In the spring of 1846, bugles in the United States army camp near the Mexican border sounded “Boots and Saddles” and “To Horse.”

Old Whitey, General Zachary Taylor’s charger, stood quietly while the commander mounted. The horse, named for the color of his hide, would behave just this calmly and steadily in a battle under shell fire and a hail of bullets. Now he stepped out, as fifes and drums joined the bugles. With dragoons and Texas Rangers scouting ahead, the army marched to war.

The story of the war with Mexico can well begin with Old Whitey because horses were closely connected with the history of Mexico ever since they had been introduced there. They played a highly important part throughout the conflict of 1846-48 as they had for many years long before it.

Old Whitey was a Mexican horse, descended from Barbs and Arabians, the splendid steeds brought by the Spaniards who invaded Mexico under Cortes in 1519-21 and conquered the Aztec empire of Montezuma. For nearly three centuries after Montezuma’s city had been stormed and gutted of its treasures, Mexico was held as a province, firm in the grasp of Spain.

The horses of the conquistadors carried the banner of Spain north and west, beyond the horizon, in an unending search for riches. Somewhere ahead, the Spaniards had heard, lay the Seven Cities of Cibola, paved with gold; shining Quivira; glittering Eldorado.

Where the sword went, the cross went, too. The armored conquistadors never found their cities of gold, but the priests in brown robes with crosses swinging from their waists located the kind of treasure they were seeking - heathens to be converted to Christianity.

In the seventeenth century New Mexico was colonized; in the eighteenth California was settled. When they rode north from Mexico City in the early 1700s, the Spanish invaded the Tejas Indians’ land, later to be known as Texas. Over that ground, five flags would float after Spain’s: the eagle emblem of Mexico, the golden Lilies of France, the Lone Star of Texas, the Stars and Stripes, the Stars and Bars of the Confederate States, and finally, the Star-Spangled Banner once more.

All the vast lands of the Missouri Valley - the territory called Louisiana - shifted back and forth between Spain and France before they were bought by the United States. Claimed by the Frenchman, Robert de La Salle, in 1682, Louisiana was held by France for eighty years. But when, in 1763, England won Canada in the French and Indian War, France (to keep Louisiana from the southward-reaching grasp of Britain) suddenly traded that great expanse to Spain in exchange for a single Mediterranean island. Then, in 1800, the powerful France of Napoleon Bonaparte wrested back Louisiana from the Spaniards. But Napoleon did not hold it long. At death grips with the British in a European war, he knew he could not defend his big possession across the sea. So he sold it to the United States for $15,000,000 - about three cents an acre. The Louisiana Purchase, that splendid bargain, was made in 1803 during the administration of President Jefferson.

Elsewhere, the mighty empire of Spain in the New World did not remain unchallenged. Russian fur traders pushed southward along the Pacific Coast from Sitka, Alaska, and threatened California. Americans from the new nation born in 1776 began to settle on the soil of Mexico - in Texas, in the Southwest, and in California. Spain held Florida until 1819; then sold it to the United States for $5,000,000. As the nineteenth century advanced, American pressure on the realms of Spain and Mexico increased.

The Spaniards and the Mexicans, after wresting wide western territories from the Indians, had turned those lands into tempting prizes.

From Mexico and Texas and on to California the friars established missions that held the empire together as links form a chain. And the settlers established estates, the haciendas and ranchos on whose produce the empire lived. There, in those estates and cattle ranches, lay the true wealth of the land — not in gold and gems but in cattle and wheat and maize, in flax and fruit and furs.

Gardens bloomed with flowers and fruit trees. Crops were harvested from furrowed fields. Dashing vaqueros, the first cowboys of North America, galloped through plains and valleys to round up the longhorn cattle.

It was a fascinating civilization that grew up in Mexico, built on the ruins of the Aztec empire and that of the Mayan Indians before them. As much as the soldiers and the settlers and the governors, it was the friars of the monastic orders, the brown-robed Fransicans and the black-robed Jesuits, who made New Spain thrive.

They were selfless and faithful men, those friars, and brave ones. Some died as martyrs, slain by Indian arrows. Under the leadership of such great missionaries as Fra Junípero Serra and Fra Bartolomé de las Casas, they carried on their good works wherever the banners of Spain or Mexico flew. They converted the friendlier Indians and taught them to build and plant and tend herds and flocks.

Through many years, the padres fought for the rights of the Indians as human beings. Really they were held in slavery, though the Spaniards called it “personal service.” Sometimes treatment was kind. Too often, it was harsh and cruel, especially at the mines and pearl fisheries. Despite the efforts of the missionaries, it was not until 1794 that the king’s decree granted the Indians freedom, and then it was frequently in name only. Spain’s empire in the New World depended on slavery as definitely as did plantations of the American South.

At the opposite end of Mexico’s class structure were the Gachupines (those who had been born in Spain) and criollos or Creoles (those born in the New World), men and women who proudly cherished their European ancestry. There was a fierce resentment, however, between these two privileged classes. The Spanish-born Gachupines, not wanting political power ever to get into the hands of native-born Mexicans (even rich and aristocratic Mexicans), forbade the Creoles to hold key Church or government offices in Mexico. These positions had to be held by the Gachupines, who were assumed to be Mexico’s most loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown. The discontent of many Creoles with this system would one day to contribute to the end of Spanish rule in Mexico. Next to the two antagonistic ruling classes ranked the mestizos, half-breeds of Spanish and Indian parentage. They, like the purebloods, lorded it over Indians and Negroes and mixtures of those two races called zambos.

For the Spanish and Mexican ruling classes - the gentes de razón (the people of reason), as they termed themselves - it was often a delightful life. The one-story adobe houses of their haciendas contained rooms opening on a charming inner patio, shaded by Cottonwood trees. Besides the bedrooms and a little chapel, storerooms, and servants’ quarters, there was a big hall or sala for dances and other parties. Its walls were hung with silks from China, brought by the Spanish galleons from the Philippines. Everybody ate in the kitchen where Indian women cooked delicious food served on silver plates: that tasty shellfish abalone, if the hacienda was near the Pacific; roast stuffed pigeon and turkey, or an olla or stew of well-spiced beef or mutton with red beans, peas, and greens; tamales and enchiladas; wines from the vineyards of the missions, and hot chocolate. Near the house, there would be the blacksmith shop and the stables, with ready-saddled horses tethered to a hitching rail, for almost everyone in Spanish Mexico rode horses, mules, or burros.

Boys often learned to ride at the age of four, when they were lifted onto the backs of cow ponies. Since their legs were too short to grip a saddle, vaqueros on either side steadied them as they started off. Women and girls also became expert horsewomen. In California, they rode and dressed like vaqueros. Broad-brimmed, low-crowned hats, secured by thongs under their chins, sat at rakish angles on the black silk handkerchiefs around their heads. Their hair was braided and tied with ribbons at the back like men’s, also worn long. Jackets were brightly colored and embroidered. From wide leather belts hung buckskin armitas or chaps, which protected their legs from cactus thorns. Spurs on their boots were silver with long rowels, and a dagger in a scabbard was strapped to their right leg. These girls broke colts and took part in the roundups, roping cattle along with the men.

What joyful evenings there were when the people of the haciendas met to dance a fandango. Fiddles, guitars, and flutes struck up a lively tune. Graceful señoritas swept into the sala, that spacious hall. Over their flowing tresses, black lace mantillas were draped from high, carved, tortoise-shell combs. Strings of lustrous pearls shone on slender necks. Embroidered jackets fitted closely above the wide flair of skirts of flowered silk. Partnering them were caballeros in black velvet with brightly colored serapes or scarves swinging from shoulders.

For some of the haciendas, remote from towns or forts, there were times of deadly peril. “Indicts!” warned a shout. A dust cloud had been sighted, stirred by galloping hoofs of the ponies of Apache, Comanche, or Kiowa raiders. It sped in fast. The chapel bell tolled a frantic alarm. Men ran from their work in the fields and children from their play. Doors of the big house clanged closed behind them - behind all who had not been too far away to reach safety. The crumpled bodies of those unlucky ones lay on the ground, pierced by lances, riddled with arrows, and scalped.

Defenders behind the parapets of the roof poked the barrels of their muskets through the gutter spouts. There were sharp reports and spurts of flame, and some of the raiders toppled from their ponies. Others raced forward on foot behind volleys of answering shots and flights of arrows. Sometimes they broke in or crawled through the water ditch to massacre every man, woman, and child and leave the house a smoking ruin. But usually, they were beaten off and dashed back to the mountains after burning crops and driving off horses and cows.

From Texas to California the white men struck back, holding the land they had conquered. Musketeers and dragoons and bands of armed settlers marched against the hostile tribes. The red men, defeated in pitched battles, were driven deeper into the mountains and the plains.

Some Mexican cavalrymen, when they fought Indians, were armed only with riatas, or lariats, preferring them to carbine or lance. As sure or surer than shot or thrust were the long, deadly throws that noosed and choked enemy bowmen. Some American soldiers in the war to come would meet such a fate when Mexican ropes circled their necks or bound their arms helplessly to their sides.

Mexicans, fighting Indians since the days of Cortes and Coronado, had to be a warlike people to keep the ground they had won. They must also stave off the French threat from Louisiana. While they fought in the New World, their mother country, Spain, engaged in wars with France and England in Europe and at sea. From the beginning, there was no lack of conflict.

But friendly relations increased between Mexico and the English colonies of North America. That was especially true after Virginians, the men of Massachusetts, and the rest rebelled and declared their independence in 1776. Mexicans sympathized with them since Spain and France were allied against England. During the Revolution, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, helped the Americans in every possible way. He opened New Orleans to them and held British frigates in port, keeping them out of action. When Spain went to war with England in 1779, Gálvez captured British forts on the Gulf of Mexico. A town in Texas later was named Galveston in his honor.

Few Mexicans or Americans realized, at the time of the American Revolution, how soon after 1776 a revolutionary movement would sweep Mexico. In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of France, deposed the rightful king of Spain, Ferdinand VII, and placed his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the Spanish throne. When the Mexicans received news that their king had been deposed - for Ferdinand VII was as much their king as he was king of the Spaniards - many Mexicans considered Joseph Bonaparte’s government to be illegal.

It was in 1808, therefore, that the first strong feeling of independence began to develop in the Mexican people - and in most of the countries of South America. And this feeling, once aroused, continued to grow, even though Joseph Bonaparte was deposed in 1813 and Ferdinand VII was restored in 1814.

On September 16, 1810, the first open rebellion of Mexicans against Spanish rule began in the little town of Dolores. The movement was led by a Mexican Creole priest, Father Hidalgo y Costilla. Assisted by two other revolutionary leaders, Father Hidalgo recruited a small army of Creoles and mestizos and took the Mexican cities of Guanajuato and Guadalajara from the Spanish forces. Then, with an army of about 80,000 men, he marched on Mexico City. Although Hidalgo’s army had some preliminary victories, it was defeated by a Spanish army on November 6, 1810. Early in 1811, after more defeats at the hands of the Spanish, Father Hidalgo was captured and later shot, along with the men who had supported him. Despite the ultimate failure of his mission, Father Hidalgo was the first hero of the Mexican Revolution, and the day of the uprising he led in Dolores - September 16, 1810 - is still celebrated as Mexican Independence Day.

After Father Hidalgo’s first move to start the Mexican Revolution, other Mexican leaders began to appear. Father Morelos, a mestizo priest who had served in Hidalgo’s revolutionary army, took over leadership of the revolution after Hidalgo’s execution. Morelos, however, had the Gachupines, the conservative Mexicans, and the Mexican monarchists against him. The rich Creoles and Gachupines had never intended to support a revolution which might hurt their privileged position, and the Morelos revolution was rapidly taking on the look of a popular uprising, supported by Indians and mestizos. Morelos suffered a series of defeats and in 1815 was captured by the Spanish forces and - suffering the same fate as Father Hidalgo - was executed by a firing squad.

In 1820, revolution broke out again. That year, word reached Mexico of an uprising against Ferdinand VII in Spain, and the Mexican ruling class decided that the only way to protect itself and preserve its way of life was to revive the revolution Father Hidalgo had started and to seize control of it.

The spokesman for the new conservative revolutionary movement in Mexico was Agustin Iturbide, a former Spanish army officer who had fought against Father Morelos. Iturbide and his followers wanted an independent Mexican monarchy as severe and autocratic as Spain’s monarchy had been before the Napoleonic Wars. In 1821, most members of the ruling classes in Mexico agreed on the Plan de Iguala, which was both a declaration of independence from Spain and a plan for the new monarchy of Mexico. In July 1821, a newly appointed Spanish viceroy of Mexico, Juan O’Donojú, arrived at Veracruz. He was informed by the Mexican authorities that he would not be allowed to proceed to Mexico City and take office because Mexico was independent of Spain. Since the revolutionaries had established their control over the army, O’Donojú had no choice but to recognize Mexican independence - which he did by signing the Treaty of Cordoba. On September 27, 1821, Iturbide entered Mexico City as a revolutionary hero and as the future emperor of Mexico.

Mexico’s history as an independent nation was not to be calm. Iturbide was crowned emperor of Mexico on July 21, 1822 - with the support of the army. But he was not a popular ruler and was deposed in 1823 and executed in 1824 when he again tried to seize control of the government by force.

On October 4, 1824, a new constitution was proclaimed, by which Mexico became a republic. Later that year, the nation elected its first president - a man who called himself Guadalupe Victoria (Our Lady of Guadalupe Triumphant) - although his name was actually Manuel Felix Fernandez - because Guadalupe Victoria had been the motto and battle cry of the revolutionary armies of Father Hidalgo and Father Morelos in which he had served. Our Lady of Guadalupe was the patron saint of Mexico and was, therefore, honored by all classes of Mexican society.

The government that Guadalupe Victoria headed remained in power until 1829. The elections for a new president, held in 1828, saw Manuel Gomez Pedraza and Vicente Guerrero as the chief contenders for office. Pedraza won the election, but Guerrero soon pushed Pedraza aside and had himself inaugurated as president of Mexico on April 1, 1829.

Guerrero’s term of office was to be short and hectic. On August 18, 1829, an invasion force of Spaniards from Cuba landed at Tampico and took it from the Mexican garrison in a last effort to recapture Mexico.

Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had long been active in Mexican politics and had been a soldier in both the Spanish and Mexican armies, led the Mexican force sent to Tampico to drive out the Spanish. His army was victorious on September 11, 1829, when the Spanish were finally forced to surrender the city. Because of his impressive military success, within a very short time Santa Anna became a Mexican national hero.

On September 15, 1829, Guerrero’s administration made more Mexican history by announcing the abolition of slavery in Mexico - making Mexico one of the first countries in the Western Hemisphere to take this step. Although it is quite possible that the Guerrero administration sincerely disapproved of slavery, the action they took in freeing the slaves of Mexico and outlawing slavery in their country was specifically directed at the slave-owning Americans who had settled, by this time, in the northern province of the state of Coahuila which was known as Texas. For these Americans were the only sizable group of slave owners in Mexico.

The hero of Tampico, Santa Anna, was unwilling to allow the Guerrero administration to become too popular, however, for he had always had personal political ambitions. In an undercover attempt to break Guerrero’s power, Santa Anna, in December 1829, helped Guerrero’s vice president, Anastasio Bustamante, stage a revolution against Guerrero. Early in 1830, Bustamante became president. Santa Anna, however, was still not satisfied with the Mexican government and would not be content until he headed it himself. In an attempt to bring himself closer to the presidency, Santa Anna engineered, in 1832, a revolution against Bustamante. The revolution was successful, and Pedraza - who was supported by Santa Anna - finished serving the final three months of the term in office he should have had to begin with. For it was Pedraza, the legally elected president of Mexico in 1829, from whom Guerrero had originally stolen the presidency.

In 1833, Santa Anna ran for president and won the election. The following year he dissolved the Congress, established himself as dictator of Mexico, and for the next twenty years dominated the politics of his country.

One of Santa Anna’s first major acts as dictator of Mexico was to send his brother-in-law, General Martin Cos, to Texas. As soon as the Texans learned of this move, they decided to resist General Cos. Fighting began in Gonzales and in San Antonio late in 1835.

Although Santa Anna knew that he would have a difficult time subduing the Texans, he went on with his establishment of a strong, centralized, and dictatorial government in Mexico City. On December 30, 1836, Santa Anna’s new constitution - called the Siete Leyes (Seven Laws) - was proclaimed. This constitution broke the power of the traditional Mexican states. The states could no longer elect their own officials but would be supplied with officials appointed by Santa Anna’s central government in Mexico City. In fact, all of Mexico was to be controlled by Santa Anna’s government, which represented the most conservative elements in Mexico - the Church and the most powerful landowners. Needless to say, the great mass of the Mexican people did not benefit in any material way from Mexico’s early revolutions - or even from independence from Spain. For of Mexico’s 7 million citizens, only 10 percent were considered eligible to play any part at all in the government of their country. The Creoles made up this 10 percent, while the rest of Mexico’s population was made up of poor and ignorant Indians and blacks and of mixtures of the races. This was basically the situation that had existed under Spanish rule, and it would not change until late in the nineteenth century. Until that time, Mexico’s revolutions were all Creole struggles to gain governmental power and control.

During this period of turmoil in Mexico, up until 1830, Yanqui settlers had been welcome in Texas, the Southwest, and California. There was plenty of land, and these men from the north were hard workers. Their ranches and fields had flourished, and they had paid taxes to the Mexican treasury. So long as they had been treated fairly they had been content.

But when the banner of Spain lowered forever, the flag of Mexico - displaying an eagle clutching a serpent in his talons upon its white stripe, bordered with red and green stripes - would become a symbol to the Yanquis of a stern and menacing Mexico. It fluttered from staffs in the plazas of such Texas towns as La Bahia, or Goliad, and of San Antonio. Its shadow fell on their strong-walled mission churches - Goliad’s Espiritu Santo and San Antonio’s Alamo. One of the flag’s stripes would soon seem to glow blood-red in the sunlight. The time was coming when those churches would give American settlers in Texas two battle cries: “Remember Goliad!” and “Remember the Alamo!”

“Remember the Alamo!”

Nobody really knew where “P. H. N. Tut, Baron de Bastrop” had come from. But by 1820, as a Texas empresario (as the Spanish termed their government land agents) he was a close friend of Antonio Martínez, the Spanish governor of the state of Coahuila. Baron de Bastrop was close enough to Martínez to persuade him to reconsider and change his mind after he had once refused to grant land to Moses Austin, land speculator of Connecticut, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas - for Martínez later granted Austin enough land to establish an Anglo-American colony on Texas’s rough, wild prairies.

Moses Austin had been pushed across the border from Missouri by the financial panic of 1819, which had stunned the southwestern United States. He had been a banker, mine owner, and slaveholder. Since the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had closed land north of the 36°30’ parallel to slavery, Moses Austin saw in Texas a chance for farmers and cotton planters to settle on its spacious lands. His decision to go to Texas was to end in the creation of a short-term nation, in the making of a President of the United States, and it almost caused the Civil War to begin a generation sooner than it did. His plans were large-scale, but on the way back from Texas, he died.

There was nobody to take over his colony but his son Stephen, who had already, at twenty-seven - after serving in the Missouri Territorial Legislature at the time when Missouri was brought into the Union as a slave state - settled in elegant, civilized New Orleans to study law.

Stephen Austin was a small man, gentle in manner, always neatly dressed. Nobody would ever have singled him out as the leader of American pioneers in the wild, rough Mexican province of Texas. Choosing rich land between the Colorado and Brazos rivers for his promised grant, he rode into Texas with a vanguard of 300 families in 1821.

Austin accepted his inheritance with some reluctance. He would never have undertaken the venture except as a son’s duty. On several occasions, he traveled to Mexico City in an attempt to establish his claims, and finally, in 1823, in the midst of Mexico’s political upsets, he succeeded. His success was even more surprising in view of Mexico’s growing fear of an always encroaching United States. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 had brought the American border to the province of Texas. And in 1819, the United States had forced Spain to sell Florida. Toward Austin’s lands in Texas, covered wagons pulled by ox teams rolled into the Southwest.

Each family was given at least 640 acres at low cost and with freedom from taxation for six years. They were willing to turn their backs on the United States, to pledge allegiance to Mexico, and to adopt her Roman Catholic religion, as they were required to do, in return for the bright opportunity that lay ahead.

By 1830, Austin had settled two of the colonists’ most pressing problems. They were to be allowed to keep slaves in Texas (even though no other portions of Mexico held slaves after 1829). Austin also arranged for Texans to be protected by the Mexican government from suits to collect debts they had contracted in the United States before their immigration to Texas. All over the depressed South, signs were to appear on the doors of bankrupt homes - “Gone to Texas.”

These colonists from the United States would help the country prosper. They would fight off raiding Indians. It was believed that they would mingle with the native Mexicans and be absorbed into the nation. The first American settlement in Texas was made in good faith on both sides.

Austin and many of his people long kept that faith. But there were firebrands among them, restless, hot-tempered men, ready to start trouble with any government unless it was strong and wise. And they soon found chances to stir up trouble under the uncertain, changeable Mexican rule.

Mexican authorities grew worried that too many Americans were coming to their country. An estimated 30,000 settlers had poured into Texas in the decade after Austin established his colony. Though they were naturalized Mexican citizens, they were still foreigners, speaking a different language. The Mexican Congress, under the urging of President Bustamante, passed severe laws against the immigration of more colonists in 1830. Trade with the United States was severely restricted. The border was to be closed to new colonists, but the long border between Louisiana and Texas could not be patrolled. Bustamante sent Mier y Teran with troops to enforce obedience, a few soldiers to stop a flood. It is said that he committed suicide, driven to despair by his failure to stop further colonization.

Texas hummed like a nest of angry hornets. American settlers were put into prison, often for trifling offenses. Among those that were imprisoned was Stephen Austin.

In July 1833, Austin had arrived in Mexico City to plead the cause of the colonists he led. They wanted to separate from the state of Coahuila and obtain full Mexican statehood for Texas, exercise control over their own affairs, have a capital more convenient to the colony, and be spared the growing nuisance of arrogant Mexican officials.

Austin presented their case, but the Mexican rulers would not listen to him. He started home but was arrested at Saltillo on January 3, 1834, after a letter of his had been intercepted. In it he had - in defiance of Mexican law - advised the Texans to establish themselves as a separate state of Mexico if his appeal failed. Charged with treason, he was jailed for eighteen months.

Texans gathered in protest meetings. The answer of the Mexican Congress was to order them to be disarmed, and more soldiers were sent.

Austin continued to try to persuade Texans to keep the peace when he was released from prison. But by this time, almost absolute power in Mexico had been seized by Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had been elected president of Mexico in late 1833. He envied the career of Bonaparte and liked to be called “the Napoleon of the West.” In gorgeous, bemedalled uniform he rode a handsome charger. His saddle was stamped with gold, its horn in the shape of an eagle head. His was a quick mind and an imperious will.

In the fall of 1835, Santa Anna sent more Mexican troops into Texas under General Martin Cos, his brother-in-law, to patrol the border and to enforce the immigration laws. Austin, who had been released from prison and had returned to Texas on September 1, announced on September 21 that Cos had landed at Copano. A cordon began to close around the settlements, and the towns were occupied. Mexico now considered that the Texans were on the verge of rebellion against their adopted country and there was no way to deal with them now but to overawe them by military force. Texans responded by taking down rifles and muskets from wall pegs. Cannons on the plazas were manned.

Thirty thousand Texas colonists, with Comanche and other hostile Indian tribes on their flanks, were daring the might of a nation of 7 million. They could count on no official aid from the United States, whose government refused to interfere in the affairs of Mexico. Southern states, in sympathy to their cause, secretly sent help. A battalion of 300 volunteers from Georgia reached Texas in December 1835. Two companies from New Orleans arrived, and there were some other reinforcements, along with munitions and supplies.

Americans had taken on heavy odds before. Here were descendants of men who had fought Great Britain from 1775 to 1783, along with veterans and sons of veterans of the War of 1812. These Texans promptly showed they were tough and determined. When Colonel Ugartechia, commander at San Antonio, sent a detachment of 100 Mexican cavalry to the town of Gonzales to demand the surrender of its brass cannon, a Texas leader trained the gun on the horsemen and raised a sign telling them to come and take it. The cavalrymen made a halfhearted attempt and then retreated. Texans chased them, hauling the cannon. They opened fire with it and charged. The Mexicans, with one man killed, were routed.

That little fight on October 2, 1835, was called “the Lexington of the Texas Revolution.” The brass 6-pounder had fired a shot heard round Mexico. The war was on.

More and more Texans answered the call to arms. A soldier of the War of 1812, Ben Milam, had recently escaped from a Mexican jail; he was fated soon to die in action. Edward Burleson, a renowned Indian fighter, possessed a flair for command. The frontiersman Erastus “Deaf” Smith was a crack shot, admired even among Texans who prided themselves on their marksmanship. One settler, James Bowie, scabbarded a knife at his belt that either he or his brother, Rezin Bowie had invented. Although death was waiting for Jim Bowie as it was for Milam and others, the Bowie knife and the manner of his dying would carry on his fame.

William Barret Travis was fiercely eager to fight for the rights of the colonists; so was another firebrand, James Walker Fannin. Stalwart Davy Crockett, a noted scout, had been a United States congressman. “Betsy,” the long rifle he cradled, had rung out in the War of 1812 and in many Indian fights.

A name that would lead all the rest was that of big Sam Houston, six feet two. He was also a veteran of the War of 1812 and an active Indian fighter, although the Cherokee, his lifelong friends, had adopted him into their tribe when he was fourteen. An able soldier, Sam Houston was also a statesman; like Crockett he had served in Congress. He took rank with Austin as a great leader under the Lone Star flag, now unfurled for battle.

The tread of booted feet and the pounding hoofs of horses drummed on the prairie. Bands of Texans closed in on the Mexican garrisons. They marched toward Goliad and San Antonio.

Ben Milam led a night attack on the small Mexican garrison at Goliad, due south of Gonzales, and on the San Antonio River. A sentry challenged and fired. He was killed almost as soon as the crimson flash of his musket flared in the darkness of that night of October 9, 1835. Texan axes crashed through the door of the headquarters of the Mexican colonel in command. He and twenty-five soldiers quickly surrendered while the rest fled. Three hundred stands of arms, several pieces of artillery, and $10,000 in money and stores were captured - a splendid prize. The Texans held Goliad. It had been easily won but would be bloodily lost.

In early October, Austin sent ninety-two men under Bowie and Fannin marching toward San Antonio while he followed with the main body. The advance force camped on the plain outside the town. San Antonio was garrisoned by 400 troops commanded by General Cos. On the morning of October 27, 1835, squadrons of Mexican lancers, accompanied by a cannon, burst through the mist and charged the Texan camp. A solid sheet of lead met them. The Texans worked in pairs, one man loading while the other fired, so there was never a gap in the volleys of musketry.

Three charges were shattered. One gun crew after another was shot down around the cannon. Whooping Texans overran it and turned it against the enemy. In half an hour, with only one man killed, they had carried the field. It was strewn with 100 Mexican dead and wounded. The victors would have rushed on to storm San Antonio at once if Austin, arriving with the main force, had not halted them in order to reorganize. The siege of San Antonio was to last another six weeks.

General Austin was sent to the United States to seek help for Texas, now in full revolt, by the general convention of Texas leaders who met at San Felipe on November 3. General Edward Burleson took over the dissatisfied, impatient army outside San Antonio. An officer stepped into his tent and emerged to assemble the Texans. He waved his hat and called out: “Who will follow old Ben Milam [into San Antonio]?”

Three hundred volunteers roared an answer. That night they slipped into the outskirts of town and were ready to launch an attack before dawn. A sentry yelled an alarm. Though “Deaf” Smith’s ears might not have heard, there was nothing wrong with his shooting eye. A bullet from his rifle killed the guard.

If the Texans had thought Mexicans would not fight, they learned better now. For five days, combat raged from street to street, from house to house. Ben Milam was killed leading an assault. On General Cos’s order, a red flag was waved from the church tower. It signaled: no quarter, no mercy for the enemies of Mexico - any man left alive would be shot. Texans were to see that flag of ominous hue again.

But now it was about to be lowered for a white one. The last defenses were stormed. General Cos, his loss 150 in killed and wounded to the Texans’ twenty-eight, surrendered on December 10, 1835. His disarmed army was allowed to march back to Mexico after he had given his parole (word of honor) that he and his men would not fight again. That promise would last only until Santa Anna broke it for him.

The victory at San Antonio was to prove costly. While the siege had been going on, the army outside the city had swelled to more than 1,000 men - Texas colonists, American volunteers (including the companies from New Orleans), and adventurers. One of these was Dr. James Grant, a Scotsman who had become a Mexican citizen, and who owned large tracts of land near Matamoros, a port at the mouth of the Rio Grande for the rich silver mining districts of Mexico. Grant suggested that an invading expedition be sent to Matamoros to detach from Mexico all the rich mining states north of a line which had been drawn due west from Tampico.

The soldiers were bored; hundreds of Texan fighters were leaving San Antonio every day and drifting back to their homes. The American volunteers were also beginning to think the war was over.

Two hundred volunteers abandoned San Antonio in late December and started south under James Fannin to seize Matamoros, 300 miles away. They gathered, with more volunteers, at Goliad.

Only 104 destitute men were left to face the cold winter under the command of Colonel J. C. Neill, who wrote the provisional council that the “Matamoros stampede” had carried off most of the food, clothing, medicine, and horses. The “Matamoros fever,” as Sam Houston called it, had already split the provisional council at San Felipe. The split was not healed until the convention met in March. The groundwork for disaster was already laid for the Alamo.

The year 1835 waned into 1836. The handful of Texas soldiers manning San Antonio believed that the enemy, driven far to the south, was unlikely to return before spring brought green grass to feed their horses. Only Jim Bowie, who held joint command with Neill, was worried. He knew that a winter invasion, with dry mesquite grass for forage, was entirely possible.

On February 11, Neill released his command to William Travis, who had just marched to San Antonio with twenty-six men. At the same time, Davy Crockett arrived, in command of twelve Tennessee volunteers.

Named for los alamos, cottonwood trees lining the water ditches beside it, the Alamo, across the San Antonio River, had been abandoned as a mission in 1793. It had since been used as a fort, but with two fortified places in the city, there were no men to man it, although they did build ditches and redoubts.

The Alamo was not yet a name to he bitterly remembered.

A young Texan stood on watch in the tower of a San Antonio church on the morning of February 23, 1836. Suddenly, far across the plain, he caught sight of pennons, lances, helmets, and sabers gleaming in the sunlight. Mexican cavalry. He tugged frantically at the bell rope, and the clapper pealed a mad alarm. When Travis ran up the tower steps, the horsemen had vanished into the swales. But the lookout had not been dreaming. Scouts rode out, and galloped back with confirmation. A force of 1,500 of the enemy was at hand, and it was only the advance guard. Santa Anna and 6,000 troops were not far behind. They had made a hard march from Presidio del Rio Grande across wastelands with little water and no forage, a feat of superb endurance.

There was no time to lose. Travis ordered the town abandoned and the Alamo occupied. He and Jim Bowie, with the racking cough of developing pneumonia, led 150 men to the fort. Captain Almaron Dickinson, his wife Sue behind him on his horse, their baby in his arms, galloped through the gate. Couriers raced off with appeals for help. In answer, thirty-two volunteers from Gonzales would slip through the Mexican lines to reinforce the garrison. That was all. The courier to Goliad, James Butler Bonham, rode back alone to the Alamo. Fannin could send no help. He, too, was being attacked. Though Bonham could bring no aid, he had returned to die with his comrades if need be.

Riflemen manned the walls, and gunners loaded the fourteen cannons. From a staff floated a flag of thirteen stripes of red and white on a blue background, in its center a lone star blazoned with the word Texas.

The Mexican army flooded into San Antonio and lapped out around the Alamo. Santa Anna sent a demand for unconditional surrender with the threat that every man would be “put to the sword in case of refusal.” His messenger was dismissed with a cannon shot to speed him. On February 23, the historic siege commenced.

Over in San Antonio another flag rose - that deadly, blood-red one that declared no quarter would be given. Massed bands played the attacking columns into action, and the tune they blared carried the same menace as the flag. It was “Deguello” - an old Moorish chant summoning men to the cutting of throats.

Davy Crockett’s long rifle, “Betsy,” picked off the first Mexican soldier. Others dropped under the unerring fire from the walls, and the columns recoiled before the blasts of the Texans’ cannons. No mere show of force would take the Alamo. It must be stormed. Santa Anna began to ring it with entrenchments, massing his infantry and moving up his own artillery. Around the encircling force, he stationed an outer cordon of cavalry. Not only would the horsemen beat off any relief that might appear but they would prevent the retreat of his own storm troops if they wavered in the final assaults.

The days of the siege dragged by. No Texan had been more than scratched, but Bowie was down, so sick he could not leave his cot. Powder and cannon balls were dwindling. And everyone knew now that no more help would come and that they must soon be overwhelmed by the Mexican might. Knowing he could expect no mercy from Santa Anna, Travis called for a fight to the death on March 3. With his sword, he drew a line on the ground and asked all volunteers to step over it. Every man crossed. (Some say one refused and escaped from the Alamo.) Jim Bowie could not move, but he called to comrades to carry his cot over the line.

On March 6, the thirteenth day of the siege, Santa Anna received reinforcements. His batteries smashed open two breaches in the walls. In the cold pre-dawn, 2,500 assault troops with scaling ladders closed in on all four sides of the Alamo. Three sentries outside the walls were bayoneted before they could cry out. Then followed a bugle blast, bands blaring the soul-chilling strains of “Deguello,” the roar of cannonading and musketry, and screams of “Viva Santa Anna.” Travis shouted: “Come on, men! The Mexicans are on us! We’ll give ‘em hell!”

A sheet of flame ran around the walls, as long rifles cracked, and the artillery thundered. One Mexican soldier who lived through that devastating fire remembered that forty men fell around him in a few moments. What was left of the assault waves ebbed back over a mass of bodies.

Jim Bowie, too weak to get up, lay on his cot in the almost pitch-dark Alamo chapel, attended by Mrs. Dickinson and several Mexican women. Two pistols, given him by Davy Crockett, and his knife rested ready to his hand. Grimly he listened to gunfire break out again and soar to a crescendo.

Santa Anna could allow no respite after that first slaughter. He ordered an all-out attack. Troops converged on the fort. Scaling ladders were flung against the walls. Texans shot and clubbed the top climbers and shoved the ladders back to crash to the ground with their burdens. But now the enemy was bursting through the breaches. Defending riflemen, targets for fire from front and rear, toppled from the parapets. Cannons could no longer be sufficiently depressed to fire into the masses below. Across the barrel of one of them slumped Travis, shot through the forehead. Bonham and Dickinson were also among those killed.

The end was near. Volleys and stabbing bayonets cut down the Texans. Davy Crockett, his right arm broken by a bullet, fired with his left till the stock of his rifle was shattered. At last he went down, his knife buried to the hilt in the chest of a Mexican soldier, with fifteen other corpses around him. Bowie was waiting when the enemy rushed into the dark chapel. Pistols flamed from his cot. For seconds, the famous Bowie knife slashed right and left before sabers and bayonets thrust past it, and it fell from a dead hand.

Echoes of the last shot had faded when Santa Anna left San Antonio and crossed the river. He rode past the still forms of the many soldiers who had died to win the Alamo for him - as many as 1,600, one of his officers estimated. Five Texan prisoners were brought out before the victorious army on parade. A general asked mercy for them. In cold fury, Santa Anna turned his back, and Mexican bayonets finished the survivors. Mrs. Dickinson, her child, the Mexican women, and two Negro slave boys were spared. But Santa Anna, true to his threat, had left no fighting man alive. Oil was poured over 182 heaped-up bodies, and they were burned.

Texas had a battle cry, bought with blood: “Remember the Alamo!”

Texas also had independence. One hundred and fifty miles to the northeast of San Antonio, while the Alamo was under bombardment, a convention of colonists at Washington-on-Brazos declared the independence of Texas on March 2, 1836, and appointed David Burnet provisional president.