Frontier Hero Davy Crockett

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Travis, busy in his headquarters room in the Alamo, looked up to find Crockett and Sutherland before him. Sutherland had injured his leg when his horse fell, and Crockett was supporting him. ‘Colonel, here am I,’ declared Crockett. ‘Assign me to a position, and I and my 12 boys will try and defend it.’ Travis promptly assigned him a post of honor–the wooden palisade between the church and the low barracks. It was the most dangerous and vulnerable spot in the Alamo.

Within hours Santa Anna had occupied Bexar with a strong force. Much of his army was still strung out back to the Rio Grande, but he would soon have several thousand men concentrated before the Alamo. He had a blood-red flag–signifying no quarter–raised over the San Fernando church and sent emissaries to the Alamo to demand unconditional surrender. Travis answered with a cannon shot.

On February 25 Santa Anna probed the Alamo’s defenses, only to have his forces thrown back. Travis, now in complete command since Bowie was desperately ill with a fever, sent a sortie of his own out against the Mexicans, burning some nearby huts that had given them cover. In a dispatch he sent out that night with Captain Juan Seguin, Travis noted of the day’s battle, ‘The Hon. David Crockett was seen at all points, animating the men to do their duty.’

Enrique Esparza, the young son of Alamo defender Gregorio Esparza, recalled the fighting many years later. ‘Crockett seemed to be the leading spirit,’ he remembered. ‘He was everywhere. He went to every exposed point and personally directed the fighting. Travis was the chief in command but he depended more upon the judgement of Crockett and that brave man’s intrepidity than upon his own.’

Reinforcements swelled Santa Anna’s army to more than 2,500 men as he tightened the ring around the Alamo, keeping up a continual bombardment. Travis’ many appeals for aid went unanswered, save for 32 bold men from Gonzales who came in early in the morning of March 1. The reinforcement cheered the garrison, as did Crockett, who often played his fiddle, told tall tales and exhibited his homespun humor. But finally even Old Davy despaired. ‘I think we had better march out and die in the open air,’ he lamented on March 4 to Susannah Dickinson, wife of an artillery captain. ‘I don’t like to be hemmed up.’

The assault came before dawn on the freezing morning of March 6, 1836. Santa Anna sent 1,500 of his best troops storming against the Alamo. Colonel Juan Morales led a column of 100 men against the stockade defended by Crockett and his boys. More than 700 men under General Cós and Colonel Francisco Duque assaulted the northeastern and northwestern walls while Colonel Jose Maria Romero’s 300 men attacked from the east.

The darkness was lit by the fire from the Texan artillery, blowing great gaps in the Mexican ranks. Duque fell wounded, and the columns faltered as the men bunched under the Alamo’s walls, seeking protection from the defenders’ guns. Santa Anna now ordered General Manuel Fernandez Castrillón, a gallant Cuban with a great shock of white hair, to take over Duque’s column while he sent in 400 reserves to bolster the attack. He ordered the Mexican bands to play the ‘Deguello’–the ancient Spanish cutthroat song signifying no quarter.

Castrillón rallied the faltering troops and, with the added pressure of the reserves, they swept over the north wall. Here Travis was killed, one of the first Texans to fall. His men fell back from the wall and retreated into the long barracks.

Morales’ column, hit hard by Crockett’s men at the stockade, had veered to the left and now swept over the southwest corner. Crockett’s company, flanked and caught in the open, fell back to the long barracks and the church. Several defenders bolted over the wall, attempting to cut their way out, only to be slaughtered on the prairie by Mexican cavalrymen.

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