UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR
UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR
HAD you stood on the banks of the Brazos in December of the year in which the nineteenth century became old enough to vote and looked northeastward across the plains of central Texas, your attention would doubtless have been attracted by a rolling cloud of dust. From out its yellow haze would have crept in time a straggling line of canvas-covered wagons. Iron-hard, bearded men, their faces tanned to the color of a much-used saddle, strode beside the wheels, their long-lashed blacksnakes cracking spasmodically, like pistol-shots, between the horns of the plodding oxen. Weary-faced women in sunbonnets and calico, with broods of barelegged, frowzy-headed youngsters huddled about them, peered curiously from beneath the arching wagon-tops. A thin fringe of scouts astride of wiry ponies, long-barrelled rifles resting on the pommels of their saddles, rode on either flank of the slowly moving column. Other groups of alert and keen-eyed horsemen led the way and brought up the rear. Though these dusty migrants numbered less than half a thousand in all,though their garments were uniform only in their stern practicality and their shabby picturesqueness, though their only weapons were hunting rifles and the only music to which they marched was the rattle of harness and the creak of axle-trees, they formed, nevertheless, an army of invasion, bent on the conquest not of a people, however, but of a wilderness.
Who that saw that dusty column trailing across the Texan plains would have dreamed that these gaunt and shabby men and women were destined to conquer and civilize and add to our national domain a territory larger than the German Empire, with Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium thrown in? Yet that trek of the pioneers, “southwesterly by the lone star,” was the curtain-raiser for that most thrilling of historic dramas, or rather, melodramas: the taking of Texas.
To understand the significance of that chain of startling and picturesque events which began with the stand of the settlers on the Guadalupe and culminated in the victory on the San Jacinto without at least a rudimentary knowledge of the conditions which led up to it is as impossible as it would be to master trigonometry without a knowledge of arithmetic. But do not worry for fear that you will be bored by the recital; thestory is punctuated much too frequently with rifle-shots and pistol-shots for you to yawn or become sleepy-eyed.
The American colonization of Texas—then known as the province of New Estremadura—began while Spain still numbered Mexico among her colonial possessions. When Iturbide ended Spanish rule in Mexico, in 1821, and thereby made himself Emperor of the third largest nation in the world (China and Russia alone being of greater area), he promptly confirmed the land grants which had been made by the Spanish authorities to the American settlers in Texas, both he and his immediate successors being only too glad to further the development of the wild and almost unknown region above the Rio Grande by these hardy, thrifty, industrious folk from the north. Under this official encouragement an ever-growing, ever-widening stream of American emigration went rolling Texasward. The forests echoed to the axe strokes of woodsmen from Kentucky; the desert was furrowed by the ploughshares of Ohio farmers; villages sprang up along the rivers; the rolling prairies were dotted with patches of ripening grain. Texas quickly became the magnet which drew thousands of the needy, the desperate, and the adventurous. Men ofbroken fortunes, men of roving habits, adventurers, land speculators, disappointed politicians, unsuccessful lawyers, men who had left their country for their country’s good, as well as multitudes of sturdy, thrifty, hard-working folk desirous of finding homes for their increasing families poured into the land of promise afoot and on horseback, by boat and wagon-train, until, by 1823, there were probably not far from twenty thousand of these American outlanders established between the Sabine and the Pecos.
Meanwhile the government of Mexico was beginning the quick-change act with which it has alternately amused and exasperated and angered the world to this day. The short-lived empire of Iturbide lasted but a year, the Emperor meeting his end with his back to a stone wall and his face to a firing-party. Victoria proclaimed Mexico a republic and himself its President. Pedraza succeeded him in 1828. Then Guerrero overthrew Pedraza, and Bustamente overthrew Guerrero, and Santa Anna overthrew Bustamente and made himself dictator, ruling the war-racked country with an iron hand. Now, a dictator, if he is to hold his job, much less enjoy any peace of mind, must rule a people who, either through fear or ignorance, are willing to forget about their constitutionalrights and obligingly refrain from asking questions. But the American settlers in Texas, as each of the Mexican usurpers discovered in his turn and to his very great annoyance, were not built according to these specifications. They were not ignorant, and they were not in the least afraid, and when the privileges they had enjoyed were revoked or curtailed they resented it emphatically.
Alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of American settlers, disturbed by their independence and self-reliance, and realizing that they were daily becoming a greater menace to the dictatorial and dishonest methods of government which prevailed, the Mexican dictators determined to crush them before it was too late. In pursuance of this policy they inaugurated a systematic campaign of persecution. Sixty-odd years later the Boers adopted the same attitude toward the British settlers in the Transvaal that the Mexicans did toward the American settlers in Texas, and the same thing happened in both cases.
For three years after Mexico achieved its independence Texas was a separate State of the republic, with a government of its own. But in 1824, in pursuance of this anti-American policy, it was deprived of the privilege of self-government and added to the State of Coahuila. Shortly afterthis a law was passed forbidding the further settlement of Americans in Texas and prohibiting Americans from even trading in that region. And, to still further harass and humiliate the Texans, a number of penal settlements, composed of the most desperate criminals in the Mexican prisons, were established in Texas. Heretofore the Texans, in recognition of their services in transforming Texas from a savage wilderness into a civilized and prosperous province, had enjoyed immunity from taxes, but now custom-houses were established and the settlers were charged prohibitive duties even on the necessities of life. When they protested against so flagrant an injustice the Mexican Government answered them by blockading their ports. Heavy garrisons were now quartered in the principal towns, the civil authorities were defied, and the settlers were subjected to the tyranny of unrestrained military rule. Still the Texans did not offer armed resistance. Their tight-drawn patience snapped, however, when, in 1834, Santa Anna, determined to crush for good and all the sturdy independence which animated them, ordered his brother-in-law, General Cos, to enter Texas with a force of fifteen hundred men and disarm the Americans, leaving only one rifle to every five hundred inhabitants.That order was all that was needed to fan the smouldering embers of Texan resentment into the fierce flame of armed revolt. Were they to be deprived of those trusty rifles which they had brought with them on their long pilgrimage from the north, which were their only resource for game, their only defense against Indians, their only means of resistance to oppression? Those were the questions that the settlers asked themselves, and they answered them at Gonzales, on the banks of the Guadalupe.
At Gonzales was a small brass field-piece which had been given to the settlers as a protection from the Indians. A detachment of Mexican cavalry, some eightscore strong, was ordered to go to the town, capture the cannon, and disarm the inhabitants. News of their coming preceded them, however, and when the troopers reached the banks of the river opposite the town they found that all the boats had been taken to the other side, while the cannon which they had come to capture was drawn up in full view with a placard hanging from it. The placard bore the ominous invitation: “Come and take it.” The Mexican commander, spurring his horse to the edge of the river, insolently called upon the inhabitants to give up their arms. It was the same demand, madefor the same purpose, which an officer in a scarlet coat had made of another group of Americans, threescore years before, on the village green at Lexington. It was the same demand! And the same answer was given: “Come and take our weapons—if you can!” Though the Mexican officer had a force which outnumbered the settlers almost ten to one, he prudently decided to wait, for even in those days the fame of the Texan riflemen had spread across the land.
Meanwhile horsemen had carried the news of the raid on Gonzales to the outlying ranches and soon the settlers came pouring in until by nightfall they very nearly equalled the soldiery in number. Knowing the moral effect of getting in the first blow, they slipped across the river in the dark and charged the Mexican camp with an impetuosity and fierceness which drove the troopers back in panic-stricken retreat. As the Texans were going into action a parson who accompanied them shouted: “Remember, men, that we’re fighting for our liberty! Our wives, our children, our homes, our country are at stake! The strong arm of Jehovah will lead us on to victory and to glory! Come on, men! Come on!”
The news of this victory, though insignificant in itself, was as kindling thrown on the fires of insurrection.The settlers in Texas rose as one. In October, 1835, in a pitched battle near the Mission of the Immaculate Conception, outside of San Antonio, ninety-four Texan farmers, fresh from the plough, whipped four times that number of Mexicans. In December, after a five days’ siege, the Alamo, in San Antonio, was carried by storm, General Cos and fourteen hundred Mexican regulars, with twenty-one pieces of artillery, surrendering to less than four hundred Texans. By Christmas of 1835 Texas was left without an armed enemy within her borders.
When word was brought to Santa Anna that the garrison of the Alamo had surrendered, he behaved like a madman. With clinched fists and uplifted arms he swore by all the saints in the calendar and all the devils in hell that he would never unbuckle his sword-belt until Texas was once again a wilderness and everygringosettler was a fugitive, a prisoner, or a corpse. As it was at San Antonio that the Mexicans had suffered their most humiliating defeat, so it was San Antonio that the dictator chose as the place where he would wash out that defeat in blood, and on the 22d of February, 1836, he appeared before the city at the head of six thousand troops—the flower of the Mexican army. After their captureof San Antonio the Texans, most of whom were farmers, had returned to their homes and their crops, Colonel W. Barrett Travis being left to hold the town with only one hundred and forty-five men. With him were Davy Crockett, the stories of whose exploits on the frontier were already familiar in every American household, Bonham, the celebrated scout and Indian fighter, and James Bowie, who, in a duel on the Natchez River bar, had made famous the terrible long-bladed knife which his brother Rezin had made from a blacksmith’s file. A few days later thirty-seven brave hearts from Goliad succeeded in breaking through the lines of the besiegers, bringing the total strength of the garrison up to one hundred and eighty-three. Surrounding them was an army of six thousand!
The story of the last stand in the Alamo has been told so often that I hesitate to repeat it here. Yet it is a tale of which Americans can never tire any more than they can tire of the story of Jones and theBonhomme Richard, or of Perry at Lake Erie. The Texans, too few in numbers to dream of defending the town, withdrew into the Alamo, an enormously thick-walled building, half fortress and half church, which derived its name from being built in a clump ofálamosor cottonwood trees. For eleven days the Mexicans pounded the building with artillery and raked it with rifle fire; for eleven days the Texans held them back in that historic resistance whose details are so generally and so uncertainly known. Day after day the defenders strained their eyes across the prairie in search of the help that never came. Day after day the blood-red flag that signified “No quarter” floated above the Mexican lines, while from the walls of the Alamo flaunted defiantly the flag with a single star.
At sunset on the 4th of March the Mexican bombardment abruptly ceased, but no one knew better than Travis that it was but the lull which preceded the breaking of the storm. Drawing up his men in the great chapel, Travis drew a line across the earthen floor with his sword.
“Men,” he said, “it’s all up with us. A few more hours and we shall probably all be dead. There’s no use hoping for help, for no force that our friends could send us could cut its way through the Mexican lines. So there’s nothing left for it but to stay here and go down fighting. When the greasers storm the walls kill them as they come and keep on killing them until none of us are left. But I leave it to every man to decide for himself. Those who wish to go out and surrendermay do so and I shall not reproach them. As for me, I shall stay here and die for Texas. Those who wish to stay with me will step across this line.”
There was not so much as a flicker of hesitation. The defenders moved across the line as one. Even the wounded staggered over with the others, and those who were too badly wounded to walk dragged themselves across on hands and knees. Bowie, who was ill with fever, lay on his cot, too weak to move. “Boys,” he called feebly, “boys, I don’t believe I can get over alone ... won’t some of you help me?” So they carried him across the line, bed and all. It was a picture to stir the imagination, to send the thrills of patriotism chasing up and down one’s spine: the gloomy chapel with its adobe walls and raftered ceiling; the line of stern-faced, powder-grimed men in their tattered frontier dress, crimsoned bandages knotted about the heads of many of them; the fever-racked but indomitable Bowie stretched upon his cot; the young commander—for Travis was but twenty-seven—striding up and down, in his hand a naked sword, in his eyes the fire of patriotism.
On the morning of the 6th of March, before the sun had risen, Santa Anna launched his grandassault. Their bugles sounding the ominous notes of thedegüello, which signified that no quarter would be given, the Mexican infantry, provided with scaling-ladders, swept forward at the double. Behind them rode the cavalry, with orders to sabre any man who flinched. As the Mexican columns came within range the Texans met them with a blast of lead which shrivelled and scattered them as the breath of winter shrivels and scatters the autumn leaves. The men behind the walls of the Alamo were master marksmen who had taken their degree in shooting from the stern college of the frontier, and they proved their marvellous proficiency that day. Crockett and Bonham aimed and fired as fast as rifles could be loaded and passed up to them, and at every spurt of flame a little, brown-faced man would drop with a crimson patch on the breast of his tunic or a round blue hole in his forehead. Any troops on earth would have recoiled in the face of that deadly fire, and Santa Anna’s were no exception. But the cavalry rode into them and at the point of their sabres forced them again to the attack. Again the shattered regiments advanced and attempted to place their ladders against the walls, but once more the sheer ferocity of the Texan defense sent them reeling back, bleeding and gasping.But there was a limit even to the powers of resistance of the Texans. The powder in their horns ran low; their arms grew weak from slaying. So, when the wave of brown-skinned soldiery rolled forward once again over its carpet of corpses, it topped and overflowed the desperately defended walls. The Texans, whose ammunition was virtually exhausted, were beaten back by sheer weight of numbers, but they rallied in the patio and, under the sky of Texas, made their final stand. What happened afterward is, and always must be, a matter of speculation. No one knows the story of the end. Even the number of victims is a matter of dispute to-day. Some say there were a hundred and eighty-three defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. Some assert that one woman escaped; some say two; others say none. Some declared that a negro servant got away; others declare with equal positiveness that he did not. Some state that half a dozen Americans stood at bay with their backs to the wall, Crockett among them. That the Mexican general, Castrillon, offered them their lives if they would surrender, and that, when they took him at his word, he ordered them shot down like dogs. (Since then a Mexican’s word has never been good for anything in Texas.) All we doknow with any certainty of what went on within those blood-bespattered walls is that every American died fighting. Travis, revolver in one hand and sword in the other, went down amid a ring of men that he had slain. Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers who attempted to bayonet him as he lay all but helpless and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another before they could finish him. Crockett, so the Mexicans related afterward, fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed against the wall, but to get at him the Mexicans had to scramble over a heap of their own dead. No one will ever know how many of the enemy each of these raging, fighting, cornered men sent down the long and gloomy road before he followed them. The pavement of the patio was scarlet. The dead lay piled in heaps. Not an American remained alive. Death and Santa Anna held the place. As the inscription on the monument which was raised in later years to the defenders reads: “Thermopylæ had her messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none.” But before they died, the ninescore men who laid down their lives for Texas sentsixteen hundredMexicans to their last accounting.
By order of Santa Anna, the bodies of the Texans were collected in a huge pile and burned,while the Mexican dead—sixteen hundred of them, please remember—were buried in the local cemetery. As Bowie’s body was brought out, General Cos remarked: “He was too brave a man to be burned like a dog—but never mind, throw him in.” As the Sabbath sun sank slowly into the west the smoke of the funeral pyre rose against the blood-red sky like a column draped in mourning. It marked something more than the end of a band of heroes; it marked the end of Mexican dominion above the Rio Grande.
Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of anotherBowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another.
Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another.
Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another.
While Santa Anna was besieging the Alamo, General Urrea invaded eastern Texas for the purpose of capturing San Patricio, Refugio, and Goliad and thus stamping out the last embers of insurrection. It was not a campaign; it was a butchery. The little garrison of San Patricio was taken by surprise and every man put to death. At Refugio, however, a force of little more than a hundred men under Colonel Ward repulsed the Mexicans, whose loss in killed and wounded was double the entire number of the defenders. A few days later, however, Ward and his men, while falling back, were surrounded and taken prisoners. When Urrea’s column appeared before Goliad, Colonel Fannin, whose force was outnumbered six to one, ordered a retreat, feelingconfident that the Mexicans, for whose fighting abilities the Texans had the utmost contempt, would not dare to follow them. But the Texans made the fatal mistake of underrating their adversaries, for, before they had fallen back a dozen miles, they found themselves hemmed in by two thousand Mexicans. Escape was out of the question, so Fannin formed his three hundred men in hollow square and prepared to put up one of those fight-till-the-last-man-falls resistances for which the Texans had become famous. Being cut off from water, however, and with a third of his men wounded, he realized that his chances of success were represented by a minus sign; so, when the Mexican commander, who had been heavily reinforced, offered to parole both officers and men and return them to the United States if they would surrender, Fannin accepted the offer and ordered his men to stack their arms. The terms of the surrender were written in both English and Spanish, and were signed by the ranking officers of both forces with every formality.
The Texan prisoners were marched back under guard to Goliad, the town they had so recently evacuated, and were confined in the old fort, where they were joined a few days later by Colonel Ward’s command, who, as you will remember,had also been captured. On the night of the 26th of March a despatch rider rode into Urrea’s camp bearing a message from Santa Anna. It contained an order for the murder of all the prisoners. The next day was Palm Sunday. At dawn the Texans were awakened and ordered to form ranks in the courtyard. They were then divided into four parties and marched off in different directions under heavy guard. They had not proceeded a mile across the prairies before they were halted and their captors deliberately poured volley after volley into them until not a Texan was left standing. Then the cavalry rode over the corpse-strewn ground, hacking with their sabres at the dead. Upward of four hundred Texans were slaughtered at Goliad. The defenders of the Alamo died fighting with weapons in their hands, but these men were unarmed and defenseless prisoners, butchered in cold blood in one of the most atrocious massacres of history.
With the extermination of the Texan garrisons, Santa Anna complacently assured himself that his work in the north was finished and prepared to return to the capital, where he was badly needed. It is never safe, you see, for a dictator to leave the chair of state for long, else he is likely to return and find a rival sitting in it. Now, however,Santa Anna felt that the Texan uprising was, to make use of a slangy but expressive phrase, all over but the shouting. But the Texans, as stout old John Paul Jones would have put it, had only just begun to fight. Learning that a force of Texan volunteers was mobilizing upon the San Jacinto, the “Napoleon of the West,” as Santa Anna modestly described himself, decided to delay his departure long enough to invade the country north of Galveston and put the finishing touches to the subjugation of Texas by means of a final carnival of blood and fire. Theoretically, everything favored the dictator. He had money; he had ample supplies of arms and ammunition; he had a force of trained and seasoned veterans far outnumbering any with which the Texans could oppose him. It was to be a veritable picnic of a campaign, a sort of butchers’ holiday. In making his plans, however, Santa Anna failed to take a certain gentleman into consideration. The name of that gentleman was Sam Houston.
The chronicles of our frontier record the name of no more picturesque and striking figure than Houston. The fertile brain of George A. Henty could not have made to order a more satisfactory or wholly improbable hero. Though his exploits are a part of history, they read like the wildestfiction. That is why, perhaps, the dry-as-dust historians make so little mention of him. The incidents in his life would provide a moving-picture company with material for a year. Born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his father, who had been an officer in the Revolution, answered to the last roll-call when young Sam had barely entered his teens. The support of a large and growing family thus falling upon the energetic shoulders of Mrs. Houston, she packed her household goods in a prairie-schooner and moved with her children to Tennessee, then upon the very edge of civilization. Here Sam, who had learned his “three R’s” in such poor schools as the Virginia of those early days afforded, attended a local academy for a time. Translations of the classics having fallen into his hands, his imagination was captured by the exploits of the heroes of antiquity, and he asked permission of the principal to study Latin, which, for some unexplainable reason, was curtly refused him. Whereupon he walked out of the academy, declaring that he would never repeat another lesson.
His family, who had scant sympathy with his romantic fancies, procured him a job as clerk in a crossroads store. Within a fortnight he was missing. After some months of anxiety his relativeslearned that he was living among the Cherokee Indians across the Tennessee. When one of his brothers attempted to induce him to return home, young Sam answered that he preferred measuring deer tracks to measuring tape, and that, if he was not permitted to study Latin in the academy, he could at least dig it out for himself in the freedom of the woods. Houston dwelt for several years with his Cherokee friends, eventually being adopted as a son by the chieftain Oolooteka. Upon the outbreak of our second war with Great Britain he enlisted in the American army. Though his friends remonstrated with him for entering the army as a private soldier, his mother was made of different stuff. As he was leaving for the front she took down his father’s rifle and, with tear-dimmed eyes, handed it to her son. “Here, my boy,” she said bravely, though her voice quavered, “take this rifle and never disgrace it. Remember that I would rather that all my sons should lie in honorable graves than that one of them should turn his back to save his life. Go, and God be with you, but never forget that, while my door is always open to brave men, it is always shut to cowards.”
Houston quickly climbed the ladder of promotion, obtaining a commission within a year afterhe had enlisted as a private. He first showed the stern stuff of which he was made when taking part in General Jackson’s campaign against the Creek Indians. His thigh pierced by an arrow during the storming of the Indian breastworks at Tohopeka, Houston asked a fellow officer to draw it out. But it was sunk so deeply in the flesh that the attempt to extract it brought on an alarming flow of blood, whereupon the officer refused to proceed, fearing that Houston would bleed to death. Thereupon the fiery youngster drew his sword. “Draw it out or I’ll run you through!” he said. Out the arrow came. General Jackson, who had witnessed the incident and had noted the seriousness of the young officer’s wound, ordered him to the rear, but Houston, mindful of his mother’s parting injunction, disregarded the order and plunged again into the thick of the battle. It was a breach of discipline, however, to which Andrew Jackson shut his eyes.
Opportunity once more knocked loudly at young Houston’s door when the Creeks made their final stand at Horseshoe Bend. After the main body of the Indians had been destroyed, a party of warriors barricaded themselves in a log cabin built over a ravine in such a situation that the guns could not be brought to bear. The place mustbe taken by storm, and Jackson called for volunteers. Houston was the only man who responded. Snatching a rifle from a soldier, he shouted, “Come on, men! Follow me!” and dashed toward the cabin. But no one had the courage to follow him into the ravine of death. Running in zigzags, to disconcert the Indian marksmen, he actually reached the cabin before he fell with a shattered arm and two rifle-bullets through his shoulder. It was just the sort of deed to win the heart of the grim old hero of New Orleans, who until his death remained one of Houston’s staunchest friends and admirers.
Seeing but scant prospects of promotion in the piping times of peace which now ensued, Houston resigned from the army, took up the study of law, and was admitted to the bar within a year from the time he opened his first law book. He practised for a few years with marked success, gave up the law for the more exciting field of politics, was elected to Congress when only thirty, and four years later became Governor of Tennessee. As the result of an unhappy marriage, and deeply wounded by the outrageous and baseless accusations made by his political opponents, he resigned the governorship and went into voluntary exile. In his trouble he turned his face towardthe wigwam of his adopted father, Oolooteka, who had become the head chief of his tribe and had moved from the banks of the Tennessee to the falls of the Arkansas. Though eleven eventful years had passed, the old chiefs affection for his white son had not diminished, and the exile found a warm welcome awaiting him in the wigwams and beside the council-fires of his adopted people. Learning of the frauds by which the Indian agents were enriching themselves at the expense of the nation’s wards, Houston, who had adopted Indian dress, went to Washington and laid the facts before Secretary Calhoun, who, instead of thanking him, rebuked him for presuming to appear before him in the dress of an Indian. Thereupon Houston turned his back on the secretary, and went straight to his old-time friend, President Jackson, who promptly saw to it that the guilty officials were punished. When the story of Calhoun’s criticism of Houston’s costume was repeated to the President, that rough old soldier remarked dryly: “I’m glad there is one man of my acquaintance who was made by the Almighty and not by the tailor.”
After three years of forest life among the Indians Houston decided to emigrate to Texas and become a ranchman, setting out with a few companionsin December, 1832, for San Antonio. The romantic story of Houston’s self-imposed exile had resulted in making him a national figure, and the news that he had come to Texas spread among the settlers like fire in dry grass. Before reaching Nacogdoches he learned that he had been unanimously elected a member of the convention which had been called to meet at Austin in the spring of 1833 to draft a constitution for Texas. From that time onward his story is that of his adopted country. When the rupture with Mexico came, in 1835, as a result of the attempt to disarm the settlers at Gonzales, Houston was chosen commander of the volunteer forces to be raised in eastern Texas, and after the battle at the Mission of the Immaculate Conception he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Texan army.
When Santa Anna, flushed by his bloody successes at the Alamo and Goliad, started to invade central Texas, in the spring of 1836, Houston, who had been able to raise a force of barely five hundred untrained and ill-armed men, sullenly retreated before the advance of the dictator. On the 18th of April, however, his plan of campaign was suddenly reversed by the capture of two Mexicans, from whom he learned what he had not positively known before: that Santa Anna himselfwas with the advance column and that he was temporarily cut off from the other divisions of his army. The chance for which Houston was waiting had come, and he seized it before it could get away. If Texas was to be free, if the Lone Star flag and not the flag with the emblem of the serpent and the buzzard was to wave over the region above the Rio Grande, it was now or never. There were no half-way measures with Sam Houston; he determined to stake everything upon a single throw. If he won, Texas would be free; if he lost he and his men could only go down fighting, as their fellows had gone before them. Pushing on to a point near the mouth of the San Jacinto, where it empties into the Bay of Galveston, he carefully selected the spot for his last stand, mounted the two brass cannon known as “the Twin Sisters,” which had been presented to the Texans by Northern sympathizers, and sat down to wait for the coming of “the Napoleon of the West.” On the morning of the 20th of April his pickets fell back before the Mexican advance, and the two great antagonists, Houston and Santa Anna, at last found themselves face to face. The dictator had with him fifteen hundred men; Houston had less than half that number—but the Texans boasted that “two to one was always fair.”
At daybreak on the 21st Houston sent for his chief of scouts, the famous Deaf Smith,[D]and ordered him to choose a companion, take axes, and secretly destroy the bridge across the San Jacinto. As the bridge was the only means of retreat for miles around, this drastic step meant utter destruction to the conquered. Talk about Cortes burning his boats behind him! He showed not a whit more courage than did Houston when he destroyed the bridge across the San Jacinto. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon he quietly paraded his little army behind the low range of hills which screened them from the enemy, who were still drowsing in their customary siesta. At this psychological moment Deaf Smith, following to the letter the instructions Houston had given him, tore up on a reeking horse, waving his axe above his head, and shouted: “Vince’s Bridge is down! We’ve got to fight or drown!” That was the word for which Houston had been waiting. Instantly he ordered his whole line to advance. The only music of the Texans was a fife and adrum, the musicians playing them into action to the rollicking tune of “Come to the Bower.” And it was no bower of roses, either. As they swept into view, rifles at the trail and moving at the double, the Mexicans, though startled at the unexpectedness of the attack, met them with a raking fire of musketry. But the sight of the brown-faced men, and of the red-white-and-green banner which flaunted above them, infuriated the Texans to the point of frenzy. Losing all semblance of formation, they raced forward as fast as they could put foot to ground.
In front of them rode the herculean Houston, a striking figure on his white horse. “Come on, boys!” he thundered. “Get at ’em! Get at ’em! Texans, Texans, follow me!” And follow him they did, surging forward with the irresistibility of a tidal wave. “Remember the Alamo!” they roared. “Remember Goliad! Remember Travis! Remember Jim Bowie! Remember Davy Crockett! Kill the damned greasers! Cut their hearts out! Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!”
In the face of the maddened onslaught the Mexican line crumbled like a hillside before the stream from a hydraulic nozzle. Before the demoralized Mexicans had time to realize whathad happened the Texans were in their midst. Many of them were “two-gun men,” who fought with a revolver in each hand—and at every shot a Mexican fell. Others avenged the murdered Bowie with the wicked knife which bore his name, slashing and ripping and stabbing with the long, savage blades until they looked like poleaxe men in an abattoir. In vain the terrified Mexicans threw down their arms and fell upon their knees, pattering out prayers in Spanish and calling in their broken English: “Me no Alamo! Me no Goliad!” Within five minutes after the Texans had come to hand-grips with their foe the battle had turned into a slaughter. Houston was shot through the ankle and his horse was dying, but man and horse struggled on. Deaf Smith drove his horse into the thick of the fight and, as it fell dead beneath him, he turned his long-barrelled rifle into a war-club and literally smashed his way through the Mexican line, leaving a trail of men with broken skulls behind him. An old frontiersman named Curtis went into action carrying two guns. “The greasers killed my son and my son-in-law at the Alamo,” he shouted, “and I’m going to get two of ’em before I die, and if I get old Santa Anna I’ll cut a razor-strop from his back.”
The commander of one of the Mexican regiments attempted to stem the tide of defeat by charging the Texan line at its weakest point with five hundred men. Houston, instantly appreciating the peril, dashed in front of his men. “Come on, my brave fellows!” he shouted, “your general leads you!” They met the charging Mexicans half-way, stopped them with a withering volley, and then finished the business with the knife. Only thirty-two of the five hundred Mexicans were left alive to surrender. Everywhere sounded the grunt of blows sent home, the scream of wounded men, the choking sobs of the dying, thecrack-crack-crackof rifle and revolver, the grating rasp of steel on steel, the harsh, shrill orders of the officers, the trample of many feet, and, above all, the deep-throated, menacing cry of the avenging Texans: “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad! Kill the greasers! Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!”
In fifteen minutes the battle of the San Jacinto was over, and all that was left of Santa Anna’s army of invasion was a panic-stricken mob of fugitives flying blindly across the prairie. Hard on their heels galloped the Texan cavalry, cutting down the stragglers with their sabres and herding the bulk of the flying army toward the riveras cow-punchers herd cattle into a corral. And the bridge was gone! Before the Mexicans rolled the deep and turbid San Jacinto; coming up behind them were the blood-crazed Texans. It was death on either hand. Some of them spurred their horses into the river, only to be picked off with rifle-bullets as they tried to swim across. Others threw down their weapons and waited stolidly for the fatal stroke or shot. It was a bloody business. Modern history records few, if any, more sweeping victories. Of Santa Anna’s army of something over fifteen hundred men six hundred and thirty were killed, two hundred and eight wounded, and seven hundred and thirty taken prisoners.
The finishing touch was put to Houston’s triumph on the following morning when a scouting party, scouring the prairie in search of fugitives, discovered a man in the uniform of a common soldier attempting to escape on hands and knees through the high grass. He was captured and marched nine miles to the Texan camp, plodding on foot in the dust in front of his mounted captors. When he lagged one of them would prick him with his lance point until he broke into a run. As the Texans rode into camp with their panting and exhausted captive, the Mexican prisonersexcitedly exclaimed: “El Presidente! El Presidente!” It was Santa Anna, dictator of Mexico—a prisoner in the hands of the men whom he had boasted that he would make fugitives, prisoners, or corpses. Lying under the tree where he had spent the night, the wounded Houston received the surrender of “the Napoleon of the West.” The war of independence was over. Texas was a republic in fact as well as in name, and the hero of the San Jacinto became its president. The defenders of the Alamo and Goliad were avenged. From the Sabine to the Rio Grande the lone-star flag flew free.