In this episode, I discuss perhaps the most famous of all battles, the Alamo.

In previous episodes, I’ve discussed the battles that took place Gonzales, Goliad (La Bahia), and the Siege of Bexar (or San Antonio) which took place from October through December of 1835. I’ve discussed a group of Texans who were very important in the revolution, the Tejanos, the Mexican Texans. Now it’s time to look at the actual battle of the Alamo.

Before I get too much into the actual story, I need to mention that there have been at least 8 movies made about the alamo, with the 1st being produced in 1915. It was a silent movie called Martyrs of the Alamo and it was produced by D.W. Griffith. Now, let’s be honest and fair. Most of the movies about the battle of the Alamo are nonsense. The first of them, the one by D.W. Griffith was total garbage. Griffith, whose contributions to the movie industry cannot be denied,  was a well-known white supremacist  whose movies all reflected that.  Now the 2004 version is probably the most accurate of the movies made about the battle, but even it took what we call literary license with the events that took place, especially in the use of dialogue. So what really happened?

One thing that the movies do get correct is there were some big-name folks who fought there. One of them was David Crockett, from Tennessee,  (by the way his actual fiddle is in the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and I once had a chance to hear it played during a recording session that took place in the Alamo Chapel). On different sides of the battle were two men who had once been friends adventurer James Bowie, and Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna.

For a large number of Americans and almost all Texans, the battle for the Alamo has become a symbol of patriotic sacrifice and bravery. The men and women who were in the battle were indeed brave and as I mentioned in the beginning, the traditional popular novels, stage plays, and motion pictures, obscure the actual historical event.

To understand the reality of the battle, we have to look at why San Antonio and the Alamo itself was strategic. Remember how in December 1835 a Federalist army of Texan (or Texian, as they were called) immigrants, American volunteers, and their Tejano allies had captured San Antonio from the Mexican Army, or the Centralist forces that were there  during the siege of Bexar. As I said in the episode about the Siege of Bexar after the victory, a majority of the Texan volunteers of the "Army of the People" left service and returned to their families. Even though the siege itself was over many members  of the provisional government feared the Centralists would mount a spring offensive. The main issue with that is there were only two main roads leading into Texas from the interior of Mexico.

 The first was the Atascosito Road, which stretched from Matamoros on the Rio Grande northward through San Patricio, Goliad, Victoria, and finally into the heart of Austin's colony. The second was the Old San Antonio Road, a Camino real that crossed the Rio Grande at Paso de Francia (the San Antonio Crossing) and wound northeastward through San Antonio de Béxar, Bastrop, Nacogdoches, San Augustine, and across the Sabine River into Louisiana.

Each of these roads were blocked by forts. Presidio La Bahía at Goliad and the Alamo at San Antonio. Each spot served almost like an early warning system, ready to alert the Texas settlements of any enemy advance. The Bexar garrison, or the Alamo was commanded by James Clinton Neill. While James Walker Fannin, Jr., took over the forces at Goliad. Many of the settlers had returned to home and that meant that some newly arrived American volunteers made up a majority of the troops at Goliad and Bexar.