At dawn on March 6, 1836, cannon fire and gunshots shattered the stillness around the old Spanish mission known as the Alamo. Davy Crockett and the defenders on the southwestern corner of the compound shouldered their rifles and poured volley after volley into the Mexican soldiers scrambling up wooden ladders propped against the mission walls. As Crockett reloaded, men fell to his left and right. Below, hordes of Mexican troops pressed toward the small mission, vastly outnumbering the defenders.
Everyone inside understood this was a fight to the death. The men had spent weeks fortifying the crumbling mission, piling stones and soil to shore up weak points in their defenses. Most had hardly slept. Cannonballs crashed into the thick adobe walls, tearing gaps that the attacking soldiers rushed to exploit.
Soon the first attackers poured over the walls and were met by Crockett and his comrades in ferocious close-quarters fighting with knives, pistols, and anything else at hand. Both sides were resigned to a vicious struggle, and a life-or-death street fight erupted just inside the parapet. Most of the defenders were American citizens who had moved to Texas seeking a better life and who had chosen to fight for Texas’s right to break away from Mexico. But contrary to popular belief, many were immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Denmark, along with a number of native-born Mexicans, known as Tejanos, who had sided with the Texian cause.
No man at the Alamo, however, was as famous as David “Davy” Crockett. Even then, Crockett was a national celebrity, celebrated as a legendary hunter, frontiersman, master storyteller, and backwoods statesman. He had met presidents and foreign dignitaries, attended high-society parties in New York and Washington, served in Congress, and even been the subject of a Broadway play. Now his story seemed destined to end on the hard, dusty ground of Texas.
But that was not where his story began. Crockett was born in 1786 in Greene County, in what became Tennessee, the fourth of five boys and the seventh of nine children. He grew up on the frontier, tracking, hunting, and fishing. His father had turned him out as labor to pay off family debts.
He served in the War of 1812 under Andrew Jackson, mostly as a scout and hunter, and gained a reputation for skill and endurance. He married Polly Finley in 1806, and they had three children before she passed away in 1815, likely from complications related to childbirth. Crockett remarried later that year, to Elizabeth Patton, who brought three children of her own from a prior marriage. Together they had three more children.
Crockett’s rise in politics came from his ability to captivate audiences with his simple, enthralling storytelling style. He was elected justice of the peace of Lawrence County in 1817, then lieutenant colonel of the local militia, and finally a state legislator in the Tennessee House in 1821. Moving his family ever westward, he built a reputation among his constituents as a trustworthy, plain-spoken representative. That reputation carried him to Congress in 1827, where he broke ranks with his former commander, now President Andrew Jackson, and vehemently opposed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Cherokee Chief John Ross sent Crockett a letter of gratitude in January 1831. But opposing Jackson cost him support at home, and he lost his bid for reelection in 1831. He regained his seat in 1833, only to lose it again in 1835 to another Jacksonian politician. Growing frustrated, Crockett, who had been exchanging letters with friends in Texas, reportedly told his fellow Tennesseans, “They may all go to hell.
I’m going to Texas. ” In 1835, Texas was a tinderbox of political upheaval. The Mexican government had long permitted American settlers to build homesteads in the area, partly as a human buffer between northern Mexico and the Comanche. But the Law of April 6, 1830 severely restricted further Anglo settlement and levied special taxes and tariffs on Texans, deepening their sense of injustice.
Tejanos had borne decades of ferocious native attacks while feeling neglected by Mexico City. General Santa Anna’s orders for Mexican troops to occupy northern towns, including San Antonio, then known as Béxar, further united Anglo settlers and Tejanos in opposition. Tensions erupted in October 1835 at the Battle of Gonzales, when Mexican officials demanded the return of two cannons loaned to the town for defense against the Comanche. The Texans refused, hid the cannons, and met the Mexican army on the banks of the Guadalupe River under a flag reading “Come and take it.
” After a brief skirmish, the Mexicans retreated, and the Texas Revolution began. On October 9th, the Texans seized the Presidio La Bahia at Goliad, cutting off Mexican supplies to San Antonio. They won again at the Battle of La Concepción on October 28th and in December at the Siege of Béxar, wresting control of San Antonio from Santa Anna’s army. The Texans took control of the old mission, the Alamo, and began fortifying it for the inevitable return of Santa Anna.
By the time Crockett and a band of roughly thirty volunteers arrived on February 8, 1836, command of the Texan forces had changed hands several times. Joint command had fallen to Colonel William B. Travis, a 26-year-old Alabama lawyer who had fled severe debt and become a firebrand supporter of Texas independence, and Jim Bowie, a 42-year-old frontiersman celebrated for his role in the famous 1827 knife fight that gave birth to the Bowie knife. Bowie was now desperately ill, most likely with typhoid pneumonia.
Crockett was warmly welcomed by both men, and all believed victory was at hand. But Santa Anna was already marching north from Mexico City with thousands of troops. On February 23rd, only two weeks after Crockett’s arrival, sentries spotted Mexican cavalry in the hills near San Antonio. None could believe Santa Anna had returned so quickly.
Roughly 1,500 to 1,800 Mexican troops surrounded a force of around 180 men. Travis and Bowie ordered every Texan in San Antonio into the Alamo. The rebels were caught off guard, and Santa Anna knew it. The Mexican army took control of the city and trapped the defenders inside the mission walls.
For thirteen torturous days, the Mexican army laid siege to the Alamo, pounding the walls with artillery and destroying the wooden structures around the compound. Santa Anna sent envoys to negotiate surrender, but all were refused. On February 24th, Travis wrote a letter pleading for reinforcements, ending with the words, “Victory or death. ” That same day, Santa Anna ordered the black flag of no quarter raised above his headquarters, signaling that none would be spared.
Thirty-one men from Gonzales slipped through the lines to reinforce the defenders, but they were only a fraction of what Travis had hoped for. All but one man, Louis Rose, chose to remain and fight to the end. Now the attack had come. Within minutes, Travis was shot dead on the north side of the compound.
Jim Bowie, bedridden and unable to stand, was killed by Mexican soldiers who barged into his room. Crockett, one of the few remaining combatants, continued to fire until he ran out of ammunition, then fought with his rifle as a club and with his hunting knife. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear. Some accounts hold that he was shot in the final stages of the battle; others say he and a few surviving defenders were taken prisoner and executed on Santa Anna’s orders.
His cause of death is unknown, but his fate was the same as all the defenders’. The bodies were stacked in piles and burned, denied funerals and proper graves. The Battle of the Alamo was a resounding defeat for the Texans. But Santa Anna expected it to break their will, and instead it produced the opposite result.
The example of the defenders renewed the fury of the rebels, and cries of “Remember the Alamo! ” resounded across the battlefields. Santa Anna’s later defeat at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836 forced him to surrender, and Texas gained its independence. Without the sacrifice of the men at the Alamo, that victory might never have come.
Decades later, on June 27, 1874, another fight unfolded on the plains of northern Texas. In the tiny settlement of Adobe Walls, James Hanrahan, owner of a sod-roof saloon, stood alone in the darkness clutching a revolver. He had received reports of a large war party gathering nearby. Not wanting to drive away business, he had kept the news to himself.
Now he fired a pistol into the air to wake the sleeping men of the settlement, then told them the noise came from a cracked ridgepole holding up his roof. He offered free drinks to those who helped with repairs, intending to keep the men awake until the attack came. The population of Adobe Walls was mostly buffalo hunters and skinners, a hardened lot born from the boom in demand for buffalo hide. The industrial revolution had created a market for leather in everything from boots to machinery straps.
Over the decade from 1870 to 1880, the buffalo population of North America was utterly decimated, from more than twelve million in 1870 to fewer than 400,000 by 1880. The hunters slaughtered the animals by the thousands and left the carcasses to rot on the plains. This practice had expanded into territory belonging to the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, who depended on the buffalo for their survival and were becoming increasingly angry and desperate. Among the Comanche, a 23-year-old medicine man named Isatai had convinced his weary people that he possessed great power.
He claimed he could stop bullets with spells, fly into the sun to speak with spirits, and belch up wagonloads of bullets. His claims gained credibility through his close friend, the legendary warrior Quanah Parker, the half-white son of captured Texan Cynthia Ann Parker and Comanche chief Peta Nocona. In May 1874, at a gathering on the Red River, Isatai and Quanah persuaded warriors from the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho to rise up against the whites. Their main target was Adobe Walls, the headquarters of the buffalo trade.
At around 4:00 a. m. , the war party arrived atop the ridgeline overlooking the settlement. Isatai was naked and painted head to toe in yellow, the color of invincibility.
Many warriors and their horses were also covered in yellow paint. As the sun crested the horizon, the force charged down the hill. Billy Dixon, a 23-year-old buffalo hunter, later described the sight as “a splendidly barbaric” charge of hundreds of warriors mounted on their finest horses, their bodies and the bodies of their running horses splashed with paint, scalps dangling from bridles, war bonnets fluttering in the wind. The buffalo hunters raced to grab their weapons and barricade themselves inside the adobe buildings.
The walls were two feet thick. But they were outnumbered by at least twenty to one, and many were half-drunk after a night of labor and whiskey. Two hunters, the Shadler brothers, were asleep in a covered wagon and were quickly cut down along with their dog. Another resident, Billy Tyler, was shot through the lungs.
Quanah Parker tried to batter down the saloon door with his horse, then the warriors attempted to set fire to the buildings, but the adobe and sod roofs would not burn. After suffering heavy initial losses from the hunters’ powerful Sharps rifles, the attacking force pulled back to the northern ridge. The attacks dragged on for days. Two more hunters arrived and were pressed into service, bringing the force to thirty.
On the third day, a frustrated group of warriors and Isatai gathered on a hill roughly a thousand yards away to argue over their failures. Billy Dixon, standing in the doorway of the saloon, took aim and fired. His shot struck one of the warriors dead, a distance nearly everyone thought impossible. The group scattered.
Quanah Parker continued to charge fearlessly, and his horse was shot out from under him at nearly five hundred yards. He escaped with a wound between his neck and right shoulder blade. Dissension grew among the tribes, and Isatai was berated and beaten by older chiefs. On the fourth day, the native forces disappeared into the plains.
The buffalo hunters survived, but the battle marked the beginning of the end for the way of life of the plains tribes. Quanah Parker would go on to become a pivotal figure for the Comanche in their new life on the reservation. Billy Dixon would later receive the Medal of Honor for a fight against the Comanche and Kiowa. A young hunter and skinner named Bat Masterson was also present at Adobe Walls, and he would go on to become one of the Old West’s most legendary figures.
Just months later, on September 28, 1874, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie led the US Army’s 4th Cavalry into Texas’s Palo Duro Canyon to find and defeat the Comanche and their allies. Mackenzie, a West Point graduate who had been wounded seven times in the Civil War and lost the use of his right hand, was one of the Army’s most aggressive and demanding leaders. After weeks of searching with his Tonkawa scouts, he located the village of the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. At dawn, his men descended a nearly vertical embankment and moved into position.
Dogs alerted the village just before the attack, and the soldiers charged into a village of mothers and children fleeing for safety. The warriors fought, but by 9:00 a. m. the fighting was over, with roughly sixty defenders dead.
The vast majority of the Comanche escaped on foot, and the entire herd of more than a thousand horses fell into Mackenzie’s hands. Mackenzie faced a dilemma. He lacked the supplies to take the herd, and turning the horses loose would allow the Comanche to recapture them. So he ordered the troopers to select a few hundred of the best horses and shoot the rest.
Through the afternoon and nearly until sundown, the soldiers herded the animals into small ravines and killed them. The gunfire and horse screams echoed through the canyon. For the Comanche, whose entire way of life was built around the horse, the loss was devastating. Under Quanah Parker’s leadership they fled deeper into the canyon, but the harsh winter of 1874 to 1875 drove many to surrender at Fort Sill.
In the summer of 1875, Quanah Parker led the final holdouts into the fort and officially surrendered. Quanah Parker adapted to his new life, working for the equitable treatment of his tribe, becoming a successful businessman, and hosting such guests as Geronimo and Teddy Roosevelt at his Oklahoma home. He died in 1911 at the age of 62. Mackenzie, however, met a far different end.
His reputation rose to the finest field officer on the American frontier, and he was promoted to Brigadier General in 1882. But his physical and mental decline became increasingly evident. By 1884, he was officially declared unfit to serve and forced into retirement, with symptoms pointing to epilepsy, brain damage, or deterioration from a long-suffering syphilis infection. His family placed him in an asylum on Staten Island, where he fell into a deepening disconnection from reality.
He died in 1889 at the age of 48, and was laid to rest in the West Point Cemetery. The order to kill the horses at Palo Duro Canyon left the most indelible mark on Mackenzie’s legacy. It stands as one of the great tragedies, both physical and spiritual, for the Comanche culture, which held the horse in deep reverence. Depending on who you ask, the hoofbeats and whinnies of the massacred herd can still be heard on quiet nights.
The battle was a pivotal moment in the history of the Old West, unofficially marking the end of the plains tribes’ way of life. Never again would the buffalo range in such numbers, and never again would the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho roam with such freedom.