『Episode 52: Joe and The Alamo – Little Known Stories』のカバーアート

Episode 52: Joe and The Alamo – Little Known Stories

Episode 52: Joe and The Alamo – Little Known Stories

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Joe and The Alamo – Little Known Stories The Last Man Standing Joe the Battle of The Alamo, and the testimony that became history There were many stories on the wagon trail. To understand what Joe did, you first have to understand what he wasn’t supposed to do at all. He wasn’t a soldier. Nobody swore him in. Nobody handed him a rank. He was, in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the man who owned him, property, a twenty-year-old enslaved man named Joe, body servant to a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant colonel named William Barret Travis. Joe pressed his master’s clothes. Saddled his horse. Drove his carriage into town. That was the job. That was supposed to be the whole of his story.Here on Quarter Miles Travel – Well say his name and we tell his story. In December of 1835, Travis was ordered to the Texas frontier, to a small town built around a crumbling Spanish mission, San Antonio de Béxar. He brought Joe with him. Not as a companion. As equipment – as property. They arrived on February 5th, 1836. Within three weeks, everything about that place would become permanent carved into American memory for two hundred years. The mission was called the Alamo. On February 23rd, Mexican forces under General Antonio López de Santa Anna poured into San Antonio far faster than the Texans expected. Santa Anna raised a blood-red flag over the bell tower of San Fernando Church, a message with only one meaning: no mercy, no quarter, no surrender terms. Travis answered with a single cannon shot. For the next thirteen days, roughly two hundred men, Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the volunteers who’d gathered behind the Alamo’s crumbling walls, held out against a force that outnumbered them many times over. And for thirteen days, Joe was there too.He didn’t get a say in whether to stay and fight or to run. He shared every hour of it anyway, the cold, the hunger, the exhaustion, the slow realization that the reinforcements everyone hoped for weren’t coming. Historians will tell you plainly: an enslaved man’s presence during a siege like this wasn’t unusual for the era. What’s unusual, what’s remarkable is that we know what Joe experienced at all. Because almost nobody in that position ever got to speak afterward. Joe did. Before dawn on March 6th, 1836, the assault came. By Joe’s own later account, he was asleep in the same room as Travis when the alarm went up. Travis grabbed his rifle and his sword. He shouted for Joe to follow him. They ran together to the north wall. Travis called out to his men, one last order to stand and fight. He fired his weapon. Almost in the same instant, he was shot and fell inside the compound. Joe watched his master go down. And then he did the only thing that gave him any chance at all, he pulled back into one of the interior buildings and kept firing from cover as the walls came apart around him. The battle by this point wasn’t a battle in any organized sense anymore. It was hand to hand. Rifle butts, knives, bayonets. Men fighting for their own lives with whatever was in their hands. When Mexican soldiers finally broke all the way through, they moved building to building. And they called out, demanding that any Black men inside reveal themselves. Joe stepped out. Even so, in the chaos, a soldier struck him with a pistol and drove a bayonet toward him before a Mexican officer intervened and stopped it. He was one of only a small handful of people left alive inside those walls.The only adult male defender to survive. Joe was taken into Béxar as a captive. He watched a formal review of the Mexican army, a display, really, meant to communicate total victory. And then he was brought before Santa Anna himself. Joe apparently spoke some Spanish. So Santa Anna questioned him directly, about the size of the Texan forces, about Sam Houston’s army, about what was left to stand between the Mexican military and the rest of Texas. He was also asked to help identify the bodies of Travis and Bowie among the Alamo’s dead. Then, for reasons historians still debate, he was released. Think about the position he was in. A prisoner. Interrogated by the general who’d just ordered the deaths of everyone he’d spent thirteen days beside. No protection. No guarantee that walking out of that room meant walking out alive. And somehow, it was Joe, not a Texan officer, not a diplomat, who became one of the only living sources of truth about what had actually happened inside the Alamo. Joe made his way to Gonzales, traveling alongside Susanna Dickinson wife of a fallen Alamo defender, and her infant daughter. Together they delivered the news to Sam Houston and the gathering Texan forces there: the Alamo had fallen. Everyone inside was dead. It was the first confirmation Texas had. Houston, realizing Santa Anna’s army was still advancing, ordered Gonzales burned and its people evacuated east, the beginning of what Texans still call the Runaway Scrape. ...
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