The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation by James Donovan Read Free Book Online

statements, including “The country is lost if its inhabitants do not take its affairs into their own hands.” Soon after, Austin succeeded in persuading the government to repeal the April 1830 immigration ban, and gained several other concessions—though statehood was put on hold.
    In January 1834, on his journey home, Austin was arrested at Saltillo on suspicion of attempting to incite insurrection in Texas: his October letter had fallen into the wrong hands and been sent to Farías in Mexico City. The man who had preached and lived allegiance to his adopted country for so long was transported to the capital in irons and jailed in the century-old Prison of the Inquisition. He was denied a trial, and kept in solitary confinement for three months. The authorities moved him to another jail, and then another. He was finally freed eleven months later, on December 25, under a general amnesty for political prisoners. But he was not allowed to leave the city until June. He reached the port city of Veracruz in July 1835 and prepared to sail for New Orleans.
    But the weary empresario ran into trouble leaving the country—a not-so-simple matter of the wrong papers. To gain permission to leave, he called on Mexico’s president, the general again relaxing at his hacienda just outside Veracruz. The hero of Tampico, and now Zacatecas, the self-styled Napoleon of the West, cleared up the problem, and told Austin he would visit Texas the following March—as a friend. Austin took his leave, but was unconvinced. “His visit is uncertain—his friendship more so,” Austin wrote of his meeting with Santa Anna. His suspicions would prove to be well founded.

THREE
    “The Celebrated Desperado”
     
    He seemed to be a roving man.
    C APTAIN W ILLIAM Y. L ACY
     
    O n the warm, clear morning of September 19, 1827, two groups of well-dressed men made their way by small boat, by horse, and then by foot to a peninsular sandbar on the Mississippi side of the Mississippi River, just above Natchez. A duel had been arranged between Samuel Wells and Dr. Thomas Maddox. There was bad blood between the two, and between several other members of this unusual excursion party, most of them prominent gentlemen from Rapides Parish in Louisiana.
    Samuel Wells had brought with him one brother, two cousins, and two other friends, one of whom was thirty-year-old James Bowie.
    Ten men and several servants accompanied Dr. Maddox, including Major Norris Wright, the former sheriff of Rapides Parish—a small man but a crack shot with a pistol who had slain more than one enemy in a duel. A year earlier, Wright and Bowie had crossed paths at an Alexandria, Louisiana, hotel card game, and a long-simmering enmity between the two—likely a mix of politics and personal animus—erupted. Bowie, having heard that Wright had been slandering him, confronted the major; in response, Wright had fired a pistol at point-blank range. Somehow, the bullet—perhaps deflected by a pocketknife or a silver dollar—only bruised the target’s left side, and the tall, thickly muscled Bowie pounced on the smaller man and had to be dragged off before he strangled him.
    The single-shot flintlock pistols of the day were unreliable and took time to reload, and might “snap,” or misfire, for one reason or another. After the altercation, Bowie decided to carry a large hunting knife in a leather scabbard for protection, as a regular part of his dress. He would not be found defenseless again.
    Most of the men this September day were armed with one or two pistols. At least a couple in the Maddox party carried shotguns, another a hunting rifle, and two others wielded sword blades concealed in canes. Five doctors in both groups were present to minister to any wounded.
    Previous incidents in the long-simmering feud included political arguments, unpaid loans, personal insults, a sword-cane stabbing, shootings, and, inevitably, an insult to a woman’s name. Several other dueling challenges had