped their ladders—ten ladders in each of the first two columns on the north side. A few in Cós’s column also held axes and crowbars, since there were well-fortified doors and gates and blocked-in windows here and there along the walls that might yield to a determined battering. Each man prayed to his Maker, and thought of his loved ones. Men would die in the assault, everyone knew.

At three a.m., near the cottonwood-lined Alameda to the southeast, the cavalry began saddling up. At four a.m., Santa Anna and Almonte quietly made their way across the river and around the fort to the entrenchment a few hundred yards north of the Alamo. The artillery would not be used—the danger of hitting their own infantry was too high—so the cannon there were pulled back from the embrasures to make room for Santa Anna and his staff to observe the attack. The reserves under Colonel Amat and the battalion bands were positioned nearby.

Sometime after five a.m., Mexican skirmishers crept up to the drowsy rebel pickets stationed in trenches outside the Alamo and dispatched them without alerting the fort’s sentinels. A short time later, at 5:30 a.m., Zapadores bugler José María González lifted his horn to his lips.

Two hundred yards north of the Alamo, Lieutenant Colonel de la Peña waited with Duque’s column. Like most of the men around him, he could not sleep. Inevitably, his thoughts were somber: that many of those around him who were now breathing would soon be dead, and that others, badly wounded, might wait for hours before aid arrived. And he hoped fervently that the anxiety and uncertainty would end, for the blood of their dead comrades, and Mexican honor, deserved vengeance.

But he was exhausted, and suffering from lack of sleep, and his eyes were just closing when he was jolted wide awake by the bugle sounding the charge, and he and the other men around him jumped to their feet and began to run toward the Alamo.

SIXTEEN

“That Terrible Bugle Call of Death”

A horrible carnage took place.

J
OSÉ
E
NRIQUE DE LA
P
EÑA

T
he door to Travis’s quarters along the west wall burst open. “Colonel Travis,” shouted officer of the day John Baugh as he ran into the room. “The Mexicans are coming!” There had been no warnings from the pickets stationed outside the fort, and the enemy was advancing upon them as he spoke.