Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (49 page)

Meanwhile, as more light of day illuminated the plain outside the fort, the sight of a large number of Mexican cavalry surging toward them presented a nasty surprise to the escapees. After all, during the twelve days of siege, garrison members had seen no such sizeable cavalry deployment, or even the repositioning of Mexican horsemen in the early hours of March 6.

Not only had young men of dissimilar cultures, religions, and races clashed at the Alamo, but the battle also involved dissimilar means of waging warfare. And this wide difference in battle tactics was forcefully demonstrated outside the Alamo’s walls. What was now about to transpire outside the Alamo was a confrontation between two means of waging war that had been transferred to the New World. While most garrison members had learned how to fight as a foot soldier, Mexican superiority was manifested in its rich cavalry traditions and heritage. Even more than natives from the South, where horse culture dominated, the Mexicans, like the Spanish before them, were masters of horsemanship: a lengthy tradition brought from the dry plains and mountainous regions of Spain.

Unlike the Anglo-Celtic riflemen primarily from the Deep and Upper South, the Mexican cavalry was ideally suited for waging war amid the dry, open prairies around San Antonio, which so closely resembled Spain’s interior. More then any other aspect of the struggle, therefore, the fighting outside the walls would represent the clash of two distinct traditional means of waging war. Contrary to the mythical Alamo last stand, meanwhile, only a relatively handful of men now attempted to defend themselves inside a compound now overflowing with the soldado tide. Eulalia Yorba described the final contest swirling in and around the Long Barracks, including the church: “It did not seem as if a mouse could live in a building so shot at and riddled as the Alamo was that morning.”
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However, the men who had stayed inside the Alamo were destined to die mercifully compared to the grisly fates awaiting those who fled outside the walls. Vacating the open prairie to seek some meager shelter after seeing the onrushing Mexican cavalry, they had retired back into the brushy shelter of the irrigation ditch to make a stand. Dispatched by General Sesma, a lancer company of the Dolores Regiment swept down to smash into the 62 men from the flank after they took defensive positions in the “bushy and craggy ground,” while other Mexican lancers attacked them in front. While those garrison members who remained behind trapped in the Alamo faced ugly demises from muskets shots and bayonets, the escapees—who now made the forgotten last stand not inside but outside the Alamo—would have to face Mexico’s most highly skilled killers.

As best they could, these men now had to fend off blows delivered with heavy dragoon sabers that could split skulls open and sever and arms held up in vain for protection. But worst of all, they confronted the most feared of all opponents, the deadly Mexican lancers, who charged them in front. As revealed by Sergeant Loranca of the Dolores Cavalry, in a revealing 1878 article that appeared in the
San Antonio Daily Express
, the “Sixty-two Texans who sallied forth . . . were received by the Lancers,” the pride of Mexico.
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But almost as shocking as facing lancers was the fact that the escapees now confronted some black soldiers for the first time in their lives. With the port city’s heavily mixed population, people of African descent had long served in Vera Cruz’s military units, including the elite Vera Cruz Lancers: an integrated military unit since the time of the American Revolution. And by 1798, the majority of the Vera Cruz lancers consisted of pardos—lighter skinned descendants of blacks and Spaniards—and morenos, who were darker-complected offspring of Spanish and African parents. These dark-skinned Jarochos (citizens of “Puerto de Veracruz”) were proud of their beautiful port city and their African heritage. Ironically, for the doomed white soldiers, even the lengthy lances that were now employed with such business-like efficiency had been inherited from Islamic Moors of African descent.
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The unfortunates outside the Alamo’s walls were all but defenseless at this time. With little, if any, powder remaining, they were also without bayonets, the standard weapon with which infantrymen defended themselves against cavalry throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Without bayonets to fend off charging Mexican horsemen, mounted on fast mustangs that were smaller than American horses, these escapees were at the mercy of the seven-foot-long deadly lances.
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Before Santa Anna began his march on San Antonio, at least one insightful evaluation from the
Red River Herald
had offered a grim warning for any unlucky Texas riflemen caught in the open, and that now proved most prophetic for the 62 escapees: “ . . . they will be powerless against cavalry. . . . Bayonets and lances are what are, therefore, needed by American volunteers” fighting in Texas.
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The struggle outside the walls began as a conventional fight: an organized defense that was remarkable under the circumstances. While hit in front by the lancers, the dragoons of the Dolores Cavalry Regiment smashed into their flank, flushing some survivors from the irrigation ditch. Now out in the open and far from the Alamo’s walls, those men who sought to escape met a grisly end during a brutal mismatch that was little more than a bloody game of predator pursuing its doomed quarry. They could neither escape nor survive out in the open for long. Meanwhile, other men continued to defend themselves from the ditch’s cover.

Contrary to traditional accounts and newer, more controversial assertions, including the de la Pena memoir, Crockett very likely was killed at this time far from the Alamo’s walls and not far from the Alameda. One of the most persistent Alamo myths has been the alleged tenacious defense at the wooden palisade by Crockett and his Tennessee volunteers. Armed with Long Rifles, they have been viewed as the Alamo’s most deadly defenders. But very likely the Tennessee men were among the 62 who escaped through the palisade. It would have been almost beyond human endurance, not to mention common sense, for a handful of Tennessee men to stand by to die for no gain, after so many garrison members had left by way of the palisade.

If the Tennesseans had been part of this exodus, which was likely the case, then might Crockett have joined them instead of remaining in the church area? The former Tennessee Congressman possessed perhaps more reasons than anyone to depart with more than 60 comrades: a bright political future in a new Texas revolutionary government that he would “consider . . . a paradise,” as he wrote in a letter; the Alamo’s defense was already compromised by this time; and, of course, he had a wife and family yet dependent upon him. Therefore, he quite likely joined the first escape attempt out of the compound. He might even have led it.

Earlier, Crockett had informed Susanna Dickinson that “we had better march out” of the Alamo death-trap. If he had led the escape effort, this would also explain why so many garrison members departed from the palisade. A natural leader, any decisions made by this popular Volunteer State frontiersman-turned-politician would have been followed by many garrison members. For his part, the Tennessean faced two distinct choices once the Mexicans had poured into the fort: either withdraw to the “safety” of the Long Barracks or the Alamo chapel, or go out through the palisade not only with his Tennessee boys, if that is the case, but with the day’s largest concentration of defenders on that nightmarish morning.

A number of Mexican officers and soldados viewed this large-scale escape from the Alamo, because it was not only the first but also the most concentrated attempt of a large number of garrison members to reach safety. Mapmakers José Sánchez-Navarro and Estado De Parras both noted this desperate flight from out of the palisade. On his 1836 map and quite correctly, Navarro described the wooden palisade as “the weakest part of the fort. It is defined only by a stockade and a bad tree fall [abatis]; from this post, in vain, when all was lost some colonists attempted to escape.”
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And in his 1840 map, Parras also indicated that the wooded palisade was the “point [where] some colonist[s] attempted to escape” the slaughter inside the Alamo’s walls. Evidently, not knowing the location of the little gate, or sally port, at the church’s southwest corner at the palisade’s edge, he indicated, as in the 1836 map, that the exact point of escape was located at the cannon embrasure, or opening at the center of the wooden palisade. But most significant, both early Alamo mapmakers considered the flight of garrison members from the palisade to be of some historical significance, when they instead could have omitted it to glorify the victory won by embracing the core tenants of the mythical Alamo last stand.
⁵⁷

But there was little to glorify in the struggle so far outside the walls. In General Sesma’s words that described the attack on the 62 escapees, including perhaps Crockett himself, around the aqueduct: “The gallant lancer officers charged them, and in the same manner the troop [of the Dolores Cavalry] that they had commanded also charged” the defenders in a one-two punch.
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All the while, the lively, almost festive “music of the regiment of Dolores” inspired hundreds of lancers and dragoons to make their killing as efficient as possible. After initial resistance was broken, the slaughter of so many garrison members took on an almost a carnivallike atmosphere far from the Alamo’s walls in a vicious, life-and-death struggle that has long been overlooked by historians.
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Meantime, either shortly before or while while the 62 escapees were under attack outside the walls, the panic among the few survivors along the south wall—in the low barracks and at the main gate—became more widespread, with every man for himself. The mounting shock and terror caused primeval instincts to rise to the fore, and it was now a matter of simple survival, which called for one final act—flight—to escape the massacre. Unlike the first escape attempt out the palisade, therefore, the two subsequent flights of Alamo men would not be as organized, resulting more out of panic to escape a slaughter than a prearranged design. However, one Anglo emphasized not only the first escape attempt but also those that followed, concluding that nearly the entire garrison had fled. William C. Murphy, who evidently learned what had really happened from Mexican prisoners taken at San Jacinto or from Tejano eyewitnesses, spoke to a reporter and described how resistance inside the Alamo had continued until “finally [the garrison] was compelled to abandon the fort.”
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Appearing in his obituary in the February 23, 1895 issue of the
New York Times
(appropriately on the 59th anniversary of the arrival of Santa Anna’s army in San Antonio), Murphy’s rare account of what actually happened on the morning of March 6 is most significant, because it is the only known Texian version in existence today that has described the exodus from the Alamo, coinciding with Mexican accounts before the latter were known or seen by him.
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But besides the ample number of Mexican accounts, perhaps the best evidence of these multiple flights of escapees was the fact that overall resistance had been so feeble from beginning to end. As revealed by the journal of Juan Nepomuceno Almonte (both the aristocratic general and his journal were captured at San Jacinto) less than 300 Mexican soldiers would fall on this day, including a large percentage from friendly fire. The illegitimate son of Mexican revolutionary leader Jose Maria Morales, he served as Santa Anna’s Chief of Staff, and knew the truth of what actually occurred on March 6th. He therefore penned in his journal how, less than a half hour after the attack’s opening, “the enemy attempted to fly” from the Alamo. Most important, both Murphy and Colonel Almonte indicated a widespread collapse of resistance and how a large percentage of the garrison attempted to flee.
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As a proud member of the Dolores Cavalry Regiment, however, Sergeant Loranca had only witnessed the first flight of 62 men from the palisade, and he spent sometime that morning fighting and slaughtering escapees on the open prairie. Consequently, he failed to bear witness to subsequent flights from the Alamo.
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But the account of Colonel Almonte, a highly respected officer esteemed on both sides, was especially reliable. No wonder the surprised editors of the
New York Herald
who published Almonte’s journal, which had been picked up on the San Jacinto battlefield by Private Anson Jones, a future president of the Texas Republic, could only write with some dismay: “The assault on the Alamo is very briefly given. It will be observed that Almonte’s account differs very essentially from what we received at the time through the Texas papers.”
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Additional escape attempts by desperate soldiers in such a no-win situation as the Alamo garrison faced were not only to be expected but inevitable. Even the most disciplined veterans of the French and English armies of the Napoleonic Wars ran for their lives when defensive lines broke, no hope existed for either success or survival, or when facing bayonets and a policy of no mercy.
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And even the most battle-hardened Germans troops, often considered invincible, of the Second World War often gave way “to the primal terror and the urge to flee” the battlefield, if hard-hit or caught by surprise. Despite separated by more than a century, both situations and examples applied to the Alamo defenders.
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To insist that the Alamo’s men, who were neither seasoned nor welltrained soldiers in the conventional sense, died to the last man in going down fighting in a heroic final stand actually borders on the far-fetched, given the circumstances From beginning to end, the heroic last stand of myth was all but an impossibility for undisciplined citizen-soldiers in a no-win situation, under a no-quarter threat, with little ammunition, and few leaders left alive, especially after the Alamo’s walls had been breached. To believe otherwise indicates a lack of understanding of the basic nature of not only combat but that of the fighting man, human behavior, psychology, and the history of warfare through the ages.