The Alamo, February to March 1836
Near San Antonio, Texas
The mission had been secularized in seventeen ninety-three, the friars gone, the Indigenous converts dispersed. For a generation it served as a military barracks. Mexican troops stationed there in the early nineteenth century called it the Alamo, after the cottonwood grove near the main gate, or possibly after the town of Alamo de Parras in Coahuila where many of them were from. The name stuck even after the soldiers left.
In the winter of eighteen thirty-six, the old mission compound became the site of a thirteen-day siege. A garrison of Texian and Tejano defenders, the numbers disputed in the historical record but generally estimated at somewhere between one hundred eighty-nine and two hundred fifty, had fortified the compound against the Army of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. The Mexican government had repealed the Constitution of eighteen twenty-four, and Texas settlers, both Anglo-American immigrants and many native Tejanos, were in open revolt.
Santa Anna's army, which varied in estimates from roughly eighteen hundred to several thousand men, arrived at San Antonio on February twenty-third. His demand for unconditional surrender was answered with a cannon shot. The siege lasted thirteen days. Before dawn on March sixth, four columns of infantry struck the walls simultaneously. Within roughly ninety minutes, the fighting was over. All the defenders perished. Among them were James Bowie, William Barret Travis, and David Crockett, a former congressman from Tennessee.
Historians continue to debate the details: how many defenders, what proportion were Tejano, what precisely happened to Crockett in the final minutes. The record is incomplete, and no single account should be taken as settled fact. What is not in dispute is the military outcome and what followed. The Battle of San Jacinto, fought six weeks later on April twenty-first, ended with Santa Anna's capture and the independence of the Republic of Texas.
The stone chapel and part of the long barracks still stand on Alamo Plaza. The building that was once a mission, then a garrison, then a ruin, is now the most visited historic site in Texas.
