A Time to Stand: The Epic of the Alamo

  Dolphin Floyd, Dr. Pollard, all the others quickly succumbed. The “Texas fever,” as it was called, swept New Orleans and spread across the South. In Tennessee, a 26-year-old blacksmith named Almeron Dickinson told his bride to start packing. In Kentucky, Green B. Jameson, a lawyer with a mechanical bent, gathered his things too. Throughout the Mississippi Valley men scrawled “G. T. T.” (Gone To Texas) on their cabin doors and headed for the border.

  Soon the whole country knew. On a remote Missouri farm, Andrew Kent explained it all to his wife Elizabeth and began laying plans. Hiram Williamson, a footloose Philadelphia bachelor, decided there was room for him too. In Athens, Georgia, a wild 18-year-old named William Malone went on a drinking spree … couldn’t face his martinet father … set off the following day. In Illinois, young Jonathan Lindley also got ready to go. His father had heard that the Mexican government gave families an extra 160 acres for every child—and the Lindleys had eleven.

  Land was the magnet, but most of these people weren’t just speculators hoping to turn a quick profit. Lewis Duel was a Manhattan plasterer … Marcus Sewell an English shoemaker … William Jackson a landlocked sailor.

  They were, in fact, all types. Henry Warnell was as raucous a character as roamed the frontier. A freckled, redheaded little jockey, he drank hard, talked fast, and chewed mountainous wads of tobacco. Sometime in the early ’30’s he turned up in Arkansas … married (or didn’t marry) a girl in Sevier County … found himself a father … decided it was time to move on to Texas.

  Micajah Autry was the opposite. An adoring husband, he wrote poetry, sketched pictures and played the violin beautifully. But somehow he could never make any money. Born well-to-do in North Carolina, he tried his hand at “literary pursuits,” teaching and the law. In 1831 he brought his family and slaves to Jackson, Tennessee, where he practiced a little, then opened a store. Of course it failed. Deciding Texas might be the answer, he headed west once more, planning to send for his family later. He was one of the last to come, but a letter to his wife Martha conveyed a thought that might well have been written by any of them: “I am determined to provide for you a home or perish.”

  One and all, they poured across the Sabine River and into the promised land. Some with great fanfare—like Sam Houston, the brilliant ex-governor of Tennessee. Houston had resigned in disgrace after mysteriously parting from his bride … brooded for a while among the Cherokee Indians … finally decided that Texas held the key “to grace his name for after ages to admire.” But most came unnoticed, quietly putting up with immense hardships for this great new chance. It was August, 1830 when Jacob Darst piled his wife and two children on an oxcart and creaked away from his Missouri farm. Crawling over the faintest trails, lurching along dry stream bottoms, they took nearly six grinding, painful months to reach the Texas border.

  But it was worth it. For once, the glib promoters were not exaggerating. Texas proved to be an eye-opening, breathtaking sight.

  “It does not appear to me possible that there can be a land more lovely,” wrote William Dewees, one of the first arrivals. “No language can convey anything adequate to the emotion felt by the visitor,” echoed David Edward, another early traveler.

  And indeed it did defy language, judging from the efforts of Mary Austin Holley, whose handbook became almost a bible: “One feels that Omnipotence has here consecrated in the bosom of Nature and under Heaven’s wide canopy, a glorious temple in which to receive praise and adoration of the grateful beholder.”

  The sheer abundance of everything staggered the imagination. No drought or falling water table had yet taken its toll. The prairie was an endless sea of waving grass and wild flowers—dahlias, geraniums, primroses, carpets of violets. The fresh green river bottoms were thick with bee trees, all dripping honey. Deep, limpid pools lay covered with lilies. The streams were full of fish, and game was everywhere—bear, deer, rabbits, turkeys, prairie chickens. Mustangs and buffalo roamed at will—there for the taking.

  It was enough to give birth to a Texas penchant for superlatives that was destined to endure. Travelers described sugar cane that grew twenty-five feet in a single season … pumpkins as large as a man could lift … a sweet potato so big that a whole family dined on it, and there was enough left over to feed the pigs.

  Exaggerated or not, the reaction was immensely significant. It meant that at last these restless people had found what they wanted. Old sorrows were forgotten in the discovery of this great new land, and from the very beginning, they were determined never to lose it again. “We’re here all united together,” wrote William Dewees, “bound together by an indissoluble tie. As the past has been full of bitterness, we of course look forward to future happiness. …”

  Some moved in among the Mexicans, settling in the sleepy mission towns, the lazy Gulf ports, and especially the old provincial capital of San Antonio de Bexar. Often known simply as Bexar, the town had been an important center in the days of Spanish rule. But with Mexico’s independence, it became merely a neglected outpost and soon crumbled into decay. In ten short years, half the population left.

  Yet, the place still had undeniable charm. During the hot, sunny day, brightly dressed Mexicans lolled against the flat-roofed adobe houses that lined the narrow streets. Others bathed in the sparkling little San Antonio River on the eastern edge of town, or gossiped in the two central squares whose names, Main Plaza and Military Plaza, carried a trace of past grandeur. In the evening, fires glowed in every yard, and guitar music drifted from half-closed doorways. Nobody worked very hard in San Antonio—just enough to stay comfortable.

  It was hard for an American not to fall under the spell of this pleasant life. Nat Lewis, a shrewd young man from Falmouth, Massachusetts, opened a store on Main Plaza; by 1832 nearly everybody owed him money. John W. Smith, a versatile Missourian, became the town’s leading carpenter, engineer, entrepreneur and boardinghouse keeper.

  But of them all, Jim Bowie was the one who really stood out. To the settlers in Texas, this tall, sandy-haired man was a living legend. He had grown up in the tough sugar cane country of Louisiana. He had roped and ridden alligators. He had fought in that most famous of all frontier brawls, the Sand Bar Fight, where his big knife killed Major Morris Wright in one fierce thrust. He had used it in other fights too, so it was said, and although the details were hazy, nobody cared to take issue with him. He had made vast fortunes—$65,000 slave trading with the pirate Jean Lafitte … $20,000 on Arkansas land titles that already smelled of fraud … huge speculations in Texas; by now he was said to own a million acres. He had gone to San Antonio in 1828, turned Catholic, become a Mexican citizen and married the richest girl in town—blond 19-year-old Maria Ursula de Veramendi. He had made still more money, survived countless adventures—like the fabulous Indian fight near the San Saba mine, where he and ten friends fought off 164 Indians for two days.

  A typical performance, for Bowie was the toughest of fighters. But never in a rough-and-tumble way. On the contrary, he was smooth, polished, rarely raised his voice. But this very coolness somehow made him seem, when aroused, all the more lethal.

  Such moments were rare, for Bowie was quite used to getting his way. Once, returning on an exhausted horse from deep inside Mexico, he fell in with Sam Houston. Bowie’s greeting was brief and to the point: “Houston, I want your horse.”

  “You can’t have him. I have only one and I need him.”

  “I’m going to take him,” said Bowie, and left the room for a moment.

  “Do you think it right,” Houston asked a friend, “for me to give up my horse to Bowie?”

  “Perhaps,” answered the friend quietly, “it might be proper under the circumstances.”

  “Damn him, let him take the horse.”

  Yet Houston liked the man. Unlike Austin, who always sniffed at Bowie as an impossible adventurer, Houston saw in him the admirable qualities of a born leader, a good friend.

  And Bowie was all this. Generous, even extravagant, he gave mu
ch to his friends and expected much in return. Once in San Antonio Bowie got into a fracas and asked a companion why he didn’t offer better support. “Why, Jim,” the man said, “you were in the wrong.”

  “Don’t you suppose I know that? That’s just why I needed a friend.”

  Underneath this hard, uncompromising approach ran a streak of curious gentleness. To people in distress he was instantly helpful. Once he intervened in a marriage ceremony to save a girl from a well-known charlatan. On another occasion he brought order to a rowdy congregation so that a frightened young Bible student might be heard. And in his relations with women he was positively courtly.

  Perhaps it was this gentleness that made his marriage such a success. He was the most devoted of husbands, and Ursula a perfect wife. As the daughter of Vice Governor Juan Martin Veramendi, a proud aristocrat of pure Spanish blood, she might have been impossibly sheltered and aloof. Actually, she was wise, tactful and immensely helpful in Bowie’s myriad business deals. She seemed especially useful in fending off various Mexicans who had given Bowie unsecured funds for investment. She would write him tactfully that “here they have another way of thinking.” But whatever the problem, she would always close her letters: “Receive thou the heart of thy wife.”

  All this ended in 1833. When cholera broke out that summer, Bowie packed Ursula and their two children off to the safer climate of the Veramendi summer home at Monclova. Then he took off himself on a business trip East. He was in Mississippi when he got the shattering news—the cholera had swept Monclova too; Ursula, the children, her father and mother were all dead.

  Bowie couldn’t get over it. For months he grieved in Louisiana, then returned to San Antonio, where he tried to pick up the strings again. More dealing, but his heart was no longer in it. He lived a lonely life in the big empty Veramendi house on Soledad Street, surrounded by odds and ends of the past—Ursula’s black dress, Ursula’s apron. People noticed that he was drinking more than before.

  Bowie’s career was of course anything but typical. Few other Americans, even in San Antonio, mixed as deeply in Mexican affairs. Most of the new arrivals took the opposite course—they stayed clear of the Mexicans completely. Instead, they formed new towns of their own, or settled in the American-dominated communities flourishing in eastern Texas. John McGregor, a jaunty Scot devoted to his bagpipes, moved to Nacogdoches near the Louisiana line. This was the convivial center for gamblers, smugglers and other shadowy figures who found it convenient to operate near an international border.

  The more ambitious flocked to San Felipe, center of Stephen Austin’s colony. Here Green B. Jameson set up a legal practice in 1830. He soon found he had anything but the town to himself. The place swarmed with lawyers, surveyors and investors of every sort. Everyone had a scheme to make money. Small deals involving a calf or two; big deals that made men giddy—like the huge land speculations of Samuel Swarthout, Collector of the Port of New York, who preferred Eastern life but had local lieutenants. They all played the game—Houston himself was Swarthout’s man.

  But the real strength of Texas lay not in the nimble minds of San Felipe; far more important were the sturdy families beating back the wilderness in little American settlements like Columbia, Brazoria, Gonzales. These people too loved their deals and swaps, but basically they had come to work, to farm, to build a new life in a new country.

  It was not easy. One night at Gonzales Mrs. Isaac Baker barely escaped from a wildcat that sprang out from the dark and mauled her dog to death. Far worse, it might have been Indians—whooping and howling, stealing the horses, raiding the crops. When a party of Comanches murdered a French trader near Gonzales, the men of the town decided to act. Next day, Jacob Darst, Wash Cottle, Jesse McCoy and Almeron Dickinson helped avenge the killing with a raid on the Indian camp. No wonder these men found themselves gradually drawn together by tighter bonds than they ever dreamed possible.

  Life was a challenge even when nothing was happening. The crude log cabins, with their puncheon floors and glassless windows, were anything but comfortable. Homemade stools and plank tables graced the rooms; gourds were used for glass and china. Clothes were buckskin or homespun, and had to be, for it was astronomically expensive to bring anything in. If Almeron Dickinson paid only four cents a pound for pork, he had to spend five dollars for a razor and two dollars for even a pencil.

  It was hard on the women especially. The very roughness of the life gave a man satisfaction—hunting, fishing, riding the prairies, even the occasional “shooting scrapes.” But the women put in long, lonely hours of drudgery—pounding corn into meal, spinning cotton, pouring soap, molding candles in cane stalks. There was more than a little truth in pioneer Noah Smithwick’s observation that “Texas was heaven for men and dogs; hell for women and oxen.”

  But the good part made up for everything: the land … the spirit of sharing … decent neighbors … even a government that let a man alone. “A live mastodon would not have been a greater curiosity than a tax collector,” remarked John J. Linn, another early arrival.

  There seemed no limit to the Mexicans’ easygoing tolerance. “So reasonable are all the parties in Mexico of the dependence on public sentiment,” explained Woodman’s Guide to Texas Immigrants, “that none have even ventured to attempt any change in the fundamental principles of government. Neither do the feuds of the different parties in Mexico reach Texas, or have any influence over the minds of the people there. The colony is too far off to feel the throes of political convulsion in Mexico.”

  It wasn’t quite that simple. Mexico had gone through many political upheavals since the Colonization Law of 1825—and the government was indeed preoccupied with troubles closer to home—but down underneath was a growing, deep-rooted fear of “Anglo-American” expansion in Texas.

  There was much to worry about. By 1830, Americans made up over 75 per cent of the population. American syndicates illegally controlled huge blocks of territory. American traders engaged in wholesale smuggling. American planters disregarded the government’s stand against slavery. American settlers refused to pay taxes—only 1,665 pesos collected in two years. American families ignored the religious requirement; many openly called themselves “Muldoon Catholics” in honor of a genial San Felipe padre who didn’t care what they did. To top it all, the American government itself was offering to buy the province, and each overture somehow conveyed the impression that if Mexico didn’t sell, she would lose Texas anyhow.

  And underlying everything was the difference in background and temperament. It hadn’t mattered in the early days, but as the Mexicans realized they were losing control, the idea became an obsession. They bitterly pictured a host of Viking invaders, “possessed of that roving spirit that moved the barbarous hordes of a former age in a far remote north.”

  The first distant rumblings came in February, 1830, when the influential Mexican Minister of Relations, Lucas Alamán, blurted out his pent-up feelings on the subject. Action quickly followed. Under a new law that April, no foreigner could settle in Mexican territory bordering the country he came from—a clear slap at American immigrants. In addition, the law suspended all unfilled colonization contracts … ended the colonists’ monopoly on coastal shipping … banned future slavery … required all foreigners to have passports issued by the Mexican Consulate at their place of residence. Most trying of all, the colonists lost the duty exemption which Mexico had given them on essential goods and materials.

  Things moved slowly in Mexico, but by 1831 General Manuel Mier y Teran was stationing troops all over Texas to see that the law was enforced. He jailed two minor officials … dissolved the council or ayuntamiento at the town of Liberty … closed all the ports except Anáhuac.

  The Texans were indignant. They believed they were guaranteed self-government under the Mexican Constitution of 1824. Now it was being scrapped in favor of “centralism.” They thought there was a tacit understanding about little things like smuggling and slavery—and suddenly this easy toleranc
e was gone. They felt cheated and deceived. Protest meetings were held; incidents erupted. A growing number of American settlers were sure that Mexico had finally shown her colors. The only course was for Texas to break free. Of this group, none was more vocal than William Barret Travis.

  In many ways Travis was typical of these men who had come to Texas for a fresh start in life. Like so many others he came from the South—born 1809 near Red Bank, South Carolina. When he was nine, his family joined the great trek west, finally settling in southern Alabama. Here Travis grew up—a tall, raw-boned young man. He studied law in nearby Claiborne, taught school on the side to earn his way. This proved unexpectedly rewarding: in 1828 he married one of his pupils, Rosanna Cato, daughter of a prosperous farmer. They soon had a son, another child on the way. With a promising legal practice, Travis seemed heading for a smooth, if uneventful life.

  Then came the crushing blow. The marriage blew up early in 1831. No one ever knew why, but Travis certainly considered Rosanna unfaithful. Loose tongues said he even killed the other man. In any case, he stormed away and headed west alone.

  He turned up in Texas in May, 1831. Applying for his headright, Travis quickly fell in with the Texans’ knack of burying the past. He listed himself as “single,” later as “widower.” He settled first in the little port of Anáhuac, then moved to San Felipe, where he plunged into the town’s wildly varied legal practice. He wrote wills … recovered a stolen rifle … fought the sale of a blind horse. He took on anything and accepted any fee—once a yoke of oxen.

  Socially, he was now very much a bachelor at loose ends. He lived out of a satchel at Peyton’s boardinghouse, inveigling Mrs. Hamm to mend his shirts. He drank a little and gambled a lot—faro, monte, brag, poker—usually losing more than he won. He liked racy clothes; his white hat and red pantaloons were quite a sight in this buckskin community. And of course he had girls—casual affairs noted briefly in Spanish in the diary he meticulously kept. He liked wild evenings, and the dance after Christmas, 1833 must have been terrific. In his diary next day, all he could say was, “Hell among the women about party.”