Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (30 page)

From the beginning, Jackson and his soldiers sought revenge upon the Red Sticks. Jackson’s strategy included a deliberate attempt to terrorize the Indian people to break their will and destroy their war-waging capabilities by burning villages and crops. Avenging Fort Mims, which was located just north of Mobile, Alabama—then the Mississippi Territory—and the August 30, 1813 massacre, Jackson proclaimed with satisfaction: “We have retaliated for the destruction of Fort Mims.”
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But in fact, an even greater retaliation unleashed by Jackson that decisively broke the power of the Red Sticks came at Horseshoe Bend. After Jackson’s men stormed the Creek breastwork of logs, they poured over the parapet to slaughter every Red Stick warrior they could find. Among the Creeks, “None asked for quarter,” and none was given by the vengeful Anglo-Celts, ensuring that “the butchery was continued for hours.” Perhaps as many as 800 Red Sticks were killed in a “terrible vengeance” during one of the bloodiest days in America’s Indian Wars. But the American eagle of Manifest Destiny was soaring high. The slaughter opened up a vast land to settlement, including the cane break country of southwest Alabama that Travis called home.
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Quite simply, no quarter was a widely accepted brand of warfare on both the United States and Mexican frontiers. Americans practiced such utter ruthlessness for generations upon the enemies of their people— Indians, Spanish, Americans, and Mexicans—and vice-versa. In part, such slaughters evolved into the universal form of warfare practiced on the southwest frontier, partly because it was so remote from centers of government, big cities, societal restrictions, and cultural norms, allowing civilized rules to degenerate into barbarity.

Consequently, from the beginning of Texas’ settlement, the colonists from the United States brought this no-quarter brand of warfare— Anglo-Celt cultural baggage—with them across the Sabine. When the Kickapoo attacked the Joseph Taylor family in the remote northern frontier of the Brazos River country in November 1835, tough Texas Rangers retaliated. The Rangers vented their wrath against two unfortunate Kickapoo warriors who they tracked down. Not satisfied with killing them, the Rangers—emulating the Spanish—then cut off their heads and mounted them on poles to serve as a warning to other Indians. In early 1836, other Indian fighters and hardened Rangers, like Noah Smith, decorated saddles with Indian scalps. Clearly, these frontier excesses indicated that nasty, ugly war was a common feature of life on the edges of civilization. Ironically, the cultured, privileged elites of Mexico City, who loved art, scholarly books, fine wine, Spanish architecture, and the refined niceties of Mexican society, likewise promoted the brutal policy of no quarter for the Texans and United States volunteers in arms.
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In overall terms, what had developed in America between the Anglo-Celts and the Indians was the racial war, pure and simple, and this racial animosity was given new life in Texas. Not unlike the seemingly endless, merciless religious wars—including the Crusades— between Islamic and Christian warriors for more than 1,000 years, this racial war between whites and Indians was noted for its savagery. The Red Stick Creeks had been inspired by Tecumseh’s words of “Let the white race perish.” Tecumseh had desired nothing less than the massacre of every white in America, driving them “back into the [Atlantic] water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! [And] slay their wives and children, that the very breed may perish.”
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And like the embattled Red Sticks before them, the Mexican people had now declared their own holy war of extermination upon the AngloCelts of Texas. The seemingly endless cycle of racial war had come full circle, continuing in yet another faraway land that had become just another savage racial frontier. As if in divine retribution for having encroached upon Texas lands at the expense of both the Native American and the Mexican people, and to mock the folly of the inexperienced leadership of Neill, Bowie, and Travis, who wanted to hold an indefensible position, a good many young men and boys were about to pay a stiff price for leadership mistakes. The Alamo defenders were about to be sacrificed to soldados committed to “saving” Mexico.
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Eerily, a past chapter of history was about to be repeated at the Alamo. During the First War for Texas’ Independence, the mostly U.S. volunteers of the ill-fated Gutierrez-Magee Expedition of 1812–13 had captured Béxar. They then made an ill-advised defensive stand in the Alamo with a number of cannons, including the little “Come and Take It” gun that Neill had commanded after Gonzales had been given it by the Mexican government in 1831. Then, they raised a green flag with Irish revolutionary antecedents, which flew over the old Spanish mission that always seemed to draw revolutionaries like a magnet. Occupying both San Antonio and the Alamo with a blind overconfidence, this earlier group of largely Anglo-Celtic revolutionaries was doomed by indecision, lack of experience, underestimating their opponent, lack of discipline, and disunity of command—ironically, the same fatal formula now repeated by yet another generation of Anglo-Celts at the same place in early 1836. The twisting contours of history were once again about to repeat itself in San Antonio with the same bloody results.
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General Filisola explained the utter disaster for this earlier generation of Anglo-Celtic revolutionaries in Texas: “That was the fatal and inevitable consequence of the lack of a good system, unity, discipline and subordination to the leaders” of a revolutionary bid for independence.
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Ironically, during the siege, the Alamo’s commander might have been the most delusional garrison member, having what was called “The Walter Scott disease.” Unfortunately for his soldiers, Travis existed in the unrealistic world of romance and historical fiction. Like some chivalric knight of a bygone romantic age, Travis had wanted nothing more than to have ridden off on a romantic Quixotic quest with the Matamoros Expedition, instead of having been ordered to reinforce San Antonio. Even so, the Alamo’s leaders and their followers still expected to vanquish any number of Mexicans hurled their way. Travis might have gotten along better with Bowie had he known that a distant Bowie relative was none other than the Scottish nationalist hero, Rob Roy McGregor.
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John Sowers Brooks never realized how prophetic he had been when he wrote: “I have resolved to stand by her [Texas] to the last, and in a word, to sink or swim with her.”
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And in a like manner, Travis also swore that he would follow the Texas Revolution “right or wrong, sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish.”
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The entire Alamo garrison, however, was not going to swim, but sink from the weight of their own mistakes and miscalculations, while being “sacrificed to the vengeance of a Gothic enemy,” in Travis’ March 3 words.
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Drawing upon what little military experience he possessed, and basically clueless in regard to the art of war, Travis was not prepared for the role in which he now found himself. As many couriers as possible had been dispatched by Travis to seek aid before it was too late. Little more could be done. Without hesitation or second thoughts of the ugly implications, Travis had risked all—especially his men’s lives—on the single hope that all of Texas would rise up to come to his assistance, including from Fannin’s force at Goliad.

But in fact, aside from the arrival of the tiny Ranger Company early on March 1, no one else would be coming to the Alamo’s succor. Ironically, this reinforcement was not unlike the Morelos Battalion, that had rushed all the way from Laredo to Cós’ aid, only to be trapped and captured inside the Alamo. And like Travis, these seasoned Mexican troops had defiantly declared with pride to their besiegers how their battalion “has never surrendered.” Strangely, the Alamo deathtrap had a way of causing so many defenders—filibusters, Tejanos, Mexican troops, Texas rebels, U.S. volunteers—to stake their lives on an obscure, indefensible place where they would most likely lose the bet.

Ironically, Fannin was in the process of becoming the convenient scapegoat for the Alamo’s fall rather than leaders like Neill, Travis, Bowie, and Houston. Despite the fact that he needed to hold Goliad, as it was more strategically important than San Antonio and the objective of Santa Anna’s right wing in his pincer movement across Texas, the West Pointer would be blamed for not reinforcing the Alamo and saving the day, when in truth it was the fault of the people of Texas for staying home and not rushing to arms. As if already knowing that a cruel fate awaited the Alamo garrison, Fannin wrote to Lieutenant Governor Robinson and revealed what most of all doomed its defenders: “[W]ill not curses be heaped on the heads of the sluggards who remained at home?”
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Only one day before the Alamo’s fall, an outraged editor of the
Telegraph and Texas Register
would lament an undeniable reality, because the poorer Texians remained out of military service since “they have already served longer [in the 1835 campaign] than some of their richer neighbors [and] we hear men say, they are ready to fight, but are not willing to turn out, while men possessed of lands and other property [slaves] are staying at home” while the forsaken Alamo garrison waited to die.
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Unfortunately for the Alamo’s defenders, the all-important unityfirst caused by General Cós’ presence into Texas in 1835, which had so solidly united the old settlers and newcomers from the United States to serve as members of the “Army of the People,” was no more.
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Clearly, by this time and with all hope gone, the Alamo’s soldiers began to finally realize that their time on earth was short, save for a miracle. Only one reality remained: the haunting reminder of the grim fate that awaited them each time the no-quarter flag fluttered from the belfry of the San Fernando Church. As in the case of Custer’s doomed men at Little Big Horn on the Great Plains, some suicide pacts were almost certainly made among garrison members. No one wanted to be captured alive by the Mexicans, who were known for their cruelty. If they surrendered or were captured, the no-quarter flag indicated that these Protestants might even be tortured by Catholics, like during the Spanish Inquisition.

During the siege, along with reading inspirational passages from the Torah, the handful of Jewish members might have contemplated the fate of the Jewish rebels of Masada, especially if they had read the work by renowned Jewish historian, Josephus. The Jewish rebels who fought against the powerful Roman legions looked upon suicide as a victory of sorts when success was unattainable, and especially when the Romans promised no-quarter, becoming almost a religious duty. As Josephus explained, some of the Jewish warriors “were driven to suicide [and] they made sure that at least they should not die at Roman hands.”
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Jewish rebels who defied the imperial legions of Rome accepted the fatalistic concept that: “It is a brave act to kill onself.”
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Alamo garrison members were in a similar no-win situation like the Jewish rebels of Masada: surrounded and bottled up in a doomed, fortified position with no hope for survival or escape. In addition, the contrast between the Jewish rebels and the elite soldiers of the Roman Legions were similar to the wide differences between the Alamo defenders and Santa Anna’s finest troops. Josephus explained that the difference was that the Jewish rebels who pitted themselves against Rome’s imperial, centralized authority possessed “neither discipline nor experience in war, and are nothing but a rabble, not fit to be called an army.”
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Like Santa Anna in facing the Texas rebels, so the Romans also benefited from the internal divisions among the rebellious Jews that made conquest easier. Nothing could stop the Roman Legions from conquering Masada, and the Hebrew warriors knew as much. During the lengthy siege, it seemed to the Hebrew defenders that “God was indeed on the side of the Romans,” causing the Jewish rebels to become increasingly fatalistic.
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Besides Moses (or Louis) Rose, and Alabama-born teenager Gabia Fuqua of Gonzales, another Jewish defender of the Alamo was Private Anthony—or Avram or Abraham—Wolfe. At age 54, Wolfe was one of the oldest garrison members. A former Spanish subject of the LouisianaTexas frontier before Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, he possessed experience as an infantry lieutenant in the Louisiana militia in 1806. Wolfe was a unique, enlightened individual for the day, especially in dealing fairly with Native Americans while serving as an Indian agent by 1818 and into the early 1820s. As a member of Captain Carey’s company, Wolfe now served as an artilleryman, operating one of Captain Dickinson’s guns positioned on the elevated firing platform at the church’s rear. In addition to this Jewish private from Washington County, Texas, were his two sons, age eleven and twelve. The three Wolfe males would find their own personal Masada on the remote Texas frontier, but not by way of suicide.
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On the night of March 5, at least two garrison members decided not to risk the fight at the Alamo. One might have been Moses (or Louis) Rose, another Jewish defender and a Napoleonic veteran who had been born in the Ardennes Forest region of France—a fact that might have gained Santa Anna’s mercy if captured. Rose had taken a lesson from the tragic pages of Masada’s story that had been overlooked by Wolfe: get out while one was still able and before it was too late.
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Another garrison member leaving the Alamo was Captain Juan Nepomuceno Seguín, born in 1896 as the privileged son of a leading San Antonio Tejano, whose Tejano horse company had joined Austin’s rustic “Army of the People” in the third week of October 1835, just in time for the siege of San Antonio. Chosen as a messenger, he evaded the Mexican forces by easing out under the cover of darkness along an irrigation ditch that concealed him from prying Mexican eyes and took him to the Gonzales Road.
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