have dreamed that these gaunt and shabby men and women were destined to
conquer and civilize and add to our national domain a territory larger
than the German Empire, with Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium thrown
in? Yet that trek of the pioneers, “southwesterly by the lone star,”
was the curtain-raiser for that most thrilling of historic dramas, or
rather, melodramas: the taking of Texas.
To understand the significance of that chain of startling and
picturesque events which began with the stand of the settlers on the
Guadalupe and culminated in the victory on the San Jacinto without at
least a rudimentary knowledge of the conditions which led up to it is
as impossible as it would be to master trigonometry without a knowledge
of arithmetic. But do not worry for fear that you will be bored by the
recital; the story is punctuated much too frequently with rifle-shots
and pistol-shots for you to yawn or become sleepy-eyed.
The American colonization of Texas--then known as the province of New
Estremadura--began while Spain still numbered Mexico among her colonial
possessions. When Iturbide ended Spanish rule in Mexico, in 1821, and
thereby made himself Emperor of the third largest nation in the world
(China and Russia alone being of greater area), he promptly confirmed
the land grants which had been made by the Spanish authorities to the
American settlers in Texas, both he and his immediate successors being
only too glad to further the development of the wild and almost unknown
region above the Rio Grande by these hardy, thrifty, industrious folk
from the north. Under this official encouragement an ever-growing,
ever-widening stream of American emigration went rolling Texasward. The
forests echoed to the axe strokes of woodsmen from Kentucky; the desert
was furrowed by the ploughshares of Ohio farmers; villages sprang up
along the rivers; the rolling prairies were dotted with patches of
ripening grain. Texas quickly became the magnet which drew thousands of
the needy, the desperate, and the adventurous. Men of broken fortunes,
men of roving habits, adventurers, land speculators, disappointed
politicians, unsuccessful lawyers, men who had left their country
for their country’s good, as well as multitudes of sturdy, thrifty,
hard-working folk desirous of finding homes for their increasing
families poured into the land of promise afoot and on horseback, by
boat and wagon-train, until, by 1823, there were probably not far from
twenty thousand of these American outlanders established between the
Sabine and the Pecos.
Meanwhile the government of Mexico was beginning the quick-change act
with which it has alternately amused and exasperated and angered the
world to this day. The short-lived empire of Iturbide lasted but a
year, the Emperor meeting his end with his back to a stone wall and
his face to a firing-party. Victoria proclaimed Mexico a republic and
himself its President. Pedraza succeeded him in 1828. Then Guerrero
overthrew Pedraza, and Bustamente overthrew Guerrero, and Santa Anna
overthrew Bustamente and made himself dictator, ruling the war-racked
country with an iron hand. Now, a dictator, if he is to hold his
job, much less enjoy any peace of mind, must rule a people who,
either through fear or ignorance, are willing to forget about their
constitutional rights and obligingly refrain from asking questions.
But the American settlers in Texas, as each of the Mexican usurpers
discovered in his turn and to his very great annoyance, were not built
according to these specifications. They were not ignorant, and they
were not in the least afraid, and when the privileges they had enjoyed
were revoked or curtailed they resented it emphatically.
Alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of American settlers,
disturbed by their independence and self-reliance, and realizing that
they were daily becoming a greater menace to the dictatorial and
dishonest methods of government which prevailed, the Mexican dictators
determined to crush them before it was too late. In pursuance of this
policy they inaugurated a systematic campaign of persecution. Sixty-odd
years later the Boers adopted the same attitude toward the British
settlers in the Transvaal that the Mexicans did toward the American
settlers in Texas, and the same thing happened in both cases.
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.