My Own Private Alamo
Some days, the icon of Texas independence seems like just another old building. But there’s plenty to celebrate and remember—if you know how to look at it.
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Now walk into the post office. The building dates from the same era as the cenotaph, and the wraparound mural above the lobby depicts the story of Texas with static, bygone conviction. What concerns us here, however, is not art but history. The post office was built over the site of the Alamo’s north wall, and when you stand in the lobby, you are standing pretty much in the place where the Mexican army (notably the men of the Toluca battalion, who suffered grievous casualties from point-blank cannon fire) managed to fight their way over the walls. It was somewhere around here—perhaps over by the metal detectors, perhaps by the post office boxes—that Travis was shot through the head in the first minutes of the battle.
The killing ground in front of the north wall, where, according to one source, the Tolucas lost half their rifle company in a single volley from the Alamo’s artillery, is now such a crowded cityscape that it is impossible to conjure up what it must have been like in the chilly predawn darkness of March 6, with those Mexican fusiliers and cazadores marching toward the ominously silent walls of the Alamo as signal rockets burst overhead and the defenders, frantically rousing themselves from sleep, began to sight their guns.
The attack came from four directions, but the north wall and the northwest corner were the breakthrough points. Once the Mexicans gained access into the fort and Santa Anna committed his reserves behind them, they became an unstoppable force, whereupon many of the defenders retreated into the CONVENT, or Long Barrack. As you leave the post office and walk down the eastern edge of the plaza toward the church, you pass the main building of the Alamo mission. It is hard to know today exactly how much of the original convent is still standing, since it was blown apart during the battle, transformed into a store during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and then all but razed in 1912. Probably the facade is all that remains, and even it has been reconfigured several times.
The second floor of the convent, which was once an arched cloister for Franciscan friars and may have housed the Alamo hospital during the siege, is long gone, and the rebuilt first floor is now the Long Barrack museum. The museum—whose artifacts include Santa Anna’s mosquito-netted cot—is definitely worth a careful look, but take a moment to remember that this is where some of the most hellish fighting of the battle took place. When the defenders hastily abandoned their positions on the overrun north and west walls, they had no time to spike their cannons; as soon as they took refuge in this building, the Mexicans turned the Texians’ own artillery on them, turning the convent into an abattoir. “A horrible carnage took place,” reads the de la Peña manuscript. “The tumult was great, the disorder frightful; it seemed as if the furies had descended upon us.”
Now it’s time to leave the museum. Remove your hat and go inside the CHURCH. What can one say about this place, which seems like the vault of history itself? But like many other features of the Alamo, this hushed and dark sanctuary is nothing like it appeared in 1836. The church had no roof back then. It was open to the winter sky, and an artillery ramp of packed earth took up a good deal of the interior. If you look up and around, you can see plainly enough the seams where those original walls were later extended to support the roof. This is most evident at the rear wall, where the artillery battery stood, and whose roofline was vulnerably low to the ground. There was death here too: The church was probably the last position the Mexicans took as they mopped up the resistance in the compound. The Texians had three cannons in the battery here, but they were pointed outward and in the end were probably not effective in defending against the final assault.
As you move through the church, take a good look at the linked rooms on the left side. This was the sacristy, where the women and children hid during the terrible hour of the battle. Susanna Dickinson recalled, in a suspiciously flowery interview given almost forty years after the event, that her husband burst into this room and said, “Great God, Sue, the Mexicans are inside our walls! All is lost! If they spare you, save my child.” Then, “with a parting kiss, he drew his sword and plunged into the strife.” I find her succinct testimony to the Texas Adjutant General’s office to be more credible: She said she saw no part of the fight, but could distinctly hear it. And what she heard, particularly in this church as the Mexicans were bayoneting the last survivors, would have been horrible.
When you leave the church through the back door, you will find yourself facing the ALAMO GIFT SHOP. Of course, you must go in. There are a few not-bad exhibits here and a spirited diorama of the final assault by Thomas Feely that should not be missed. But the real appeal of the place is in its staggering testimony to the undying iconographic power of the Alamo. The gift shop has been refurbished lately (it’s more tasteful and less cluttered), but its fundamental mission—to provide an endless and ever-varying stream of Alamo cups, plates, mugs, key chains, clocks, Davy Crockett teddy bears, snow globes, night-lights, golf tees, wallets, T-shirts, and plastic bowie knives—is clearly undiminished. I can’t believe I spent $22 on a necktie depicting Travis drawing the line in the sand, but God help me I did.
There is one more stop. Like most of the other important locations involving the Alamo, it is hard to pinpoint. Take a few minutes, if you can, to walk back down Alamo Plaza, cross Commerce at the light in front of Dillard’s, and walk east thirty or forty yards. There, across the street from the Rivercenter parking garage, you’ll see a PLAQUE proclaiming that it was on this spot that the “bodies of the heroes slain at the Alamo were burned on a funeral pyre.”
I tend to think the actual location was a little farther east, perhaps where the Denny’s or the La Quinta Inn now stands at the edge of Interstate 37. In any case, this is the general vicinity. According to a Béxar citizen named Pablo Diaz, the corpses of the defenders were burned in two piles, one on each side of the Alameda, a promenade lined with cottonwoods that once occupied the approximate space now commanded by the mall.
Diaz recalled that the pyres were about ten feet high, made up of alternating layers of corpses and wood. Melted tallow was poured over the bodies to help them ignite. “The dense smoke from this fire went up into the clouds,” he wrote, “and I watched it while the fire burned for two days and nights.” The air during those two days was filled with an overpowering stench, and thousands of vultures circled over San Antonio de Béxar. “It filled me,” Diaz continued, “with the greatest horror.”
That horror is distant now, out of mind and out of reach, overwhelmed by myth and overgrown by the city that San Antonio de Béxar came to be. But remembering the Alamo means remembering that almost anyplace you set your foot in downtown San Antonio bears the trace of that battle, that when you buy a shirt in Dillard’s or order your lunch at Side Wok Café in Rivercenter Mall, you may be standing at the spot where a soldado from the Matamoros battalion was killed by a Kentucky sharpshooter, or where a fleeing defender was run down by a mounted lancer in a hopeless escape attempt as the Mexicans poured over the walls. It is all sacred ground, and its history is disturbingly immediate—if only you know where to look.
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