Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
Bowie spent little time with his young bride, but she bore him two children, who died soon after birth. When an outbreak of cholera spread across the Mississippi Valley and then farther west into Texas, he was bedridden in Natchez with a bout of malaria. He was still recuperating early in November when he received news of Ursula’s death in Monclova, where her family had fled from the cholera. Ursula, her mother, her father, and her adopted brother all died from the disease within days of reaching the city. The Bowies had been married for only two and a half years.
The news almost destroyed the weakened Bowie, and although he made a complete recovery, at least physically, more than one man would detect tears in his eyes when his late wife’s name was mentioned. When he was able, he left Natchez and returned to Béxar in early 1834. After a months-long expedition into far north Texas, in June he traveled to Monclova, the new capital of Coahuila y Tejas, where he eventually amassed—legally, though aided by a few corrupt politicians—more than half a million acres of Texas land. If the Mexican immigration laws loosened up, Bowie could make a fortune in sales to immigrants, even without the eleven-league leases. He spent almost a year in Monclova, wheeling and dealing with several other speculators.
When Santa Anna, now virtually a dictator, got wind of the massive land grabs effected by Bowie and other speculators, he had their claims annulled, and Bowie and several others were arrested in late May 1835 and taken to Matamoros. A couple of weeks later Bowie and his friend Blas Despallier escaped when their captors relaxed their guard. They made their way overland to Texas, eventually reaching Nacogdoches in October.
Bowie’s treatment at the hands of the Mexican authorities—and, undoubtedly, the loss of his potential fortune—pushed him further toward those clamoring for war and independence. Santa Anna’s decision to reopen the customs houses in Texas and enforce the collection of import duties had been unpopular with a populace increasingly at odds with their Mexican hosts. After Travis seized the Anahuac garrison, Texian settlements large and small began to organize local militias in preparation for a major confrontation that appeared increasingly inevitable. Within days of Bowie’s arrival in Nacogdoches, a hundred men gathered in the town square and elected Bowie “colonel” of their hastily formed militia, an honorary rank often bestowed upon a leader of a group of armed men in the South—and a recognition of a man’s leadership, charisma, and popularity, qualities Bowie possessed in spades.
He and his men marched to a warehouse the Mexicans used as an armory and broke in, arming themselves with muskets. Nothing came of it; the majority of the locals seemed less than excited about the idea of armed revolt. But a week or so later, Bowie learned of the whereabouts of dispatches directed to the Mexican consul in New Orleans. He engineered the packet’s seizure, then read the letters aloud before a town meeting in the Nacogdoches public square. Besides arrest orders for Travis and his cohorts, the dispatch discussed the possibility of a military occupation of Texas—news that pushed the enraged townsmen closer to action.
By late summer Bowie was on the road again, this time eastward, to his old stomping grounds in Louisiana. After several weeks spent visiting friends and talking up investment schemes, he returned to east Texas by early October with some associates. He had been there barely a week or two, tying up loose business ends, when the news arrived of an outbreak of hostilities in Gonzales, and a Texian army mobilizing for action. That was all Jim Bowie needed. He and his companions saddled up and rode west.
Nothing but the certainty of hard fighting, and that shortly, could have kept us together so long.
B
URR
D
UVAL
T
he settlers of
empresario
Green DeWitt’s colony, immediately west of Austin’s colony, and DeWitt’s only town, Gonzales, were an especially hardy breed. They had to be, for as the westernmost Anglo settlement in the province, DeWitt’s colony made a tempting target for predatory Indian tribes such as the Tawakonis, the Wacos, and the largest and fiercest, the Comanches. And because it was the settlement farthest from the coast, its store of supplies, both essential and nonessential, was sparse. But the land in the grant, stretching northwest along the Guadalupe River, was as fine and fertile as any in Texas. “It is a remarkably healthy and pleasant country, well watered… with valuable streams for mills and a forest of pine timber,” observed an early visitor. “All the hills and dales, woods, and prairies, abound with buffalo, deer and turkey and occasionally black cattle for milk and work, and mustangs for riding.”
The town of Gonzales had been laid out a decade earlier, on the west bank of the Guadalupe River, about seventy-six miles east of Béxar and eighty miles west of San Felipe. The first few years of its existence were tenuous ones. There were frequent Indian attacks, and most of the colony’s early settlers came in from their fields at the end of the day and remained overnight with their families in the small fort near the river constructed for just that purpose. But a decade of steady immigration and enterprise had transformed Gonzales, and though Indians were still a constant threat, flocking to the fort was no longer a nightly ritual. By 1835 the village comprised more than thirty structures, including two small hotels, a kitchen, two blacksmith shops, a few mercantile establishments, and the requisite grogshop or two—one, named Luna, was just a few yards behind a small kitchen and restaurant owned by erstwhile moonshiner Adam Zumwalt, known as Red Adam. Most were only crude one-story log buildings, but Gonzales was beginning to look like a town. A large schoolhouse was under construction, and there was even a hat factory opened by New Yorker George Kimble and his business partner, Almeron Dickinson, a blacksmith from Tennessee whose comely young wife, Susanna, had recently given birth to a daughter they named Angelina. The hats were made of wool and rabbit fur—“not very handsome, but serviceable,” remembered one DeWitt colonist.
There were other signs of civilization. Early the previous summer, the town’s first ball had been held in the small inn owned by Thomas Miller, considered the richest man in town. Folks came from forty miles around, many of them displaying admission cards that read: A
DMIT
M
R. ______ AND SWEETHEART TO BALL AT
M
ILLER
H
OTEL
. Women wore fancy white dresses for the first time in years. In the large dining area serving as the ballroom, candles on boards stuck in the walls cast a warm glow as George Washington “Wash” Cottle and Dr. John Tinsley fiddled away, Cottle calling the sets of Virginia reels, cotillions, and other dances and singing:
We’ll dance all night
Till broad daylight
And go home with the gals in the morning.
Everyone, young and old, danced. The floor was so crowded that the dancers had to take the floor in two shifts. The ball went on until eight the next morning. Everyone left saying they’d had the time of their lives.
Until the fall of 1835, DeWitt colonists had condemned previous revolutionary acts of the pro-independence War Dog party. Their
ayuntamiento
had refused to attend the 1832 convention for fear that the citizens might be associated with the independence movement. They had even passed a resolution of loyalty to Mexico in July. Their sentiments began to change in September, though, after twenty-five Mexican soldiers brazenly appropriated Zumwalt’s store to quarter for the night; for no apparent reason, a Mexican soldier used his musket to bloody the head of colonist Jesse McCoy—recently elected second lieutenant of the Gonzales militia—as the young Tennessean attempted to make his way into Zumwalt’s storeroom. That act, combined with news of Santa Anna’s dictatorial takeover and brutal subjugation of the rebellious state of Zacatecas in May—news that was gleaned from occasional newspaper accounts and a steady stream of stories from riders along the Béxar–San Felipe road—considerably jaundiced the colonists’ views.
Thus, in late September, when a Mexican corporal and five soldiers rode from Béxar to Gonzales with an empty oxcart and appeared at the river’s edge opposite town, requesting the return of their cannon, the townspeople were not as eager as they might have been to hand it over. The gun in question was only a six-pounder, and was crudely mounted on a makeshift wooden caisson. Green DeWitt had requested it in 1831 to help defend his town against Indian attacks. It was an old piece of artillery, showing visible damage and evidence of crude repairs, and was good for little more than a loud noise and a large belch of smoke—the better, it was hoped, to scare off the Indians. But the Texians knew that the authorities in Béxar had no need of it; there were several larger cannon at the Alamo, the old Franciscan mission east of town now home to a presidial unit charged primarily with protecting the locals against Comanche raids.
Their position was made known when the corporal and his men were disarmed by a dozen townsmen and taken prisoner, then paroled back to Béxar. The townspeople quickly called a meeting at which they discussed the ramifications of their actions. They knew more soldiers, many more, would return, and soon. But they voted to continue their resistance; only three citizens were in favor of returning the six-pounder. The colonists began to prepare for the ensuing troubles, and most of those on the west side of the Guadalupe moved across the river into town, or into the woods or upriver to hide.
A few days later Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea, the military commander in Béxar, sent one hundred dragoons under Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda to secure the piece. The lieutenant had been stationed at Béxar for more than a dozen years, and had commanded the Alamo presidial company for fourteen months—he owned two small houses on the northwest corner of the old mission, where he lived with his wife and family. But he had never been ordered to commandeer a cannon. Besides, he was a federalist himself. Nevertheless, he led his troop out of the compound and toward the small Anglo settlement two good days’ ride east.
Though about a hundred colonists and their families lived in the area, only eighteen were on hand when the lieutenant arrived at the banks of the rain-swollen Guadalupe on September 29. They had hidden all the canoes and the ferryboat on the east side of the river. When Castañeda yelled across the river and demanded the cannon, the Texians, to gain time, told him the
alcalde
was not at home, but would return the next evening. The
presidiales
fell back and bivouacked a half mile from the river.
While this small force prevented Castañeda and his men from crossing the Guadalupe and entering town, express riders galloped north and east, requesting reinforcements. Militiamen from Bastrop (which had been renamed Mina in 1834; its name would officially become Bastrop again in 1837), located on the upper Colorado River, along with militiamen from San Felipe, Washington, and other settlements on the Brazos, quickly organized and rode to Gonzales. When the colonists had initially confronted the small group of soldiers who had come for the cannon, they had sent the soldiers back to Béxar with a message intended to confuse the Mexican commanders about the situation. This had bought some precious time, and now more such delaying action by the town’s leaders gained them another day. By September 30, a hundred men had gathered in the settlement, most of them congregating at Winslow Turner’s double log hotel; the next day, there were 168 men. Green DeWitt’s daughter Naomi offered up her wedding dress for a proper flag—a white banner bearing the words
COME AND TAKE IT
above the outline of an unmounted cannon.
Castañeda moved his company upriver in search of a crossing. That night, to the howling of a distant wolf pack, the Texians crossed the Guadalupe with the six-pounder, now mounted on a pair of oxcart wheels. They decided to take the offensive. At four the next morning, in a dense fog, a skirmish broke out when the Mexican pickets fired on the Texian advance guard. After a parley that produced nothing, James C. Neill, a Bastrop man who had served under Andrew Jackson against the Creek Indians, fired the first cannon shot of the resistance. The Texians opened fire and charged. The Mexicans, who had been instructed to retire if the opposing force was superior, wheeled around and fled, having already lost one soldier.
Over the next week, men continued to arrive in Gonzales, until about three hundred colonists, embracing a dozen or so militia companies from various settlements, were gathered there. Turner’s two-story hotel continued to serve as the rallying point. Each company elected its own captain, but none recognized a commander in chief. There was no consensus of opinion regarding Mexico: “Some were for independence; some for the constitution of 1824; and some for anything, just so it was a row,” remembered one volunteer. The one thing they agreed on was the need to march to Béxar and finish the job. General Martín Perfecto de Cós, commander of the Eastern Interior Provinces, was probably there by now, with seven hundred troops or so. The son of a doctor, Cós was a small, elegant man—he wore gold earrings and traveled with gold candlesticks—and a longtime supporter of Santa Anna. Most believed he would march to Gonzales to take care of the problem himself. But save for their effective cavalry and the recently arrived Morelos Battalion, a regular army unit of two hundred veteran infantrymen, the Texians were unimpressed with the Mexicans’ show of force. Many troops sent to the northern border states were convicts given the thorny choice of prison or Texas, and the Mexican army in general was underfed, underpaid, undersupplied, and unmotivated to fight a war few of them understood.