Читать книгу Texas Got It Right! - Sam Wyly - Страница 21

The Battle of Gonzales (see opposite page) in

October 1835 may have provided the spark for the

Texas Revolution, but the settlers who won it proba-

bly didn’t anticipate just how hot the flames of their

new war would burn. By early the next year, six thou-

sand Mexican troops had poured into Texas to put

down the insurrection. Mexico’s dictator, General

Santa Anna—who in early 1835 had ransacked the

Mexican silver-mining town of Zacatecas to crush the

rebels who were fighting to preserve their freedom

under the Mexican Constitution of 1824—

issued a decree to his troops to take no

prisoners. Five months after the

rebels at Gonzales rallied under

the slogan “Come and Take

It,” 187 of their brethren

(including nine

Tejanos, or Texans of

Mexican descent)

met their end at

the point of a bay-

onet or barrel of

a gun, fighting

bitterly, to the

last man and

Bowie knife, at

an old Spanish

religious outpost

called the Alamo. A

The Alamo, originally named Mis-

sion San Antonio de Valero, was a

home to missionaries and their Indian

converts for almost seven decades

before it was secularized in 1793.

few weeks later, Mexican troops massacred 342

Texan prisoners at Goliad, where an early version of

the Texan Declaration of Independence had been

signed. But the Texas rebels were not deterred.

They’d thrown in all their chips with a perilous

cause—that of independence from a dictatorship—

and they were going to take that cause to its

conclusion.

TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!

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