Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
COMMANDANCY OF BÉXAR, 3 o’clock P.M. The enemy in large force are in sight. We want men and provisions. Send them to us. We have 150 men and are determined to defend the Alamo to the last. Give us assistance.
P.S. Send an express to San Felipe with news night and day.
Travis needed an express rider, and quick. Sutherland’s injuries clearly rendered him unfit for garrison duty. Travis asked him if he was capable of riding to Gonzales with the message and rallying the settlers there to come to his aid. The doctor said he was, and left at once. A few minutes later he ran into Smith, also on his way to Gonzales; his family and pregnant wife were already there, en route to New Orleans. By that time the Mexican cavalry had reached Main Plaza, so the two headed south on the Goliad road until they were out of sight, then struck east for Gonzales.
There was not much time left. Travis dispatched another express rider, cavalryman John B. Johnson, to Goliad with a similar request for aid. He had sent James Bonham there a week earlier, and for the same purpose. Now their plight was much more serious. They would hold out, he wrote Fannin, “until we can get assistance from you, which we expect you to forward immediately. In this extremity, we hope you will send us all the men you can spare promptly. We have one hundred and forty six men, who are determined
never to retreat
.” Fannin had previously ignored several requests for aid, so now Travis added a jab to his honor that could not be overlooked: “We deem it unnecessary to repeat to a brave officer, who knows his duty, that we call on him for assistance.” There were more than four hundred men at the presidio in Goliad. If Fannin responded quickly and sent even half of them, the Alamo garrison’s chances would be improved greatly.
Johnson jumped on a large bay, rode out of the lunette and through the Plaza de Valero, then turned southeast onto the road to Goliad.
Meanwhile Crockett, at Travis’s side, was assessing the situation. He was not the official commander of the Tennessee Mounted Volunteers—that honor belonged to Captain William B. Harrison, who had arrived, bringing several more men, a few days after Crockett—but since he had fallen in with them he had occasionally assumed some leadership duties, and this was no time to stand on ceremony. He asked Travis to assign him and his “twelve Tennessee boys” a position to defend. Travis gave the ex-congressman the 115-foot wooden palisade between the church and the low barracks, the most vulnerable part of the perimeter. Crockett’s renowned marksmanship could make a difference there.
M
IÑÓN LED HIS LINE OF
skirmishers over the Alazán Hills, past the Campo Santo cemetery, and into the western edge of Béxar. Crude
jacales
gave way to larger stone and adobe structures as they neared the center of town. The few remaining residents stayed hidden behind closed doors. The
cazadores
waded the shallow San Pedro Creek. The sprawling Plaza de Armas, the Military Plaza, lay less than two hundred feet ahead. They gripped their Baker rifles and Brown Bess muskets tighter.
But no American rebels were in sight, and the only occupants of the barracks were the dozen or so Mexican
soldados
—most of them from the battered Morelos Battalion—too seriously injured in the battle for Béxar in December to leave with General Cós, and the doctor and two interns who had remained behind to tend them in the hospital. The rebel flag had been taken down from the flagpole in the center of the plaza. Miñón ordered his veterans to secure the area and wait for His Excellency to arrive.
A
S THE
M
EXICAN TROOPS ENTERED
the west side of town a frenzy of activity engulfed the east. Somehow Bowie found the strength to lead a detachment of his men in breaking into several deserted
jacales
near the Alamo’s south gate in a last-minute search for food. They found eighty or ninety bushels of corn, which they carried into the fort. Travis scribbled a receipt for thirty beeves to a local man and ordered them driven into the cattle pen on the eastern side of the compound. The meager horse herd arrived soon after and was guided into the corral adjacent to it.
Half the garrison—artillerymen, primarily—was already quartered in the Alamo. The remainder, most of whom had been bunking in the presidial barracks on Military Plaza, quickly gathered their few possessions and trooped down Potrero Street and across the footbridge on the San Antonio River. As they trudged down the street toward the river they waved to friends among the
bexareños
standing in doorways watching them. “Poor fellows,” some of the women cried. “You will all be killed; what shall we do?” At his shop on Main Plaza, bald-headed Nat Lewis, a one-time whaling man from near Nantucket, jammed as many of the most valuable goods he owned into saddlebags and joined the line of people crossing the river.
A few of the rebels were still boys in their teens. Carlos Espalier, the mulatto boy informally adopted by James Bowie and his wife, was now seventeen years old. He had been born out of wedlock to a Louisiana widow and shunted off to live with his aunt in Béxar as a child. Bowie, a friend of the family, and his wife, Ursula, had taken the boy in years ago. At the age of thirteen he accompanied Bowie on the legendary San Saba expedition in 1831, when the Bowie brothers and their comrades held off repeated attacks by more than a hundred Indians. Now he marched into the Alamo to fight alongside the man he called Uncle.
At the Alamo, there was a great deal of activity but little panic. As the men evacuating Béxar neared the south entrance they could see an artillery captain named William Ward at one of the lunette’s cannon. The frequently inebriated Irishman now stood quietly at his post with his battery mates, sober and calm. Inside the compound, everyone was busy. Other gunners were readying the rest of the pieces. A few defenders were storing the bushels of corn in the rooms of the granary, on the north end of the long barracks. Several of the Tejanos were herding the cattle into the pen on the east side. Some of the volunteers who had sold their guns for drinking money—still hungover, no doubt—were scrambling to procure muskets or rifles at the small arms arsenal at the south end of the long barracks, and swearing up a blue streak doing it. Nat Lewis would never forget the vivid profanity he heard that day. He only stayed a short while, but he noticed that not one member of the garrison deserted. He had no horse, so he headed east toward Gonzales on the San Felipe road with his heavy saddlebags over his shoulders.
When the news of the Mexican army’s approach reached Captain Almeron Dickinson he galloped up to the Músquiz residence on Main Plaza and yelled for his wife. Susanna appeared with her daughter in her arms. “The Mexicans are upon us,” he told her. “Give me the babe, and jump up behind me.” She passed Angelina up to him and climbed up behind the saddle, then took her child. Mexican soldiers were across the plaza on Potrero Street, so they made their way to a ford on the south side of town. They splashed across the shallow crossing, then followed the river bend up past the deserted
jacales
of La Villita and into the fort, where Dickinson gave Susanna an embrace and a kiss and left to join his company.
Horace Alsbury had left recently on a journey east to the settlements, to find a wagon to remove his family and their belongings from town. He had not returned, so Juana Alsbury, Bowie’s sister-in-law, also moved into the Alamo, with her eleven-month-old child, Alejo, and her younger sister. Alsbury had placed his new wife under the care of Bowie; now Bowie was under hers.
A dozen or so other Tejano women and children made their way into the Alamo as well, among them Juana Losoya Melton, the new wife of Lieutenant Eliel Melton, a Nacogdoches merchant who served as the garrison’s quartermaster. Her mother, Concepción Losoya, was there; so was her brother, defender Toribio Losoya, with his wife and three children. Toribio had been born and raised in one of the Alamo houses, and had still lived in it as a private in the Alamo presidial company; he had left his birthplace only when he had joined the rebels. A few black slaves and servants, two of them Bowie’s, entered also. Up on the parapets, men jeered at some of the fleeing merchants as they made their way across the river and out of town, carrying on wagons and their backs as much of their merchandise as they could.
John Smith had left Sutherland in Crockett’s care to run by his own place. Then he raced to his friend Gregorio Esparza’s house on North Flores Street, north of the plazas, to warn him. Esparza had fought in the battle of Béxar, and Smith was godfather to Esparza’s youngest son, Francisco. The family had been preparing to leave for San Felipe after a friend offered the use of his wagon and team. Now it was too late for that.
“Well, I’m going to the fort,” Esparza told his wife, Anna.
“Well, if you go, I’m going along, and the whole family,” she said. There were four children, including Enrique, the boy who had learned the song from the
norteamericanos
.
The family carried everything they could and made their way down Potrero Street. As they crossed the footbridge they could hear the drums of the Mexican army beating on Military Plaza.
By early evening, when the last courier had been dispatched and all but a few of the rebels were inside the mission, the defenders watched grimly as, five hundred yards across the river, a blood-red banner was hoisted atop the bell tower of the Church of San Fernando. Everyone knew its meaning:
degüello
—no quarter. No mercy would be extended. When the flag was brought to Travis’s attention, he ordered a blast from the eighteen-pounder, to the cheers of the gunners at their posts. It was a statement of intent, its meaning as clear as that of the flag: defiance.
The Mexicans quickly unlimbered two howitzers and fired a round from each in response, then another—fused bombs that would explode upon impact, usually to little effect.
Soldados
were still pouring into Béxar from the west. From their position on a slight rise across the river, the men on the Alamo walls could see them as they filed into the two plazas flanking the church. There looked to be at least a thousand, including some lancers. A large cloud of dust downriver, somewhere near Mission Concepción, suggested the presence of hundreds more.
Siege etiquette of the time dictated that the attacking army offer the besieged force the opportunity to surrender. A
soldado
displaying a white flag walked down to the footbridge over the river. With him was one of Santa Anna’s staff officers.
In the mission, someone told the fatigued Bowie that there had been a Mexican bugle call just before the cannon shot—probably a request for a parley. When he learned of the large numbers of enemy soldiers, it gave him pause. The rebels were seriously outnumbered, perhaps ten to one. It might be worth exploring possible terms—perhaps a parole like the one they had generously extended to Cós in December. After his foraging exertions, Bowie was exhausted and unable to write, but he and Juan Seguín crafted a message to the invaders requesting a parley. When the Tejano captain finished the note he handed it to Bowie, who managed to sign it in a shaky hand, and noticed that Seguín had ended the missive with the traditional “Dios y Federación México.” Bowie crossed out the last two words and replaced them with “Texas.”
Green Jameson took the letter, mounted a horse, and rode through the front gate and past several
jacales
bordering the west side of Plaza de Valero. He held up his own white cloth as he approached the footbridge, 220 yards from the Alamo. He dismounted and walked over the bridge and handed the communiqué to the officer there, who was none other than Colonel Juan Almonte, well known throughout the colonies after his extensive fact-finding mission in 1834, which had alerted the Mexicans to the colonists’ rebellious potential. A decent and cultured man, Almonte had been educated in a Catholic school in New Orleans and spoke English fluently. Squarely built, about 5 feet 6 inches tall, with a round, copper-colored face that betrayed his mestizo blood, he was a good-natured sort. Green could hardly have found more sympathetic hands into which to deliver Bowie’s message. Almonte glanced at it, then gave it to the soldier to deliver to Santa Anna.
The letter enraged His Excellency. Perhaps further angered by the insolent claim of “God and Texas,” he ordered an aide, Colonel José Batres, to write an uncompromising reply.
At the footbridge, Almonte and Jameson talked while they waited for the response. Jameson revealed to the colonel the bad state of affairs in the fort, and his personal hope that some honorable conditions could be negotiated. When the reply arrived, Jameson carried it back to the mission.
“The Mexican army,” read the response, “cannot come to terms with rebellious foreigners to whom there is no other recourse left, if they wish to save their lives, than to place themselves immediately at the disposal of the Supreme Government from whom alone they may expect clemency after some considerations are taken up.”
An unconditional surrender at discretion—this meant no guarantees of safety, and possibly mass executions, as had happened twenty-three years ago, when Arredondo had quashed the Republican Army of the North and hanged as many as five hundred rebels and citizens alike. The terms were clearly unacceptable, and Travis, infuriated at Bowie’s unilateral decision to request a parley, now sent his own emissary, Albert Martin, down to the bridge. Almonte was still there. This message was oral: if Almonte wished to speak with Travis, he would be received with pleasure. But Almonte could only reiterate His Excellency’s terms, and did so.
As his comrades watched from the mission’s ramparts, Martin rode back to the fort with the response. When Travis heard the message, he gathered the men together. In a stirring speech, he swore that he would resist to the end. If he had any doubts about the mood of the garrison, they were dispelled now: he received a roar of confirmation in reply.