USA > Texas > Border fights & fighters; stories of the pioneers between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi and in the Texan republic > Part 20
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" It will not be the least of General Proctor's mortifi- cation to find that he has been baffled by a youth who has just passed his twenty-first year. He is, however, a hero, worthy of his gallant uncle, General George Rogers Clark."
Congress brevetted Croghan a lieutenant-colonel, and, years afterward, presented him with a medal of honor for his splendid and magnificent defence with its far-reaching consequences. Like his great uncle, he had again saved the northwest to the American flag. And the final de- feat of Proctor at the Thames may be traced back to this bloody repulse at Lower Sandusky.
PART VI TEXAS
I David Crockett and the Most Desperate Defence in American History
DAVID CROCKETT
AND THE MOST DESPERATE DEFENCE IN AMERICAN HISTORY
I. A Typical American
T HAT is what, MY DOG! ANDREW JACKSON. in emphatic lan- guage entirely consonant with his ac- tions, David Crockett said he would never wear on his collar. And the doughty declaration of individual right following may be taken as indicating what David Crockett really was. It reads well in these days of the Boss and His Slaves- which things are we!
" I am at liberty to vote as my conscience and judgment dictate to be right, without the yoke of any party on me, or the driver at my heels with the whip in his hands, com- manding me to ' Gee-whoa-haw ' just at his pleasure."
The spelling of the paragraph is not that of its author. In his autobiography, one of the most naïve and delight- ful of books, he takes occasion to defend his orthography by remarking that he despised " the way of spelling con- trary to nature!" It may be said, in passing, that many of his most eminent fellow-citizens and contemporaries shared his contempt for the rules of orthography. In
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that book he speaks of himself with the utmost frankness; as for instance :
" Obscure as I am my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world. I can't tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will everybody seems anx- ious to get a peep at me; and it would be hard to tell which would have the advantage if I, and the 'Govern- ment,'* and ' Black Hawk,' and a great eternal big cara- van of wild varments, were all to be showed at the same time in four different parts of any of the big cities of the nation, I am not so sure that I shouldn't get the most custom of any of the crew !"
A modest man was David, it would appear, and a confi- dent author, too; witness this assertion :
" I don't know of anything in my book to be criticised by honorable men. Is it my spelling ?- that's not my trade. Is it my grammar ?- I hadn't time to learn it and make no pretension to it. Is it in the order and arrange- ment of my book ?- I never wrote one before and never read very many; and of course know mighty little about that. Will it be on authorship ?- this I claim and I'll hang on to it like a wax plaster ! "
Evidently he considered grammar of no more account than spelling, and equally evidently the porous plaster had not been invented when he searched for a clinging simile !
There never was the slightest room for misunderstand- ing where Crockett was concerned. His character was plainness and simplicity itself. He usually hit the mark at which he aimed, whether with a rifle or not, in life, so clearly and plainly that dispute was impossible. Even
* By the "Government" he means-and appropriately enough, too- Andrew Jackson, the book being written while Crockett was in Congress.
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the " 'coon " up the tree upon which he " drew a bead " with his famous weapon, the death-dealing " Betsy," at once recognized the futility of resistance, and, being for the nonce endowed with speech, with the famous remark, "Don't shoot, Colonel, I'll come down," gave up the game. True, Crockett would not be Andrew Jackson's dog, and because he countered some of the President's plans he had to give way-as did nearly everyone else in like circumstances. But nothing less than " Old Hick- ory "-better " Old Steel "-ever mastered or moved this redoubtable pioneer-unless it was a woman. His , was a susceptible heart !
Nowhere but in America would such a career as Crock- ett's have been possible. With Jackson and Houston he represents a phase of American life, opportunity, and suc- cess, peculiar to the time and not to be repeated again. Though he was the least and humblest of the famous trio in both achievement and reputation, he was not unworthy of association with them. And upon the score of manly, lovable qualities he stood first of the three. His famous motto, which he earnestly strove to live up to, was of the very best :
" Be sure you're right, then go ahead !"
Crockett was born at Limestone, Greene County, Ten- nessee, on the seventeenth of August, 1786. His father was an Irish immigrant who had fought in the Revolu- tion at King's Mountain-a patent of nobility on the frontier, that-and his mother was an American girl (the combination is delightful and promising). His parents were poor but happy-and therefore honest it may be in- ferred. Young David grew up in the wilds of Tennessee, a tall, sturdy, swarthy lad, with hair black and straight as
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an Indian's and keen yet merry eyes to match. He took to the forest instinctively, loving it, mastering its hidden lore, knowing its secrets, and little else apparently.
At the age of twelve he was apprenticed to a Dutch teamster, very much against his desire. After an enforced journey of four hundred miles to Virginia he ran away, and not daring to follow the road for fear of pursuit, he plunged into the wilderness and made his way back home after a hazardous and wonderful journey alone through the trackless woods. He was thereafter sent to school, where he spent just four days. Having whipped a larger and older boy who attempted to tyrannize over him, he played truant to avoid punishment, and when detected ran away again.
He spent some three years in teaming and nearly two years with a hatter-singularly inappropriate calling- and then returned home. He found his people in strait- ened financial circumstances and generously worked a year to cancel two notes amounting to $86 which a neighbor held against the elder Crockett. Thereafter he resolved to go to school. Love sent him there. The young girls of the vicinity scorned him for his ignorance, which of books at any rate was dense, not to say, total. As he said long after :
" But it will be a source of astonishment to many who reflect that I am now a member of the American Congress -the most enlightened body of men in the world-that at so advanced an age as the age of fifteen I did not know the first letter in the book!"
He continued at school for six months, working two days a week for his board and attending the sessions on the other four. And that completed his education. At
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the age of fifteen he " struck out " for himself and became a farm laborer, teamster, trapper, hunter, and general frontiersman. After various love affairs more or less serious, in 1809 he married a young Irish girl, with whom he moved westward to Franklin County and began house- keeping with " fifteen dollars' worth of things fixed up pretty grand!" For six years the young couple were very happy. They had plenty to eat, largely the result of Crockett's skill with old " Betsy," enough to wear, the fruit of the young wife's loom, and they exemplified in their lives his saying, " For I reckon we love as hard in the backwoods as any people in the whole creation!" The death of his first wife in 1815 was a sad blow to him and his young children.
In 1813 Crockett served with credit as a scout under Jackson in the Creek War. In 1816 he married again, this time a widow. There were three sets of children who lived together in an amicable if happy-go-lucky way. In 1821 he was elected a magistrate and a colonel of mili- tia, although at the time he says he had never read a newspaper! Such was his popularity that he was succes- sively elected to the State Legislature and then to Con- gress, where he served two terms; his ignorance, his odd- ity, his humor, his bravery, and his shrewdness, making him a figure of national prominence. Failing of re-elec- tion because of his antagonism to the policy of his whilom friend Jackson, and finding any future political career in Tennessee closed to him, he determined like many south- ern men of that day to go to Texas, then in the beginning of her efforts for freedom. There he hoped to make his fortune and there he found his end. And truly nothing in his life became him better than the ending of it !
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II. The Lone Star Republic
By the treaty of 1819 with Spain the United States re- linquished all claim to the western part of Louisiana, so called, lying south of the Red River and west of the Sa- bine, including the territory now comprised within the present state of Texas, then a part of the vice-royalty of Mexico. In 1821 Mexico revolted from Spain, and in 1822 one Iturbide assumed the government and the Im- perial title; his career was brief but stirring, and in 1824 he was deposed and a constitution establishing the Re- public of Mexico was adopted. Of this Republic Texas, conjoined to Coahuila, its western neighbor, became one of the states.
The first American colony of any moment had been planted there in 1820 under the leadership of Stephen T. Austin, justly styled " The Father of Texas." Successive immigration from the southern United States during fif- teen years had brought the number of white Americans within the quarter million miles of Texas land up to twen- ty thousand, with a small but steadily increasing number of negro slaves. The Spanish or Mexican population was inconsiderable.
The character of the American immigrants was not uniform. There were many insolvent debtors who had fled from their creditors in the States, broken shop-keep- ers leaving the letters " G. T. T." (Gone to Texas) chalked upon their doors, not a few adventurers and soldiers of fortune, and as everywhere, some scoundrels, but the gen- eral average of the American settlers was remarkably high. The majority were honest, capable, law-abiding, hard-working people of the middle class, the best stock
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out of which to build a nation. Accustomed to hunting and frontier life, they were bold and hardy, if reckless and impatient of discipline and restraint. All of them, like Crockett, were expert riflemen.
Meanwhile, the Mexican government became the prize of a succession of worthless adventurers, using their op- portunities for their own aggrandizement. Finally, in 1833, one Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna seized the Pres- idential office, abolished the Congress and made himself Dictator. This petty "Napoleon of the West," as he loved to style himself, was as black-hearted a scoundrel as ever schemed himself into power. Born at Jalapa in Mexico in 1795, he had been successively a lieutenant- colonel in the Spanish army, an adherent of Iturbide, a traitor to him, the diabolus ex machina of the successive revolutions with their different presidents, dictators, etc. -in short, a sort of sub-tropic Warwick! He was not without some of the qualities of a soldier, however, and he certainly knew how to win the confidence of his country- men again and again, in spite of their frequent repudia- tions of him, in his long and eventful career. His op- pressive hand was at once laid upon Texas, and because the Americans would not tamely submit to be deprived of every political right by a series of drastic measures which actually included the proposed confiscation of their arms-their sole means of defence against Indians and the Mexicans themselves-they revolted. As a matter of fact they were eager to do so.
The position of Mexico on the question of slavery was a great cause of irritation to the Texans. Slavery was prohibited by the Mexican Congress in 1824 and was for- mally abolished by the legislature, all Mexicans, in Tex- as-Coahuila, in 1829. The Americans refused to be gov-
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erned by these enactments and prohibitions and defiantly retained their slaves, even adding to their number by im- portation. This was flat and open rebellion and was quite sufficient to account for the hostilities that followed. However, Mexico might have cared but little about that matter if the colony had not rebelled against the wretched maladministration of the Mexicans and because the Americans were practically refused even the smallest share of the government, in spite of the constitution. Besides, it is not the habit of Americans to submit to the dom- ination of any alien race whatsoever, especially of the Spanish family. They could not stand the Spaniard in his Mexican, or any other guise-that was enough to account for it.
III. The Mission del Alamo
The Texan War of Independence began with a skirmish at Gonzales near the end of October, 1835. A Texan dec- laration of principles was adopted November 13th, 1835, and the Declaration of Independence on March 2nd of the following year. The battle of Concepcion was won by the Texans on October 28th, 1835, and on December Ioth, after a siege and an assault which continued for six days, the city of San Antonio de Bexar, the most consid- erable town in Texas, was captured, and every Mexican soldier was expelled from the territory. Hard by the town stood the buildings of the Mission of San Anto- nio de Valero, commonly called the Mission del Alamo, or the Alamo, word signifying cotton-wood tree. The Alamo was founded by the Franciscans in 1703, and after various removals, established in its present loca- tion in 1722.
West front of Church.
Acequia of the Alamo. Proffer
MISSION
SQUI
Freequiof running to
Stockoide and Dich
Church."
The Mission del Alamo.
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The mission buildings comprised a main plaza in the shape of a long parallelogram about fifty by a hundred and fifty yards, with the major axis north and south; the en- closing wall, built of adobe bricks, was about eight feet high and three feet thick. On the west side of the plaza stood a row of one-story buildings, and along the middle of the east side for about sixty yards was a two-story con- vent eighteen feet wide. To the east of the convent lay a yard about a hundred feet square with walls over three feet thick and about sixteen feet high, further strength- ened on the inside by an embankment eight feet high. At the northeast corner of this yard was a sally-port covered by an earth redoubt. At the southeast corner of the yard stood the stone church of the mission, built in the form of a cross, properly orientated; the walls of the church were five feet thick and twenty-two feet high, and the building was roofless and dismantled. A formidable stockade con- nected the church and the southeast corner of the main plaza. Fourteen small pieces of artillery were mounted on the walls, including three in the chancel of the church. Two aqueducts touching the west wall and the church re- spectively provided a sufficiency of water.
Early in 1836 the commander of this fort, if such the mission may be called, was Lieutenant-Colonel William Barrett Travis, a young lawyer from North Carolina, a tall, manly, red-headed young fighter, then just twenty- eight years of age .* Associated with him in the Alamo
* Since the first publication of this sketch, I have received a number of let- ters from persons prominent in the local history of South Carolina, asserting that Travis' name was William Barr, not Barrett, and that he was a found- ling ; the name, which should be spelled Bar, being given him, it is alleged, from the fact that he was found one morning tied to the bars of a gate on the farm of a man named Travis, who adopted him and named him accord- ingly. The Travis lot was situated on the public road between Saluda and
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was Colonel James Bowie of Georgia-he of the sinister knife of the same name. Bowie was senior in age and rank to Travis, but had been disabled by a fall and was then confined to his room by the injury, to which an at- tack of pleuro-pneumonia was superadded; and he was therefore compelled to yield the command to Travis. Bowie was not too ill to fight, though, as we shall see. Under these two officers were about one hundred and forty officers and men, a totally inadequate force, as it would have required at least one thousand men properly to man the extensive lines of the Alamo.
To this little band early in February, 1836, came a wel- come re-enforcement in the shape of David Crockett with twelve of his Tennessee friends and neighbors willing to help Texas to gain her independence and incidentally to join in what they all dearly loved-any kind of a fight! They were all clad in hunting suits, with 'coon-skin caps, and armed with long rifles and Bowie knives! It is sig- nificant of the spirit of the man, that Crockett refused to swear allegiance to " any future government of Texas," until the word " republican " had been inserted after the word " future " in the prescribed form of the oath.
IV. The Hundred and Eighty against the Five Thousand
On the twenty-third of February, 1836, Santa Anna in person appeared before the fort with the advance of his army and demanded its surrender. He had led some five thousand men of the Mexican regular army, with many camp followers and women, a forced march of
Johnston, South Carolina, and my correspondents claim Travis should there- fore be credited to that State. This adds a further touch of romance to Travis' story.
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one hundred and eighty leagues from Monclova to San Antonio, across a desert country in the depth of a Texas winter with its extremes of heat and cold and blasting storm. Only after incredible hardships and great losses had the terrible march been completed. That Santa Anna could do this is no small evidence of his capacity as a leader and his ability to inspire his men to heroic action.
His arrival was a complete surprise to the Texans; many of them were scattered through the town at a fan- dango at the time. When the alarm was given they re- paired to the Alamo and Travis met the demand for a surrender by a shot from his battery, at the same time hoisting his flag. This was the white, red, and green banner of the Mexican Republic with two stars (Texas- Coahuila) in the centre in place of the familiar eagle and serpent. The lone star flag had not then been adopted.
Santa Anna displayed a red ensign signifying that no quarter would be given, and began erecting batteries with which he opened fire, the Texans replying with good ef- fect. The Mexicans, while greatly outnumbering the garrison, were not yet in sufficient force completely to invest the works, although their numbers were increasing as the different regiments followed the advance guard, and the Texans might easily have escaped. Travis, how- ever, had no. thought of retreating-not he. He imme- diately despatched the following appeal for assistance :
" To the people of Texas and all Americans in the World. " Commandancy of The Alamo, " BEXAR, February 24, 1836.
" FELLOW CITIZENS AND COMPATRIOTS. .
" I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna. I have sustained a continual bom-
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bardment for twenty-four hours and have not lost a man. The enemy have demanded a surrender at discretion; oth- erwise the garrison is to be put to the sword if the place is taken. I have answered the summons with a cannon shot and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call upon you, in the name of liberty, of patriotism, and of everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all dis- patch. The enemy are receiving re-enforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. Though this call may be neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country.
" Victory or Death! " W. BARRETT TRAVIS, " Lieutenant-Colonel, Commanding.
" P. S .- The Lord is on our side. When the army appeared in sight we had not three bushels of corn. We have since found in deserted houses eighty or ninety bushels and got into the walls twenty or thirty beeves."
Brave Travis! Other ringing sentences from his sub- sequent letters are worth quoting :
" I shall continue to hold the Alamo until I get relief from my countrymen, or I perish in its defence."
" Take care of my little boy, if the country should be saved I may make him a splendid fortune, but if the coun- try should be lost and I should perish, he would have nothing but the proud recollection that he is the son of a man who died for his country."
The thought of that little boy adds a touch of pathos to the story of the dauntless cavalier and his devoted band
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facing fearful odds " for liberty and honor, God and Tex- as, victory or death !"
Travis also despatched messengers invoking assistance from adjacent garrisons. Colonel James Butler Bonham, a young South Carolina volunteer, broke through the Mexican lines and rode post-haste to Colonel Fannin at Goliad, some two hundred miles to the southeast. Fan- nin promptly started out with three hundred men and four guns, but his ammunition wagons broke down, his transportation failed him, his provisions gave out, he could not get his artillery over the rivers, and he was reluctantly forced to turn back.
He tried in vain to keep Bonham with him. "I will report to Travis or die in the attempt," returned the chi- valric Carolinian, who had been a schoolboy friend of Travis, as he started back to the fort. At one o'clock in the morning of March 3rd he succeeded in reaching the fort through the beleaguering army, after a long and dan- gerous ride in which he literally took his life in his hands. So far as any one could see he came back to certain death with his friends. Honor to him! Travis had received a valuable re-enforcement of thirty-two heroic fellows from Gonzales, who dashed through the lines on horses, cut- ting their way into the Alamo at three in the morning of March Ist. Captain J. W. Smith led them and they came cheerfully, although they divined what their fate would be if the place was stormed.
For eleven days the siege continued. The Mexicans lost heavily whenever they came within rifle range; on one occasion they tried to bridge the aqueduct and thirty of them were instantly killed. Sorties were made by the besieged at first, but were soon given over. The bom- bardment of the works was continuous, but, strange to
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say, no Texan was killed, although the whole garrison was completely worn out by the strain of ceaseless watching and continual fighting. There is no question but they could have cut their way out and escaped at almost any time, but no one dreamed of such a thing. They were there to stay until the end, whatever it might be.
Santa Anna would undoubtedly get the fort eventual- ly ; well, he might have it by paying the price; so they rea- soned, but that price would be one, in the words of a later revolutionist, that would "stagger humanity." Know- ing Santa Anna, they could have no doubt of his inten- tions toward them, especially as he had made no secret of his purpose to put them all to death unless they surren- dered at discretion. The calm courage with which they faced this appalling certainty is as noteworthy as the high heroism of their last defence.
The last of Santa Anna's army arrived at Bexar on the second of March; he allowed them three days for recuper- ation and on the fifth held a council of war to decide upon the course to be pursued. The council, like every other, was divided, with a preponderance of opinion in favor of waiting for siege guns to breach or batter down the walls. Santa Anna, however, determined upon an immediate as- sault, to be delivered at daybreak the next morning. Twenty-five hundred picked men in four columns, com- manded respectively by General Cos, who violated his parole thereby, and Colonels Duque, Romero and Mo- rales, were detailed to make the attack. They were pro- vided with scaling ladders, axes, and crowbars, in addi- tion to their weapons; and the cavalry of the army was disposed at strategic points to prevent escape should any of the hundred and eighty defenders succeed in breaking through the assaulting columns. Or, possibly, their
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function was to cut down any panic-stricken Mexican who might wish to withdraw from before the death-deal- ing Texas rifles !
Colonel Duque was to lead the main assault on the north side, while a simultaneous attack was to be made on the east and west sides and at the redoubt covering the sally-port from the convent yard. No attack appears to have been contemplated on the stockade on the south wall at first. Accounts of what happened differ widely; it is to be remembered that no American lived to tell the tale, and it is hard to get at the absolute truth from Mex- ican testimony, and the frightened recollection of two dazed women and two servants. Each narrator must build his own account by considering all the testimony and weighing the evidence. This that follows seems to me to be what happened.
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