Part 10

For three years after Mexico achieved its independence Texas was a separate State of the republic, with a government of its own. But in 1824, in pursuance of this anti-American policy, it was deprived of the privilege of self-government and added to the State of Coahuila. Shortly after this a law was passed forbidding the further settlement of Americans in Texas and prohibiting Americans from even trading in that region. And, to still further harass and humiliate the Texans, a number of penal settlements, composed of the most desperate criminals in the Mexican prisons, were established in Texas. Heretofore the Texans, in recognition of their services in transforming Texas from a savage wilderness into a civilized and prosperous province, had enjoyed immunity from taxes, but now custom-houses were established and the settlers were charged prohibitive duties even on the necessities of life. When they protested against so flagrant an injustice the Mexican Government answered them by blockading their ports. Heavy garrisons were now quartered in the principal towns, the civil authorities were defied, and the settlers were subjected to the tyranny of unrestrained military rule. Still the Texans did not offer armed resistance. Their tight-drawn patience snapped, however, when, in 1834, Santa Anna, determined to crush for good and all the sturdy independence which animated them, ordered his brother-in-law, General Cos, to enter Texas with a force of fifteen hundred men and disarm the Americans, leaving only one rifle to every five hundred inhabitants. That order was all that was needed to fan the smouldering embers of Texan resentment into the fierce flame of armed revolt. Were they to be deprived of those trusty rifles which they had brought with them on their long pilgrimage from the north, which were their only resource for game, their only defense against Indians, their only means of resistance to oppression? Those were the questions that the settlers asked themselves, and they answered them at Gonzales, on the banks of the Guadalupe.

At Gonzales was a small brass field-piece which had been given to the settlers as a protection from the Indians. A detachment of Mexican cavalry, some eightscore strong, was ordered to go to the town, capture the cannon, and disarm the inhabitants. News of their coming preceded them, however, and when the troopers reached the banks of the river opposite the town they found that all the boats had been taken to the other side, while the cannon which they had come to capture was drawn up in full view with a placard hanging from it. The placard bore the ominous invitation: “Come and take it.” The Mexican commander, spurring his horse to the edge of the river, insolently called upon the inhabitants to give up their arms. It was the same demand, made for the same purpose, which an officer in a scarlet coat had made of another group of Americans, threescore years before, on the village green at Lexington. It was the same demand! And the same answer was given: “Come and take our weapons--if you can!” Though the Mexican officer had a force which outnumbered the settlers almost ten to one, he prudently decided to wait, for even in those days the fame of the Texan riflemen had spread across the land.

Meanwhile horsemen had carried the news of the raid on Gonzales to the outlying ranches and soon the settlers came pouring in until by nightfall they very nearly equalled the soldiery in number. Knowing the moral effect of getting in the first blow, they slipped across the river in the dark and charged the Mexican camp with an impetuosity and fierceness which drove the troopers back in panic-stricken retreat. As the Texans were going into action a parson who accompanied them shouted: “Remember, men, that we’re fighting for our liberty! Our wives, our children, our homes, our country are at stake! The strong arm of Jehovah will lead us on to victory and to glory! Come on, men! Come on!”

The news of this victory, though insignificant in itself, was as kindling thrown on the fires of insurrection. The settlers in Texas rose as one. In October, 1835, in a pitched battle near the Mission of the Immaculate Conception, outside of San Antonio, ninety-four Texan farmers, fresh from the plough, whipped four times that number of Mexicans. In December, after a five days’ siege, the Alamo, in San Antonio, was carried by storm, General Cos and fourteen hundred Mexican regulars, with twenty-one pieces of artillery, surrendering to less than four hundred Texans. By Christmas of 1835 Texas was left without an armed enemy within her borders.

When word was brought to Santa Anna that the garrison of the Alamo had surrendered, he behaved like a madman. With clinched fists and uplifted arms he swore by all the saints in the calendar and all the devils in hell that he would never unbuckle his sword-belt until Texas was once again a wilderness and every _gringo_ settler was a fugitive, a prisoner, or a corpse. As it was at San Antonio that the Mexicans had suffered their most humiliating defeat, so it was San Antonio that the dictator chose as the place where he would wash out that defeat in blood, and on the 22d of February, 1836, he appeared before the city at the head of six thousand troops--the flower of the Mexican army. After their capture of San Antonio the Texans, most of whom were farmers, had returned to their homes and their crops, Colonel W. Barrett Travis being left to hold the town with only one hundred and forty-five men. With him were Davy Crockett, the stories of whose exploits on the frontier were already familiar in every American household, Bonham, the celebrated scout and Indian fighter, and James Bowie, who, in a duel on the Natchez River bar, had made famous the terrible long-bladed knife which his brother Rezin had made from a blacksmith’s file. A few days later thirty-seven brave hearts from Goliad succeeded in breaking through the lines of the besiegers, bringing the total strength of the garrison up to one hundred and eighty-three. Surrounding them was an army of six thousand!

The story of the last stand in the Alamo has been told so often that I hesitate to repeat it here. Yet it is a tale of which Americans can never tire any more than they can tire of the story of Jones and the _Bonhomme Richard_, or of Perry at Lake Erie. The Texans, too few in numbers to dream of defending the town, withdrew into the Alamo, an enormously thick-walled building, half fortress and half church, which derived its name from being built in a clump of _álamos_ or cottonwood trees. For eleven days the Mexicans pounded the building with artillery and raked it with rifle fire; for eleven days the Texans held them back in that historic resistance whose details are so generally and so uncertainly known. Day after day the defenders strained their eyes across the prairie in search of the help that never came. Day after day the blood-red flag that signified “No quarter” floated above the Mexican lines, while from the walls of the Alamo flaunted defiantly the flag with a single star.

At sunset on the 4th of March the Mexican bombardment abruptly ceased, but no one knew better than Travis that it was but the lull which preceded the breaking of the storm. Drawing up his men in the great chapel, Travis drew a line across the earthen floor with his sword.

“Men,” he said, “it’s all up with us. A few more hours and we shall probably all be dead. There’s no use hoping for help, for no force that our friends could send us could cut its way through the Mexican lines. So there’s nothing left for it but to stay here and go down fighting. When the greasers storm the walls kill them as they come and keep on killing them until none of us are left. But I leave it to every man to decide for himself. Those who wish to go out and surrender may do so and I shall not reproach them. As for me, I shall stay here and die for Texas. Those who wish to stay with me will step across this line.”

There was not so much as a flicker of hesitation. The defenders moved across the line as one. Even the wounded staggered over with the others, and those who were too badly wounded to walk dragged themselves across on hands and knees. Bowie, who was ill with fever, lay on his cot, too weak to move. “Boys,” he called feebly, “boys, I don’t believe I can get over alone ... won’t some of you help me?” So they carried him across the line, bed and all. It was a picture to stir the imagination, to send the thrills of patriotism chasing up and down one’s spine: the gloomy chapel with its adobe walls and raftered ceiling; the line of stern-faced, powder-grimed men in their tattered frontier dress, crimsoned bandages knotted about the heads of many of them; the fever-racked but indomitable Bowie stretched upon his cot; the young commander--for Travis was but twenty-seven--striding up and down, in his hand a naked sword, in his eyes the fire of patriotism.

On the morning of the 6th of March, before the sun had risen, Santa Anna launched his grand assault. Their bugles sounding the ominous notes of the _degüello_, which signified that no quarter would be given, the Mexican infantry, provided with scaling-ladders, swept forward at the double. Behind them rode the cavalry, with orders to sabre any man who flinched. As the Mexican columns came within range the Texans met them with a blast of lead which shrivelled and scattered them as the breath of winter shrivels and scatters the autumn leaves. The men behind the walls of the Alamo were master marksmen who had taken their degree in shooting from the stern college of the frontier, and they proved their marvellous proficiency that day. Crockett and Bonham aimed and fired as fast as rifles could be loaded and passed up to them, and at every spurt of flame a little, brown-faced man would drop with a crimson patch on the breast of his tunic or a round blue hole in his forehead. Any troops on earth would have recoiled in the face of that deadly fire, and Santa Anna’s were no exception. But the cavalry rode into them and at the point of their sabres forced them again to the attack. Again the shattered regiments advanced and attempted to place their ladders against the walls, but once more the sheer ferocity of the Texan defense sent them reeling back, bleeding and gasping. But there was a limit even to the powers of resistance of the Texans. The powder in their horns ran low; their arms grew weak from slaying. So, when the wave of brown-skinned soldiery rolled forward once again over its carpet of corpses, it topped and overflowed the desperately defended walls. The Texans, whose ammunition was virtually exhausted, were beaten back by sheer weight of numbers, but they rallied in the patio and, under the sky of Texas, made their final stand. What happened afterward is, and always must be, a matter of speculation. No one knows the story of the end. Even the number of victims is a matter of dispute to-day. Some say there were a hundred and eighty-three defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. Some assert that one woman escaped; some say two; others say none. Some declared that a negro servant got away; others declare with equal positiveness that he did not. Some state that half a dozen Americans stood at bay with their backs to the wall, Crockett among them. That the Mexican general, Castrillon, offered them their lives if they would surrender, and that, when they took him at his word, he ordered them shot down like dogs. (Since then a Mexican’s word has never been good for anything in Texas.) All we do know with any certainty of what went on within those blood-bespattered walls is that every American died fighting. Travis, revolver in one hand and sword in the other, went down amid a ring of men that he had slain. Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers who attempted to bayonet him as he lay all but helpless and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another before they could finish him. Crockett, so the Mexicans related afterward, fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed against the wall, but to get at him the Mexicans had to scramble over a heap of their own dead. No one will ever know how many of the enemy each of these raging, fighting, cornered men sent down the long and gloomy road before he followed them. The pavement of the patio was scarlet. The dead lay piled in heaps. Not an American remained alive. Death and Santa Anna held the place. As the inscription on the monument which was raised in later years to the defenders reads: “Thermopylæ had her messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none.” But before they died, the ninescore men who laid down their lives for Texas sent _sixteen hundred_ Mexicans to their last accounting.

By order of Santa Anna, the bodies of the Texans were collected in a huge pile and burned, while the Mexican dead--sixteen hundred of them, please remember--were buried in the local cemetery. As Bowie’s body was brought out, General Cos remarked: “He was too brave a man to be burned like a dog--but never mind, throw him in.” As the Sabbath sun sank slowly into the west the smoke of the funeral pyre rose against the blood-red sky like a column draped in mourning. It marked something more than the end of a band of heroes; it marked the end of Mexican dominion above the Rio Grande.

[Illustration: Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another.]

While Santa Anna was besieging the Alamo, General Urrea invaded eastern Texas for the purpose of capturing San Patricio, Refugio, and Goliad and thus stamping out the last embers of insurrection. It was not a campaign; it was a butchery. The little garrison of San Patricio was taken by surprise and every man put to death. At Refugio, however, a force of little more than a hundred men under Colonel Ward repulsed the Mexicans, whose loss in killed and wounded was double the entire number of the defenders. A few days later, however, Ward and his men, while falling back, were surrounded and taken prisoners. When Urrea’s column appeared before Goliad, Colonel Fannin, whose force was outnumbered six to one, ordered a retreat, feeling confident that the Mexicans, for whose fighting abilities the Texans had the utmost contempt, would not dare to follow them. But the Texans made the fatal mistake of underrating their adversaries, for, before they had fallen back a dozen miles, they found themselves hemmed in by two thousand Mexicans. Escape was out of the question, so Fannin formed his three hundred men in hollow square and prepared to put up one of those fight-till-the-last-man-falls resistances for which the Texans had become famous. Being cut off from water, however, and with a third of his men wounded, he realized that his chances of success were represented by a minus sign; so, when the Mexican commander, who had been heavily reinforced, offered to parole both officers and men and return them to the United States if they would surrender, Fannin accepted the offer and ordered his men to stack their arms. The terms of the surrender were written in both English and Spanish, and were signed by the ranking officers of both forces with every formality.

The Texan prisoners were marched back under guard to Goliad, the town they had so recently evacuated, and were confined in the old fort, where they were joined a few days later by Colonel Ward’s command, who, as you will remember, had also been captured. On the night of the 26th of March a despatch rider rode into Urrea’s camp bearing a message from Santa Anna. It contained an order for the murder of all the prisoners. The next day was Palm Sunday. At dawn the Texans were awakened and ordered to form ranks in the courtyard. They were then divided into four parties and marched off in different directions under heavy guard. They had not proceeded a mile across the prairies before they were halted and their captors deliberately poured volley after volley into them until not a Texan was left standing. Then the cavalry rode over the corpse-strewn ground, hacking with their sabres at the dead. Upward of four hundred Texans were slaughtered at Goliad. The defenders of the Alamo died fighting with weapons in their hands, but these men were unarmed and defenseless prisoners, butchered in cold blood in one of the most atrocious massacres of history.

With the extermination of the Texan garrisons, Santa Anna complacently assured himself that his work in the north was finished and prepared to return to the capital, where he was badly needed. It is never safe, you see, for a dictator to leave the chair of state for long, else he is likely to return and find a rival sitting in it. Now, however, Santa Anna felt that the Texan uprising was, to make use of a slangy but expressive phrase, all over but the shouting. But the Texans, as stout old John Paul Jones would have put it, had only just begun to fight. Learning that a force of Texan volunteers was mobilizing upon the San Jacinto, the “Napoleon of the West,” as Santa Anna modestly described himself, decided to delay his departure long enough to invade the country north of Galveston and put the finishing touches to the subjugation of Texas by means of a final carnival of blood and fire. Theoretically, everything favored the dictator. He had money; he had ample supplies of arms and ammunition; he had a force of trained and seasoned veterans far outnumbering any with which the Texans could oppose him. It was to be a veritable picnic of a campaign, a sort of butchers’ holiday. In making his plans, however, Santa Anna failed to take a certain gentleman into consideration. The name of that gentleman was Sam Houston.

The chronicles of our frontier record the name of no more picturesque and striking figure than Houston. The fertile brain of George A. Henty could not have made to order a more satisfactory or wholly improbable hero. Though his exploits are a part of history, they read like the wildest fiction. That is why, perhaps, the dry-as-dust historians make so little mention of him. The incidents in his life would provide a moving-picture company with material for a year. Born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his father, who had been an officer in the Revolution, answered to the last roll-call when young Sam had barely entered his teens. The support of a large and growing family thus falling upon the energetic shoulders of Mrs. Houston, she packed her household goods in a prairie-schooner and moved with her children to Tennessee, then upon the very edge of civilization. Here Sam, who had learned his “three R’s” in such poor schools as the Virginia of those early days afforded, attended a local academy for a time. Translations of the classics having fallen into his hands, his imagination was captured by the exploits of the heroes of antiquity, and he asked permission of the principal to study Latin, which, for some unexplainable reason, was curtly refused him. Whereupon he walked out of the academy, declaring that he would never repeat another lesson.

His family, who had scant sympathy with his romantic fancies, procured him a job as clerk in a crossroads store. Within a fortnight he was missing. After some months of anxiety his relatives learned that he was living among the Cherokee Indians across the Tennessee. When one of his brothers attempted to induce him to return home, young Sam answered that he preferred measuring deer tracks to measuring tape, and that, if he was not permitted to study Latin in the academy, he could at least dig it out for himself in the freedom of the woods. Houston dwelt for several years with his Cherokee friends, eventually being adopted as a son by the chieftain Oolooteka. Upon the outbreak of our second war with Great Britain he enlisted in the American army. Though his friends remonstrated with him for entering the army as a private soldier, his mother was made of different stuff. As he was leaving for the front she took down his father’s rifle and, with tear-dimmed eyes, handed it to her son. “Here, my boy,” she said bravely, though her voice quavered, “take this rifle and never disgrace it. Remember that I would rather that all my sons should lie in honorable graves than that one of them should turn his back to save his life. Go, and God be with you, but never forget that, while my door is always open to brave men, it is always shut to cowards.”

Houston quickly climbed the ladder of promotion, obtaining a commission within a year after he had enlisted as a private. He first showed the stern stuff of which he was made when taking part in General Jackson’s campaign against the Creek Indians. His thigh pierced by an arrow during the storming of the Indian breastworks at Tohopeka, Houston asked a fellow officer to draw it out. But it was sunk so deeply in the flesh that the attempt to extract it brought on an alarming flow of blood, whereupon the officer refused to proceed, fearing that Houston would bleed to death. Thereupon the fiery youngster drew his sword. “Draw it out or I’ll run you through!” he said. Out the arrow came. General Jackson, who had witnessed the incident and had noted the seriousness of the young officer’s wound, ordered him to the rear, but Houston, mindful of his mother’s parting injunction, disregarded the order and plunged again into the thick of the battle. It was a breach of discipline, however, to which Andrew Jackson shut his eyes.

Opportunity once more knocked loudly at young Houston’s door when the Creeks made their final stand at Horseshoe Bend. After the main body of the Indians had been destroyed, a party of warriors barricaded themselves in a log cabin built over a ravine in such a situation that the guns could not be brought to bear. The place must be taken by storm, and Jackson called for volunteers. Houston was the only man who responded. Snatching a rifle from a soldier, he shouted, “Come on, men! Follow me!” and dashed toward the cabin. But no one had the courage to follow him into the ravine of death. Running in zigzags, to disconcert the Indian marksmen, he actually reached the cabin before he fell with a shattered arm and two rifle-bullets through his shoulder. It was just the sort of deed to win the heart of the grim old hero of New Orleans, who until his death remained one of Houston’s staunchest friends and admirers.