Several days following the final assault on the walls of the Alamo, word was recieved in Gonzales, the nearest Texian settlement to San Antonio. Sam Houston had gone there to rally the Texas Army … and a company of local men had gone to the Alamo in response to Travis’ plea for help. From Daughter of Texas, this is what happened on the day that Susannah Dickinson brought the world from San Antonio that the Alamo had fallen.
The hours and days of March dragged past at a snail’s pace; a week and a half since the Gonzales Ranging Company had ridden down towards the ferry and the road to Bexar. Surely they had achieved a safe passage into that crumbling and shabby fortress and other reinforcements were on the way? Now and again, Margaret fancied that when it was very still – at dawn, or just after sunset, and the light breeze came from the north that she could hear a faint continuous rumble, like distant thunder – the sound of cannon-fire. Toward the end of that time, rumors swept Gonzales, each more dreadful than the last: the worst of them had the Alamo fallen and all the defenders put to the sword, but that tale had been brought by a pair of Mexican cattle-drovers, who – as it turned out, had not seen anything of the sort, but had heard the dreadful tale from another drover.
Within days of reading Colonel Travis’ declaration and plea in the Telegraph, soldiers, militia, and ranging companies began arriving in Gonzales, singly or in companies. Colonel Neill, who had taken leave from his duties at Bexar, thinking that all would be in order and there would be time enough to finish reinforcing theAlamo, began gathering those new recruits to his little army. Race, with his face seeming to be pale skin stretched over the bones of his face, had recovered enough strength to resume his duties as a courier and dispatch rider. More »
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