I'm very glad that this episode of Downsized History is brought to you once again by Hello Fresh. Hello, Fresh is revolutionizing, eating and cooking across the U.S. They send you fresh, pretty measured ingredients and mouthwatering seasonal recipes right to your door. I occasionally try and cook. I go out, I buy some things, I get home and the little recipe goes, Oh, just yeah, just put some oregano on. I'm like, I don't have oregano.

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And it takes 30 minutes or less. There are more than 23 recipes each week. She tried different flavors, cuisines. You're never going to get bored. And the best thing is the age now where I'm starting to think about my carbs. I'm trying to eat less meat. I want to do some more Pescatore and Vibe's than they deliver all that they can do. LACAU It's all good. It's sourced from farmers. You just cutting out middlemen all over the place here.

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Devastatingly cold weather has led to a breakdown of electricity and other key supplies, food and fresh water. We're all desperately hoping that anyone listening to this podcast in Texas is doing better now. The weather is warming up and power is being restored. We're thinking of you guys and we know that you Texans will pull through in your traditional style in honor of Texas. I want to put on a podcast from the archive, which I visited Texas and visited the site of one of the most important moments of Texan history, and that's the Alamo in San Antonio.

And today is the right way to do it, because today in 1836 and the twenty third of February, a 13 day siege began at San Antonio as Mexican troops under General Santana, who was also the president of Mexico, invested the Alamo mission and eventually stormed it and killed nearly all of the defenders. It was a pivotal moment in the Texans struggle for independence. The defiance of those defenders and the way in which they were slaughtered inspired both Texans and people crossing the border from the USA to throw the Mexicans out of Texas, which they did at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836.

Don Houston, another battlefield that I visited Putzel, another podcast and said The Alamo is considered to be an almost sacred place within Texas and is a hugely important moment in U.S. history. I visited San Antonio in 2016 2016 and I was shown around the Alamo battlefield by the absolutely brilliant WCF Strong. He's a writer. He's a podcast. He's a broadcaster. He's a professor of communication at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. You can listen to him wherever you get your podcast.

He's going to check them out. He's also written a wonderful book on stories about Texas, which is a treasured book in my library where he took me round the Alamo. And you'll hear that. All right. Now on this podcast, if you wish to see more American history or world history or any kind of history, we've got a history dot TV. It's a digital history channel. It's like Netflix. But just for history. Only for history.

You go on there history at dot TV, you sign up and then you get to watch the world's best history documentaries. We're making more and more all the time. Got a couple of very exciting projects that we're slowly beginning to film in the next few weeks as Britain's lockdown begins to loosen up slightly. Very exciting. Watch this space. There will, of course, be audio versions coming to this podcast. If you want to see a live version of this podcast being recorded, go to history at dot com slash tool.

We're recording them in great cities all around the UK this autumn. Cannot wait to see you all out there to breathe the same air as you, to have a pint in the bar afterwards. It's going to be awesome to see. You will get a history at dotcom slash tour. In the meantime, everybody here is strong. Take him around the Alamo. Enjoy. Well, I'm standing now in the heart of San Antonio, Texas, and I'm in one of the most important historic sites in the whole of the USA in the world, possibly strong, who is the father of Texan history.

Tell me, where are we? Where are we now?

I wouldn't go that far, but I will tell you that I. I think of myself as a technologist. But this is ground zero for Texas liberty there. There's no more important site in Texas for sure than where we stand at this moment. This is a shrine. This is Thermopylae. This is the Wailing Wall. And if that's true, then this is our ultimate religious symbol. But ultimately, you know, of course, we're not a religion.

We just have a kind of patriotism that approximates a religion. And this is the most significant symbol in Texas history.

Now, the the Alamo, let's let's go way back. This was what was the first site of of settlement here?

Well, the first site of settlement here was just, you know, it was a mission. This Alamo existed in Alamo, by the way, means cottonwood since cottonwood tree, because when they after about 75 years, they secularized the mission, brought in a military contingent. And those guys came from, we learned, Mexico when it looked like their hometown that was called the Alamo. So they renamed this the Alamo because they had cottonwood trees around here and that's how it got that name.

But for a long time, it operated as a mission to Christianize the Indians.

And that mission was being run by what the Spanish Mexican north of Mexico was part of the Spanish empire. And it was that this was part of that part of that extended up into what is now the U.S., right?

That's right. And so it was part of the Spanish empire at the time. And they were, of course, like all of the Spanish empire in South America. So they they worked to Christianize the Indigenous peoples. And then, of course, Mexico won its independence. And then they assumed control of the mission and they militarized it to some extent. And I mean, I thought we got to let's just describe what we can see here. We got we got the classic frontage of the church.

We got some high walls and we got a remarkable monument. Tell me tell me kind of where are we standing now?

OK, well, we're standing in front of the church, as it's called, and that's what most people call the Alamo. But the Alamo was actually about a five acre compound. And so it's much, much more than that one building. But that's just what everybody knows as the Alamo. Now we look over to the west, we're looking east as we look at the facade of the Alamo. But if you turn around and look to the west, you see what was the parade grounds about, about probably three acres of space.

That was where the major battle took place. And it actually goes about a block and a half to the north. Now, there are buildings in what was the parade grounds and then across to the west where they would look toward the city of San Antonio. At the time, only about 3000 people at the time that the battle occurred, they would have been able there were slightly elevated. So they would be able to see Santa and his army over there quite easily.

But anyway, they want to now remove all these stores that are in the way and reclaim the original footprint and get rid of the road that goes through the middle. They're going to make it a much more sacred site than it's ever been. And the big monument in the middle of the square that what was what part of what the program would have been. I mean, this is like a you kind of almost a sort of religious devotion is a Christ like figure stretching up into and then all the figures of the resistance whose names are etched on it and all looking very heroic.

Yes. A lot of people think that that contains that's called the Cenotaph. And a lot of people think it contains the ashes of the men who died here because Santa a burned 189 bodies, because he couldn't bury them. I guess he could have, but he burned them and he considered them terrorists, by the way. He thought of them as terrorists. He said they had no rights. And so a lot of people think that Cenotaph, which was created 100 years exactly after the battle, contains the ashes.

But it doesn't because they don't know he knows where the ashes are. So it's kind of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in a sense, except we know who died here. And actually this has caused a lot of controversy because going to move the Cenotaph, it's leaking. It's got a lot of problems. It needs to be rebuilt. And so they're going to move it over here about 100 yards to the south. And a lot of people don't like that because they think it has ashes and they think that it's going it's it's a violation of its sacred nature.

But of course, it is merely a monument to kind of like the unknown soldier of soldiers.

We don't know where they're buried now. OK, so let's tell me so we learn a little bit about the Alamo itself. It was a mission station for converting Indians to Christianity, Catholicism. Why did it turn into this epic battlefield in the third of the way through the 19th century? Well, it was the most defensible. Position in the landscape around, it's hard to see with all these hotels around that have been built up. I mean, it is really a tourist center.

The major one it takes is no, nothing even comes close to the two million visitors they get a year here. But if you and I were looking in 1836 across to the west, you would you see Prarie. But this would be the highest point in any direction you could see to the east for miles, you could see to the west for miles. So over and over again, it's been used as a military post. The Spanish used it, the Mexicans use it, even the Americans after the Alamo used it as a military post.

So it's always been seen as a strategic position for military defense. The other thing is, if you look at that corner right over there, that little corner, that's where the Texans had their eighteen pound cannon, which was a big gun. And it was there because they looked across to the entrance of San Antonio and they could control military entrance from that point of view. But they didn't fire it much because it took 12 pounds of explosives to shoot one ball.

So, yeah, for those for those listeners who don't understand the intricacies of Texas status, tell me why. Why was the fighting and why did they end up coming to blows? OK, well, essentially, Texans came here and became Mexican citizens because it was owned by Mexico. Texas was. And but Santana came to power and he changed the government unilaterally from a representative government, a republic to a monarchy. Well, not completely to a monarchy, but he was certainly going in that direction.

He dissolved the constitution of 1824, which took away states rights to the on the president of Mexico. He's changing the Mexican constitution. He changed the deal. They said we came here for cheap land and to become good Mexican citizens. And you changed the rules. You took away our power. And we don't have any self-government now. And so they started raising hell and they were actually pushing just for a return to the 1824 Constitution. But Santana said, well, those people up there, those colonists are rebellious, those settlers.

And I'm going to come up there and straighten them out.

And in that period, what proportion of Texans were recently arrived from the U.S. and what proportion were Mexican, if you like, who come up from from the south? Well, it was about probably 60 percent to 70 percent American because there were something like 30000 people here in 1836 because they had encouraged immigration, you know, because no one would settle this area. So Mexico wanted immigration so that they could have a buffer between the settlements and the Comanches who were encroached from the from the West.

But what happened is that we also had a lot of illegal immigration. Today, we talk about illegal immigration while the first illegal immigration was really coming from Anglo Saxon, they were coming in from because there was a process and some came in with papers and some bought land through the impresarios, which was proper. And then some just followed their relatives and came here and were squatters. And so Santa Ana actually said, I need to put the military on the river.

But he was talking about the Sabeen, not the Rio Grande. So there's actually some echoes. Well, if you could have an echo that goes backwards, it sounds like Trump at times, you know, because he was very concerned about the borders. And actually, Trump could use it as an argument. He said, you see, you don't protect your borders, you lose your country. And so that's essentially what he did. He said, I want to put the military on the border to protect us from all this wave of Anglo-Saxon illegal immigration.

And because they brought in these liberal ideas of Republicanism. And so that's where you got this struggle. And so the Texans having, you know, been part of the United States of America and been through the revolution with you guys, they said we better take a stand now or we will find ourselves slaves in this country in a sense. So, you know, like a lot of wars, it started with a little thing. And you've seen the T-shirts, I guess it says come and take it, because there was a Cannon Gonzales that the government gave to the people of Gonzales.

Tell them here you can protect yourself from the Indians with this cannon. And then when the trouble started in Santa Ana or someone from the central government said, go get that cannon. It was just a four pounder. It wasn't really a powerful cannon, but it's to go get that cannon. And so the Texans rose up and said, well, come and take it. And so they stood up to the Mexican army and they sent them packing and then they followed them because they realized they called them and they followed them back to San Antonio.

And over a couple of months, they kicked them out of San Antonio. The whole thing. General Perfecto, the costs. Great name that effect. All right, I think if I have another son, I'll name Imperfective Strong and it's a great name. But anyway, they kicked him out and he was Santa and his brother in law. Right. And so the army, the Texans conquered and they were in the Alamo and they conquered them and sent them packing.

And they made an agreement. They would never take up arms against Texans again. And Texans kind of felt like this might be the end of it, you know, good. We kicked out. And so now do they go back to the Constitution of 1824? Do they seek independence? Nobody had a clear picture of that yet. There was great bickering as to what they were doing. So to get to cut to the chase, that's ultimately what happened.

They kicked cost out of San Antonio and this was Santa and his brother in law. And here's where his mistake was made. Santana. He didn't need to conquer the Alamo. He didn't need it. He could have gone right past it and gone to the settlements and gone after Sam Houston. But it was his machismo that said, I can't take this stain on the family honor. I've got to go kick some butt and teach them a lesson because, you know, they have insulted my family.

And so what the son of the president of Mexico do about it is rebellious northern the province. Well, he brings 6000 soldiers and he splits his army into he since 2000 to what he might call the coastal plain rude to come up and shut down because they thought a Texan army was going to come into Matamoros, which is in northern Mexico, and he wanted to intercept that army. And crushing Toraya was his name. He came in that way. But Santana himself wanted to come here and crush this rebellion.

And he arrived right, right over here, about 100, 200 yards to the west of us. And, you know, the Texans saw him coming in and they were shocked because he got here about three weeks ahead of what they thought he could. I mean, he pushed his men like crazy to get here. And then he raised what they call a pirate flag over here in San Fernando Church so they could see it from from the Alamo and San Fernando.

I mean, that flag at San Fernando Church meant no quarter will be given. Everyone will die here because you are pirates, you are terrorists, and we're going to kill every one of you. And the fact that these Texans remained is kind of amazing, because at the time that that flag was raised, they were seeing an army of about 2000 over here. And there were 150 Texans, 150 of them. And yet they didn't leave and face down any chance of relief was a relief force on the way.

Well, they, of course, hope springs eternal. They were sending out letters. They were begging Texans to come to their aid. They believed with enough men they could defend this makeshift fort. So they hoped that something would come of it. But you had Travis and boy who were, you know, boys very famous in the South, you might say, because he admitted the boogie knife. So he was a kind of a celebrity, but he was also a famous night fighter and bear fighter, all that stuff he was.

But he was known here in San Antonio, particularly because he married the daughter of the vice governor of Texas. So he married into a prestigious family. So anyway, he had a great following and so did Travis. And they split command of the Alamo forces. And these guys all came from Kentucky and Tennessee, some from England, some from Germany. They came from all over the world. The only people who died at the Alamo who were actually born here were Mexican Texans, because a lot of people don't know that there were Hispanic Texans fighting alongside the anodes they're called.

They were fighting alongside the Anglos. It wasn't an Anglo Mexican war. It was a war of Texans and thanas against tyranny. That's the way, you know, of course, they saw it. And I would say that Santana saw them as insurgents. They were rebels, insurgents coming in from the United States of America who didn't belong here, and he was going to kick them out. In fact, here's another kind of Trumpy and comment from Santa Ana.

He said, I'm going to invade Texas, I'm going to kill the rebels, and I'm gonna make them pay for it. I meant what he meant was that I'm going to make them pay for the cost of the army I had to raise to crush their rebellion. I'm going to take their land and I'm going to sell it and give it to the soldiers and I'm going to give it to the Sandinistas, people loyal to me. And so I just find it amusing that, you know, two centuries ago he was saying, I'm going to be taxes and I'm gonna make the Texans pay for it.

Of course, there are no corollaries really between Trump and Santa Ana. They're polar opposites in terms of government philosophy and stuff. But in terms of perhaps egocentrism, they may have some similarities. So the battle lines have been drawn. You go Santa Ana just over two hours, just over to our side over here, he's raised the bloody flag. Was there any. No, I don't know. What about the. Big moment, the line in the sand that happened, tell me no, no, there's no evidence of that happening to the first accounting of a recounting of the alleged line in the sand really happened about 20, 30 years after the fact that it first showed up in any sort of historical literature.

So probably apocryphal, probably a myth, no doubt. But there was certainly a line in the sand in people's minds. I mean, they knew this binary choice I can escape, which they could because Santana did not have this place locked down. They could slip out and go away. They could have done it easily in the cover of darkness. And yet they chose to stay and to fight. And that's why we have such reverence for them, because they gave their lives the ultimate price they paid for Texas liberty.

People go into this shrine, this church, and cry Texans because of the gift that they gave. There's just this great virtual religious devotion to this building and the gift those men gave in this in this compound because they didn't have to. But they wanted to stand up for human liberty. And they were in some ways, following what they felt their forefathers had done in the colonies and standing up to the king that they were following these footsteps. The army had advantages.

It's interesting. The Texans were very afraid of the Mexican cavalry. They never wanted to be on the open plains with the Mexican cavalry because they were great horsemen and they would run them down and lance them. And they didn't have a chance. They weren't nearly as good a horseman as the Mexicans. But the Mexicans didn't want to fight the Texans if the Texans were in the brush or the woods because they were excellent marksmen, they were just phenomenal. And most of these guys came out of Kentucky and Tennessee with what they call Kentucky long guns, long rifles.

And they were deadly at 200 yards. They've been hunting since they were seven in the forest. And so they were excellent, excellent marksmen. Whereas the Mexicans, they had well, they had British guns, actually. They had the brown bears and they had the Baker rifle, which was their long range weapon, but they weren't nearly as deadly as as the Texans were. In fact, in one of these were not a tree like this one. A pretty, pretty big one over here, a few blocks.

There was a Mexican sniper up in one of these trees. And this was in the siege of San Antonio when they threw out general costs. But this guy was the leader of that insurgency, made him a great hero. They have a plaza named for him over there. He was shot and killed by Mexican sniper. You you're right there. They had one shot right through the head. And the men were stunned for a second that their hero had been just cut down and have a second.

And they looked up and they saw smoke coming out of one of those trees and they all turned and fired at that smoke. And they the the assassin didn't live without thirty seconds longer than Ben Mahlum because they saw the smoke and they took him out. So the bastard. So, you know, so there was no line in the sand. They all stayed and they stayed. They stayed willingly. OK, let me tell you about the line in the sand.

And of course, in the famous movie by John Wayne, The Alamo, they have the line in the sand. So that becomes a powerful image for Texans. And a lot of people won't give up on it. They said, well, you don't know, it didn't happen. You know, it would have made sense for it to happen. I've seen historians give lectures and things that I would call it not revisionist. I would call it correction ist, you know, but people won't have it.

They'll say you're just not a Texan, you know, and they want to string them up. We're saying such things. The line in the sand is a sacred myth and they want to hold on to it. That's why I say certainly it was a line in the sand for the men there and they wouldn't leave their brothers in arms. And the one thing that did happen that I find just really stirs my heart to this day is that they did get about three days before the actual battle, the final battle.

There's a 13 day siege. Right. So it took a long time to have the final battle. But thirty two came in from Gonzalez. Thirty to soldier. They weren't really soldier. They were just the common man coming with their guns. And they came in here and they crossed through. They kind of, in a sense, fought through the Mexican lines to get the right to fight at the Alamo. And they call them the immortal thirty two.

And they came in and it lifted spirits a great deal because finally they had some kind of reinforcement. But even with that, they had one hundred and eighty nine men to defend a quarter mile of walls. So there are those who figure that Goliad had 300 men that was not too far from here and 90 miles away. And if they could have come, they might have been able to defend the fort, possibly. You've done a better job anyway, but that's a matter for the military strategists to work out.

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So we're standing on one stretch of walls now, the enclosure would have gone under all these buildings, right? Did the Mexicans just simply sit back and pound the old artillery or were they launching attacks on the walls with infantry? No, they stood back for 13 days. And again, Santa Ana could have waited them out, probably if he wanted to. The thing that he didn't do that a lot of his officers felt he should have done is he had two big guns coming.

They were behind. It could have been a lot of rain. They couldn't get it through the mud. So they were two or three days behind these cannons. So they were they were supposed to arrive, these these cannons that were 12 pounders, you know, really significant guns. And they were supposed to arrive in about three days. But Santana got impatient and said, let's go ahead and do it, is that it's going to cost a lot of men.

And he said, well, I don't care, let's just knock them out. But before that, for 13 days, they pounded away with their they had six pounders and they hit the walls and stuff. And but if they had had their their big guns, they could have blasted holes in those walls, not needed to scale them, which cost a lot of men their lives. So ultimately, what happened is Santana said, all right, this is I'm not going to wait for the guns.

Let's go ahead and take them out. And and he said, we'll go at 5:00 in the morning. We won't. He also did a kind of psychological warfare. He fired cannons at them 24 hours a day to keep them awake. So then he let the guns go silent for the night so they would rest, get sleepy. And then he was going to hit them with a surprise attack at 5:00 in the morning. And it probably would have worked, except that some of his men got overly enthusiastic and started saying, Viva Santa Ana as they were rushing the walls and it woke everybody up and and they boom, they're on the walls.

They light the cannons and there's carnage everywhere. Because what they did is they figured the weakest spot was the north wall. They flanked the northwest wall and the northeast wall, and then they sent columns of foot soldiers up the middle, backed by Lancers so they couldn't retreat. It's kind of like you guys get over that wall. They're not coming back this way. They weren't supposed to kill them. But, you know, it's kind of put pressure on the foot soldier to get over the wall.

But they had big cannons. They had three cannons at that end. And they say that the the force from Toluca was half decimated by one cannon blast just gone. And not only from the shrapnel from the cannon did enormous damage, but then it eviscerated the soldiers and they had shrapnel from their bones and things that didn't even further damage. They say the blood in that corner was like two to three feet deep in the sand because there was so much carnage caused by these close range cannon blasts.

Also, another thing happened as they were supposed to have ladders to get over the wall and the ladders were in the back or the guys carrying the ladders got killed. So the guys at the bottom of the wall were trapped and the Texans were reaching over and firing and killing those guys at the bottom of the wall. But finally, they discovered there were footholds they could get footholds in the wall. And once they discovered that, they started scampering over, you know, like ants climbing over the walls and the Texans retreated from the north wall to the long barracks, it's called.

But unfortunately, they forgot to they'd have time to spike the cannons so the Mexicans to turn the cannons around and used it against Technip to blow up in the doors of their own barracks. Now, the long barracks is in front of us. Now it's maybe nine, 10 feet high. Still, still with still with its small windows. It looks like a strong building with the condition it would have been in. Now, this has been rebuilt and it was actually two stories tall.

So they had a second story, balcony apartments, you might say, but they had actually configured this to to be protective. A lot of what you see are windows were doors, and they wanted to be able to retreat into there. They actually planned it. They said, OK, we'll retreat from the north wall into here and take a secondary stand in the long barracks. They had rifle holes and things that they could shoot so you could shoot out.

But then what happened is, as I said, they didn't spike the cannons. So the cannons were turned around to blow open the doors. And then a lot of them saw it, as you know, inside, they said, well, this is hopeless. And they began sticking their rifles out with some of them anyway, with the white flag. You know, I give up, I give up. But so the Mexicans thought, OK, they're surrendering.

And then they went in. But not all of them were willing to surrender. So they ran into this maelstrom of of of bullets. And then it got crazy because, you know, in battle how people get into this frenzy of killing and for survival. And so out came the bloody nose and out came the bandits. And it was just a bloodthirsty scene until all the Texans were killed. But, you know, the price that the Mexicans paid was enormous.

They lost a third of their army in this, and Travis, by the way, there was the commander here, he said before the battle and writing a letter, he said, we may lose, but the victory will cost the enemy so dear that it will feel like a defeat. And that was a very prophetic because even one of their own, when he said that, his own officer said we can't take another victory like this. So it's a Pyrrhic victory.

So we're going to imagine in this structure in front of us, room to room, fighting hand-to-hand. And were there any survivors of the Texan garrison at all? You know, everybody was killed. Now they say that there were three or four survivors in the church. Now, of course, he let the women and children, if there was a women and children here and he let them one them was the wife of a soldier that was killed. But there were allegedly three or four survivors that the officers brought to Santa Ana and said, you know, they surrendered and he said, well, execute them.

And so they were executed right there on the officer didn't want to do it. So the guys in the infantry took him out to impress the emperor, so to speak, because, you know, Napoleon called himself the pulling of the West. Sometimes he called himself the Napoleon of the West. He tried to dress like Napoleon. He admired him greatly. And he tried to always ask yourself, what would Napoleon do? And so he wanted to come and crush these Texans.

And a lot of people now make fun of him because they say, well, if he was Napoleon, he would have never made these military blunders like he did, even though this wasn't exactly his Waterloo. It was the thing that preceded his Waterloo. It led to it, you might say, let's quickly just finish up. So from here. So he's won a bloody victory here. And yet, you're right, it proved costly and it would what effect the Alamo have on the rest of the world?

Well, of course, it enraged the Texans because he showed, you know, know what you would say of international respect for customary laws of warfare. He just killed everybody and considered them pirates. And and he did the same thing, by the way, in Goliad and Golia had this soldier surrendered, 300 of them. And one of the officers there in charge told them, he said, you can keep your guns, go back to America, take your horses and go in.

The Santa Ana countermanded. He said, no, no, no, not kill them, kill them all. And so they made them think they said, OK, well, we're going to escort you a ways out here to help you get on the way. And then when they got them out into the country, they surrounded them and shot. And they did. I think they had two different groups they did this to, but they killed Walt Whitman.

And often Fannin, who was in charge of Goliad Fort, which was really a fort. He gets a really bad reputation in history because he sat there kind of paralyzed. He couldn't decide what to do. He didn't know if he could come to the aid of the Alamo or should he stay and defend their security retreat and go with Houston, you know, what should he do? And so he just kind of stayed put where he ultimately lost this powerful force because he couldn't make up his mind.

But as you mentioned, Sam Houston, he would have been left. I guess he was the the last best hope of the Texans, was he? Yes. Sam Houston was in Gonzales when they brought the news of the the fall of the Alamo. And now there were no survivors back. Santana let Dickinson I think Sara Dickinson, I believe, was her name. She was the wife of one of the fallen soldiers and he let her go to tell the story.

They say Thermopylae had a messenger, but the Alamo had none until sent. And I said, OK, I'll let you go. You tell the story. And so she went there. And a lot of the fallen were from that little town of Gonzales with the Moral 32. So I was weeping and gnashing of teeth and people, you know, enormously sad and deep grief. And Houston was there and he you know, there were about 300 volunteers there.

And they wanted to go to the Alamo, take on Santana. And he said, no, no, no, no, let's not be rash. All we'll do is go over there and get crushed. Let's wait. Let's get more men. Let's take our time. And so he went east and his soldiers hated it because they thought he was the general. He wouldn't fight. They call him a coward because he kept going east and they would tell him, okay, well, I to stand at the Colorado and they and then he said, no, this isn't a good place.

We'll make a stand at the Brazos. No, no, wait. Let's go across the bridge. But on the other hand, people saw him as a wily fox because he sucked Santa Ana in to a long, long march after his soldiers were demoralized. I mean, imagine you're part of the infantry and one third of your buddies are gone. And nothing sad is that there were about 100 guys who died needlessly because Santana didn't have any surgeons with him.

He moved too fast to bother with medical and a lot of them died where they should have live because they weren't hurt that badly infections. And he also there were also two. Doctors in the alleyway killed them, too. So he lost a lot of help that might have saved men in any case. Santana pursued Sam Houston and there's a saying in Texas when I hear you saying is it's quote I love from Isaac Klein, who was essentially famous as one of the early weather forecasters.

I know it sounds kind of odd, but it was a young science. And he's the one who pushed for the development of a network of weather stations to monitor weather. And this was, you know, back he was in the late eighteen hundreds, not in the time of the Alamo. But he has a saying. Like he said, Texas is a land of interminable drought, interrupted occasionally by biblical floods. And that spring they had biblical floods and that's what slowed Santa Anna down.

He could move his cannons. His men were exhausted. They were demoralized. So that's why I say the Alamo is a great gift. Was it stalled him for two weeks while Sam Houston was able to gather volunteers and able to train them there. No training. So we had this group of very independent men who came from the states. And they you know, one way to look at it, I think, is that they came from many of them, from the the rural areas of England.

So they were used to rural. They even bypassed the cities when they came to America and went to the Appalachian Hills because that's what seemed familiar to them. And so when they came and then eventually that became too civilized, they moved to Texas. The new frontier is incredibly independent spirits and hunters and fishermen and outdoorsman. And they took on, you know, this mostly professional army that Santa Ana styled after European methods. And so it was that typical insurgency fighting a guerrilla war, kind of not fighting in traditional ways.

They were shocked, the Santayana's men, that these men at the Alamo could take their long guns and pick off people 200 yards away. So that's why they couldn't move their cannons. And I suppose they wanted to be because they kept shooting the gunners. They hadn't seen that kind of marksmanship before. But eventually, Santa Ana and Houston did meet on the battlefield in pretty much in what is now the city of Houston, right? Yeah, well, right outside the San Jacinto, they call it is the battlefield, but outside kind of to the east of Houston, which is next door to where, by coincidence, USS Texas is parked, which is my favorite ship on Earth.

Yes. There you go. Yes, it's right there. And it's kind of a large museum known as the great monument there to Texas Independence. And anyway, Sam Houston depends on who you talk to. Some say Sam Houston just got lucky, you know, that he kept going east, kept going east, and he finally found a place where he couldn't go anymore. You know, he was kind of stuck and his men wanted to fight. They were just saying, please let us fight.

And so there are a lot of more unhappy with him. He said, why won't you fight your general fight? And of course, he says that he was trying to work them up into this frustrated frenzy and he wanted to suck Santa Ana in to a situation where he couldn't retreat, where Santa Ana was stuck could be. So depends on who you talk to, what Monday morning quarterback you want to listen to. But in any case, the brilliant thing that I think he did do was he attacked them during siesta time.

You know, they expect to fight in the morning. You know, the Santana was expecting the battle to be in the morning, as battles always are, you know, and and so they're resting and taking a rest because they've had a long march. The men are exhausted and they're all in siesta time. And here he comes. And there they march across this long prairie, 900 men across a long period of attack. Twelve hundred Mexicans in encampment.

And they have cannons, by the way. And Sam Houston only has one, but they surprise them. They I mean, they are really caught by complete surprise and they're in disarray, running without their guns. And there are 600 Mexicans killed in nineteen minutes and only about I think there are nine Texans killed in this battle the last eight minutes. Some say ten that it was over really, really fast. And and then, of course, because of Goliad and because of the Alamo, the Texans were taking the ridge.

So a lot of these Mexicans were swimming across them. There was kind of a lake there and they were swimming across the lake to get away and fish in the water, you know, the takes just picking them off, picking them up, picking them off. They would say, remember the Alamo, remember Goliad? And even the Mexicans would throw up their hands, said no Alamo, no Alamo. And I wasn't there. I was there. Don't don't take it out on me.

So it was a resounding victory. You know, the story, of course, that Santana got away dressed as a kind of private, you know, got a. It got rid of all his is signs of command, and he was captured the next day and they brought him in not knowing who he was, they thought he was just a regular soldier. And then his soldiers started bowing to him and said, Commandant, there it is. So they gave him up.

You know, they outed him. And so Sam Houston knew there were two other armies out there that he couldn't fight, probably, or it would be tough. And so he had sent Anacin them commands to go back to Mexico and the Santa Ana sign, the documents giving Texas its independence. So Texas won its independence on the part of the San Jacinto. And yet we really we remember the anniversary briefly, like, why is it that the battle that happened here is the one that is remembered?

Because this was the complete sacrifice and this is the one where everybody died. You know, it was Thermopylae. They gave the ultimate gift to Texas when they didn't have to and they stood up for freedom in that way. I think that's why also, you have such a powerful support for the Second Amendment in Texas, because these men defended liberty with their own guns from their own houses for Texas. That resonates, you know, to come and take it.

You know, I'm not going to give up my arms. I'm not going to be defenseless against tyrants. And that metaphor resonates throughout Texas culture, even to this day, not for everybody. I mean, there are people who are for reasonable gun control and things, but for many, it's it's a line in the sand that cannot be crossed. This in itself articulates that pretty strongly. Like I say, I mean, it's an almost religious reverence.

That's Christ like figures on it. The writing is extremely traumatic in memory of the heroes who sacrificed their lives at the Alamo and their names written on. And are that there are some people from the UK on here. Oh, yes. Yes. There's there were eight people who died here from the UK. So. So you guys helped us out. Thank you so much. And when did Texas join become a U.S. states, a Texan appeared as an independent country?

Yes, we were on our own for 10 years and Mexico kept coming back. You know, the Mexicans, they came back in 1842, six years after the Alamo, to hear San Antonio and took about 12 of the citizens back to Mexico and put them in prison. Prominent citizens that they were rebels and they wanted one of those guys was Samuel Maverick. He's the guy that the word maverick comes from. You're aware of the term maverick, meaning someone is nonconformist.

Right? But where it attaches to this guy, Samuel Maverick, is he had some cows and he didn't brand them. And so any cow that was unbranded became known as Mavericks. Cows is a maverick. You know, he doesn't have is he's a nonconformist, that cow sheep. And so that's where the idea comes from. And he was a mayor here twice and he was taken by Santana's government anyway. And as president of Mexico 11 times, get that Sam Maverick was taken down and put in parotid prison, you know, just horrible, horrible, like the Tower of London sort of thing.

And he was in a dungeon in chains. And, you know, Santana sent word to him, said, if your sign this document saying that Texas was illegally seized, I'll let you go. And he said, well, I can't sign my name to a lie, so I'll have to stay in my change. Now, that's a maverick. That's why he should be known as a maverick, not because he had cows that were unbranded. Ultimately, you know, he wasn't a rancher.

He was an investor. He bought huge tracts of land to resell and things. And he wasn't interested. They just got some cows that they gave him. You know, someone paid him as a debt here, spawner cows. And he had a guy to take care of them, but got him random, you know, that's how it came to be. But I always say that he should be known. As a maverick for not signing that document when it would have given him his freedom and by the way, when he was released, he took the chains that had bound him in the dungeon with him to remind himself of the priceless nature of freedom all his life.

Right over here behind you, this building, this hotel Gibbs right here is called the front desk. Right there is about the place that Travis died at the front desk of that hotel. That's where Travis fell. It was one of the first to die. And that that used to be where Samuel Maverick lived. There's a plaque over there to show you Samuel Maverick dedication to Samuel Maverick. And he built a house there because he felt he should. He was here at the Alamo and probably would have died here had they not elected him to go sign the Declaration of Independence for Texas.

And he felt that he should honor them by living here. Now, tell me about the importance of let's finish off by saying what does this building mean to Texas today? And is it true that Texans are Texans first and American second? Absolutely. We are Texan first and incidentally, American. I like to compare us to like the, you know, the Bavarians of Germany, that we have this incredibly strong identity as a as a state or a region that transcends our national identity.

That's why I'm sure you see it all the time. When you meet a Texan in London, they will tell you I'm Texan. Then, you know, they don't bother to say I'm American. I'm from Texas. So that's our identity. And one of the things that you'll find here, and not just at the Alamo, but it's all over Texas is you will see T-shirts in this shop that are very common throughout Texas where they they have come and take it t shirts.

They have, of course, the Texas flag and a t shirt. And they have the famous saying of David Crockett. When he left Tennessee, he said he lost a political race and he said, y'all can all go to hell, I'm going to Texas. And so that's a T-shirt shirt, very common. You see it all over. And one of the things that I see in my stories that I do on the radio, I get letters from people all the time that tell me that they were moved to tears over some description I had of Texas liberty or Texas patriotism.

And sometimes I'm surprised and I mean, I know it's out there, but the depth of it is stunning. Thank you so much. That was a tour de force. Now, how do people listening to this around the world stay in touch with your work and listen to you on some of your many other subjects? A mature expert? Well, they can just go to stories from Texas podcast and they can get what I do on the radio in podcast form, or they can buy my book stories from Texas.

Some of them are true on Amazon and it's on it's on audible also. And it's on Barnes & Noble and most of the great bookstores in Texas. You can find it. But the easiest thing is to get the to get the e-book on Amazon and I make more money on that one anyway. So download that one. OK, you do it when you heard the man. Thank you for taking me around. This is truly remarkable. Battlefield's a real pleasure.

One more thing. I believe it is the greatest story in Fehrenbach, who takes a historian who said that when the Mexicans looked across those planes to these Celtic warriors here in the Alamo, these Santa Ana descendants roam. Looking across at these Celtic warriors. They must have thought we've been here before. I mean, it's like the Romans taking on the German troops in the woods and 980.

I like it, like, you know. Big in the history of our country. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring folks. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favor, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do.

Martinus. I know, but them's the rules. Then we go farther up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. I'll sleep well.

Akehurst powers some of the world's best podcasts. Here's a show we recommend. Hi, this is Ross Golan, the host of the podcast, and the writer is I've written with hundreds of artists and writers over the years, and my favorite part of each session is the first hour when we catch up about life in the industry, politics, composition, whatever. So our podcast is a journey of learning, why people write songs, how people write songs, and most importantly, who the people are who write the songs.

Guess this season include Gwen Stefani, Luke Combs, Victoria Monet and Clemans. Love J.Y. did it in many more. Listen to our show and the writer is every Monday on a cast or wherever you get your podcast, visit our website at West Dot and the writer is Dotcom.

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