The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

Captain Travis tells them that all that remains to them is the choice of their death, and that they have but to decide in which manner of dying they will best serve their country. They can surrender and be shot down mercilessly, they can make a sortie and be butchered before they have gained twenty yards, or they can die fighting to the last, and killing their enemies until that last comes.

He gives them their choice, and then stooping, draws a line with the point of his sword in the ground from the left to the right of the rank.

“And now,” he says, “every man who is determined to remain here and to die with me will come to me across that line.”

Tapley Holland was the first to cross. He jumped it with a bound, as though it were a Rubicon. “I am ready to die for my country,” he said.

And then all but one man, named Rose, marched over to the other side. Colonel Bowie, lying wounded in his cot, raised himself on his elbow. “Boys,” he said, “don’t leave me. Won’t some of you carry me across?”

And those of the sick who could walk rose from the bunks and tottered across the line; and those who could not walk were carried. Rose, who could speak Spanish, trusted to this chance to escape, and scaling the wall of the Alamo, dropped into a ditch on the other side, and crawled, hidden by the cactus, into a place of safety. Through him we know what happened before that final day came. He had his reward.

Three days after this, on the morning of the 6th of March, Santa Anna brought forward all of his infantry, supported by his cavalry, and stormed the fortress. The infantry came up on every side at once in long, black solid rows, bearing the scaling-ladders before them, and encouraged by the press of great numbers about them.

But the band inside the mission drove them back, and those who held the ladders dropped them on the ground and ran against the bayonets of their comrades. A second time they charged into the line of bullets, and the second time they fell back, leaving as many dead at the foot of the ladders as there were standing at bay within the walls. But at the third trial the ladders are planted, and Mexicans after Mexicans scale them, and jump down into the pit inside, hundreds and hundreds of them, to be met with bullets and then by bayonet-thrusts, and at last with desperate swinging of the butt, until the little band grows smaller and weaker, and is driven up and about and beaten down and stamped beneath the weight of overwhelming and unending numbers. They die fighting on their knees, hacking up desperately as they are beaten and pinned down by a dozen bayonets, Bowie leaning on his elbow and shooting from his cot, Crockett fighting like a panther in the angle of the church wall, and Travis with his back against the wall to the west. The one hundred and seventy-two men who had held four thousand men at bay for two sleepless weeks are swept away as a dam goes that has held back a flood, and the Mexicans open the church doors from the inside and let in their comrades and the sunshine that shows them horrid heaps of five hundred and twenty-two dead Mexicans, and five hundred more wounded.

There are no wounded among the Texans; of the one hundred and seventy-two who were in the Alamo there are one hundred and seventy-two dead.

With an example like this to follow, it was not difficult to gain the independence of Texas; and whenever Sam Houston rode before his men, crying, “Remember the Alamo!” the battle was already half won.