The Battle of the Alamo, 1836

It was not a fort. That has to be said first, because the story has spent two centuries turning it into one.

The Alamo was a mission at San Antonio de Béxar, in Texas: a chapel, a long barracks, a walled compound of about three acres built to keep out raiders and hold cattle. Its walls were too long for the men available and too low in places to be a serious obstacle, and parts of the perimeter were closed with a wooden palisade because there was no wall there at all. A competent engineer had done what he could with it over the winter. He could not change what it was.

Texas had risen against Mexico, and Santa Anna was bringing an army to put the rising down. Into the mission, in February of 1836, went somewhere between one hundred and eighty-five and two hundred and sixty men. A lawyer of twenty-six named Travis held the command jointly with Bowie, who was a knife fighter and land speculator of some reputation and who spent most of the siege on his back with a sickness nobody has satisfactorily identified. Crockett was there, a former congressman from Tennessee who had come to Texas for land and found this instead.

Santa Anna arrived on the twenty-third and put out a red flag from the church tower in town, which meant no quarter, and opened a bombardment which he maintained, in a desultory way, for twelve days. Travis wrote letters out. The famous one is addressed to the People of Texas and All Americans in the World, and it says he will never surrender or retreat, and it is signed Victory or Death. Around thirty men came in from Gonzales in response. Nobody else came.

He knew by the last days that nobody else was coming. Whether he drew a line in the dirt with his sword and asked the men to step across it is a story that appeared decades later and cannot be traced to anyone who was there, and I will not confirm it for you. What is certain is that they had thirteen days to leave, and the ones who could walk did not.

At about half past five on the morning of the sixth of March, in the dark, with the bands playing, the columns came at four points at once. The first two assaults were driven off the walls. The third got over on the north side, where the wall was weakest and where Travis was, and he was killed there early, shot through the head at his post. After that it went inward: the compound taken piece by piece, then the long barracks room by room, doors barricaded from the inside and forced, and the guns turned around and fired down the length of the rooms. Bowie was killed in his bed. Where Crockett fell is disputed and always will be.

Ninety minutes. That is the whole of it, from the first column at the wall to the end.

Between four and six hundred of Santa Anna’s men were killed or wounded taking a position held by fewer than two hundred and sixty, which is a ratio that should have told him something. It did not. He had the bodies burned in pyres outside the walls, and he said afterwards that it was a small affair. Six weeks later, at San Jacinto, an army came at his camp shouting the name of this place and took eighteen minutes to destroy him, and he spent the rest of his life explaining.

I do not deal in last stands. Men use that phrase to make a shape out of something that has no shape while it is happening. What happened here was a hundred and eighty-odd separate endings inside an hour and a half, most of them in the dark, most of them indoors, a good many of them of men who never saw who did it.

I was in every room of it. I am always in every room.