USA > Texas > Tarrant County > Fort Worth > History of Texas : Fort Worth and the Texas northwest edition, Volume I > Part 39
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"The above-described fort. if it merited that name. was, when the siege commenced, in the condition for defense in which it had been left by the Mexican general. Cos, when he capitulated in the fall of 1835. The chapel, except the west end and north projection, had been unroofed. the east end being occupied by the platform of earth B. 12 feet high, with a slope for ascension to the west. On its
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level were mounted three pieces of cannon. One (1), a 12-pounder, pointed east through an embrasure roughly notched in the wall; another (2) was aimed north through a similar notch; and another (3) fired over the wall to the south. High scaffolds of wood en- abled marksmen to use the top of the roofless wall as a parapet. The intrenchment (R) consisted of a ditch and breastwork, the latter of earth packed between two rows of palisades, the outer row being higher than the earthwork. Behind it and near the gate was a battery of four guns (4 5 6 7), all 4-pounders, pointing south. The porte-cochére through the low barrack was covered on the out- side by a lunette of stockades and earth, mounted with two guns (8, 9). In the southwest angle of the large area was an 18-pounder (10), in the centre of the west wall a twelve-pound carronade (11), and in the northwest corner of the same area an eight-pounder (12), and east of this, within the north wall, two more guns of the same calibre (13, 14). All the guns of this area were mounted on high platforms of stockades and earth, and fired over the walls. The several barriers were covered on the outside with a ditch, except where such guard was afforded by the irrigating canal, which flowed on the east and west sides of the fort and served to fill the fosse with water.
"Thus the works were mounted with fourteen guns, which agrees with Yoakum's account of their number, though Santa Anna in his report exaggerates it to twenty-one. The number, however, has little bearing on the merits of the final defense with which cannon had very little to do. These guns were in the hands of men unskilled in their use, and owing to the construction of the works most of them had little width of range. Of the buildings above described, the chapel and the two barracks are probably still standing. They were repaired and newly roofed during the Mexican war for the use of the United States Quartermaster's department.
"On the 4th of March Santa Anna called a council of war, and fixed on the morning of the 6th for the final assault. The besieging force now around the Alamo, comprising all the Mexican troops which had yet arrived, consisted of the two dragoon regiments of Dolores and Tampico, which formed a brigade, commanded by Gene- ral Andrade, two companies or batteries of artillery under Colonel Ampudia, and six battalions of infantry, namely. Los Zapadores (engineer troops), Jimenes. Guerrero, Matamoros, Toluca, and Tres Vilalas. These six battalions of foot were to form the storming forces. The order for the attack, which I have read, but have no copy of, was full and precise in its details. and was signed by Gene- ral Amador, as Chief of Staff. The infantry were directed at a certain hour between midnight and dawn to form at convenient dis- tances from the fort in four columns of attack and a reserve. These dispositions were not made by battalions, for the light companies of all were incorporated with the Zapadores to form the reserve, and other transpositions were made. A certain number of scaling ladders, axes, and fascines were to be borne by particular columns. A com- manding officer, with a second to replace him in case of accident,
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was named, and a point of attack designated for each column. The cavalry were to be stationed at suitable points around the fort to cut off fugitives. From what I have learned from men engaged in the assault, it seems that these dispositions were modified before it was carried out so as to combine the five bodies of infantry, including the reserve, into only three columns of attack, thus leaving no actual reserve but the cavalry. The immediate direction of the assault seems to have been intrusted to General Castrillon, a Spaniard by birth and a brilliant soldier. Santa Anna took his station, with a part of his staff and all the bands of music, at a battery about five hundred yards south of the Alamo and near the old bridge, from which post a signal was to be given by a bugle-note for the columns to move simultaneously at double-quick time against the fort. One, consisting of Los Zapadores, Toluca, and the light companies, and commanded by Castrillon, was to rush through the breach on the north ; another, consisting of the battalion of Jimenes and other troops, and commanded by General Cos, was to storm the chapel; and a third, whose leader I do not recollect, was to scale the west barrier. Cos, who had evacuated San Antonio a year before under capitulation, was assigned to the most difficult point of attack, prob- ably to give him an opportunity to retrieve his standing. By the timing of the signal it was calculated that the columns would reach the foot of the wall just as it should become sufficiently light for good operation.
"When the hour came, the south guns of the Alamo were answer- ing the batteries which fronted them ; but the music was silent till the blast of a bugle was followed by the rushing tramp of soldiers. The guns of the fort opened upon the moving masses, and Santa Anna's bands struck up the assassins note of deauello, or no quarter. But a few and not very effective discharges of cannon from the works could be made before the enemy were under them, and it was probably not till then that the worn and wearied garrison was fully mustered. Cas- trillon's column arrived first at the foot of the wall, but was not the first to enter. The guns of the north, where Travis commanded in person, probably raked the breach, and this or the fire of the riflemen brought the column to a disordered halt, and Colonel Duque, who commanded the battalion of Toluca, fell dangerously wounded ; but. while this was occurring, the column from the west crossed the bar- rier on that side by escalade at a point north of the centre, and as this checked resistance at the north, Castrillon shortly after passed the breach. It was probably while the enemy was thus pouring into the large area that Travis fell at his post, for his body, with a single shot in the forehead, was found beside the gun at the northwest angle. The outer walls and batteries, all except one gun, of which I will speak, were now abandoned by the defenders. In the meantime Cos had again proved unlucky. His column was repulsed from the chapel, and his troops fell back in disorder behind the old stone stable and huts that stood south of the southwest angle. There they were soon rallied, and led into the large area by General Amador.
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I am not certain as to his point of entrance, but he probably fol- lowed the escalade of the column from the west.
"This all passed within a few minutes after the bugle sounded. The garrison, when driven from the thinly manned outer defences, whose early loss was inevitable, took refuge in the buildings before described, but mainly in the long barrack ; and it was not until then. when they became more concentrated and covered within, that the main struggle began. They were more concentrated as to space, not as to unity of command; for there was no communicating be- tween buildings, nor, in all cases, between rooms. There was little need of command. however, to men who had no choice left but to fall where they stood before the weight of numbers. There was now no retreating from point to point, and each group of defenders had to fight and die in the den where it was brought to bay. From the doors, windows, and loopholes of the several rooms around the area the crack of the rifle and the hiss of the bullet came fierce and fast ; as fast the enemy fell and recoiled in his first efforts to charge. The gun beside which Travis fell was now turned against the build- ings, as were also some others, and shot after shot was sent crashing through the doors and barricades of the several rooms. Each ball was followed by a storm of musketry and a charge; and thus room after room was carried at the point of the bayonet, when all within them died fighting to the last. The struggle was made up of a num- ber of separate and desperate combats, often hand to hand, between squads of the garrison and bodies of the enemy. The bloodiest spot about the fort was the long barrack and the ground in front of it, where the enemy fell in heaps.
"Before the action reached this stage, the turning of Travis' gun by the assailants was briefly imitated by a group of the defenders. 'A small piece on a high platform,' as it was described to me by General Bradburn, was wheeled by those who manned it against the large area after the enemy entered it. Some of the Mexican officers thought it did more execution than any gun which fired outward ; but after two effective discharges it was silenced, when the last of its cannoneers fell under a shower of bullets. I cannot locate this gun with certainty, but it was probably the twelve pound carronade which fired over the centre of the west wall from a high commanding position. The smallness assigned to it perhaps referred only to its length. According to Mr. Ruiz, then the Alcalde of San Antonio. who after the action, was required to point out the slain leaders to Santa Anna, the body of Crockett was found in the west battery just referred to; and we may infer that he either commanded that point or was stationed there as a sharpshooter. The common fate overtook Bowie in his bed in one of the rooms of the low barrack. when he probably had but a few days of life left in him; yet he had enough remaining, it is said, to shoot down with his pistols more than one of his assailants ere he was butchered on his couch. If he had sufficient strength and consciousness left to do it, we may safely assume that it was done.
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"The chapel, which was the last point taken, was carried by a coup de main after the fire of the other buildings was silenced. Once the enemy in possession of the large area, the guns of the south could be turned to fire into the door of the church, only from fifty to a hundred yards, off, and that was probably the route of attack. The inmates of this last stronghold, like the rest, fought to the last, and continued to fire down from the upper works after the enemy occupied the floor. A Mexican officer told of seeing one of his soldiers shot in the crown of the head during this melee. Towards the close of the struggle Lieutenant Dickenson, with his child in his arms, or as some accounts say, tied to his back, leaped from the east embrasure of the chapel, and both were shot in the act. Of those he left behind him, the bayonet soon gleaned what the bullet had left ; and in the upper part of that edifice the last defender must have fallen. The morning breeze which received his parting breath probably still fanned his flag above that fabric, for I doubt not he fell ere it was pulled down by the victors.
"The Alamo had fallen ; but the impression it left on the invader was the forerunner of San Jacinto. It is a fact not often remem- bered that Travis and his band fell under the Mexican Federal flag of 1824, instead of the Lone Star of Texas, although Inde- pendence, unknown to them, had been declared by the new Con- vention four days before at Washington, on the Brazos. They died for a Republic of whose existence they never knew. The action, according to Santa Anna's report, lasted thirty minutes. It was certainly short, and possibly no longer time passed between the mo- ment the enemy entered the breach and that when resistance died out. The assault was a task which had to be carried out quickly or fail. Some of the incidents which have to be related separately occurred simultaneously, and all occupied very little time. The ac- count of the assault which Yoakum and others have adopted as authentic is evidently one which popular tradition has based on con- jecture. By a rather natural inference it assumes that the enclosing walls, as in the case of regular forts, were the principal works, and that in storming these the main conflict took place. The truth was, these extensive barriers formed in reality nothing more than the out- works, speedily lost, while the buildings within constituted the citadel and the scene of sternest resistance. Yoakum's assertion that Santa Anna, during the height of the conflict, was under the works, urging on the escalade in person, is exceedingly fabulous. Castrillon, not Santa Anna, was the soul of the assault. The latter remained at his south battery, viewing the operations from the corner of a house which covered him, till he supposed the place was nearly mastered. when he moved up towards the Alamo, escorted by his aids and bands of music, but turned back on being greeted by a few shots from the upper part of the chapel. He, however, entered the area towards the close of the scene, and directed some of the last details of the butchery. It cannot be denied that Santa Anna in the course of his career showed occasional fits of dashing courage, but he did not select this field for an exhibition of that quality. About the time
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the area was entered, a few men, cut off from inward retreat, leaped from the barriers, and attempted flight, but were all sabred or speared by the cavalry except one, who succeeded in hiding himself under a small bridge of the irrigating ditch. There he was discovered and reported a few hours after by some laundresses engaged in washing near the spot. He was executed. Half an hour or more after the action was over a few men were found concealed in one of the rooms under some mattresses. General Houston, in his letter of the 11th, says as many as seven; but I have generally heard them spoken of as only four or five. The officer to whom the discovery was first reported entreated Santa Anna to spare their lives; but he was sternly rebuked, and the men ordered to be shot, which was done. Owing to the hurried manner in which the mandate was obeyed, and the confusion prevailing at the moment, a Mexican soldier was acci- dentally killed with them. A negro belonging to Travis, the wife of Lieutenant Dickenson, who at the time was enceinte, and a few Mexican women with their children were the only inmates of the fort whose lives were spared. The massacre involved no women and but one child. Lieutenant Dickenson commanded the gun at the east embrasure of the chapel. His family was probably in one of the small vaulted rooms of the north projection, which will account for his being able to take his child to the rear of the building when it was being stormed. An irrigating canal ran below the embrasure, and his aim may have been to break the shock of his leap by landing in the mud of that waterless ditch, and then try to escape, or he may have thought that so striking an act would plead for his life; but the shower of bullets which greeted him told how vain was the hope. The authenticity of this highly dramatic incident has been questioned, but it was asserted from the first, and was related to me by an eye- witness engaged in the assault.
"It was asserted on the authority of one of the women that, while the church was being stormed, Major Evans, the Master of Ordnance, rushed with a torch or burning match towards the magazine of the fort to fire it, when he was shot down before his object was accom- plished. It may seem unlikely that any of the women would be in a position to witness such an incident, but they may have been put into the magazine as a place most sheltered from the enemy's shots. The powder was probably stored in the little vaulted room on the north of the chapel which I have just referred to.
"There were two officers of the name just mentioned in the gar- rison of the Alamo, Major Robert Evans, Master of Ordnance, an Irishman, and Captain J. B. Evans, of Texas, a nephew of General Jacob Brown, who formerly commanded the United States army.
"I must now endeavor to approximate as nearly as can be done by inference. for I have no direct data. to the number of troops engaged in the assault and the amount of their loss-matters which have been the subject of absurd perversion on both sides. The old popular tale of Texas that the Alamo was stormed by 10,000 men, of whom 1,000 or more were killed, shows how rapidly legend mav grow up even in this age, and the belief which has been given to it
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is worthy of an era when miracles were considered frequent. The entire force with which Santa Anna invaded Texas in 1836, and which after his defeat he rated at 6,000 men, probably amounted to 7,500, or 8,500, as it consisted of seventeen corps; viz., three regi- ments of horse and fourteen battalions of foot. It is proper here to observe that the Mexicans apply the term regiment only to cavalry corps, a colonel's command of infantry being always called a bat- talion. The nominal complement of a regiment or battalion is 1,500; but I never heard of one that was full, and seldom saw one during my long residence in Mexico that contained as much as a third of that number. I doubt if it is considered convenient ever to swell one to over 500 men; for the host of officers who have sufficient influence to obtain commands can be supplied only by keeping up the number of corps at the expense of their fulness. I saw all the corps composing the said army when it retreated from Texas to Matamoras after the campaign of 1836, and from the size of those which had not been in action, as well as from the remaining bulk of those which had suffered, after allowing for probable loss, I am convinced that their average strength when they entered Texas was short of 500 men each, and that the smaller of the two amounts I have assigned to the aggregate is most likely to be true.
"This estimate applies especially to the six battalions of infantry which formed the assaulting force of the Alamo. They may pos- sibly have numbered 3,000 men; but from the best information and inference I have been able to gather, I believe that their aggregate did not exceed and may have fallen short of 2,500. Santa Anna's invariable practice was to exaggerate his force before an action, by way of threat, and to underrate it after, whether to excuse defeat or magnify victory; and in accordance with this trickery, in his report of the taking of the Alamo, he sets down his storming force at 1,400, in his loss of sixty killed and 300 wounded, and the num- ber of the garrison all told and all killed at 600. Where the slaughter was wrought by good firearms in good hands at close quarters there would hardly be such disparity between the number of killed and wounded. The probability is that he struck off an even thousand from the round numbers of the assaulters and 100 or 200 from the number of his killed, while he made out as big a butchery of rebels as Mexican credulity would swallow. If we correct his falsification on this assumption, he had in the assault 2,400, and lost in killed and wounded 460 or 560. Anselmo Bor- gara, a Mexican, who first reported the fall of the Alamo to Gen- eral Houston, at Gonzales, having left San Antonio the evening after it occurred, stated that the assaulting force amounted to 2,300 men, of whom 521 were killed and as many wounded. He had probably found means of ascertaining with approximate correctness the number of infantry at San Antonio; but his report of the loss has evidently acquired its bulk by the process of doubling. Neither Mexican troops nor any others are apt to take forts with a loss of more than two-fifths of their number. He had probably heard of 521 as the total of killed and wounded, and then converted the whole
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into the former and supposed an equal amount of the latter. The odd numbers attached to the hundreds, and the limits which prob- ability would assign to a large loss, favor the belief that he had heard the result of an actual count of the whole deficit. This an- alysis of falsehood may not be a very sure way of finding out truth, but it is not without value when it has some corroboration. The Mexican officers captured at San Jacinto, including Santa Anna's secretary, as I was told by Colonel Seguin, were generally of the opinion that the loss at the Alamo in killed and wounded was about 500. Some rated it lower, and others higher ; and one, but only one, went as high as 700. The opinions of such enlisted men as I have conversed with were about the same as those of the officers, rang- ing from 400 to 600. Nothing is more apt to make an exaggerated impression on the casual view than a field of slaughter, and I think that the higher of the above estimates may be errors of that kind. General Bradburn, who was at the scene of action soon after it occurred, believed that the eventual loss to the service (killed and disabled for life) would be 300. This I consider equivalent to 500 killed and wounded, and it is my opinion that the Mexican loss at the Alamo differed little from that number.
"Now, if 500 men were bullet-stricken by 180 in half an hour or little more, it was a rapidity of bloodshed which needs no ex- aggeration ; but it may require strong proofs to save it from the imputation of fiction, for defenders of better forts than the Alamo seldom slay many times more than their own number, unless they possess extraordinary means or opportunities for destruction. The slaughter was not in this case the carnage of unresisted pursuit, like that of San Jacinto, nor the sweeping havoc of cannon under favor- able circumstances, like that of Sandusky. The main element of defence was the individual valor and skill of men who had few advantages of fortification, ordnance, discipline, or command. All their deficiencies, which were glaring, serve only to enhance the merit of individuality, in which no veterans could have excelled them. It required no ordinary bravery, even in greatly superior numbers, to overcome a resistance so determined. The Mexican troops displayed more of it in this assault than they have done on almost any other occasion ; but it must be remembered that better troops than those of Santa Anna always fail under loss as heavy as romance often assigns to the assailants of the Alamo.
"If we owe to departed heroes the duty of preserving their deeds from oblivion, we ought to feel as strongly that of defending their memory against the calumnious effect of false eulogy. which in time might cause their real achievements to be doubted."
CHAPTER XX JOHNSON AND GRANT AND FANNIN
Soon after the fall of San Antonio, Colonel Gonzales, a former fed- eral officer, but who had joined the Texans and obtained authority . to raise men and annoy the enemy in every way he could, arrived with some hundred Mexican adherents. During his stay at San Antonio, it was agreed that such of the force then in San Antonio as would volun- teer should join him in an expedition against Matamoras, Gonzales assur- ing us that he would be able, in a short time, to augment his force to 1,000 or more men, from the Rio Grande settlements. He left, after promising to keep us informed of his movements, and to establish a plan of rendezvous. That was the last we heard of him.
Impressed with the importance of occupying and holding Matamoras, and thus transferring the war into the enemy's country, as well as giving employment to the volunteer troops, Colonel Johnson repaired to San Felipe to lay it before, and get the authority of, the Provisional Govern- ment to make the campaign. Colonel Grant, in the meantime, raised a force of such as would volunteer, and marched to Goliad, and thence to Refugio, at which place Colonel Johnson joined him, after getting the authority of the government to make the expedition. Colonel Fannin was also authorized to ship the "Georgia Battalion," then at the mouth: of the Brazos, and but recently arrived, to Copano, for the same purpose.
Fannin and the troops arrived in due time and, after being elected colonel, and coming to an understanding with Colonels Johnson and Grant, he marched to Goliad, where he was joined by other volunteers, which increased his force to some 500 men.
Johnson and Grant proceeded to San Patricio on the Nueces River. where they remained some time reconnoitering and scouring the country around, capturing a small Mexican force, which was released on parole. The officer commanding was allowed the privilege of the camp on his word of honor not to leave. He, however, soon deserted and joined Urrea at Matamoras.
Soon after this, Johnson and Grant crossed the Nueces, and advanced to Rio Colorado, on the road to Matamoras, for the purpose of getting horses to mount a cavalry force. an arm much needed by Fannin. They succeeded in obtaining horses sufficient to mount at least 100 men.
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