Aware that he had wasted precious hours listening to such men demean themselves, Bonham saluted his unworthy superiors and told them that he must get on with his duty. ‘And what is that?’ Fannin asked.
‘Return to the Alamo. Colonel Travis deserves a reply.’
‘But the place is surrounded. You said so.’
‘I got out. I’ll get back in.’
‘Stay here with us. Help us defend Goliad.’
Bonham looked at the two men with whom he would not care to defend anything, then at the walls they had been reinforcing. He said nothing, but thought: Fannin will pin himself into another Alamo, and three weeks from now he will be sending out cries for help.
Turning his back on the two futile commanders, confused incompetents lusting for power but incapable of the action by which it is earned, Bonham, the medieval knight resurrected for service in modern Texas, rode off toward duty. He carried with him no promises of aid, no hope for rescue, only the mournful confirmation that Texas was in mortal danger.
When Zave Campbell and the thirty-one Gonzales men broke through Mexican lines and entered the Alamo at three in the morning of Tuesday, 1 March, they found a legendary man who, even though confined to his cot, gave them hope.
He was Jim Bowie, forty-one years old and revered as the best knife-fighter on the entire frontier. He was a big red-headed man of enormous energy, and had the wishes of the men who were to do the fighting been consulted, he would have been their commander during the siege. Unluckily, on the day Santa Anna’s men took their positions ringing the Alamo, Bowie, who had been ill for some time, was laid low by a raging fever somewhat like the one that had killed his wife, Ursula Veramendi, and when Zave went to report he found Bowie in bed.
‘I’ve heard of you,’ Bowie said. ‘Glad to have you.’
‘You look pale,’ Zave said. ‘Like maybe Santy Anny hit you with something.’
Bowie said wanly: ‘And you look like your neck’s on crooked. Like maybe somebody tried to hang you.’
‘Necks don’t straighten easy,’ Zave confessed, and the two old frontiersmen discussed the places and people they had known, especially in and around Natchez.
‘Is it true you used to rassle alligators?’ Zave asked.
‘Still do, if one comes after me,’ Bowie said, laughing. ‘Man never knows when a gator is gonna come after him.’
Zave would never see this once-powerful man standing upright, but he was impressed by the sheer sense of force that Bowie exuded, even from his cot. When the sick man learned that Campbell had also married a mexicana, he said: ‘There’s another fellow in here like us,’ and when he sent for Mordecai Marr, these three Texicans shared memories of the joys they had known with their Mexican wives. ‘The others think we married peasants,’ Bowie said. ‘You should’ve heard my wife order me about. She was twice as smart as me.’
The three men fell silent, for at the far end of the barracks in which Bowie’s cot stood they saw Amalia Marr moving about, assisting the women and children who had chosen to stay in the Alamo with their men, and the graceful way she held her head, the poetry of her motion as she worked delighted them, for Bowie and Campbell could see in her a portrait of their own wives. It was then that Bowie exclaimed with deep emotion: ‘Damnit, Campbell! It would have been a lot better for Texas if every unmarried man who wandered down here from Kentucky and Tennessee, or from Georgia and Alabama, for that matter … if he had been forced to take himself a Mexican wife. Maybe we could have bridged the gap.’
‘What gap?’ Zave asked.
‘Americanos, mexicanos. We’re bound to share this land for the next two hundred years. If we’d got started right …’
‘They tell me that this guide Deaf Smith, best of the lot, they say he has a Mexican wife.’
‘I think he does,’ Bowie said. ‘I wish he was in here to help us.’
‘The men all feel they’d have a better chance of holdin’ this place if you was leadin’.’
‘Now stop that. Stop it right now. Travis will prove a damned good fighting man.’
‘But the men tell me,’ Marr said, ‘that you were supposed to be in command.’
Jim Bowie, the most belligerent man in the Alamo, sighed: ‘It hasn’t been a neat affair. Seems like nothin’ in Texas is ever neat. We were supposed to share a joint command, Travis in charge of the army men, me in charge of the volunteers.’
‘That’s what I’m sayin’. Us volunteers want to fight under your orders.’
Bowie’s voice hardened with exasperation: ‘How in hell can I command if I can’t stand? You tell me that.’ With the generosity of spirit which marked him he growled: ‘I’m perfectly willing to give the leadership to Travis,’ and while neither Zave nor Marr believed him, they had to respect him for his soldierly deportment.
The man all the newcomers wanted to meet was Davy Crockett, the former congressman from Tennessee. Tall, clean-shaven, and with a head somewhat larger than normal, he was a famous raconteur whose disreputable stories narrated in dialect often made him look ridiculous: ‘They was me and this bear and a Injun. Now, that bear was grindin’ his teeth, just waitin’ to git at me. And the Injun was reachin’ for his arrers to shoot one through me.’
‘And what were you doin’?’ someone was supposed to ask, at which Davy would reply: ‘I be ’shamed to tell you, ’cept that later I had to do some washin’.’
He was irrepressible, and after conducting a survey of the situation within the Alamo, he had insisted upon defending the palisaded weak spot, where the danger would be greatest: ‘I want sixteen good men here with all the rifles we can muster, and them Mexicans better beware.’ When Zave saw the frailness of the palisade and the grim look of the men from Kentucky and Tennessee who would have to defend it, he whispered to Galba Fuqua: ‘There’s bound to be one hell of a fight here.’
Whenever Zave could not locate Galba, for whom he felt great responsibility, he would look to see where Davy Crockett was holding forth, and there the boy would be, listening intently as the wild frontiersman spun his yarns but fully aware that Crockett’s mocking manner masked a character of profound determination. The boy had no way of assessing how strong a man Jim Bowie might have been if healthy, but he knew that Davy was one of the most powerful men he had ever seen: ‘You killed more’n a hundred bears?’
‘Most dangerous animal I ever met was that Tennessee Democrat Andrew Jackson. He’d cut a man’s throat for sixpence.’
‘But did you kill forty-seven bears in one month?’ Galba asked.
‘I sure did. Forty-seven bears, forty-six bullets.’
‘How was that?’
‘Two of the bears was misbehavin’,’ and he winked at the boy.
One morning Galba was standing guard with him atop the fort at the southwestern end of the mission. Crockett was dressed as usual—coonskin cap, deerskin jacket with Indian beads, buckskin trousers—and beside him he had two long rifles. ‘You see that Mexican over there across the river?’ he said to Galba. ‘Tracin’ marks in the dust? You see that other man behind him? As soon as I fire, slap the other gun into my hand.’
The two men were so far distant that Galba believed it impossible for Crockett to reach them, but he watched as the expert leveled his gun, firmed it against the edge of the rampart, and with breathless care pulled back his trigger finger. Poof! Not much of a crackle, for this was a good tight gun, but down went the man in front.
‘Quick!’ Davy whispered, as if the other man could hear, and before the latter could seek refuge, a second bullet sped across the river, dipped under the trees on the far side, and splatted into its target.
Insolently, Crockett rose from behind the protective wall, pushed back his coonskin cap, and reloaded his two rifles, daring Santa Anna’s men to fire at him with their outdated smooth-bore English muskets that could not carry half that distance.
‘How far was that?’ Galba asked, as if the dead men had been squirrels.
Crockett said with equal i
ndifference: ‘Maybe two hundred and fifty yards,’ but quickly added: ‘You know, you couldn’t do it at that range, not unless you could prop your gun.’
‘Could I fight with you, at the palisade?’
Crockett said: ‘It’s gonna be easy to hold that spot, what with the men I got. A good shot like you, you’re needed wherever Travis puts you.’
That night Galba Fuqua lost his heart all over again to Davy Crockett, for the famous bear hunter astounded everyone by producing a fiddle that he’d brought into the Alamo with him, and for two hours he entertained the fighters with scraping squeals of mountain music so ingratiating that even Zave Campbell danced in the moonlight.
When Colonel Travis was assigning the Gonzales men to their defensive positions, Zave volunteered for one of the more exposed locations. He chose that long western wall, knowing it would be vulnerable if the Mexican foot soldiers were brave enough to bring their scaling ladders there. To Fuqua, who volunteered to stand with him, he said: ‘What we must do, Galb, is run back and forth and change our positions. Confuse ’em.’
‘Will there be lots of them?’
‘Lots.’ And he pointed out to the boy where the danger spots would be: ‘That gully gives them protection. They’ll come up from there and hit us about here. We’ll be waitin’. You keep your eye on those trees—not many of them, but they’ll interrupt our fire. They’re sure to come at us from those trees. So you’re to guard this point, and never allow them to place even one ladder.’
‘What am I to do?’
‘The minute they place a ladder, you run there with this forked pole and push it down.’
The boy looked at the trees, saw the pitiful distance that separated them from the wall, and for the first time since he left Gonzales, realized that within a few days men were going to be killed, in great number: ‘Will many be killed, Mr. Campbell?’
‘Lots,’ Zave said. Then, appreciating the boy’s fear, he took Galba by the hand and said: ‘That’s what a battle is, son. The killing of men.’
‘Does the red flag over there really mean no surrender?’
‘It’s them or us, son. Come battle day, it’s purely them or us.’
At first Campbell had not liked Colonel Travis, whom he saw as an austere man with a lawyer’s finicky attitude toward duty and no sense of humor: ‘He talks too big, Galb.’ The boy repeated what he had heard many of the men say: ‘Bowie ought to be our commander,’ but out of respect for the sick man’s wishes Zave quieted such talk: ‘Travis is our leader now. Bowie said so. And you better do what he says.’
By Wednesday, 2 March, Campbell was developing a much different opinion of Travis: ‘He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to defend a position. And look how he puts his finger on the weak spots.’ Zave liked especially the manner in which Travis disposed his men, never carelessly, never arbitrarily, but always with an eye on firepower.
‘You know, Galb, he has every weak man down there caring for the cattle and things. All the good men are up here on the ramparts.’
‘You count me a good man?’
‘I sure do, and so does Travis.’
But not even after Zave had granted Travis every concession did he like the man the way he admired Bowie and Crockett: ‘It’s the way he’s always tidyin’ up his clothes, Galb. When a man does that, he’s apt to be prissy. Damnit, Travis ought to be commandin’ a cavalry post in Carolina and attendin’ afternoon teas with the ladies. He may be a fightin’ man, but he sure as hell ain’t a frontiersman.’
‘You prefer the way Bowie dresses?’
‘I sure do,’ but as he said this he saw Travis standing atop the fortress corner at the north, surveying the land across which the Mexican attack would come, and his slim figure, so taut, so tense, seemed so extraordinarily military that even Zave had to confess: ‘He knows what he’s doing, that one.’ And when Travis next inspected the rooftops, Zave saluted.
On Thursday, 3 March, at about a quarter to eleven, Colonel Travis and everyone within hearing of Galba Fuqua’s voice were startled to hear the lad cry: ‘Man comin’ on horseback!’ And when they looked toward the sun high in the sky they did indeed see a lone horseman making a wild effort to cut directly through the heart of the enemy lines.
‘It’s Bonham!’ men began to shout. ‘Go it, Bonham!’
They did more than shout. Two men limbered up a field piece and tossed cannon shells at Mexican soldiers who were trying to catch the fleeting messenger, while others grabbed their rifles to pick off individual men who sought to attack him.
‘Zave!’ Fuqua shouted, proudly aware that his warning cry had helped this incredibly brave rider by alerting the riflemen on the walls. ‘He’s going to make it!’
‘Break open those gates!’ Travis shouted, and men eagerly leaped to do so, just in time to bring the dodging, darting Bonham into the protection of the Alamo. Twice out to safety, twice back to his post of duty, he had ridden alone and had four times penetrated heavy enemy concentrations.
His message was brief and terrifying: ‘Colonel Fannin refuses to leave Goliad. Gonzales has no more men to send us. No relief is on the way. You already have all the men you’ll ever have. There’ll be no more.’
Friday, 4 March, was a solemn day within the Alamo, for additional Mexican reinforcements streamed north from the Rio Grande to increase Santa Anna’s superiority, so that even the most hopeful Texicans had to confront the fact that within a few hours the mighty attack would begin, and it could have only one outcome.
Each of the doomed men spent this fateful day as his personality dictated: Jim Bowie almost wept at his inability to rise from his cot and help; Davy Crockett entertained his men at the palisade with outrageous stories of his confrontations with his Tennessee constituents and especially with President Andrew Jackson, whom he despised: ‘All show and bluster. Calls hisself a friend of the common man, but the only people he really befriends are the rich. If we had a real man in the White House, we’d have three thousand American troops in this building right now, and God knows how many cannon.’ He refused to allow any talk of odds or dangers or the likelihood of annihilation. He was in another tight spot and he would as always do his best.
James Bonham was exhausted and reflective. He could not understand Fannin; he simply could not understand. ‘Obviously,’ he told Travis, ‘he could have marched here fifteen days ago. I broke through yesterday and so could he, with all the men he had. I fear a great disaster is going to overtake that poor man.’ He slept most of the afternoon.
Zave Campbell, as a good Scotsman, had sought out a kinsman, John McGregor, who he found had brought with him into the Alamo a set of fine bagpipes. So later in the afternoon Campbell, Fuqua and McGregor gathered in the northwest corner of the big field, and there McGregor marched back and forth as if he were in some royal castle on the Firth of Tay, piping the stirring reels and strathspeys of his youth.
Then, without announcement, he switched to a most enchanting tune, not military at all, and when Campbell said: ‘I don’t know that one,’ the piper explained: ‘We call it “The Flooers of Embry,” which means “The Flowers of Edinburgh.” A grand tune.’ He played this sad, sweet music for some time, then once more without warning he altered his music; with head tilted back as if he were looking for omens in the sky, he offered the near-empty field one of the grand compositions of Scotland, and now Campbell knew well what it was, the great ‘McCrimmon’s Lament,’ that historic threnody for brave men dead in battle, and as he marched back and forth, men in various parts of the Alamo seemed to sense that he was playing some notable piece of music for them, and they began to appear from odd corners.
But this haunting moment lasted only briefly, for Davy Crockett bellowed from the palisade: ‘Damn that stuff! Fetch me my fiddle!’ And when this was done he took it and ran the length of the field to meet with McGregor, and for about an hour as day waned the two men gave a wild and raucous concert of wailing pipes and screeching fiddle, and for a rowdy while the hundred a
nd eighty-three men in the Alamo forgot their predicament.
Ominously, on Saturday, 5 March, the daily bombardment by the Mexicans—thirteen days of barrage without killing one Texican—ceased, and Marr predicted to those about him: ‘Santa Anna’s redeploying his troops. Tomorrow he’ll come at us.’
Colonel Travis, reaching the same conclusion, experienced an overpowering sense of doom, and as he realistically surveyed the situation of his troops and the few women and children who had remained with them in the Alamo, he realized that to hope for any further miracles was futile. His aides reported: ‘Santa Anna’s army increases daily. He’s moving up his big guns. The final attack cannot be delayed much longer.’
Everything Travis saw confirmed this gloom. No matter how he disposed his men along the walls, there were empty spaces which the enemy would be sure to spot. And his ammunition was limited. Unlimited was the willingness of his men to fight, but as their leader, he felt obligated to give each man one last chance to escape the certain death which faced them all. That afternoon he assembled his force near the plaza leading to the chapel, and there, with the women and children listening and even Jim Bowie on his cot, which had been hauled into the open, he told them the facts: ‘The red flag still flies, and Santa Anna means it. No prisoners. His army is fifteen times ours, and he has more cannon, too. I suspect the attack will come tomorrow—that’s Sunday, isn’t it? I want to offer every man here one last chance to retire if he should wish to.’
What happened next would be forever debated; some, basing their accounts on those of certain women who escaped the carnage, say that Travis drew a line in the sand with the tip of his sword and indicated that those wishing to take their chances fighting beside him step over it; others laugh at the suggestion of such flamboyance but grant that he may have indicated some kind of line as he scuffed his left foot across the plaza. At any rate, he certainly warned his men that death was imminent and gave them a choice of either staying and fighting a hopeless battle with him or kiting over the wall to such escape as each man could maneuver for himself.