Remembering the Alamo: vastly outnumbered and with no hope of relief, the Alamo's defenders courageously gave their lives and bought precious time for Texans to rally resistance. (History--Struggle for Freedom).

Daniel Cloud, a 21-year-old Kentuckian lawyer, had been on sentry duty for hours in the bell tower of the San Fernando Church. Like most of the other "Texians" who had gathered in the town of San Antonio de Bexar, Cloud had retired late following the previous night's fandango celebrating George Washington's birthday, and the chilly February weather did little to dispel his torpor.

The previous day's celebration began with a lengthy patriotic speech by Davy Crockett at noon, and continued well into the evening, as Texians--their spirits buoyed by a string of victories over the Mexican army--feasted on tamales washed down with skull-splitting mescal, and diverted themselves with dancing, horse races, and cockfights. The festivities may have continued well into the morning hours had it not been dampened by two developments: A sudden midnight rain shower; and a message warning Jim Bowie that General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the military dictator of Mexico, had encamped with several thousand troops on the Medma River--just a few miles south of the mission-fortress called the Alamo.

This dire intelligence was greeted skeptically by some, particularly William Barret Travis, the Alamo's tall, red-haired, 27-year-old commandant. Travis believed it unlikely that Santa Anna would choose to move his army across the barren 300-mile expanse (much of which Texian scouts had burned) separating his stronghold at Saltillo from San Antonio. Without adequate forage for his army's horses, Santa Anna would have to wait until spring--at least, that's how Travis sized up the strategic situation. Jim Bowie, the legendary adventurer from Kentucky with whom Travis grudgingly shared command, saw the situation much differently.

On the morning of February 23rd, 1836, as William Cloud kept watch on the western horizon, and other Texian fighters slept off the previous day's indulgences, Jim Bowie was seriously ill and gravely worried. "The message he had received last night at the dance was far from the first such warning," recorded historian Lon Tinkle in 13 Days to Glory. "For two months there had been rumors, vague murmurs impossible to verify, mostly wrong--but maybe, as Bowie suspected, right." Some young Mexican scouts loyal to Bowie reported that bakeries in small border towns along Santa Anna's probable route were suddenly thriving, suggesting that they were helping stock a large army.

Bowie had led a colorful (and not entirely commendable) life before settling in San Antonio in 1830. Although he never officially enlisted and held no formal commission, he fought with the Texas volunteers in three victorious engagements in the fall and winter of 1835. After arriving at the Alamo on January 19, 1836, Bowie teamed up with Major Green Jameson, the Alamo's chief engineer, to fortify the small mission--which was little better than a mud fort.

Abandoned by the Catholic Church in 1793, the mission took its name from los alamos--cottonwood trees that lined nearby ditches. Mexican troops occasionally used the facility as an outpost. At its heart was a rectangular three-acre lot called the "plaza," flanked by two barracks areas. The Alamo's most prominent--and, in event of battle, defensible--feature was a thirty-foot high chapel made of cut stone and mortar; its walls were four feet thick and twenty-two feet high.

Undistinguished though it was, the Alamo was the only significant outpost between the Mexican armies to the south, and the mass of Texian colonies along the Sabine River, In October 1835, after armed rebellion against Mexican rule had broken out, soldiers under General Martin Perfecto de Cos--Santa Anna's inept, vain brother-in-law--took control of the Alamo. Cos had arrived in San Antonio with 21 artillery pieces and a 1,200-man army, half of which was used to occupy and fortify the Alamo, the rest deployed at barricades in the center of the town. In December, Cos surrendered the Alamo after his army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of 300 Texas volunteers. When the Texians reoccupied the mission, they found it had been fortified with trenches, cannon emplacements, and a stockade.