Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (48 page)

Pushing ever farther south and away from the palisade under the cover of the brushy, muddy aqueduct after nearly two weeks of siege, these 62 men must have initially felt a new lease on life. After all, they had escaped a death-trap and an inevitable massacre. Even now, those comrades left behind in the Alamo’s dark recesses, the Long Barracks, hospital, church, and other buildings, were in the process of being slaughtered to the last man.

With the first rays of dawn lightening the eastern horizon that allowed them to be seen by General Sesma, the escapees hoped that by moving away—south instead of southeast—from the squadron of Vera Cruz Lancers with whom they had first exchanged shots, they could yet escape. In and around the aqueduct’s shelter they moved steadily south in the hazy half-light, hoping to reach the Alameda. Even more in their desperate situation, any officers with this party would have attempted to keep everyone together in a tight group. After all, an organized formation would be needed to reach the Alameda in strength, because a clash was all but inevitable, after they had earlier sparred with the foremost members of the veteran lancer squadron.

At this time, these men might have planned to emerge from the aqueduct’s cover at some point just below the western end of the Alameda, around 300 yards from the Alamo. But it was already too late for a successful escape. At some point and for whatever reason, perhaps encountering either deeper water in the irrigation ditch or no longer concealed by its natural vegetation, the 62 men emerged from the area of the ditch and made a dash across open ground. In response, the evervigilant General Sesma now took decisive action after sighting the escapees emerge out in “the plains.” The luck of these Alamo defenders had now come to an abrupt end.
⁴⁴

With their quarry flushed from the Alamo’s dark confines as if a Godsend from a smiling, all-knowing Lady of Guadalupe, General Sesma and his elite cavalrymen were ready and waiting—as Santa Anna had foreseen—for the first group of escapees when they suddenly burst into the open like a covey of quail. General Sesma was a hardened professional and a martinet. Always wanting to improve his soldier’s effectiveness, this serious-minded cavalry commander had petitioned authorities in Mexico City to eliminate the time-honored practice of allowing women camp followers, who reduced the army’s mobility and speed. With little compassion for either these women or children, and far less for the northamericano rebels, Sesma wanted to uphold the service’s professionalism. This natural cavalryman, like Santa Anna, was now presented with a golden opportunity to wipe out a large percentage of the Alamo garrison on the open ground outside the walls.

Leaping at the opportunity, General Sesma could hardly wait to give the fateful order for his most trusty cavalrymen to advance to entrap the escapees, who continued to push farther from the Alamo’s walls. Indeed, after first catching sight of the daring escape attempt when they emerged from the aqueduct area into the open, General Sesma took immediate action. In his words: “As soon as I observed this, I sent a company from the [Cavalry] Regiment of Dolores with my assistants like lieutenant colonel Don Juan Herrera, captain Cayetano Montero, the Superior Lieutenant from Dolores the lieutenant colonel Don Juan Palacios, the second lieutenant Don Jose Maria Medrano so that they would harass the enemy from the sides of the branal [sic].”
⁴⁵

Here, as General Sesma realized, was a rare opportunity for the elite Mexican cavalry and lancers to win laurels before Santa Anna’s very eyes. Now the Mexican infantrymen, who were busy slaughtering the defenders inside the compound, would not be the only ones to cover themselves with glory on March 6. The intense, but natural, inter-service rivalry between the regular infantry and cavalry only further motivated the horsemen of the Dolores Cavalry and the Tampico Lancers and Cavalry Regiment of Vera Cruz, all crack permanente units. They were determined to uphold not only individual but unit and national pride at the expense of those who had escaped.

Like the rest of Santa Anna’s Army of Operations, vengeance was very much on the minds of these elite Vera Cruz lancers on this late winter morning, in part because five of their lancer comrades, good men like Juan Manuel Maldonado and Juan Nepomuceno Tello, had been killed in the late 1835 siege of San Antonio. Because the Vera Cruz lancers were Santa Anna’s favorite horsemen, the Dolores Cavalry Regiment, even though its members served as his personal guard and escort, and the Tampico Lancers would rise to the occasion this morning. Indeed, born and raised in the gulf port city, Santa Anna yet considered himself more of a Veracruzano than a member of Mexico City’s aristocracy, and identified with these hard-fighting lancers from his own hometown.

Especially after having just missed the opportunity to capture the entire Alamo garrison in the late February strike foiled by a combination of the Medina River’s swollen waters and later by Santa Anna’s own miscalculations, these battle-hardened Mexican cavalrymen lusted for this opportunity to demonstrate their worth, especially before their commander-in-chief. Consequently, they were now most enthusiastic about a chance to steal away the laurels now being garnered by the Mexican infantrymen in exterminating the last holed-up survivors inside the Alamo’s embattled buildings.

Long considered Mexico’s most elite troops, General Sesma’s men of the Dolores Cavalry Regiment were highly motivated. Here was an opportunity for them to live up to the inspirational legacy of Father Hidalgo, striking a blow as the Mexican Revolution’s protectors and inheritors of the revolutionary warcry, “Viva Mexico,” and “Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe.” Now consisting of 290 horsemen in shiny helmets and ornate breastplates, the Dolores Cavalry had been named in honor of the birthplace of Father Hidalgo’s September 1810 revolt, the tiny village of Dolores, where the bells of the parish church had first rallied Indian and mestizo revolutionaries. Here, this fiery parish priest first raised the call for equality and freedom for the downtrodden peasants to rise up against their Spanish masters. Hidalgo’s revolutionary spark began the resistance movement that culminated in Mexico’s independence from Spain.
⁴⁶

Ironically, because it was not yet full light and visibility was low, escaping garrison members had not initially realized that they were heading toward the teeth of the dragoon. Unknown to the 62 escapees, the Alameda’s high ground now served as the mobile command post of General Sesma and his cavalry and lancers. As a cruel fate would have it, the escapees now pushed not toward safety and freedom, as they believed, but toward a cavalry strongpoint and a rendezvous with disaster. Unfortunately, these fleeing men were about to encounter the finest troops in all Mexico.

Santa Anna, fully exploiting his best asset, had circled the entire Alamo with a screen of cavalrymen, including the much-feared lancers. Dressed in blue riding pants with red stripes and wearing black leather helmets decorated with lengthy, dark-colored horse-hair plumes that hung down their backs, the lancers at the Alameda were ready for action. What most distinguished them as a lethal killing machine, especially on the open ground, was the seven-foot-long lance. A deadly instrument of war, the lengthy wooden shaft carried by the crack Vera Cruz, Tampico, and Dolores lancers was topped by an iron, arrowshaped spear point. Even more, the escaping garrison members never imagined that the number of Santa Anna’s lancers, around 400 welltrained men, was more than double the entire Alamo garrison. Therefore, the flight that these escapees believed would take them to safety was about to lead them into a living nightmare instead.

General Sesma had chosen the perfect moment to unleash his lancers, who now moved in for the kill, sweeping ever closer to their victims. He had allowed the escapees to advance sufficiently far from the Alamo’s walls to preclude any possibility of a flight back to the compound. Like Santa Anna, Sesma wanted to destroy these men in the open, eliminating every revolutionary who had defied Mexico.
⁴⁷

But at this critical moment and almost as if by a miracle, the 62 men who had fled the Alamo were not without assistance during their lifeor-death bid to escape. In one of the most spirited, selfless actions among the Alamo defenders on this morning, about a dozen cannoneers of both Captain Dickinson’s and Carey’s artillery companies rose to the fore. Swept by chilly winds whistling across the prairie and especially at the top of the church, these ill-clothed gunners, who were stationed on the elevated wooden gun platform at the church’s rear, spied the attempt of so many men to save themselves. Or perhaps an officer or enlisted man with foresight had had the presence of mind to have previously informed them of the escape attempt and requested protective fire before the breakout. After Romero’s troops had earlier shifted to strike the north wall, these gunners had no targets for most of the morning. Now they saw a good many finely uniformed targets on the open prairie before them.

From their elevated perch, the gunners, including cannoneers like thirty-seven-year-old Jacob Walker from Nacogodoches, a member of Captain Carey’s artillery and the brother of the famed mountain man Joseph R. Walker, went into action to aid their fleeing comrades, old friends, and perhaps relatives. They therefore hurriedly man-handled their 12-pounder guns, that had been facing east, at an angle to the right, or more southeast. In the early morning half-light, they now sighted their guns, loaded with cannon balls for long-range shots rather than short-range canister, on the Mexican cavalry that had suddenly appeared on the horizon and was now descending on the 62 men, now vulnerable, after having left the area of the ditch.

Commanding the Alamo’s most elevated battery, Captain Dickinson, and even perhaps Captain Carey if present, very likely helped to serve the 12-pounders at the top of the gradually-sloping elevated ramp that led to the wood and earth artillery platform at the church’s rear. Raised on the busy, cobblestone streets of Philadelphia, Captain Dickinson, no longer serving as the garrison’s unofficial physician, was now attempting to save more men in a combat situation than he ever could as a man of medicine. After all, the effort to provide protective fire for the escapees was an act of salvation on this early Sunday morning in hell. Here, at Fortin de Cós, the former Gonzales blacksmith was about to forge one of the most heroic actions at the Alamo.

Acting with haste while Mexican bullets from the plaza and nearby walls whistled around their heads, this handful of feisty artillerymen sighted their guns upon the lengthy line of brightly colored Dolores, Vera Cruz, and Tampico lancers, who were swiftly approaching the escapees. Santa Anna’s cavalry was yet far enough from the fleeing soldiers that these gunners now prepared to fire over the escapee’s heads to send projectiles toward the surging Mexican cavalry formations.

At least one, perhaps two, 12-pounders now blasted away at the cavalrymen in the vain hope of preventing the inevitable slaughter on the prairie. With a sense of admiration rather than pity, Sergeant Francisco Becerra of the Activo San Luís Potosí Battalion, never forgot the sight of the valiant attempts of the artillerymen, even though they knew that they were hastening their own doom by assisting their fleeing comrades instead of defending themselves: “On the top of the church building I saw eleven Texians [and] They had some small pieces of artillery, and were firing on the cavalry. . . .”
⁴⁸

But of course this gallant action of the few artillerymen, who willing sacrificed themselves to save their comrades, came at a high price. Ironically, in now firing more times at the fight’s end than perhaps all the Alamo’s other cannon this morning, these hard-working gunners from a commanding height loaded and fired their guns as fast as they could and as long as possible in attempting to save their comrades, even while they knew that they had only a short time to live. Here, at the church’s rear and in close conjunction with the exodus from the compound, was what could be described as Captain Dickinson’s last stand, the Alamo’s authentic Thermopylae in miniature. As long as ammunition remained, these few artillerymen of Fortin de Cós continued to fire even while the Mexicans entered the church and gained the ramp’s base, and then shot down the gunners, now sitting ducks, one by one. Additionally, some of Santa Anna’s men outside the walls, evidently Mexican troopers who had advanced close to the wall to cut off more escape attempts from this point, also opened up to eliminate this booming threat to their own horse-soldier comrades, who continued to descend upon the 62 escapees.

Inside the embattled church now surrounded by Mexican infantry and cavalry, Enrique Esparza described how: “The roof of the Alamo [church] had been taken off and the south side filled up with dirt almost to the roof on that side so that there was a slanting embankment up which the Americans could run and take positions [and now] I saw numbers [of artillerymen] who were shot in the head as soon as they exposed themselves from the roof.”
⁴⁹

One of these last-stand gunners was Captain Dickinson, who commanded the three-gun battery of 12-pounders at the church’s rear. But at least one, maybe two cannon, had expended their rounds by this time and, combined with the number of gunners shot down, now became useless. Therefore, and perhaps even hoping yet to escape to the outside after having seen so many of their comrades fleeing, three unarmed gunners had left the firing platform and entered the rooms on the church’s first floor, where they were dispatched by bullets from a tide of Mexicans swarming into the building. One of these unfortunate victims was Jacob Walker, who attempted to escape the elevated gun platform but too late. He was shot and then killed with a flurry of bayonets in a dirty, dank corner of a darkened room before he could escape from the chapel now engulfed by screaming soldados. Like his fellow cannoneers of Fortin de Cós, he had bravely given his life in part to save his fleeing comrades.
⁵⁰

Ironically, this dramatic episode and one of the most heroic actions of that March 6 has been overlooked by historians in part because of a stubborn refusal to accept reliable Mexican accounts that reveal, or even hint of, an exodus from the Alamo.