Michener, James A. (66 page)

This was the able, vainglorious, vengeful commander before whom Benito Garza bowed on the road north of Saltillo: 'Excellency, all Tejas is overjoyed to see you coming to our salvation.'

i thank you. What is your name?'

'Benito Garza, of Victoria.'

'And how are things there?'

'The norteamericanos hold us in contempt. The mexicanos pray for your victory.'

Their prayers will be answered,' he said, and from the resolute manner in which he spoke, Garza was convinced that they would be.

Who was this charismatic leader in whom all Mexicans seemed to place such hope? Born in 1794 in the Vera Cruz district, he had at age eighteen proved himself to be a man of extreme personal bravery, exhibited in many battles, but also one capable of adapting to almost any situation, as proved by the fact that he would ascend to the presidency of Mexico on eleven different occasions. Four times, at the height of one crisis or another, Mexico would send him into what was intended to be lifelong exile, and three times he would storm back to resume his leadership. The fourth time he tried, he failed.

There is no one in United States history remotely comparable, nor, for that matter, in any other country. He liked to call himself the Napoleon of the West, but Napoleon returned to power only once, and then for a scant hundred days; Santa Anna returned ten times.

It seemed that whenever he resumed power his actions carried special significance for Texicans, and two incidents in his remarkable career were especially relevant. In the hot summer of 1813, when he was nineteen, he had the bad luck to participate in the battle at the Medina River, which took place near San Antonio de Bejar, along the boundary between the Mexican territories of Coahuila and Tejas. Mexican dissidents aided by American adventurers had launched a minor revolution, which Spain's colonial government decided to crush with a harshness that would forever halt subversion north of the Rio Grande.

In the battle, Santa Anna helped spring a trap on the unsuspecting Americans, enabling his general to win a resounding victory, but it was what happened next that made the battle significant, for General Arredondo gave one simple order: 'Exterminate them!' A slaughter followed, with young Santa Anna participating in the execution at point-blank range of more than a hundred prisoners and the running down of many others.

He also helped cram more than two hundred captives into an improvised jail in San Antonio; by morning eighteen had suffocated. Most of the survivors were dragged into the town plaza and shot. But Arredondo's contemptuous treatment of the civilians surprised even Santa Anna. Any who were even suspected of supporting the insurgents were also summarily shot, and when the executions were completed he authorized his troops to loot and rape in the streets. To reinforce his disdain of the populace, the general ordered the leading matrons of the city to report to a detention area, where for eighteen days they were forced to do the laundry of the victorious invaders and cook their food.

This crushing victory, and Santa Anna's resulting promotion, must, however, be judged an unfortunate affair for him. The ease with which the triumph came and the harshness which followed encouraged him to believe that the way to handle insurgents was to beat them convincingly in battle, then execute the men and humiliate the women. Now, twenty-three years later, faced with another insurgency in Tejas, he was not only prepared to duplicate those punishments but also eager to do so, for he could be extremely cruel and unforgiving when he judged it necessary to be so.

Perhaps Mexico required a ruthless leader like Santa Anna, for

these were turbulent years. During one period when the United States had only one President—Andrew Jackson, who helped bind his nation together—unlucky Mexico staggered through sixteen different incumbencies, the hideous penalty paid by many former Spanish colonies that seized their freedom without obtaining with it any coherent theory of responsible government.

But whenever Santa Anna resumed his leadership things seemed to be better ... for a while; then he would do some outrageous thing and the government would collapse again. During one return to power, having taken back the presidency on a pompously announced program of reform, he assured the electorate that he was a liberal who would reform the church, discipline the army, and grant each of the constituent states a substantial degree of self-government. As we have seen, Texicans rejoiced in this promise of a constructive freedom under which they could populate and improve their frontier regions.

But in 1834 he had startled everyone, and perhaps even himself, by announcing: 'I now realize that I am really a conservative, and as such, I offer the nation a clear three-point program which will save it from its current turbulence. We must replace federalism with a supreme central government, with the individual states having few powers and no legislatures. The traditional role of the church in national affairs must be restored. And the ancient privileges by which priests and army officers were excused from the rules of common law must be restored.' Reviving the battle cry of 'Religion y Fueros' (Religion and the Rights of Priests and Army Officers), he scuttled the liberal Constitution of 1824 and converted Mexico into a conservative dictatorship)—and many citizens applauded: 'At last we have a strong man in control. He should be made our leader for life.'

Now came the move which struck terror into the hearts of Texicans who had hoped for better, more orderly days. The rich silver state of Zacatecas, refusing to surrender its hard-won rights to Santa Anna's central dictatorship, launched a kind of rebellion in defense of its privileges, and this was exactly the kind of challenge Santa Anna loved, for it enabled him to don his general's bemedaled uniform, mount his white horse, and ride into battle.

Leading a large army up to the walls of Zacatecas, he then ripped a page from Napoleon's book, swung around the town, and attacked from the rear. At the same time he ordered several of his best officers to leave his ranks in apparent defection, sneak into the city, and proclaim themselves defenders of the Constitution of 1824 and mortal enemies of Santa Anna. As trained soldiers, they

expected to be given command of Zacatecan troops, whom they would direct into certain slaughter when the fighting began.

On 11 May 1835, with this combination of valor and deceit, Santa Anna won a devastating victory, but it was what happened next that boded ill for Tejas, for he turned his men loose in one of the ghastly rampages of Mexican history. During the terror some two thousand five hundred women and children and men who had not participated in the battle were slain. Foreign families became special targets, with English and American husbands bayoneted and their wives stripped naked and coursed through the streets. Rape and pillage continued for two days, until the once-fair city was a burning, screaming ruin.

Zacatecas had been ravaged because it refused to change its loyalty as quickly as Santa Anna had changed his, and word went out: if Tejas continues to oppose the central government and tries to cling to its old constitution, it can expect like punishment.' And in the dying days of 1835, backed by an immense army, aided by good generals and strong artillery, Generalisimo Santa Anna marched north, determined to humiliate once more the recalcitrant Texicans. All who opposed him would be slain.

On 13 February 1836 this remorseless general, accompanied by a cadre of senior officers, rode ahead to the Rio Grande and were snug inside San Juan Bautista while the main body of the troops, accompanied by Benito Garza, lagged far behind, marching on foot across that exposed and dangerous wasteland between Monclova and the river. Santa Anna, always looking ahead to the next battle and disregarding the comfort of his troops, had no cause to worry about his straggling men because the day had started with the temperature near sixty and the sun so hot that many soldiers removed their jackets and marched in shirt only, and sometimes not even that.

But this was the region just south of that in which Cabeza de Vaca had experienced the dreaded blue norther, and such a storm now hit men who had never experienced the phenomenon. At its first warning blast they hastily redonned their shirts and jackets.

Rapidly the temperature dropped to fifty, then forty, then to an appalling thirty. Men began to slow their pace, hugging themselves to keep warm, and mules started to wander in confusion. By midafternoon a wild snowstorm was sweeping across the unfettered flatlands of Tejas and northern Coahuila, and at dusk men and animals began to freeze.

All night the dreadful storm continued, throwing twelve to

fourteen inches of snow upon men who had never felt its icy fingers before. They began to stumble, and many collapsed; then the snow covered them and they became inert white mounds along the route, as if in their final moments they had pulled fleecy blankets over their dying bodies.

Worst hit was a horde of pitiful Indians from Yucatan marching under the command of General Victor de Ripperda, governor of that tropical district and former official in charge of the frontier post at Nacogdoches. His troops, hundreds of them with no shoes, no blankets, no warm clothing of any kind, simply fell down and died. Sometimes Garza, who rode up and down the files, would find eight or nine huddled together in a hopeless mass, clutching one another for warmth; after they all perished, the covering snow formed a rounded hump, a kind of natural mausoleum. When more fortunate Indians from colder climates, those with shoes and blankets, spotted such a mound, they dug inside, stripped the dead bodies of whatever cloth remained, and wrapped their own faces against the storm.

At the rear, Garza came upon soldaderas and their children suffering terribly, but like the Yucatecs they huddled in groups, and although many died, the stronger survived. It was shocking for those soldiers who formed the rear guard to stumble upon the frozen bodies of children abandoned in the snow.

Mules, oxen and horses struggled in the blinding storm, collapsing in huge snowdrifts that quickly buried them. When the norther subsided, and the surviving men and mules were counted, General Ripperda found that his army had suffered a tremendous loss. Santa Anna, warm inside mission walls, must have known this, but neither then nor after did he refer to it, for he realized that when many soldiers are required to march over a great distance in unfavorable weather, somebody is apt to die. That was one of the chances of war, unpleasant but acceptable.

And from the practical point of view, Ripperda's experience in the Monclova blizzard may have been salutary, for it rid him of many largely useless Yucatecs, toughened up the line, and enabled one young lieutenant who dreamed of impending glory to assure his fellow officers: if we can survive that blizzard, we have little to fear from the rebels in Tejas. It'll be Zacatecas all over again.'

When Benito Garza rode north of the Rio Grande toward Tejas with Santa Anna, he had an opportunity to see why the mexicano troops, officers and enlisted men alike, loved this dynamic man. He obviously thrived on campaign conditions and

could hardly wait, Benito thought, to launch the attack 'Forward, forward!' was his constant command to himself and his troops.

The dictator was going to be forty-two years old the next day, 21 February, and he would spend it in the saddle a few miles south of his ultimate target, the Alamo. The passing years had treated him well, and he looked, if the truth were voiced—and he liked it to be voiced—a good deal like one of Napoleon's marshals, Ney or Soult, or even like the emperor himself.

On this campaign he had brought along none of his mistresses, and Garza heard him complain to General Cos: 'How can a gentleman celebrate his birthday alone?' So on Santa Anna's natal day Cos ordered salutes to be fired and a ration of wine issued for celebration. The troops were now approaching the Medina, where Santa Anna had known his first great victory, with many, many more anglo rebels in the field then than there would be now. The general wanted to leave El Camino Real briefly and veer eastward toward the old battle site, but when this was done and the steep banks of the river reached, no one could locate exactly the scene of the battle, and Santa Anna was mildly displeased.

On the day after his birthday, Santa Anna moved his troops to within sight of the tall tower of San Fernando Church, just across the river from the Alamo, and there he made camp early. Scouts rode in to inform him of conditions in the town, and everything he heard was reassuring: 'No reinforcements and none on the way. Colonel Fannin and his large detachment bottled up at Goliad and he refuses to move to Bejar. Still no more than a hundred and fifty men, but they do have some cannon. And the entire town, General, is eager to welcome you.'

'Are there any mexicanos fighting with them?' This problem of loyalty irritated him.

'Captain Juan Seguin has taken arms against you. Says he will fight for the Constitution of 1824.'

'Do any support him?'

'He led nine others into the Alamo. We have their names. Abamillo, Badillo, Espalier . . .' He continued to read from the grubby paper, nine names in all.

'They're to be hanged. Not shot. Hanged.' Even as he gave this order one of the mexicanos slipped out of the Alamo, but the other nine were determined to oppose the dictator with their lives, in defense of a new Texas which would later have little use for their kind.

Garza rode with the general as he entered the town in the lead, disregarding the possibility of isolated sniper fire from some mis-

guided rebel. No doubt about it, this man was brave. Turning back to face Garza, he gave a short command: 'I want the flag I showed you last night to be flown immediately.' And now they reached the heart of Bejar, with Garza pointing out the church.

'Can its tower be seen at the Alamo?' the general asked.

'Unquestionably.'

'Fly the flag.'

So Benito Garza climbed the quivering tower stairs, accompanied by two dragoons, and when they reached the highest practical point he unfurled the big flag made from cloth which Santa Anna had brought north for this specific purpose.