Chapter Twenty-three
San Antonio de Bexar, Texas, October 1835
JOHN’S STORY
After the success at Gonzales, I think folks expected we could roll through this like a dust storm. But we got our noses bloodied on that wide road in Bexar.
Bowie hadn’t got so far that he failed to hear the commotion, and came running back. Another man went in his place, fella named James Bonham, who was to become our official courier. He was second cousin to someone who was to have a greater impact on our revolt, but I’ll get to Travis later.
Bowie announced his arrival by tossing his knife into the ground right by the small campfire the men had allowed themselves. Our men were too tired to jump at the sudden intrusion of the gleaming metal, and before they could rally to do so, they recognized it wasn’t a Mexican who had thrown it.
His approach, from the darkness into the dull firelight, was like the arrival—well, you may have had this much right: it was like God had sent an angel. Of course, I even had myself wondering if that might be so. Angels take many forms in the Bible, almost as many as Zeus in Greek myths. Who was I to say that wasn’t the case here?
Bowie immediately set to listening, not talking—which, in my experience, is what the best officers and politicians do. Once the fight had been recapitulated, he lit a cigar off the fire and considered the situation for a few puffs.
“The fact that de Cos has not come after us tells us his plan,” Bowie said. “Fortify the town and charge us dearly trying to get back in.” He gazed steadily into the night, toward the not-too-distant lights of Bexar. “It’s almost as if they’re inviting us,” he said more to himself than to us. “We’re not gonna disappoint the Peacock. Only we won’t be moving on his timetable but on ours.”
He moved closer to the fire and drew the commanders around, including John Ballard and Juan Seguín, who was simultaneously listening and translating for his men. They looked sinister around the low blaze, like Satanists who had played out their revelry but wanted more. The men were instantly and in some cases openly unhappy with what he suggested.
Bowie’s plan was to do nothing until Bonham returned. That met with widespread disapproval from the Texians, who wanted to redeem their stained honor.
“You do that, stupidly, and the enemy will cut you down,” Bowie said. “Look, all the Mexicans who are coming to Bexar are already there. We know that from our southern scouts. What we gotta do is wait until the Peacock sets up his supply lines from Bexar to Mexico, which should be finished in a day—two at the most. When he does that, when we got men from Gonzales, we set up a perimeter around Bexar—not one they can see, only feel—and close them in from all sides. We cut off the supply lines. The occupiers will send out men to get supplies; we’ll cut them down. The Peacock sends out marching troops to find us, we don’t march, we run around them and harass positions in the town.”
“Skirmishes,” one man said dismissively.
“You say that like it’s a dirty word instead of a sensible tactic,” Bowie said. “If we fight his fight, if we take on one thousand fortified men, we lose. We make him fight us where his big numbers don’t help him a bit—we win. We do more than win. When Mexican bodies start adding up in Bexar, the soldiers will either lose heart or charge after us—in which case we retreat and relocate, hacking their numbers from the sides, from the rear.”
“You’re wanting a siege, not a fight,” Ballard said unhappily from the opposite side of the campfire.
Bowie approached him. “Ballard, I’m wanting victory, that’s all,” Bowie told him, soft enough so that only those nearest heard. “You know I’m no coward, and I hope you wasn’t calling me one.”
“That wasn’t close to what I was saying.”
“Good,” Bowie replied, clapping a friendly hand on his shoulder. That was for everyone to see, to show there was no dissent among the commanders. “Hell,” he said to everyone now, “if I thought it’d end this thing, I’d sneak in there now by myself and try to cut the Peacock’s throat. But it wouldn’t. And glory?” he said with contempt for the word, “that is something to tell your grandchildren about. I ain’t interested in one and won’t ever have the other. What I want, all I want, is what I first came to these parts for: Texas for Texians. Anyone who forgets that will find himself dead under Mexican bullets or Mexican boots.”
Bowie had moved back to his place and stood there, puffing like a steam locomotive. And in the quiet that followed—as everyone digested what he had said—I saw an opportunity. If we was going to be here for October, November, longer, then I would have a chance to plant. I knew it was not an ideal time and place for that, but I knew I could make food grow to help feed the small and hopefully growing army.
Apart from the members of Juan Seguín’s militia who, draped in serapes, went to spy on the enemy, I was the only one busy morning till sunset. I tilled about an acre near the creek, good land, arable soil, and foraged through the compost piles the Mexicans built outside of Bexar. There were pits and seeds aplenty, from peaches to garlic, apples to tomatoes, and I put them in the ground under the nourishing Texas sun. It did not take more than a week for some of the first shoots to grow. Now, I knew that the trees would not produce fruit in the time we had. But they attracted the bees and birds that had seeds clung to them; they drew the varmints that had undigested pits in their patties; and with God’s help we had beans of several variety within three weeks. And Bonham, returning, had brought dozens of men, each of whom had food they contributed to our own composting.
By the end of the month, we had, by my count, over three hundred troops scattered along the creek. We’d’ve had more men, save for Bowie making good his plan to cut the Mexicans’ supply lines. Those boys stayed in the south, Bowie among them, at the San Francisco de la Espada Mission. Among our three hundred, groups of ten to twenty drilled together. They were the ones who made sorties against the enemy when the Peacock sent parties out to hunt food. The Mexicans usually lost two men for every one deer they snared or took down with bow and arrow; they stopped shooting at birds because ammunition was also not getting through, either.
I confess to being impressed by the numbers of folks who showed up, men and also women. What I heard of kids, they’d been left with grandparents and such, but the wives wanted to be a part of this effort too, just as they’d been there at Gonzales. Some of the women helped me with my labors, and I helped them, too, as they washed clothes and plates and utensils. Though it was still curious how water didn’t make me feel nearly so clean as dirt.
Or maybe not the dirt . . . the creating of something alive.
The big news of the month, apart from the original dustup, was the arrival of three men in particular. Spurred by some instinct about the Mexican army or Texas itself, Stephen Austin had come back from New Orleans with Colonel Fannin. And Sam Houston himself had ridden from the north. The meeting with Mr. Coles had alarmed him. Rather than wait for me to visit with guns—said visit obviously having been delayed by more urgent needs—he came down to Gonzales and followed the trail of men to Bexar.
A little ashamed, a little proud, a little not-sure-what-to-expect, I waited till he had been in camp a few hours before I introduced myself and presented him with one of the waylaid rifles. Now this man was tall, just a little taller than me, and he had a serious expression which remained very, very still whenever he was being told something. I imagined some dutiful secretary at a desk in his head, making careful notes about everything. He not only remembered my name as Mr. Coles had given it, he recalled the itinerary that had brought me to the settlement.
“Texas is grateful for your devotion to her,” he said as he accepted the rifle. “I’ve been told of your agrarian efforts here—very industrious.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
Houston eyed the weapon carefully. “There are mice in the attic,” he said. “Vermin enriching themselves with Texian lives. These are cavalry issue and—see this?”
He held the stock in front of me, the back of it. There were numbers cut in the wood.
“Those indicate the garrison where they were bound,” he went on. “I brought a ledger with the listings—we can check them later. That’ll tell us where our traitor or traitors are.”
I also met Austin, briefly, that first day. He seemed prickly, he seemed tired, and he seemed—he was—all consumed with just one thing: getting the enemy soldiers out of Bexar, out of Texas, and back to Mexico. That desire seemed stronger at the setting of the sun when, for the first time, the Mexicans fired that cannon again—twice. They must’ve knew our two leaders had arrived and were letting us know they weren’t impressed.
“Let ’em roar,” Austin said from the edge of our encampment. “Let ’em come! They will find us unafraid and no longer willing to retreat. I hear their stores of bread, meat, and drink are dwindling—let ’em come and we will feed them! Buckshot! Fists! Clubs! Blades! A stew of Texian resolve!”
Well, that was how Austin spoke, probably lines from speechifying these many years about Texas. New or old, the words were fresh here and the men cheered his full-throated challenge. I only hoped that when he made good his vow—and I did not doubt he would spill every drop of his own blood trying—that I had enough apple seeds to go round. There was, to me, no way this could end without rows and acres of new graves.
Near the end of the month—I did not note the day, as there was little need for that kind of record-keeping—we intercepted a pair of deserters from the village. They were posing as peasants, and just trying to get away from what we learnt was unhappy conditions in the town. Many of the shopkeepers, growers, animal herders, and other laborers had already left, most in the night so the Peacock’s men wouldn’t try to stop them. We talked to most of them; that was how we got our information about deteriorating conditions in the village.
Still, the Mexican commander did not want to risk leaving the fortifications of the church and the blocked streets and plazas. He must have felt, rightly, that we were too skilled at guerrilla strikes. If the small excursions to obtain food and water had met with death, he had to reason that larger ones would meet with greater misfortune. And now, his spies had to have told him, we had too many men for him to simply try and smash through.
And to where? His orders had been to take the town. He took it. Santa Anna would not appreciate his leaving it.
Finally, one foggy night, something happened that Austin had been waiting for: we caught our first pair of Mexican army deserters. They were dressed as peasants and surrendered, without struggle, the arms they carried. We fed them and they informed us that everything was bad in Bexar. It wasn’t so much the lack of food but the inability of the town to accommodate sanitation, cleaning, and even drilling for nearly one thousand men.
After the men finished their story, Austin said just two words: “At last!”
The men were held, lest they have a flourish of courage or guilt and return to tell the Peacock that an assault was finally imminent.
Austin sent his swiftest courier to Bowie and Fannin and told them to move closer to the town. The two colonels left the mission and closed on Bexar with ninety men. The fog continued, and the sounds of men and horses were loud and confusing. It was assumed that the Mexican commander had no clear idea how many men were closing in and from how many sides. We learned later, from prisoners, that he had dispatched one Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea with a complement of 275 men to meet the men under Bowie’s and Fannin’s command. Our boys heard them coming and dug in on the banks of the San Antonio River. The Peacock should have stuck to his original instincts.
We heard the battle through the mist. Our men, three hundred strong, had been prepared to join if the Peacock threw more soldiers into the fray—but this the commander did not do. Austin had us start to whooping and making sounds like we were charging forward. It was loud enough and enthusiastic enough to be heard on both ends of the town, from the church to the Alamo.
The attacking Mexican army took more than fifty casualties—fourteen of them fatalities—and lost the cannon they brought with them. Many horses fell not from gunfire but from being unable to see. They would add to the problem for the commander as they had to be shot later and baked under the sun. Many were cut up by townspeople for their meat.
The Battle of Concepción, as it came to be called, gave the Texians what they wanted: revenge for the hightailing-out they did during the previous encounter. And it gave Austin what he wanted as well: the start of a real, killing siege. While the Peacock licked his wounds and refortified their position, a gent named Thomas Rusk arrived from East Texas—where I was once headed, I might remind you—with about two hundred additional volunteers. That freed up a bunch of folks who hadn’t been home for several months to go see their families. They also needed new boots and warmer clothes, the chill autumn nights feeling more like winter eves with each passing day.
The good thing for us was that we didn’t have to do much foraging. Bowie’s men kept pilfering from the Mexican supply wagons that tried to get through. The gentleman I mentioned before, William Barret Travis, was one of the new arrivals and lent Bowie a hand with his captures. When Mexican reinforcements tried to reach Bexar, Travis was particularly good at getting horses and mules away from them—forcing them to travel on foot, where they were easy pickings, or return home. Many chose the latter. That had to infuriate Santa Anna, who could not have liked this reputation he was getting among Texians as the generalissimo who couldn’t win a battle.
After we’d been hunkered down a few weeks—sometime in mid-November, as I calculated—we got an added boost when over one hundred troops, three companies in all, joined us from the U.S. of A. Austin’s first reaction was that we finally had enough troops to seize rather than siege Bexar—but then he found himself possessed of both a good and bad sense about that, which he confided only to folks he could trust—and I’m proud to count myself among them.
“Washington either wants diplomatic ties or annexation,” he said. “I find myself needing to go there to make sure they understand we are fighting for republichood, not statehood.”
So Austin departed, leaving another Southerner, the sort of formal but nonetheless two-fisted Edward Burleson, in command. Burleson was of a different mind about attacking. Unlike many, he was content to starve the Peacock out. His reasoning made him a prophet.
“Santa Anna won’t sit still for long,” he said one afternoon to a group of the more aggression-minded soldiers. “When he decides to move himself off his throne, we are going to want every able man we have to send him home. Losing any Texian life here is vainglory, not sound tactics.”
We had been ensconced for a couple of weeks more when we got word from our scout “Deaf” Smith, who had lost his hearing to some illness and was married to a Mexican widow who helped me with my gardening; we heard from Deaf that Mexican cavalry was approaching. We guessed that Santa Anna must’ve been concerned when he didn’t hear from his field commander. I had spent that time growing my vegetable garden and gathering wild apples, which our lady cook baked in a variety of ways—leaving me the cores, always, from which I dutifully removed the seeds which I placed in skins of water to keep them hibernating like tiny bears.
That random thought, by the way, was what gave me the notion to grow my own bear claws. See, we didn’t really have proper tools for tilling the soil and I liked to get my hands into Mother Earth, so thinking of grizzlies put the idea in my head to shape my nails like they are. And I used bark, like the bears did, to give them their edge.
So Deaf brought word of the cavalry and Burleson fielded a considerable force to go out and meet them. They collided at Alazán Creek which was to the west, and the Grass Fight was on. It got called that because reports was that the caravan was carrying pay for the unhappy soldiers in Bexar. It wasn’t. It was carrying hay for the animals, which was more urgently needed. So people died over horse feed.
Come December, the siege was starting to wear on us as much as it was the Mexicans. Deserters told us how the Peacock had rearranged his defenses to use things like firewood more efficiently. That bunched the enemy tighter in sections of town and they started getting under each other’s skin. About a hundred of our people offered to make a run at the town, try to bust through the barricades. Part of that was courage and part of that was not wanting to be here through Christmas, the new year, and into the unwelcome arms of winter. Once those men offered, three hundred or so others agreed it was a good idea.
Two of our commanders Ben Milam of Kentucky and Bill Cooke of Virginia, two tough acorns, agreed to lead the assault. It wasn’t Burleson’s favorite plan, but a good leader has to know when to pretend a majority view was his own idea. He had the remaining four hundred men who, in addition to protecting our camp from attack, would be responsible for keeping the Peacock’s forces divided by attacking the Alamo—which was on the opposite side of Bexar. Most of that would be done with the cannon we took from the Mexicans, though enemy fire ended up taking that out with a damn lucky shot.
I went with Milam’s unit because Bowie did. Both of them being Kentucky boys, there was never any question of things being otherwise. I didn’t have a rifle for this engagement—just my big knife. My job was to scout enemy positions and bounce the sun off my machete to point them out.
We started the onslaught on a clear, cold morning, quickly seizing the Veramendi and Garza houses, which were situated on the north of the plaza where a large force of Mexicans was stationed. The Peacock was no dope: he let us have those two places, then blew them, and us, all to hell with cannon fire.
We withdrew, which didn’t beat the drum for morale. Our spirits sunk further when a Mexican dead shot put a big hole in Milam’s head and he died where he stood. After a few days we was reinvigorated, though. The Mexicans charged our camp and were repulsed. We attacked the town, and this time it got nasty. We went in on foot, just the way we’d retreated from the church, and fought the Mexicans hand to hand. I slashed necks and arms and anything else that came in front of me. I realized I didn’t have to kill, just injure, to take a man out. Blood? I was dripping with it. It was in my hair, my eyes, my ears, my mouth. I must’ve had more than a dozen different varieties on my skin and clothes. As a result of this fighting we got planted in several buildings on our camp-side of Bexar. The big blow for the Peacock came when he ordered more troops into the Alamo there. Four companies rode to that side of town . . . and kept on riding. Our crossfire was hellish, and merciless, and the Mexicans lost a lot of men that day—not just from desertion but from our determination to take the damn village.
We succeeded. After a lot of noise and a lot of blood being soaked up by the dirt; with the wounded of both sides crying into the air or their sleeves or into the earth if they fell facedown, Martín Perfecto de Cos took off his fluffy plumage and surrendered.
It was a win but it had been a bloody one. It wasn’t a picnic like Gonzales, with women making soup while we chased Mingo home. We lost thirty-two men in Bexar—which was unexpected. The only consolation was that it was less than the 150 or thereabouts the Peacock had lost. Most of that was from infantry forces because cavalry could get away faster when things didn’t go so well. The commander had misunderstood our resolve but also our weapons and our soldiers. We had better guns—the forward-most of them from the crates that had been stolen that we stole back. We also had better shooters and a reason to fight. Men like that don’t give up. They die, but they never surrender.
But I’ll tell ya. Though the Texians now had San Antonio de Bexar, we all of us started to realize that the rest of Texas would come at a larger price. Nobody openly questioned the wisdom of what we were doing. But you could hear that in their silence, see it in their faces as we said words over the graves of our dead.
I went about my planting. Some folks found it objectionable, like I was committing a desecration. I explained to them what I had come deeply to believe, that these honored dead required a living grave marker and that my trees would feed the children of Texas for generations to come. Not everybody agreed. But while I worked the fields, I had plenty of time to think. And it struck me out there that I was upholding tradition. I was challenged around the campfire one night by a still-emotional younger brother of one of the dead. Name was Robert Brown, and he would end up being one of those combat veterans who saw the revolution through from first bullet to last.
While chewing tobacco, and spitting, he accused me of disrespect and being what he called a “ghoul.”
“Sir,” I said, finally voicing the thoughts that had been growing in my head, “how is this different than I heard from men who have been to sea, that those who died shipboard were interred in the arms of the ocean? Meaning no offense, every one of them souls got ate by fish who themselves got caught and ate by people. It is God’s way, not mine.”
He looked like he wanted to punch me but someone just out of the circle of light lay an arm on his shoulder. It was Bowie.
“Brown,” Bowie said, “if it was my wife and children who lay in that field, I believe their immortal souls would be pleased that their mortal bodies were not just food for worms. We are the new occupiers of Bexar and, come spring, we will need food for ourselves and for the populace whose goodwill we desire—who will become citizens, in fact, of this republic we seek to build.”
Now, Jim Bowie could’ve said black was white and most people would nod in agreement, such was his stature. But in this instance his words had nothing to do with his and my history. They was heartfelt and no one ever again complained about my work.
Neither he nor I nor anyone present could have imagined how fateful those words would be.