Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
“This made many a man who had not known him before Colonel Crockett’s friend,” remembered Dr. Sutherland.
Crockett lodged at the large stone house of Ramón Músquiz, on Main Plaza, where the doctor and the Dickinsons were staying. His arrival brought some material benefits as well as a boost to morale: Susanna was able to make some money doing the laundry of Crockett and other volunteers.
A few days later, Neill received news by express of an illness in his family at Bastrop. His two boys, Samuel and George, were serving in one of Robert Williamson’s ranging companies, but his wife, Harriett, and daughter, Mary, were alone at their homestead. He decided to take a furlough to attend to the problem, promising to be back in twenty days at most. At least one man suspected another motive for Neill’s departure: Dr. Sutherland believed he was riding to San Felipe to obtain part of the rumored $5,000 loan to Texas for the Alamo garrison’s use. True or not, Neill left knowing the post was in much better shape than when he had inherited it—reinforcements had begun to arrive, Jameson and his crews had made the Alamo more defensible, and strong leaders such as Bowie, Crockett, and Travis were on hand.
Before he left, Neill signed discharges for more than a dozen volunteers who had decided to leave in the next few days—for most of them, their two months was up, and they had received no pay, clothes, or provisions. He also transferred command of the regulars to Travis, the ranking officer at Béxar. Travis also inherited John Baugh as adjutant. The thirty-three-year-old Virginian had been elected lieutenant by his fellow New Orleans Greys, and after the fierce fight for Béxar, Neill had chosen him as his executive officer and promoted him to captain. He was a reliable and loyal man, and not a Bowie acolyte—possibly one of the reasons a problem of command arose.
Most of the men of the garrison, all save Travis’s mounted company and a few others, were true volunteers who had remained in Béxar after everyone else had left. They had acknowledged Neill as commander because he had been there from the first, and had proven himself worthy of their respect after four long months of battle and hardship. Bowie, their inspirational leader, also acknowledged his command. They had no such basis of trust with Travis, however. True, he had led a spy company during the siege of Béxar, but he had left after only a month or so. They had not left, and neither had Neill, as their ragged clothing would attest. Besides, Travis was only twenty-six, and not an easy man to warm to. And he was a newly commissioned cavalry officer, with no experience commanding a fort and a formidable array of artillery.
The final sticking point was one the volunteers had been touchy about since the beginning. Travis was a regular army officer, and they had repeatedly made it clear that they would only obey a commander they had elected themselves. As a result, only one of the volunteer companies agreed to serve under him. Some of the men went to Crockett to see if he was interested in taking command. Crockett refused—he was there, he explained, to assist Travis. “Me and my Tennessee boys have come to help Texas as privates,” he reiterated.
Travis, appreciative of his “truly awkward and delicate” position, wrote Smith the day after Neill’s departure requesting orders. But a reply, if it ever came, would be a week away at best, so on the same day, he issued an order for an election. Only the volunteers voted, naming Bowie as their choice.
Like most men of the time, Jim Bowie imbibed occasionally, but he had never been known as a heavy drinker, as had his friend Sam Houston. Now, though, Bowie responded to his election in an uncharacteristic and spectacularly unfortunate manner. Perhaps the grief in his heart since his wife’s death had reached a spillover point as a result of his quartering at the Veramendi house, where they had lived as newlyweds and where the reminders of her presence were constant. The cumulative aches of decades of serious injuries, illness, and wear to his body, or even the pressure of gaining authority, may have led to the snap. In any case, he proceeded to go on a massive drinking bout, accompanied by unseemly behavior.
During his embarrassing two-day rampage, Bowie remained roaring drunk. Out of control, though in command, he told his men to stop the carts of families on their way out of town and prevent them from leaving. He ordered the release from prison of a Mexican convicted of theft by a twelve-man jury—of which he had been a member. He also freed one of Travis’s cavalrymen found guilty of mutiny, to loud cheers from the volunteers. For good measure, he set at liberty all prisoners, Tejano or Anglo, who had been placed on work details. When Juan Seguín, acting as the town judge, threw one convict back into jail, a furious Bowie confronted him and demanded the prisoner’s release. When Seguín refused, Bowie sent to the Alamo for troops, many of whom were also drunk. The soldiers paraded around Main Plaza under arms—those who had them; some had sold their guns for alcohol—“in a tumultuous and disorderly manner,” as Adjutant Baugh put it in a letter to Governor Smith two days later, which expressed his support for Travis. “Things… have become intolerable,” he wrote. Travis threatened to move his few loyal troops out of town.
Just when the garrison needed strong leadership—spies rode into town that day with another report of a thousand Mexican soldiers on the Rio Grande poised to invade Texas—a serious schism had erupted. Travis wrote Smith again begging to be relieved of command: “If I did not feel my honor & that of my country compromised I would leave here instantly for some other point with the troops under my command as I am unwilling to be responsible for the drunken irregularities of any man…. I do not solicit the command of this Post,” he continued. “I will do it if it be your orders for a time until an artillery officer can be sent here.” Fannin’s commission was in the artillery, and he was only ninety-five miles away, with more than four hundred men. The solution seemed obvious.
Travis went on to request more troops—regulars, to be specific—and he revealed that, despite his disagreements with Bowie, Béxar and its makeshift mission fortress had got into his bones also. “It is more important to occupy this Post than I imagined when I last saw you,” he told Smith. “It is the key of Texas from the Interior without a footing here the enemy can do nothing against us in the Colonies.”
But before Travis could complete the move of his troops away from town, Bowie sobered up and made amends for his behavior, and the two came to an agreement. The express rider carrying the previous day’s letters from Travis and Baugh was detained until he could be given another dispatch, again requesting money and reinforcements, and ending with this pronouncement:
By an understanding of today, Col. J. Bowie has the command of the volunteers of the Garrison, & Col. W.B. Travis, of the Regulars & Volunteer cavalry.
All general orders, and correspondence, will hence forth be signed by both, until Col. Neill’s return—
The letter was in Travis’s hand but signed by both men—Travis as commandant of cavalry and Bowie as commandant of volunteers. The crisis was averted, at least for now.
Save for one scrawled signature a week hence, Bowie would not sign any more official correspondence. Some sickness had invaded his body—respiratory, it seems, from the descriptions given later by those who knew him and cared for him—and would soon render him bedridden. Sutherland would later describe the illness as “being of a peculiar nature… not to be cured by an ordinary course of treatment.” Other witnesses would describe it as typhoid fever, typhoid pneumonia, or consumption—tuberculosis. Whatever the diagnosis, or lack of one, the final result was an incapacitated Jim Bowie, confined to his bed in the Veramendi house, suffering from an illness that might prove fatal. His sister-in-law Juana Alsbury began to minister to him.
So Travis gradually took over the duties of running the garrison. This time there was little resistance from the volunteers, so vociferous just a few days ago, and there was no election. Bowie, the man they had elected, had agreed to a cocommandancy, and now he was increasingly incapacitated and unable to rise to the demands of the position. Willingly or not, he ceded authority to the young lieutenant colonel.
One of Bowie’s last acts as commander involved the near-constant stream of messengers to the east. One morning in mid-February, Crockett and Robert Evans, the tall, black-haired ordnance chief, along with a couple of young volunteers, made their way to the high ground east of town, where many of the horses grazed. They met up with two other soldiers, who asked Crockett if he thought there was any chance of a fight—if not, they were going home. Crockett pointed out that men were leaving as fast as others came in, and remarked that “if he were in command, he would have given them shit long ago,” remembered a recent arrival to Béxar named David Harman. They needed someone to “carry orders back to hurry up the drafted men and all soldiers at home,” said Crockett. Harman, a stripling of only a hundred pounds, volunteered for the mission. Back in town, Crockett brought him to Bowie, who remarked that Harman looked awfully young to be a soldier. Harman insisted he could handle the job, and Bowie gave him dispatches for the recruiting officers at San Felipe and other towns and sent him on his way.
Under Travis, the work details continued—most important, the shoring up of the adobe walls of the mission, particularly the badly damaged north wall. Jameson had devised a cribbing of log braces along the entire extent, and instructed his men to pack earth between the wall and the wooden supports and bank earth against the exterior. It was nowhere near finished, but a good start had been made on the northeast end. The men dismantled Antonio Saez’s blacksmith shop, in La Villita, near the Alamo’s south gate, and carried the materials into the compound; old Saez had been repairing their guns since the battle of Béxar, and lately he had been busy preparing
langrage
and canister shot for the artillery. And sixty-five head of cattle were bought from a local rancher at twelve dollars a head. Travis, lacking funds, could only give the man a signed claim for his $780.
Few of the men had any money, but occasionally they scraped together a few coins. Anna Esparza, the wife of Gregorio Esparza, one of Juan Seguín’s men, and her oldest son, eleven-year-old Enrique, carried earthen jars full of food over the San Antonio River footbridge to the Alamo. While his mother sold the Americans tamales and beans, they taught the boy a ditty, and laughed and gave him centavos when he sang:
We are the boys so handy,
We’ll teach Santa Anna to fear
Our Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Every morning Travis walked from his quarters on Main Plaza to the footbridge across the shallow river and into the Alamo. The last house before the river belonged to Ambrosio Rodríguez, who was friendly to the rebel cause and another of Juan Seguín’s horsemen. Travis often stopped to talk to Rodríguez and his wife. Years later the couple’s son would recall the tall American. “Colonel Travis was a fine man of more than ordinary height,” he remembered. “He was a very popular man and was well liked by everyone.” When the elder Rodríguez heard a report that Santa Anna was on the way to Béxar with a well-organized army of seven thousand men, he told Travis and advised him to abandon the town and retreat into the interior of Texas. Travis refused to believe it. Cós had been defeated just two months before. There was no way Santa Anna could have organized such a large force in so short a time.
The scarcity of horses complicated the scouting duties, but Travis kept as many spies out in the field as he could. Most of them were Juan Seguín’s Tejanos, who continued to bring in reports of a large Mexican army on the Rio Grande. Some of Seguín’s men requested permission to help move their families out of town, and on February 21 a dozen or so received discharges—a gracious move, but one that further compromised scouting. The reliable Erastus “Deaf” Smith, recently recovered from an injury sustained in the December assault on Béxar, had ranged to a point a few miles from the river, where he spotted Santa Anna’s Vanguard Brigade preparing to march north. But Smith rode out of town on February 15 to assist his family, who had departed for the East months earlier, and few non-Tejanos were familiar enough with the area to scout very far from town.
On his way, Deaf Smith agreed to stop in San Felipe first to see Henry Smith and apprise him of the situation in Béxar. But Governor Smith, who had no control over the other two Texian forces—Fannin’s at Goliad, and what remained of the Matamoros expedition, commanded by Grant and Johnson—offered no resources, given his almost nonexistent authority. And acting governor Robinson was nearly as hamstrung: the General Council, which had not mustered a quorum since January 18, had substituted an advisory committee of several men that made recommendations to the governor. That board dwindled to two men by mid-February. Some of their suggestions were implemented, some not, but by the end of January, the committee had come to the conclusion that there were enough men at Béxar (likely misunderstanding Neill’s request of January 14 that a hundred men be transferred to his command from Goliad or somewhere else), and told Robinson so. The word went out to recruiting agents throughout Texas to stop directing volunteers there.
A
T
B
ÉXAR
, small groups of men came and went. Eleven volunteers tired of garrison duty left to scout the area east around Cibolo Creek for their bounty land. A few days later, the garrison’s two elected delegates to the convention, Jesse Badgett and Samuel Maverick, prepared to depart for Washington. Badgett left first, but Maverick, who had moved to Béxar a few months before the siege, remained in town to buy another tract of land—his fifth since the rebels had taken command of the city—and did not leave until February 19. John Sutherland continued to assist Dr. Amos Pollard with the two dozen or so sick and wounded men as Pollard moved all of them into the second story of the old
convento
building, where the hospital was located—and found to his surprise that most of the necessary medical instruments were already there.