First over the line was white-haired Mordecai Marr, who mumbled to the two who followed: ‘I’m American and Mexican, loyal to both, but it seems like the first one wins.’ Jim Bowie, without question, asked that his cot be moved to where his onetime adversary was standing, and Travis welcomed him. Davy Crockett shuffled over, and of course James Bonham moved to accept the death which he had known three weeks ago to be inevitable. Zave Campbell looked down at Galba Fuqua, shrugged his shoulders, and said unheroically: ‘We’ve come this far, Galb. Do you want to go all the way?’ Without hesitation the boy took Zave’s hand as they joined the patriots.
When Travis made his remarkable and moving speech, one hundred and eighty-two men and boys faced him. Of that number, all but one crossed to die with him. The one man who did not—and his reasoning for preferring shameful life to heroic death was startling to the men who heard him voice it—was Louis Rose, fifty-one years old, born in France and entitled to wear the Legion of Honor as a distinguished veteran of Napoleon’s campaigns in the kingdom of Naples and in Russia. He had come to Texas as early as 1826, when he changed his first name to Moses, believing it to sound more American. At first he had served as a day laborer in Nacogdoches, then as a teamster, and finally as a self-trained butcher. Loving the soldier’s life, as soon as trouble threatened he mortgaged all his holdings and went off to join the fighting at San Antonio, where he had helped defeat General Cós in 1835.
Rose was by far the most experienced soldier in the group, and it pained Jim Bowie to see such a man reluctant to stay for the fight. Forcing himself upright in his cot, Bowie chided the Frenchman: ‘You seem unwilling to die with us, Mose.’
‘I came to America to live a new life, not to die needlessly,’ the old campaigner said. ‘Only fools and amateurs would try to defend this place.’
Davy Crockett said with a touch of levity: ‘Mose, you may as well die with us, because you’ll never get through them Mexican lines.’
‘I speak Spanish,’ Rose said, and he bundled up his clothes, climbed the wall to the very spot where Galba Fuqua would stand guard, and hesitated for a moment as if reconsidering. Looking back at his friends, he half nodded, then turned and abruptly leaped to the ground, where he quickly lost himself among the trees.
At three-thirty in the cold morning of Sunday, 6 March, Galba Fuqua reached over and nudged his friend Zave Campbell as they stood watch atop the long barracks: ‘I think they’re coming.’
Zave rubbed his eyes and peered into the darkness, seeing for himself that there was much movement among the trees to the west: ‘I think you’re right, Galb—Hey, where you goin’?’
‘I gotta pee.’
‘You stay here.’
‘But I gotta pee.’
‘So do I. When men face danger, like a fistfight or a hurricane or a battle like this … they often have to pee. Even the bravest. I do too. But up where I’m needed, not down there.’
So the man and the boy urinated against the adobes which they were about to defend, and as they finished, Zave said something that would encourage the boy mightily in the frenzied hours ahead: ‘Galb, it’s gonna be a tough fight, that’s sure. If you see me showin’ any signs of cowardice …’
‘You could never be a coward, Mr. Campbell.’
‘No man ever knows. So if I start to show signs, you kick me in the ankle. You don’t have to say anything. Just kick me in the ankle and we’ll know what it means.’
The boy considered this, then said in a trembling voice: ‘I see shadows moving, Mr. Campbell.’ A hush, then: ‘Oh! They’re coming.’
Then, in the darkness of the night, seven Mexican buglers, each marching with his own contingent, started sounding one of the most powerful calls ever heard on the world’s battlefields. It was not a piercing command to charge, nor a stirring cry to enhance courage. It was the ‘Degüello,’ an ancient Moorish plea to an enemy to surrender. Its name meant ‘The Beheading,’ and once it sounded, its meaning was stark and clear: If you do not surrender immediately, we shall behead you, everyone.
Across the empty fields of Béjar it came, over the walls and into the Alamo, this wild lament, this recollection of home, of people loved, of the gentler scenes of peace. Through the vast spaces of the Alamo it echoed, and everyone who heard it understood its frightful promise that within hours everyone inside the walls would be slain.
Nine times the ‘Degüello’ was repeated, a terrible tattoo bringing the small, white-clad Indian troops ever closer to the walls. ‘Don’t waste your bullets,’ Campbell told Galba. ‘They’ll be close soon enough.’
Santa Anna had assigned tasks skillfully: ‘Cós, you command our best troops. Hit the northwest wall. General Duque, smash the northeast. That’s where I’m sure we can break through. Ripperdá, you have the ones we can send forth in floods. Knock down the palisade. Morales, hit the main gate, but when they concentrate to defend it, slide off to your left. You’ll find a weak spot. The rest of you, scaling ladders against that long west wall. They can’t protect all of it.’
During the first minutes of battle the four generals with the important assignments made little progress, for they were attacking major positions, but the nondescript troops trying to scale the west wall became a real threat. Campbell now yelled: ‘Galb, we must run back and forth, like we agreed.’ And these two, with the assistance of three Tennessee men, threw down one ladder after another.
At the point of great danger, the north wall, General Cós, who had sworn in writing never to return to Tejas under arms, gained one crushing success, although at the time he did not know it: some of his men, firing a blind fusillade, luckily hit a brave Texican who was defending the northern gun batteries. This man took a shot through the head, pitching backward into the dusty yard. The dead man was Colonel William Travis, whose iron will had kept his men in the Alamo.
The grinding assault came at the palisade, where Davy Crockett had lined up his Tennessee sharpshooters, with Mordecai Marr and twelve Kentucky men in support. These tough veterans laid down a continuous rifle fire, but the pressure against them was unyielding, because General Ripperdá had an unlimited supply of barefoot Yucatán Indians whom he proposed to use as human battering rams.
When Benito Garza first heard his assignment—‘You’ll lead the third wave’—he found it difficult to accept, for he knew how perilous such an attack would be, but when he watched the first wave move out and get mowed down, every man, by that unrelenting fire from the palisade, he lost all fear and began to shout to the second wave: ‘Take that line of sticks! Damnit, rush them!’ And when this wave lost more than eighty percent of its numbers, he could hardly wait to lead his charge.
Ripperdá, cold and stiff as ever, moved always closer to the palisade, ignoring both the whistling bullets and the appalling loss of his Indians: ‘Garza, you’ll succeed. Drive right at the center.’ And he watched with impassive approval as Benito leaped forward, bringing his horde behind him. On this bloody Sunday, Texican and Mexican alike showed what courage was.
At the west wall, Campbell mustered a brilliant defense, running back and forth, firing his four rifles with devastating effect and reloading as he ran. ‘We knocked them back!’ Galba Fuqua shouted to his mentor, who called back: ‘Use your pole! Keep pushin’ them ladders down!’ And so the first hour ended with no Mexican having gained the top of the wall. It was now nearing six, and Santa Anna’s bold boast to be inside the walls by sunrise had failed. Now he threw in fresh troops, who came at the weakened walls with a roar and the popping of guns. The lack of range was no longer important, for the guns were discharged at a distance of thirty feet, and often with telling effect as brave Texicans began toppling backward like their commander.
By six the remaining Texicans numbered only slightly over a hundred, and still those irrepressible Indians and mestizos came at them, little men of giant courage, for they climbed barehanded up the walls or placed their ladders and held them in the face of withering gunfire while those behind them scr
ambled to the top, to be greeted by swinging gun butts in the face.
But on they came, hundreds of them, thousands it seemed, and for every six of them slain, a Texican fell off the wall, a bullet through his head or a knife through his breast.
At the southern end, Colonel Morales led his troops in a vain assault on the main gate, but as the Texicans cheered his repulse, he slid easily along to the western end of that wall and surprised its defenders with a bayonet attack. The Mexicans swarmed on and gained a major advantage, for they were now inside the walls.
At almost the same moment, Generals Cós and Duque applied maximum pressure at a weak point in the north wall, and there another breach was made. Before the irresistible white-clads could storm into the central area, Benito Garza and his Yucatán troops engulfed the palisade, overrunning old Mordecai Marr, who continued trying to reload even when on his knees. Three bayonets ended his adventurous life.
At this moment Zave Campbell, still atop the roof and still pushing away ladders, uttered a terrible cry of pain, not for himself but for his much-loved companion of these past days, Galba Fuqua, who had taken a pair of bullets right through his upper and lower jaws, blowing away a part of his brave young face.
Zave saw the lad put his hand to his head, then blanch and almost faint when he found what had happened. ‘Galb, go down to where the women are. Get help.’ With great force he lifted the boy from the post he had defended so valiantly and dropped him to the ground, watching him as he trailed blood across the yard.
Now he fought with deadly vigor, slashing, killing. Once he waited like a cat till two men climbed the ladder at the spot left vacant by Fuqua, then dashed forth like a tiger, swinging one of his guns like a madman and crushing skulls. He was about to return to his own spot, where Mexicans were close to controlling the wall, when he saw Galba climb back onto the wall, to resume his duty. When Zave saw the bloody mass he began to vomit, and for some moments he was immobilized, whereupon the boy kicked him and moved the remnant of his face as if he were saying: ‘Courage, old man! Don’t play the coward now.’
With an anguished roar, speaking for them both, Zave shouted at the climbing myrmidons: ‘Come ahead, you bastards,’ and he saw with horror how they did come, eight of them, and how they leaped upon Galba Fuqua, and stabbed him a score of times, tossing his body like a sheaf of threshed wheat to the ground below.
Now it was Zave Campbell, with his four rifles no longer of use except as clubs, who rushed at the twenty who stormed the rooftop. Swinging and cursing and lashing out with his two knives, he held them at bay for some moments, sending three more to their deaths.
But not even he could restrain the overwhelming force of this assault, for while he was defending himself against assailants in front, three others crept up on him from behind, and one stabbed him with such terrible force that the point of the bayonet reached out four inches from his breast. He was so astonished to see it that he gasped, reached down to pull it away with his bare hand, and took nine other stabs simultaneously. Giving a wild bellow of rage, he grabbed for his tormentors, and died draped across the wall he had defended with such valor.
Not three minutes later, James Bonham, hero of heroes, tried to hold off six attackers at the mission chapel, but was overpowered. He died taking several of the enemy with him.
Now all was confusion, and by six-thirty in the morning triumphant bugle calls echoed across the big field as Santa Anna’s victorious troops searched every corner of the Alamo’s defenses for any remaining Texicans. Whenever they found one they obeyed their general’s stern command: ‘No prisoners.’ Men who had fought bravely until all hope was gone endeavored to surrender, but were either gunned down or pierced by bayonets. There were no prisoners, not among the men, although Amalia Marr and the other women who were inside the walls were spared.
Jim Bowie in his cot was bayoneted.
Long after the terrible victory, when men were trying to sort out details of what had happened to the 182 Texicans, a Mexican officer claimed that the last of the famous defenders to survive was Davy Crockett: ‘He hid under a pile of women’s clothes and begged and pleaded and wept when we trapped him. Said he would do anything if we spared him, but we shot him in contempt.’ Unlikely, that.
Who were these heroes who died defending the Alamo? From what terrain did they come and upon what traditions had they been reared to make them willing to give their lives for the freedom of a territory to which they had so recently come?
Ten were born in England, twelve in Northern Ireland, three in Scotland, two in Germany, and one each in Wales and Denmark. Those born in the United States were thirty-one from Tennessee, fourteen from Kentucky, five from Alabama, four from Mississippi, five from Georgia, thirteen from the Carolinas, eleven from Virginia, twelve from Pennsylvania, and a scattering of others from Vermont, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Massachusetts and Illinois. Of the heroic congregation, only six had been born in Texas itself. Their names: Abamillo, Badillo, Espalier, Esparza, Fuentes, Nava—Mexicans all. Juan Seguín, who was in the Alamo when the siege began, we shall see shortly.
By seven that Sunday morning the battle was over, as complete a victory as any general could have hoped for. The Tejas rebellion was crushed almost before it was fairly launched, and Santa Anna, joyous in his triumph, gave one last order: ‘Burn them all.’ And the pyre was lit, and all but one were burned. By special dispensation of General Cós, the body of Gregorío Esparza was released to his brother for burial.
Into an unmarked grave, unhonored and spat upon, were thrown the ashes of the Alamo heroes, but even before the acrid fumes from the fire died away, men in various parts of the world were beginning to utter the name with reverence, and anger, and hope, and determination. ‘The Alamo!’ screamed newspapers throughout America. ‘The Alamo!’ whispered men to their wives as they prepared to leave for greater battles in the future. And in the weeks ahead, when men from all parts of Texas and the United States began to muster to avenge this savagery, they voiced a threat, a blood-oath that would bind them together: ‘Remember the Alamo!’
From the heroism of these ordinary men, from their unmarked grave rose an echo of immortality. By their deaths, the living were morally obligated to finish what they had begun. From their skeletons, burned to ashes, the backbone of a new nation would be formed.
Where was General Sam Houston, the hero of Texas history, when such events were taking place? As one of many would-be commanders in chief, he had tried desperately to bring order to the defense of Texas, and he had failed. ‘Abandon the Alamo and blow it up,’ he had counseled Travis, who had disobeyed him for his own heroic reasons. ‘Abandon Goliad and blow it up,’ he had ordered Colonel Fannin weeks ago, and again he had been ignored. Like Achilles before Troy, he sulked, this time among his beloved Cherokee, whom he visited to help them regularize their relations with the United States and especially with the Texas that was now arising.
If the present leaders of the emerging nation were proving themselves to be a gang of inept fools, so be it. He would do his job with the Indians and return when the real fighting men were willing to listen, to retreat in orderly fashion, to suck Santa Anna ever deeper into perilous terrain, and to save all energy for one titanic effort against the Mexicans, whose supply lines would grow longer and longer and always more difficult to defend against those backwoods tactics which had proved so disastrous to British hopes in years gone by.
Sam Houston became an American version of the Roman Fabius Maximus, derisively nicknamed Cunctator, the Dawdler, who in 217 B.C. avoided defeat by the Carthaginian Hannibal through a series of skillful retreats that wore down the enemy. Houston devised a masterly plan which would enable him to do the same with Santa Anna, who had a vastly superior army, good cannon, able generals, and everything in his favor except time and distance. These two lesser advantages, he thought, could defeat the Mexican dictator.
Houston was in Gonzales when he learned that the Alamo had fallen. The m
orning and evening guns, which had reassured distant listeners that the mission remained in Texican hands, had fallen silent, so he was not surprised when a woman Santa Anna had released for the sole purpose of spreading her tale of terror reached Gonzales with the awful news that all the Texicans, including the thirty-two from Gonzales, were dead.
Then began the great retreat, the Runaway Scrape, in which civilians fled before the onrushing Mexicans. Towns were abandoned and set to the torch by their inhabitants. Cattle were herded north and east, then left to fend for themselves at river crossings. Hamlets were left bare. Nothing seemed able to halt the victorious dictator.
To Sam Houston, retreating like the others, one thing became essential: Colonel Fannin must get his men out of that trap in Goliad. He must bring his forces north to unite with ours. The safety of all Texas depends upon his actions now.
When Finlay Macnab learned of Colonel Fannin’s latest mismanagement he did not despair, though he was appalled to think that an officer with formal training could be so incompetent. Not only had Fannin ignored General Houston’s urgent plea to abandon the indefensible presidio, but he was also dividing into smaller groups what few forces he did have, sending badly needed troops on a wild-goose chase to defend some willful civilians who should have left the area long before.
After heated discussion with other concerned volunteers, Macnab sought a meeting with the colonel to protest. Taking Otto along so that the boy could better understand the situation in which they were involved, he reported to the corner of the presidio grounds where Fannin had his tent. ‘Sir—’ he began, but he had uttered only that word when Fannin interrupted.