At length an assault was lodged. The swart Mexicans, more in terror than in exultation, poured across the broken wall. In the hospital lay forty helpless men, each with his rifle at his side. These, sick and crippled, broken-bodied, iron-hearted, poured their last volley into their assailants as they came in. A cannon was discharged down the room and nearly a score of the crippled and sick were blown to pieces. Outside, in the open space, the lances of the Mexicans reached farther than the clubbed rifles or the bitter, biting knives of the stalwart Americans, now raging in their last tremendous, magnificent and awful Baresark rage.
No one knows the story of the end. Even the number of the victims is matter of dispute to-day. Some say there were a hundred and eighty-three defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. Some say one woman escaped; some say two. Some declare that one negro servant got away; some say two. The state of Texas adopted the “Alamo baby,” but the Alamo baby did not see Crockett fall. There are different reports. Some state that there were six Americans left hemmed up against the wall, and that the Mexican general, Castrillon, called upon them to surrender. They did so, Crockett being one of the six. Confronting the Mexican commander, they were treacherously ordered to be shot down. It is said that Crockett, bowie knife in hand, sprang with all his force for the throat of the Mexican general, but was cut down or shot down with the others, “his face even in death wreathed in an expression of contempt and scorn at such treachery.”
All this is but imagination; and there is all reason to suppose that there never was any surrender of these six last survivors. The commoner story is that Crockett fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed against the wall, before him lying the bodies of some twenty Mexicans. The usual impression is that he killed these twenty Mexicans himself before he was cut down, but this is perhaps the result of emotional writing. No one knows how many foes had fallen to his arm. No one can tell how many Mexicans each of these raging, fighting men destroyed before he himself went down. Earlier in the siege Crockett recounts picking off five cannoneers one after the other. He tells how the Bee Hunter and Thimblerig did their sharpshooting, how the Pirate died of wounds received in a sortie, how the Bee Hunter—a most unlikely thing—burst into poesy and song at the hoisting of the Texas flag. Some of these things have too unreal a sound. There is something not quite Crockett, though à la Crockett, in the conclusion of Crockett’s so-called, or rather alleged, diary:
“March 5.—Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! throughout the day. No time for memorandums now. Go ahead. Liberty and independence forever!”
These are the last recorded words of dear Davy Crockett. It is probable in the extreme that he never wrote them. It is unlikely to an equal degree that, in all the turmoil of the Alamo fight, he could deliberately have kept a diary, or that it could have been preserved after all the horrible details of that bloody and disastrous conflict. As to the end of Davy Crockett, there is and has been no living human being who could speak with absolute accuracy and authenticity. Bloody San Jacinto, the field where the cry “Remember the Alamo!” was the watchword of a dire and just revenge, left but few Mexican eye-witnesses of the Alamo.
Be that as it may, we know that Davy Crockett died fighting, that he died with his face to the enemy, like the brave man that he was, undaunted, unafraid. No politics now, no statesmanship, no little ambitions now for Davy Crockett. He was once more the child of the wilderness, stark, savage, exultant, dreadful, one more of those Titanic characters that swept away a weaker population, beat down all opposition, conquered the American wilderness and made way for an American civilization.
The study of Crockett’s life shows us an America yet loose and scattered, not knit together into a national whole; and the political problems of that day were still those arising from geography. Backwoods Davy was after all not so poor a thinker, nor so far from getting to the marrow of things. After his visit to the North, and his reconciliation to the doctrines of a protective tariff, he makes one comment which, while it may not settle political argument, ought to teach a national courtesy and a human tolerance on both sides in any national difference.
“If Southerners would visit the North,” he says, “it would give different ideas to them who have been deluded and spoken in strong terms of dissolving the Union.” A trifle ungrammatical this, perhaps, but startling reading, when one remembers that it was recorded in 1834. Again we find our independent thinker discussing freely the questions of transportation, which were then and always have been so important in this country. He was opposed to Jackson in the first place because Jackson “vetoed the bill for the Maysville road.” He was opposed to Van Buren because he “voted against the continuance of the national road through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and against appropriations for its preservation.” He opposed Van Buren further because he “voted in favor of toll gates on the national road, demanding a tribute from the West for the right to pass on her own highways, constructed out of her own money,—a thing never heard of before.”
Crockett’s changes of residence, ever drifting farther to the westward in his native state, and his final long pilgrimage to the Southwest, where he certainly, though his autobiography does not so state, visited different parts of Texas and the Indian nations, is index of the tendency of the times. The West of that day is the South of to-day. Thus, a writer of 1834 states, “The West is settled by representatives from every country, but it is very largely indebted for its inhabitants to Virginia, Georgia and the two Carolinas.” History and our census maps show us that the day of the upper West was yet to come. Boone and his like had led across the Appalachians. Crockett and his like had crossed the Mississippi. The march toward the Rockies was now steadily and determinedly begun, under what difficulties and with what results we shall presently observe.