At dawn on March 6, 1836, cannon fire and gunshots shattered the quiet of San Antonio as Mexican soldiers scrambled up ladders against the walls of the Alamo. Davy Crockett and the defenders on the southwestern corner unleashed volley after volley into the attacking ranks, reloading as fast as they could while men fell to their left and right. The garrison was vastly outnumbered, and every man inside knew the fight would end in death. For days they had labored, fortifying weak points with piled stones and soil, snatching little sleep beneath their blankets.
Now the battle had come, and within minutes the first attackers poured over the walls, meeting the defenders in a ferocious close-quarters struggle with knives, pistols, and anything else at hand. The defenders were a mixed lot. Most were American citizens who had moved to Texas seeking a better life and were willing to fight for the right to secede from Mexico. But many were immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Denmark, and a number were native-born Mexicans who sided with the Texian cause, known as Tejanos.
No man among them was as famous as Crockett. By 1836 he was a national celebrity, celebrated as a hunter, frontiersman, storyteller, and backwoods statesman. He had met presidents and foreign dignitaries, attended high-society parties in New York and Washington, served in Congress, and been the subject of a Broadway play. Now his story seemed destined to end on the hard, dusty ground of Texas.
His legend had begun in 1786 in Greene County, in what would become Tennessee, where he was born to John and Rebecca Crockett, the fourth of five boys and seventh of nine children. He grew up on the frontier, tracking, hunting, and fishing, and was hired out by his father to pay off debts. He served in the War of 1812 under Andrew Jackson as a scout and hunter, gaining a reputation for skill and endurance. He married Polly Finley in 1806 and had three children before her death in 1815, likely from complications of childbirth.
He remarried later that year, to Elizabeth Patton, and the blended family grew. His political rise began with his ability to captivate audiences with plain, enthralling tales of frontier life. Elected justice of the peace in Lawrence County in 1817, then lieutenant colonel of the local militia, he reached the Tennessee House in 1821. In 1827 he was elected to Congress, where he famously broke with his former commander, President Andrew Jackson, opposing the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
The Cherokee chief John Ross sent him a letter of gratitude, but the stance cost Crockett his seat, as Tennessee was full of ardent Jackson supporters. He lost the 1831 election to William Fitzgerald, yet his celebrity only grew after The Lion of the West, a play loosely based on his life, became a smash hit in New York, and Crockett himself received a standing ovation at a performance. He won back his seat in 1833 but was defeated again in 1835 by Adam Huntsman. Frustrated, he declared to his fellow Tennesseans that they might all go to hell, for he was going to Texas.
Texas in 1835 was a tinderbox. The Mexican government had long permitted American settlement as a buffer between northern Mexico and the Comanche, who held real power over much of the region. But the Law of April 6, 1830, severely restricted further Anglo immigration and imposed taxes on Texans, deepening their sense of injustice. Tejanos had endured decades of ferocious native attacks while being treated as secondary concerns by Mexico City.
General Antonio López de Santa Anna had ordered troops to occupy northern towns, including San Antonio, then known as Béxar, further uniting Anglo settlers and Tejanos in resentment. One contentious issue divided them: slavery, which Mexico had abolished in 1829 but many Anglo settlers continued to practice. Still, most Tejanos were willing to overlook that disagreement in the interest of independence from a government that had failed them. In October 1835, tensions erupted at Gonzales, where Mexican officials demanded the return of two cannons loaned for defense against the Comanche.
The Texans refused, hid the guns, and on October 2 met the Mexican army on the Guadalupe River under a flag reading “Come and take it. ” After a brief skirmish, the Mexicans retreated. That clash effectively began the Texas Revolution. A week later, Texans seized the Presidio La Bahia at Goliad, cutting off Mexican supplies to San Antonio.
They won again at La Concepción in October and at the Siege of Béxar in December, wresting control of San Antonio from Santa Anna’s army. Confident, they fortified the old mission, the Alamo, expecting Santa Anna to return. Among the roughly two hundred Texans, many believed they would defeat the general and force his surrender. By the time Crockett and about thirty volunteers arrived on February 8, 1836, command of the Texan forces had changed hands several times.
James Clinton Neill had been forced to resign after receiving word that his family was critically ill. In his place, joint command fell to two men. One was William B. Travis, a twenty-six-year-old Alabama lawyer who had fled debt, leaving behind his wife and children, and become a fiery revolutionary.
The other was Jim Bowie, a forty-two-year-old frontier celebrity of questionable repute, famed for a knife fight on the Mississippi in 1827, but now bedridden with a deadly illness, likely typhoid pneumonia. The defenders believed victory was at hand, but within two weeks the situation collapsed. Santa Anna, furious at losing San Antonio, was marching north with thousands of troops. On February 23, only two weeks after Crockett’s arrival, sentries spotted Mexican cavalry in the hills.
Between 1,500 and 1,800 Mexican troops surrounded the force of roughly 180 men. Travis and Bowie ordered every Texan in San Antonio into the Alamo, their only refuge, and the defenders, several with wives and children, were trapped. For thirteen days the Mexican army laid siege, pounding the walls with artillery. Santa Anna sent envoys demanding surrender; all were refused.
On February 24, Travis wrote a letter carried by Captain Albert Martin to Gonzales, seventy-five miles east: “I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna, and I shall never surrender or retreat. I call on you, in the name of liberty, of patriotism, and of everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid. Victory or death. ” Martin and thirty-one men from Gonzales made it through, but they were only a fraction of what Travis had hoped for.
That same day, Santa Anna raised the black flag of no quarter, signaling that none would be spared. All but one man, Louis Rose, chose to remain and fight to the end. When the final assault came, Travis was shot dead on the north wall with a musket ball through the forehead. Bowie, too ill to stand, was bayoneted in his bed.
Crockett fought until he ran out of ammunition, then used his rifle as a club and slashed with his hunting knife. Exactly how he died remains unclear; some accounts say he was shot in the final stages, others that he and a few survivors were captured and executed on Santa Anna’s orders. All the defenders met the same fate. The Mexican troops stacked the bodies and burned them, denying the dead both funerals and graves.
Santa Anna expected the crushing defeat to break Texan resistance, but it produced the opposite. “Remember the Alamo” became a rallying cry. At San Jacinto in April 1836, Santa Anna was defeated and forced to surrender, and Texas won its independence. Four decades later, on the open plains of northern Texas, another fight unfolded.
In the tiny settlement of Adobe Walls on the night of June 27, 1874, James Hanrahan stood outside his sod-roof saloon, exhausted and nervous. He had received reports that a large war party was gathering nearby, but he had kept the news to himself so as not to drive away business. His clientele were buffalo hunters and skinners, a hardened lot drawn by the boom in demand for buffalo hide, which eastern tanners had found ideal for boots, coats, and machinery belts. The hunters had decimated the herds; in 1870 more than twelve million buffalo roamed the plains, but by 1880 fewer than four hundred thousand would remain.
The carcasses were left to rot by the thousands. This slaughter had pushed the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho to desperation. Among the Comanche, a twenty-three-year-old medicine man named Isatai had convinced many that he could stop bullets, fly into the sun, and belch up wagonloads of ammunition. His credibility rested on the endorsement of Quanah Parker, the half-white son of Cynthia Ann Parker and Chief Peta Nocona, a respected warrior with great influence.
In May 1874, the bands gathered on the Red River for a Sun Dance, and Isatai promised invincibility. A force of between 250 and 1,000 warriors, mostly Comanche with Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho allies, set out for Adobe Walls, the headquarters of the buffalo trade. Hanrahan, desperate to keep the men awake, fired a pistol into the air. When the gathered men asked what had happened, he claimed a ridgepole holding up his saloon roof had cracked and offered free drinks to anyone who would help replace it.
The men labored and drank through the night while Hanrahan watched the eastern horizon. At around four in the morning, the war party appeared on the ridgeline, Isatai naked and painted yellow, the color of invincibility. The warriors charged at dawn with startling speed and ferocity. Billy Dixon, a twenty-three-year-old hunter, later described the scene: hundreds of warriors on finest horses, armed with guns and lances, shields of thick buffalo hide, scalps dangling from bridles, war bonnets fluttering, bodies painted red, vermilion, and ochre.
The hunters, half-drunk and exhausted, scrambled into the adobe buildings. The Shadler brothers, asleep in a covered wagon, were cut down, along with their dog, and all three were scalped. Billy Tyler was shot through the lungs rushing for cover. Quanah Parker tried to kick down the saloon door with his horse but was driven off by gunfire.
The warriors attempted to set the buildings ablaze, but the adobe and sod roofs would not burn. After heavy losses, the attackers pulled back to regroup. For three days, intermittent attacks continued. The defenders buried their dead and their horses and oxen.
On the third day, a group of frustrated warriors and Isatai gathered on a hill roughly a thousand yards away. As they quarreled over blame, Isatai claiming that the Cheyenne had eaten a skunk and nullified his medicine, Billy Dixon braced his Sharps rifle against the doorjamb and fired. One of the warriors slumped from his horse. The shot, from nearly a mile away, scattered the group and shook their nerve.
Quanah Parker continued to fight fearlessly, at one point lifting a wounded comrade with one hand, until his horse was shot from under him and he took a bullet between his neck and shoulder blade. The loss of so many warriors and the failure of Isatai’s promises created dissension. On the fourth day, the native forces vanished into the plains. By August, a cavalry troop arrived to find a dozen hunters still holding the outpost, with the skulls of vanquished warriors impaled on posts outside the saloon.
Isatai was held in great contempt, but Quanah Parker would become a seminal figure in Comanche history. Billy Dixon would later receive the Medal of Honor for action against the Comanche and Kiowa. A twenty-year-old hunter named Bat Masterson was also present, and would go on to become one of the Old West’s most legendary figures. The battle marked the beginning of the end for the plains tribes’ way of life.
Never again would buffalo range in such numbers, and never again would the tribes roam with such freedom. On September 28, 1874, in the pre-dawn darkness, the men of the US Army’s 4th Cavalry under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie descended a nearly vertical embankment into Texas’s Palo Duro Canyon. Mackenzie, a strict disciplinarian with an unrelenting pursuit of his enemy, had been tasked with finding and defeating the Comanche and their allies, who had joined forces in the canyon’s labyrinthine confines. He had located the village after weeks of searching with his Tonkawa scouts.
The soldiers moved cautiously, and it was nearly seven in the morning before they were within striking distance, still unnoticed. Then dogs began barking. The village erupted in chaos as mothers and children fled deeper into the canyon. Mackenzie ordered a head-on attack.
The Tonkawa scouts terrified the women most of all, for the intertribal warfare between the Comanche and Tonkawa had seen entire villages slaughtered. The warriors fought to cover the retreat but were quickly overrun. By nine in the morning, roughly sixty defenders lay dead, while the majority of the Comanche escaped on foot under the leadership of Quanah Parker. The Comanche had lost their horses, and with them went their entire way of life.
Mackenzie’s force of roughly four hundred men could not take the herd of more than a thousand horses. Turning them loose risked recapture by the Comanche. So he gave the order that would define his legacy: select a few hundred of the best animals for cavalry use and shoot the rest. For hours, nearly until sundown, the soldiers herded the horses into ravines and killed them.
Many of the men were horrified. The gunfire and screams of horses echoed off the canyon walls. Mackenzie seemed pleased. The Comanche did not surrender immediately.
Under Quanah Parker, they fled deeper into the canyon, evading the army through the fall. But the winter of 1874–1875 was one of the harshest in decades, and many Comanche trickled into Fort Sill to survive. Quanah Parker did not lead the final holdouts into the fort until the summer of 1875, officially surrendering and resigning his people to reservation life. He adapted well, working for equitable treatment of his tribe, becoming a successful businessman, and hosting guests like Geronimo and Teddy Roosevelt at his Oklahoma homestead, Star House.
He died in 1911 at sixty-two, a warrior of the plains who had come to own a luxury car. Mackenzie’s fate was far darker. His reputation rose to that of the finest field officer on the frontier. He was promoted to Brigadier General in 1882 at forty-two, one of the youngest men ever to hold the rank, and given command of the entire jurisdiction of Texas.
But his physical and mental decline accelerated. He had been wounded seven times in the Civil War and suffered concussions on the frontier. By 1883, he was issuing contradictory orders and experiencing violent mood swings, paranoia, and despair. In mid-1884 he was declared unfit to serve and forced into retirement.
Whether the cause was epilepsy, brain damage, or syphilis, he was brought to an asylum on Staten Island, where he slipped deeper into disconnection from reality. He died in 1889 at forty-eight, with dementia listed as the cause of death, and was buried in the West Point Cemetery. The slaughter of the horses at Palo Duro Canyon remains the most indelible mark on his legacy, viewed by the Comanche as a great tragedy, both physical and spiritual.
Even today, some say the hoofbeats and whinnies of the massacred herd can still be heard in the canyon on quiet nights.