The road to glory

by E. Alexander Powell

There was not so much as a flicker of hesitation. The defenders moved across the line as one. Even the wounded staggered over with the others, and those who were too badly wounded to walk dragged themselves across on hands and knees. Bowie, who was ill with fever, lay on his cot, too weak to move. “Boys,” he called feebly, “boys, I don’t believe I can get over alone ... won’t some of you help me?” So they carried him across the line, bed and all. It was a picture to stir the imagination, to send the thrills of patriotism chasing up and down one’s spine: the gloomy chapel with its adobe walls and raftered ceiling; the line of stern-faced, powder-grimed men in their tattered frontier dress, crimsoned bandages knotted about the heads of many of them; the fever-racked but indomitable Bowie stretched upon his cot; the young commander—for Travis was but twenty-seven—striding up and down, in his hand a naked sword, in his eyes the fire of patriotism.

On the morning of the 6th of March, before the sun had risen, Santa Anna launched his grand assault. Their bugles sounding the ominous notes of the degüello, which signified that no quarter would be given, the Mexican infantry, provided with scaling-ladders, swept forward at the double. Behind them rode the cavalry, with orders to sabre any man who flinched. As the Mexican columns came within range the Texans met them with a blast of lead which shrivelled and scattered them as the breath of winter shrivels and scatters the autumn leaves. The men behind the walls of the Alamo were master marksmen who had taken their degree in shooting from the stern college of the frontier, and they proved their marvellous proficiency that day. Crockett and Bonham aimed and fired as fast as rifles could be loaded and passed up to them, and at every spurt of flame a little, brown-faced man would drop with a crimson patch on the breast of his tunic or a round blue hole in his forehead. Any troops on earth would have recoiled in the face of that deadly fire, and Santa Anna’s were no exception. But the cavalry rode into them and at the point of their sabres forced them again to the attack. Again the shattered regiments advanced and attempted to place their ladders against the walls, but once more the sheer ferocity of the Texan defense sent them reeling back, bleeding and gasping. But there was a limit even to the powers of resistance of the Texans. The powder in their horns ran low; their arms grew weak from slaying. So, when the wave of brown-skinned soldiery rolled forward once again over its carpet of corpses, it topped and overflowed the desperately defended walls. The Texans, whose ammunition was virtually exhausted, were beaten back by sheer weight of numbers, but they rallied in the patio and, under the sky of Texas, made their final stand. What happened afterward is, and always must be, a matter of speculation. No one knows the story of the end. Even the number of victims is a matter of dispute to-day. Some say there were a hundred and eighty-three defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. Some assert that one woman escaped; some say two; others say none. Some declared that a negro servant got away; others declare with equal positiveness that he did not. Some state that half a dozen Americans stood at bay with their backs to the wall, Crockett among them. That the Mexican general, Castrillon, offered them their lives if they would surrender, and that, when they took him at his word, he ordered them shot down like dogs. (Since then a Mexican’s word has never been good for anything in Texas.) All we do know with any certainty of what went on within those blood-bespattered walls is that every American died fighting. Travis, revolver in one hand and sword in the other, went down amid a ring of men that he had slain. Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers who attempted to bayonet him as he lay all but helpless and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another before they could finish him. Crockett, so the Mexicans related afterward, fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed against the wall, but to get at him the Mexicans had to scramble over a heap of their own dead. No one will ever know how many of the enemy each of these raging, fighting, cornered men sent down the long and gloomy road before he followed them. The pavement of the patio was scarlet. The dead lay piled in heaps. Not an American remained alive. Death and Santa Anna held the place. As the inscription on the monument which was raised in later years to the defenders reads: “Thermopylæ had her messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none.” But before they died, the ninescore men who laid down their lives for Texas sent sixteen hundred Mexicans to their last accounting.

By order of Santa Anna, the bodies of the Texans were collected in a huge pile and burned, while the Mexican dead—sixteen hundred of them, please remember—were buried in the local cemetery. As Bowie’s body was brought out, General Cos remarked: “He was too brave a man to be burned like a dog—but never mind, throw him in.” As the Sabbath sun sank slowly into the west the smoke of the funeral pyre rose against the blood-red sky like a column draped in mourning. It marked something more than the end of a band of heroes; it marked the end of Mexican dominion above the Rio Grande.

Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another.

While Santa Anna was besieging the Alamo, General Urrea invaded eastern Texas for the purpose of capturing San Patricio, Refugio, and Goliad and thus stamping out the last embers of insurrection. It was not a campaign; it was a butchery. The little garrison of San Patricio was taken by surprise and every man put to death. At Refugio, however, a force of little more than a hundred men under Colonel Ward repulsed the Mexicans, whose loss in killed and wounded was double the entire number of the defenders. A few days later, however, Ward and his men, while falling back, were surrounded and taken prisoners. When Urrea’s column appeared before Goliad, Colonel Fannin, whose force was outnumbered six to one, ordered a retreat, feeling confident that the Mexicans, for whose fighting abilities the Texans had the utmost contempt, would not dare to follow them. But the Texans made the fatal mistake of underrating their adversaries, for, before they had fallen back a dozen miles, they found themselves hemmed in by two thousand Mexicans. Escape was out of the question, so Fannin formed his three hundred men in hollow square and prepared to put up one of those fight-till-the-last-man-falls resistances for which the Texans had become famous. Being cut off from water, however, and with a third of his men wounded, he realized that his chances of success were represented by a minus sign; so, when the Mexican commander, who had been heavily reinforced, offered to parole both officers and men and return them to the United States if they would surrender, Fannin accepted the offer and ordered his men to stack their arms. The terms of the surrender were written in both English and Spanish, and were signed by the ranking officers of both forces with every formality.

The Texan prisoners were marched back under guard to Goliad, the town they had so recently evacuated, and were confined in the old fort, where they were joined a few days later by Colonel Ward’s command, who, as you will remember, had also been captured. On the night of the 26th of March a despatch rider rode into Urrea’s camp bearing a message from Santa Anna. It contained an order for the murder of all the prisoners. The next day was Palm Sunday. At dawn the Texans were awakened and ordered to form ranks in the courtyard. They were then divided into four parties and marched off in different directions under heavy guard. They had not proceeded a mile across the prairies before they were halted and their captors deliberately poured volley after volley into them until not a Texan was left standing. Then the cavalry rode over the corpse-strewn ground, hacking with their sabres at the dead. Upward of four hundred Texans were slaughtered at Goliad. The defenders of the Alamo died fighting with weapons in their hands, but these men were unarmed and defenseless prisoners, butchered in cold blood in one of the most atrocious massacres of history.

With the extermination of the Texan garrisons, Santa Anna complacently assured himself that his work in the north was finished and prepared to return to the capital, where he was badly needed. It is never safe, you see, for a dictator to leave the chair of state for long, else he is likely to return and find a rival sitting in it. Now, however, Santa Anna felt that the Texan uprising was, to make use of a slangy but expressive phrase, all over but the shouting. But the Texans, as stout old John Paul Jones would have put it, had only just begun to fight. Learning that a force of Texan volunteers was mobilizing upon the San Jacinto, the “Napoleon of the West,” as Santa Anna modestly described himself, decided to delay his departure long enough to invade the country north of Galveston and put the finishing touches to the subjugation of Texas by means of a final carnival of blood and fire. Theoretically, everything favored the dictator. He had money; he had ample supplies of arms and ammunition; he had a force of trained and seasoned veterans far outnumbering any with which the Texans could oppose him. It was to be a veritable picnic of a campaign, a sort of butchers’ holiday. In making his plans, however, Santa Anna failed to take a certain gentleman into consideration. The name of that gentleman was Sam Houston.

The chronicles of our frontier record the name of no more picturesque and striking figure than Houston. The fertile brain of George A. Henty could not have made to order a more satisfactory or wholly improbable hero. Though his exploits are a part of history, they read like the wildest fiction. That is why, perhaps, the dry-as-dust historians make so little mention of him. The incidents in his life would provide a moving-picture company with material for a year. Born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his father, who had been an officer in the Revolution, answered to the last roll-call when young Sam had barely entered his teens. The support of a large and growing family thus falling upon the energetic shoulders of Mrs. Houston, she packed her household goods in a prairie-schooner and moved with her children to Tennessee, then upon the very edge of civilization. Here Sam, who had learned his “three R’s” in such poor schools as the Virginia of those early days afforded, attended a local academy for a time. Translations of the classics having fallen into his hands, his imagination was captured by the exploits of the heroes of antiquity, and he asked permission of the principal to study Latin, which, for some unexplainable reason, was curtly refused him. Whereupon he walked out of the academy, declaring that he would never repeat another lesson.

His family, who had scant sympathy with his romantic fancies, procured him a job as clerk in a crossroads store. Within a fortnight he was missing. After some months of anxiety his relatives learned that he was living among the Cherokee Indians across the Tennessee. When one of his brothers attempted to induce him to return home, young Sam answered that he preferred measuring deer tracks to measuring tape, and that, if he was not permitted to study Latin in the academy, he could at least dig it out for himself in the freedom of the woods. Houston dwelt for several years with his Cherokee friends, eventually being adopted as a son by the chieftain Oolooteka. Upon the outbreak of our second war with Great Britain he enlisted in the American army. Though his friends remonstrated with him for entering the army as a private soldier, his mother was made of different stuff. As he was leaving for the front she took down his father’s rifle and, with tear-dimmed eyes, handed it to her son. “Here, my boy,” she said bravely, though her voice quavered, “take this rifle and never disgrace it. Remember that I would rather that all my sons should lie in honorable graves than that one of them should turn his back to save his life. Go, and God be with you, but never forget that, while my door is always open to brave men, it is always shut to cowards.”