Tl,e Struggle for Independence, I835-I836
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there were, in fact, only 183. This number tallies with the estimate of Travis. He declared in one of his last reports that he had 150 fighting men and that 32, possibly 33, had come in from Gonzalez on March 1. At the time of the attack there appears to have been in the Alamo more than 200 persons, perhaps 215, combatants and noncom- batants. According to the carefully compiled list of the Alamo garrison, seven Mexicans were among the 183 dead. 48 There were more survivors than is generally believed, but these were all women, children, _and slaves. Among them were Mrs. Almeron Dickenson and her fifteen-month-old daughter, whom Santa Anna begged to adopt; a sister-in-law of Bowie, Mrs. Alsbury, wife of Dr. Horace Alsbury, and daughter of Angel Navarro, who was the only member of the Navarros who had not joined the Texas cause; her son Alejo, a little boy, eighteen months old; her fifteen-year-old sister, Gertrudis; Mrs. Gregorio Esparsa and her eight-year-old son Enrique, besides her three younger children; Mrs. Toribio Losoya, who later became Mrs. Milton, and her three children; Madam Candelaria; Dona Petra, a very old woman, whom all called "Nana"; Joe, Travis's slave; Sam, Bowie's slave; Anselmo Borgara (Vergara?), who was Travis's hired man, a noncombatant, who took the news to Colonel Seguin at Gonzalez, and eight or ten other unidentified Mexican women and their children. It was found, therefore, that there were more than thirty persons in all who survived the destruction of the Alamo garrison. Borgara, as he is generally called, and Anselmo Barcena, his friend, were the first to arrive in Gonzalez on March 8 with the news of the tragedy. Ignorant of the fact that Houston had just come to town, the two men failed to report to him. The news created a panic, and Houston had to arrest the two messengers as spies in order to calm the citizenry. Mrs. Dickenson, accompanied by Joe and the Negro slave of Santa Anna, Anselmo, whom he·had sent along as an escort, arrived March 11. The fate of the Alamo could no longer be hidden from the public. T/1-e ashes of th6 Alamo heroes. As already stated, Santa Anna ordered Alcalde Ruiz to gather the Texan dead and bum them as a sanitary measure. The three pyres, built of alternate layers of wood and corpses, were set on fire late that same afternoon to merge their "'Juan N. Seguin tried to stay to the end, but was urged to take a mess:ige to Gonzalez. For a complete list of the Alamo dead, see Williams, "A Critical Study of the Siege and Fall, of the Alamo," (Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas), 237-250.
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