Texas [antikvár]

First page: the flag of the Lone Star State, (previous pages) a cattle drive reminiscent of olden days and (facing page) the University of Texas Tower in Austin, the state capital. Of all the images conjured by the name Texas, the Alamo is the most unforgettable. Without the memory, some say, Texas as we know it wouldn't exist. Texas children who never heard of the Battle of Agincourt and who suppose that D-Day must have had something to do with the founding of Dallas, can describe every detail of the short siege of a fortified mission at San Antonio more than 150 years ago. Americans had been drifting into Spanish Texas for a dozen years before the confrontation at San Antonio, and bad blood between the fiercely independent men of the frontier and the Spanish, who considered themselves masters of all they surveyed, was inevitable. The Anglos had originally declared loyalty to Mexico as a condition of living there, but in 1832 they made it clear that they intended to live like Americans when they petitioned the Mexican Government to create a separate state for them and named Stephen F. Austin as their president. The recently elected Mexican president, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, put down their claim as an illegal affront. But Austin went to Mexico City to plead their case. In twenty months of negotiation he was able to convince the authorities to allow more American immigration into Texas, but before he was able to leave for home, he was unceremoniously tossed into prison. By the time he was released eighteen months later, the enthusiasm for independence had caught fire in Texas and no one was in a more revolutionary frame of mind than Stephen F. Austin. The shooting started not long after the harvesting was finished in 1835. A small Mexican force dispatched to confiscate a cannon at Gonzales was forced to retreat when the Texans opened fire. There was no turning back after that. The Anglos made their next move at Goliad and then, flushed with success, began marching on San Antonio. The army was little more than a mob. It had few trained officers and no experienced soldiers. Its artillery consisted of the lone cannon the Texans had defended at Gonzales, but that was left behind miles away mired in the mud. By the time they reached their destination, the ragtag force was mired in confusion too and when the military men among them refused a direct attack in favor of a long, dull siege, many of the volunteers decided to go home. Meanwhile, word had crossed the Sabine River into United States territory that there was a war going on in Texas and hundreds of rough and ready characters decided to get in on the action. Soon there were more immigrants in the army than Texans, but if they weren't there to save their farms and families, they were more than willing to die for what seems to have been just the hell of it. Once the attack got underway, it took five days of house-to-house fighting to capture the Mexican stronghold behind the walls of the Alamo and a few days later they had driven all the Mexican troops out of Texas. It was a signal to the remaining Texans to go home, at least for the winter, and even their commander followed them. The Anglo force had captured the two strongpoints necessary for the defense of Eastern Texas, and the Mexican Army was hundreds of miles away across hostile countiyside. The Texans couldn't agree on how to govern themselves, but for a variety of reasons, nearly all of them personal to members of provisional government, they decided to take the war south of the Rio Grande into Mexico itself. Fortunately, there were some cool heads among them, including Governor Henry Smith, who had recently been impeached by the Council but held on to his office at the point of a gun. He thought a march into Mexico was foolishness and dispatched General Sam Houston to Goliad to attempt to stop the army in its tracks. Houston did better than that. He reinforced the garrison there, and sent Colonel James Bowie on to San Antonio to strengthen the fortress at the Alamo. But the army was itching for a fight. Out of 450 men ready to move south, only twenty- five were Texans and it was politely pointed out to Houston that he had no authority to command "American" volunteers. Houston responded by heading north to fight Indians. When Jim Bowie arrived at the Alamo, he found the garrison reduced to 104 men with not a single Texan among them. Governor Smith responded by appointing Lieutenant Colonel Buck Travis to take charge at San Antonio and to take fifty Texas volunteers with him. Not long after he arrived, Davy Crockett, a frontier legend