* * *
The bands played the Degüello, the buglers sounded charge, and the Mexican army surged forward for the second time that morning as the sounds of cannonballs whistled over their heads. The balls crashed against the walls and this time portions of the battered old walls gave way under the onslaught. Great gaping holes were blown in the walls. Defenders rushed to plug the holes with their own flesh and floor, hastily throwing up human barricades with rifles and pistols in their hands.
On both sides, all knew that very soon it would come down to bayonets and knives at close quarter.
“Hold, boys, hold!” Travis’s shout could be heard above the din of battle.
And the volunteers held, beating back the second charge that morning.
General Cos retaliated swiftly, sending his troops back into the fray without a second’s hesitation. The colonel had delivered the courier’s message word for word, perhaps even adding some additional dialogue, since General Cos was not a well-liked commander.
It was six o’clock in the morning and the sun was blood red lifting into a cold and cloudless day when the first troops of the Mexican army breached the walls, pouring through a huge hole into the plaza of the Alamo.
William Barrett Travis turned to look with dismay at the Mexican soldiers running screaming with bayonets fixed into the plaza. “Hold, boys, hold!” he shouted, waving his sword, the blade catching the rays of the sun. “Hold for God and for Texas!”
Those were the last words the South Carolinian spoke. A single rifle ball caught the colonel in the center of the forehead, felling him instantly. He slumped to the platform, dead.
William Travis was certainly among the first, or even the first, Texan death. But outside the walls, it was terrible bloody carnage. Over a thousand Mexican soldiers lay dead or dying. And within the remaining fifty or so minutes, another thousand or more would be dead or wounded inside the walls. That so few men could inflict so many casualties against a force so huge would remain a lasting tribute to the fighting spirit of these defenders of the Alamo.
The Mexican army kept pouring men through the newly blasted-open holes in the wall. The fight became, for most of the Texans, hand to hand and eyeball to eyeball; the Mexicans used their long, needle-pointed bayonets, the defenders of the Alamo used their Arkansas Toothpicks and Bowie knifes. The walls and the grounds of the plaza became splattered with blood, most of it from the Mexican soldiers.
To the uniformed Mexican troops, the sight of the men of the Alamo came as a shock, for many of the defenders were literally in rags.
Ragged or not, the Texan force made it perfectly clear that surrender was not on their minds, and that they were prepared to fight to the last man.
The first seventy-five Mexican soldiers to come through the shattered wall died on the spot. Those who came behind them were forced to use the bodies of their fallen comrades as shields.
But within minutes, the Mexican troops had the upper hand. Once in the compound, the defenders had no place to go and death looked them square in the face.
But the Mexican troops still had a horrible, bitter, and bloody fight on their hands from the Texas force.
“Kill ’em all, boys!” Davy Crockett roared from his position along the walls. “Make ’em pay, by God. Make ’em pay in blood!”
With a mighty pantherlike scream that chilled those Mexican troops who heard him, Davy leaped from the platform, his men right behind him, screaming like wild banshees, and then proceeded to literally cut and club their way through the advancing troops of Santa Anna, making their way across the compound toward the old church itself. As they leaped from the walls, the Tennessee volunteers fired rifles and pistols and then used their empty rifles as clubs with one hand and their long-bladed and extremely sharp knives to open a way to the church. They left behind them frozen ground slick with fresh blood and littered with dead and dying, horribly mangled Mexican troops.
It was a scene that would haunt many of the surviving Mexican troops for the rest of their lives.
Crockett and his men and a few others took refuge behind the low wall that separated the main plaza of the Alamo from the much smaller plaza of the old church. They had the high walls of the building used as the hospital on one side, and a battery of artillery on the other side. The church lay to their backs.
Many of the Texans had retreated into the rooms in the buildings along the west, south, and east sides of the walls. Those left outside were quickly killed and then horribly butchered and the bodies mutilated, so great now was the rage of the Mexican soldiers.
“I could have told you,” Bowie said aloud, as the sounds of knives and machetes striking cold dead flesh came to him in his room.
But at Travis’s firm insistence, the rooms had been prepared for a last stand, and it was here that the defenders of the Alamo could, for the first time that bloody day, crouch behind cover and level their rifles and pistols at the enemy. Probably five hundred of Santa Anna’s troops, at least, were killed in this action alone.
Davy Crockett, with an arm wound (left or right has never been firmly documented), was roaring like an enraged grizzly bear and killing Mexican troops as fast as he could load rifle and pistols. “You bastards will find Ol’ Davy hard to kill!” he bellered.
His strong voice and unflagging courage gave the defenders new life. No hope, for they knew they were all minutes away from death, but new fighting spirit. Those who had run out of powder and shot started swinging their rifles like clubs, smashing open heads and smearing the ground and the walls with more blood. The Alamo defenders were all shouting and cursing and taunting the enemy. Many of the Mexican troops simply could not bring themselves to kill any more of these brave men. They threw down their weapons and refused to kill again. Not because they were afraid — for they certainly were not — but because courageous men like these should not be killed.
Their sergeants and officers shot those men dead.
Jim Bowie cocked his pistols and waited for the door to his room to smash open.
Sam sat on a stool in the corner.
Travis’s slave, Joe, sat at Travis’s desk, his hands by his side. Like Sam, Joe had been ordered to offer no resistance when the door was smashed open.
The plaza of the Alamo was now filled with hundreds of Mexican soldiers.
Almeron Dickerson and half a dozen of his men were at the only cannons still in Texan hands. They loaded the two cannons with whatever they could find, lowered the elevation and touched a torch to the fire-hole. The cannon roared and the rocks and bits of rusty chain and broken pieces of muskets cleared a path fifty feet wide right down the center of the plaza, hurling bloody chunks of Santa Anna’s soldiers in all directions, splattering other soldiers with the blood of their comrades.
The rifles of the Mexican troops cracked and the men manning the last battery of cannon fell dead.
Susanna Dickerson would see her husband one more time — to identify the body.
Troops kicked in the door to Bowie’s quarters and the famous knife fighter lifted his first two pistols and shot two soldiers dead. He tossed the empty pistols aside and grabbed his last two pistols and fired. He had double-shotted these and the four balls struck three Mexican troops. Soldiers scrambled over the bodies of their comrades and pinned Bowie to the cot with bayonets, running him through. Jim Bowie roared in pain, blood spraying from his mouth and with the last of his strength, swung his big-bladed knife at a soldier who had the misfortune to get just a tad too close to Bowie. The knife took the man’s head off clean just as another soldier drove his bayonet through Bowie’s right eye, pinning his head to the wooden frame of the cot. The head bounced once on the floor, the eyes open in astonishment.