Read Online The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation by James Donovan - Free Book Online
Authors: James Donovan
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only town, Gonzales, were an especially hardy breed. They had to be, for as the westernmost Anglo settlement in the province, DeWitt’s colony made a tempting target for predatory Indian tribes such as the Tawakonis, the Wacos, and the largest and fiercest, the Comanches. And because it was the settlement farthest from the coast, its store of supplies, both essential and nonessential, was sparse. But the land in the grant, stretching northwest along the Guadalupe River, was as fine and fertile as any in Texas. “It is a remarkably healthy and pleasant country, well watered… with valuable streams for mills and a forest of pine timber,” observed an early visitor. “All the hills and dales, woods, and prairies, abound with buffalo, deer and turkey and occasionally black cattle for milk and work, and mustangs for riding.”
The town of Gonzales had been laid out a decade earlier, on the west bank of the Guadalupe River, about seventy-six miles east of Béxar and eighty miles west of San Felipe. The first few years of its existence were tenuous ones. There were frequent Indian attacks, and most of the colony’s early settlers came in from their fields at the end of the day and remained overnight with their families in the small fort near the river constructed for just that purpose. But a decade of steady immigration and enterprise had transformed Gonzales, and though Indians were still a constant threat, flocking to the fort was no longer a nightly ritual. By 1835 the village comprised more than thirty structures, including two small hotels, a kitchen, two blacksmith shops, a few mercantile establishments, and the requisite grogshop or two—one, named Luna, was just a few yards behind a small kitchen and restaurant owned by erstwhile moonshiner Adam Zumwalt, known as Red Adam. Most were only crude one-story log buildings, but Gonzales was beginning to look like a town. A large schoolhouse was under construction, and there was even a hat factory opened by New Yorker George Kimble and his business partner, Almeron Dickinson, a blacksmith from Tennessee whose comely young wife, Susanna, had recently given birth to a daughter they named Angelina. The hats were made of wool and rabbit fur—“not very handsome, but serviceable,” remembered one DeWitt colonist.
There were other signs of civilization. Early the previous summer, the town’s first ball had been held in the small inn owned by Thomas Miller, considered the richest man in town. Folks came from forty miles around, many of them displaying admission cards that read: A DMIT M R. ______ AND SWEETHEART TO BALL AT M ILLER H OTEL . Women wore fancy white dresses for the first time in years. In the large dining area serving as the ballroom, candles on boards stuck in the walls cast a warm glow as George Washington “Wash” Cottle and Dr. John Tinsley fiddled away, Cottle calling the sets of Virginia reels, cotillions, and other dances and singing:
We’ll dance all night
Till broad daylight
And go home with the gals in the morning.
Everyone, young and old, danced. The floor was so crowded that the dancers had to take the floor in two shifts. The ball went on until eight the next morning. Everyone left saying they’d had the time of their lives.
Until the fall of 1835, DeWitt colonists had condemned previous revolutionary acts of the pro-independence War Dog party. Their ayuntamiento had refused to attend the 1832 convention for fear that the citizens might be associated with the independence movement. They had even passed a resolution of loyalty to Mexico in July. Their sentiments began to change in September, though, after twenty-five Mexican soldiers brazenly appropriated Zumwalt’s store to quarter for the night; for no apparent reason, a Mexican soldier used his musket to bloody the head of colonist Jesse McCoy—recently elected second lieutenant of the Gonzales militia—as the young Tennessean attempted to make his way into Zumwalt’s storeroom.
The town of Gonzales had been laid out a decade earlier, on the west bank of the Guadalupe River, about seventy-six miles east of Béxar and eighty miles west of San Felipe. The first few years of its existence were tenuous ones. There were frequent Indian attacks, and most of the colony’s early settlers came in from their fields at the end of the day and remained overnight with their families in the small fort near the river constructed for just that purpose. But a decade of steady immigration and enterprise had transformed Gonzales, and though Indians were still a constant threat, flocking to the fort was no longer a nightly ritual. By 1835 the village comprised more than thirty structures, including two small hotels, a kitchen, two blacksmith shops, a few mercantile establishments, and the requisite grogshop or two—one, named Luna, was just a few yards behind a small kitchen and restaurant owned by erstwhile moonshiner Adam Zumwalt, known as Red Adam. Most were only crude one-story log buildings, but Gonzales was beginning to look like a town. A large schoolhouse was under construction, and there was even a hat factory opened by New Yorker George Kimble and his business partner, Almeron Dickinson, a blacksmith from Tennessee whose comely young wife, Susanna, had recently given birth to a daughter they named Angelina. The hats were made of wool and rabbit fur—“not very handsome, but serviceable,” remembered one DeWitt colonist.
There were other signs of civilization. Early the previous summer, the town’s first ball had been held in the small inn owned by Thomas Miller, considered the richest man in town. Folks came from forty miles around, many of them displaying admission cards that read: A DMIT M R. ______ AND SWEETHEART TO BALL AT M ILLER H OTEL . Women wore fancy white dresses for the first time in years. In the large dining area serving as the ballroom, candles on boards stuck in the walls cast a warm glow as George Washington “Wash” Cottle and Dr. John Tinsley fiddled away, Cottle calling the sets of Virginia reels, cotillions, and other dances and singing:
We’ll dance all night
Till broad daylight
And go home with the gals in the morning.
Everyone, young and old, danced. The floor was so crowded that the dancers had to take the floor in two shifts. The ball went on until eight the next morning. Everyone left saying they’d had the time of their lives.
Until the fall of 1835, DeWitt colonists had condemned previous revolutionary acts of the pro-independence War Dog party. Their ayuntamiento had refused to attend the 1832 convention for fear that the citizens might be associated with the independence movement. They had even passed a resolution of loyalty to Mexico in July. Their sentiments began to change in September, though, after twenty-five Mexican soldiers brazenly appropriated Zumwalt’s store to quarter for the night; for no apparent reason, a Mexican soldier used his musket to bloody the head of colonist Jesse McCoy—recently elected second lieutenant of the Gonzales militia—as the young Tennessean attempted to make his way into Zumwalt’s storeroom.
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