Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

That is just what it was, when the building which is the premier landmark in San Antonio – and perhaps all of the rest of Texas – first achieved fame immortal, in the short and bloody space of an hour and a half, just before sunrise on a chill spring morning in 1836. People who come to visit today, with an image in their mind from the movies about it – from John Wayne’s version, and the more recent 2004 movie, or from sketch-maps in books about the desperate, fourteen-day siege are usually taken back to discover that it is so small. So I know, because I thought so the first time I visited it as an AF trainee on town-pass in 1978. And it is small – one of those Spanish colonial era buildings, in limestone weathered to the color of dark ivory. That chapel is only a remnant of a sprawling complex of buildings. Itself and the so-called ‘Long Barracks’ are the only things remaining of what was once called the Mission San Antonio de Valero, given it’s better known appellation by a company of Spanish cavalry stationed there in the early 19^th century – they called it after the cottonwood trees around their previous station of Alamo de Parras, in Coahuila. It was the northernmost of a linked chain of five mission complexes, threaded like baroque pearls on a green ribbon, and originally established to tend to the spiritual needs and the protection of local Christianized Indian tribes. The missions were secularized at the end of the 18^th century, the lands around distributed to the people who had lived there. Their chapels became local parish churches – while the oldest of them all became a garrison.

There is a birds-eye view map of San Antonio drawn and published in 1873, a quarter century after the last stand of Travis and Bowie’s company that shows a grove of trees in rows behind the apse of the old chapel building. In the year that the map was made, the chapel and the remaining buildings were still a garrison of sorts – an Army supply depot, and the plaza in front of it a marshaling yard. One wonders if any of the supply sergeants of that time or any of the laborers unloading the wagons bringing military supplies up from the coast and designated for the garrison gave a thought to the building they worked in. Did they think the place was haunted, perhaps? Did they hear whispers and groans in the dark, think anything of odd stains on the floors and walls, of regular depressions in the floor where defensive trenches had been dug at the last? What did they think, piling up crates, barrels and boxes, in the place that the final handful of survivors had made their last stand, against the tide of Santa Anna’s soldiers flooding over the crumbling walls?

Probably not much– whitewash covers a lot. And a useful, sturdy building is just that – useful. By the 1870s, those Regular Army NCOs working in there were veterans of the Civil War, and perhaps haunted enough by their own war, just lately over. The growing city had spread beyond those limits that William Travis, David Crocket and James Bowie would have seen, looking down from those very same walls.

In 1836 that cluster of buildings, and the old church with it’s ornate niches and columns twisted like lengths of barley sugar sat a little distance from the outskirts of the best established provincial town in that part of Spanish and Mexican Texas, out in the meadows by a loop of clear, narrow river fringed by rushes and willows. San Antonio de Bexar, mostly shortened then to simply “Bexar”, was then just a close clustered huddle of adobe brick buildings around two plazas and the stumpy spire of the church of San Fernando. It is a challenge to picture it, in the minds eye, to take away the tall glass buildings all around, the lawns and carefully tended flowering shrubs, to ignore the sounds of traffic, the SATrans busses belching exhaust, and see it as it might have appeared, a hundred and sixty years ago. I think there would have been cottonwood trees, close by. Thirsty trees, they plant themselves across the west, wherever there is water in plenty, their leaves trembling incessantly in the slightest breeze. There might have also have been some fruit orchards planted nearby – the 1873 map certainly shows them. But otherwise, it would have been open country, rolling meadows star-scattered with trees, and striped across by two roads; the Camino Real, the King’s road, towards Nacogdoches in the east, and the road towards the south, towards  the Rio Grande. In the distance to the north, a long blue-green rise of hills marks the edge of what today is called the Balcones Escarpment. It is the demarcation between a mostly flat and fertile plain which stretches to the Gulf Coast, and the high and windswept plains of the Llano, haunted by fierce and war-loving Indians. This is the place where three very different men came to, in that fateful year that the Texians rebelled against the rule of the dictatorship of what the knowledgeable settlers of Texas called the “Centralistas” – the dictatorship of the central government in Mexico City.

That most northern, fractious and rebelliously-inclined of those northern provinces of the nation of Mexico was in ferment in the 1830s, some of which might be chalked up to the presence of settlers who had come to Texas from the various United States looking for land. Texas had plenty of it to go around, and a distinct paucity of residents. Entrepreneurs, such as Stephen Austin’s father were allotted a tract of land, based upon how many people they might induce to come and settle on it, to build houses and towns, businesses and roads. All they need to do was to swear to a new allegiance – initially to the King of Spain, later to the Mexican government, which was making tentative and eventually unsuccessful efforts to model itself after the United States’ experience in democracy. Oh, and convert to Catholicism, at least on paper, although most American settlers were assured that they would be left alone thereafter, as afar as matters religious.

Texas was thinly settled, and a long, long way from the seat of authority in Mexico City anyway. So, Americans trickled in over two decades; undoubtedly many like Stephen Austin were honestly grateful for the free land and consideration from the Mexican authorities, and initially had no thought of trafficking in rebellion. Probably equal numbers of Americans did have an eye on the main chance in coming to Texas, as the initially small and poor United States spilled over the Appalachians, purchased a great tract of the continent from the French, and began to think it was their unique destiny to reach from sea to shining sea.

But the land drew them – and it was a beautiful, beautiful place, that part of Texas that forms the coastal plain. Wooded in the east, in the manner that the American settlers were accustomed to, crossed and watered by shallow rivers, a country of gently rolling meadows and hills, fairly temperate, especially in comparison to more northerly climes. Winters were mild – there was not the snow and brutal cold that forced a three or four month long halt to all agricultural and herding pursuits. The sky seemed endless, a pure clear blue, with great drifts of clouds sailing through it.

And so three men came to Texas in the 1830s, three men of different backgrounds and experience, and all of them looking for a second chance after various personal, political and business screw-ups. One more thing had they in common – they all died on a dark March morning in a single place, within the space of an hour or so.

James Bowie was the one who came first; a hot-tempered roughneck with a series of distinctly shady business dealings in his immediate past – which included slave-smuggling and real-estate fraud. He was famous for the wicked-long hunting knife which he always carried, after a particularly bloody brawl in which he had been armed with a clasp knife, which he opened with his teeth (losing one in the process) while gripping his opponent one-handed. A charismatic scoundrel, a bad-hat, a violent man, occasionally given to moments of chivalry; he does not come across as someone whose company would have been totally pleasant. It might aptly be said of him, as it was of Lord Byron, he was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.

William Barrett Travis was the second; almost a generation younger, but driven by similar impulses, grandiose ambitions, and with an ego almost as big as Texas itself. He would also not have been very good company, laboring as he did under the conviction that he was meant to do great things. Moody and impulsive, somewhat hot-tempered, he had come to Texas alone, abandoning a wife and two children and set up a law practice in Anahuac, the official port of entry for Texas. He drifted into a faction opposed to the Mexican rule of Texas, and in contention with the local Mexican authorities.

Davy Crockett – who rather preferred to be known as David Crockett, as a gentleman, rather than as a simple, blunt-spoken frontiersman — was in his lifetime the most famous of the three, and also a latecomer to Texas. A politician and a personality, he was a restless spirit, never quite entirely content with where he was, or what he was doing for long.  One senses that he would have been the most congenial of  the three: relatively soft-spoken, adept with words – a skilled politician. He played the fiddle, and probably did not wear a coonskin cap or a fringed leather jacket; he looks quite the polished, genteel and well-dressed gentleman in the best-known portrait of him, in high collar and cravat, and well-tailored coat.

And so by different paths, they came to the Alamo, a sprawling and tumbledown mission compound, much too large to be defended by the relative handful of men and artillery pieces they had with them. They stayed to defend it, for reasons that they perhaps didn’t articulate very well to themselves, save for in Travis’s immortal letters. Bowie was deathly ill as the siege began, Crockett was new-come to the country, in search of adventure more than glory. None of them perfect heroes by any standard, then or now… but of such rough clay are legends made.

Most people, when they have a mental vision of an Army fort on the American frontier, think of a wooden stockade of standing timber – but that was hardly ever the case in Texas. Indians almost never attacked those forts, so defensive walls were not necessary. An Army post on the far frontier for much of the 19th century, consisted of four ranges of buildings – necessary offices like the hospital and guardhouse, warehouses, enlisted barracks and officers’ quarters, all arranged around the quadrangle of the parade ground. Some of these posts are still in use by the military – but many were made redundant as the frontier advanced.  Fort Martin Scott, on the eastern outskirts of Fredericksburg, just off US Route 290 is one such. It was established late in the 1840s, rendered almost redundant by the early 1850s, briefly garrisoned by the returning US Army after the Civil War, and the site of it finally sold to a local leading citizen who transformed it into his family’s homestead.

Most of the buildings present, set out among a scattering of oak trees in a foot-ball field rectangle running from the verge of Rte 290 down to the banks of Baron’s Creek are reconstructions. There are some few foundations left here and there of a sulter’s store and the laundry, set conveniently close to water, down on the creek-bank. There are a few stones left of a huge oven to bake bread for the soldiers, nothing at all left of where the warehouse and post hospital was, nor of the stable for the dragoon’s horses, and the blacksmith’s forge. The approximate position of the commander’s house is merely outlined in stones. The only original building, from the time when it was an active US Army establishment is a thick-walled limestone building with very tiny slit-windows in one end which served as the guardhouse and military jail – when the property was sold to the Brautigam family, it was added onto and became their home, until the site was sold to the city, and restoration of the long-decayed original buildings began.

It wouldn’t have been one of those dramatic forts, in it’s time – no bloody sieges, no great expeditions launched from the little parade-ground, between the whitewashed log, or stone buildings.  About the only instance of drama would have taken place in about 1850, when a soldier from the Fort became drunk, angry and abusive in one of the general stores in Fredericksburg: when it came to blows, the soldier drew a knife, and in the melee with the storekeeper, the soldier wound up with the knife in his chest, with fatal results. In retaliation, his comrades came back that night and burned the store to the ground  – coincidentally destroying many of Fredericksburg’s early civic records. The storekeeper was also the town clerk. (A version of this incident opens Book Two of my Adelsverein Trilogy.)

The front-porches of the officer’s quarters, and the breezeways between the three-pen log enlisted barracks would have looked out on little but the same military garrison routine, day after day. Moving supplies from wagons coming up the road from San Antonio and the coast into the warehouse, shoeing horses and doing laundry, mounting guard and standing retreat at the end of the day – that would have been it, for the soldiers and their officers sent here for a bare handful of years. No doubt many of them spent their time in a quiet backwater of the Texas frontier, hoping that something exciting would happen, something to break up the boredom and routine of peacetime service, something that would bring them glory and renown.

For a good few of them, that supposed wish did come true, in the following decade, when officers who had served at Fort Martin Scott – like James Longstreet – did indeed find glory and renown. Very possibly, they looked back then on their tour of service at a tiny fort on the banks of Baron’s Creek with considerable nostalgia.

No, not that sort of brush – not a narrow escape from a driver on a cellphone running a red light, or a particularly embittered book critic – but a walk through an old cemetery near Fredericksburg, Texas. About a year ago, I had a two-day event: a presentation at dinner for museum volunteers at the Pioneer Museum in Fredericksburg, and the next day, a book-signing at the local independent bookstore. Clara Jung,  who Blondie and I met at the dinner, asked if we would like to see the old Catholic Pioneer cemetery, if we had time the next day.  And of course – after she told us a little bit about it, we said yes. It’s not the main Catholic cemetery; which is all very tidy and orderly and well-organized, or the main city burial ground, which is just over Town Creek, and a couple of blocks in back of the Nimitz Museum, once the grandest, most hospitable and best-run hotel between Austin and El Paso, in the days before the transcontinental railway, when the fastest way to travel comfortably involved a coach and horse teams.

And the fact that there should be a little, quarter-acre sized cemetery tucked away in the middle of scrub oak and cedar brush is not all that unusual. Odd as it seems, all over Texas there are small graveyards tucked away in all kinds of odd corners not directly associated with a church. Many of them are remnants of small town’s burial grounds – there is one halfway up Perrin Beital, right smack dab in the middle of the gas stations, auto parts stores, budget hotels and pawn shops. There is another just off Stahl Road, not three or four blocks from where I live, with tract houses all around, and a tiny enclosure on Evans Road, in under the shade of some oak trees near an old farmhouse. In the old days, far from towns and churches, sometimes people just wanted to have their kin buried close by – so many of the old ranches and farmsteads had a family burial ground.

This particular graveyard has about fifty graves in it, being used for only the short space of about fifteen years, from the late 1850s up to the early 1870s. All of the names – save two, are German. (The two exceptions are Hispanic.) Most of the remaining original and badly weathered stones are in German also. Our guide to the old graveyard lives in a nicely remodeled 1970s house a short distance away – she drives past it every day. Several of them are surrounded with rusting enclosures, but many of the graves had no more marking than a badly decayed wooden marker. A few have metal tags mounted on a metal stake driven into the ground – any stone marker being either long-gone or never installed in the first place. The descendent of one of the families buried there is doing new flat marker stones; he is getting the pinkish granite slabs at cost and doing the carving himself.

But even the dates are clear on the old stones, and it is the dates that told the most tragic stories of all – as most of the graves were for babies and children. There could be no clearer reminder that life for children – pre-vaccine, pre-antibiotic, and pre-sterile standards for the doctor’s surgery – was perilous, and apt to be cut suddenly, heartbreaking short. An infected cut, a cold which brought on pneumonia, an epidemic of one of those diseases like typhoid or diphtheria – which now happen so rarely to children that modern pediatricians might not even recognize the symptoms – tainted milk or bad water; all of these could be mortal for a small child … and loving and protective parents would be helpless. Over and over again, as related on the forlorn pink granite slabs, or on the weathered limestone crosses – children died after living a few days, months – even just a few hours; dead at the age of two, or four, or five. Most heartbreaking to imagine were two pairs of stones with the same family names, and listed dates of death merely days apart, in 1861. An older sister of eight or nine, a little brother of three or so … imagine the frantic grief of a mother, nursing her sick children with home remedies, with herbal teas and sponge-baths, sitting up at night with them … and then losing one. And within another day or so, losing the other. I think there must have been some kind of epidemic in 1861 – I know there was a horrific diphtheria epidemic in the last year or so of the Civil War. I had read in a brief biography of Fredericksburg’s main doctor, that he had so many patients at that time that his wife drove his trap from house to house, from patient to patient, so that he could snatch a few moments of sleep during those moments. Someone, now that the old cemetery has been rescued from neglect and brush, adorns the children’s graves with these little porcelain angel-bells. Our guide says that the deer step on them, knock them over and they chip and break – so it’s almost an exercise in futility.

It was a relief to come upon that handful of stones marking the last resting place of those who beat the odds and managed to live to some kind of maturity, even into ripe old age. Oh, thank God – there are some grownups here! Not many in comparison to the children – but some of them have their own sad stories:

This one, I thought I recognized the surname: there was an Emma Metzger whose older sister worked at the Nimitz Hotel during the last year of the Civil War. She and her younger sister Anna went in to town one day from their parent’s farm nearby, to carry a message from their mother to the sister. On their return, they were surprised by a band of Indians, Kiowa or Comanche. Emma was killed, and Anna carried away, according to an account published here – she was taken to Indian Territory by her captors and managed to escape a year later, returning to her parents, and eventually marrying a man who settled in Mason, a man who had been in the posse who chased after the Indian raiders who had taken her and killed her sister.

This surname I also recognized: There was a local character – an inventor and stone-mason named Peter Berg, who had come with the Adelsverein migration, along with his brother – also a stonemason. Eventually, after being jilted by a woman who had promised to marry him, Peter Berg became a sort of hermit, living in an eccentric stone tower that be built himself, back in the hills. At some point, his brother was killed by Indians, and Peter Berg turned to distilling very fine whiskey, and selling that was how he made a living. Perhaps this is where his brother was buried. Peter Berg wouldn’t have been buried in consecrated ground, though – he killed himself, ages later, turning his own shotgun on himself, as he lay on his bed. No one would have known of it, save that the shotgun blast also set fire to the  bedding, and his nearest neighbor saw the puffs of smoke.

Finally – and rather reassuringly – there were the graves of a married couple, both of whom lived into old age, as it was then counted, who must have come with the first Verein settlers in those last years when Texas was still an independent republic. Born in Germany, immigrated as adults and settled on the wild frontier, lived through all the early hardships and heartbreak, the wars with Indians and the Hanging Band; surviving epidemics and accidents, childbirth and the killing labor required of anyone settling in a new land. The last and most ornate monument was for Grandmother Maria Magdalena Leyendecker, who achieved the great age of 70; born in Germany, eventually becoming the grandmother and great-grandmother of children, who saw to it that she had a suitable monument – with an epitaph in English carved onto it. In the end, she had become an American.