At 4 o’clock on the morning of March 6, 1836, Santa Anna advanced his men to within 200 yards of the Alamo’s walls. Just as dawn was breaking, the Mexican bloodcurdling bugle call of the Deguello echoed the meaning of the scarlet flag above San Fernando: no quarter. It was Captain Juan Seguin’s Tejanos, the native-born Mexicans fighting in the Texan army, who interpreted the chilling music for the other defenders.
Santa Anna’s first charge was repulsed, as was the second, by the deadly fire of Travis’ artillery. At the third charge, one Mexican column attacked near a breach in the north wall, another in the area of the chapel, and a third, the Toluca Battalion, commenced to scale the walls. All suffered severely. Out of 800 men in the Toluca Battalion, only 130 were left alive. Fighting was hand to hand with knives, pistols, clubbed rifles, lances, pikes, knees and fists. The dead lay everywhere. Blood spilled in the convent, the barracks, the entrance to the church, and finally in the rubble-strewn church interior itself. Ninety minutes after it began, it was over.
All the Texans died. Santa Anna’s loss was 1,544 men.
LSP
I was wondering if you'd twig to it being Alamo Day. Shame on me for not knowing you'd be right on top of the important stuff. It is one of my all time favorite and holy places to visit. Do they even teach it in school anymore?
ReplyDeleteCourage to be remembered on one hand and a callous disregard for lives on the other. Doubt many of the attackers were that keen to die.
ReplyDeleteCan't post on facebook, might offend some snowflake.
ReplyDeleteAdrienne, I went to the Alamo expecting to be underwhelmed. I wasn't. On the contrary, a holy place to visit. Very moving.
ReplyDeleteGood call, WSF. Santa Anna was a bad man and a bad leader.
ReplyDeleteG706, this lighthearted mind blog's banned from facebook, insta and twitter, though you can kinda get around it by the old "lonestarparsondotblogspotdotcom" gambit. Confuses the snowflake algos, cumbersome though.
ReplyDeleteRemember the Alamo.
ReplyDeleteAs Adrienne said, it's sacred ground. The last time I was there, I stumbled around like the belching civilian that I am. A re-enactor came up to me and asked me what the pistol he was holding was. I correctly identified it as a "Baby LeMat". He seemed surprised.
If they had LeMat pistols at the Alamo, it might have turned out differently.
When I was a young lad of about 8, my mother and I flew along with my grandmother to Texas to visit kin and the old family stomping grounds. Along the way we stayed with relatives in San Antonio, and thus payed a visit to the Alamo.
ReplyDeleteMy memories of that visit are pretty dim now, except for the toy cannon in the gift shop that caught my young eye. I knowingly committed a cardinal sin by asking if we could buy it. My aunt took pity on me and made the purchase. My mother was livid at my behavior.
The cannon barrel 5 inches long and machined from solid brass. The carriage and wheels are solid steel, painted black, and the wheels roll. On the bottom of the carriage stamped in capital letters, "MADE IN U.S.A.". It closely resembles the cannon shown here--
https://medium.com/the-alamo-messenger/the-alamo-takes-on-the-10-year-and-100-challenge-635fec67663d
It stands guard on my reloading bench as I type this.
We are nowadays instructed to celebrate our diversity. Fair enough, let us proceed accordingly, lest we be determined ray-cist. If you read the names of the dead inscribed on the Cenotaph out front, you'll find obviously Black and Hispanic names along with the Anglos. There's a bronze plaque on the end of the "long barracks" just outside the doors of the mission building that reads in part "Blood of heroes hath stained me. Let the stones of the Alamo speak that their immolation be not forgotten."
ReplyDeleteSo lets not forget the inclusiveness of Santa Anna who killed them all, black, brown and white, you can't get more equal than dead, and then forced the citizens of Bexar, later known as San Antonio, at gun and bayonet point to burn the bodies. Hence the blood and immolation quotation. Then he packed up and headed on over to San Jacinto, where things did not go so well for him, with a wee diversion to Goliad where he massacred the Fannin group on the way. But, that's another story.
Baby LeMatt. Nice one, LL.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of re-enactors, I was in Annapolis some years back and there they were, re-enactors. My mom, KPH, shrank back and pointed at them, Salem style, hissing under her breath to Becky, "Look, darling, CRAZY PEOPLE."
Well, she had a point.
I love that story, RHT.
ReplyDeleteWWW, here's my take, for what little it's worth.
ReplyDeleteWhen things get rough again and bullets start flying, there'll be very little room for degenerate nonsense. Let's hope that rough point doesn't arrive and people come to their senses.
In the meanwhile, smart people are cleaning weapons and loading mags and, in my case, some ahem, remedial pt....
Amen, Parson. Amen indeed.
ReplyDeleteI was stuck in Memphis one weekend and took in a gun show whilst awaiting Monday morning to roll back around, and there was, of all things, a group of reenactors set up representing WWI Brits with full kit. One of them had a Webley revolver with a birds-head grip tucked into his belt and I thought to myself, now that's how to set a style.