From the Annals of the Revolution – In 1836, Col. William B. Travis issued a call for help on behalf of the Texian defenders of the Alamo.  The troops in the crumbling mission turned fort included regular Texas Army soldiers and a variety of volunteers with Davy Crockett being the most famous.

Travis was in command of troops in the recently captured city of San Antonio de Bexar.  His military capability has been much debated.  His troops were surprised by the arrival of the leading forces of the army of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana on February 23 even though they had been marching from Mexico for over a month. Travis and his troops took shelter in the Alamo, where they were joined by a volunteer force led by Col. James Bowie.

The mission was quickly surrounded by Santa Ana’s 5,000 troops.  When Santa Ana called for Travis and his men to surrender, they answered with a bold shot from one of the Alamo’s cannon.  Furious, Santa Ana began a 13 day siege. Travis recognized his predicament and sent out several messages via couriers asking for reinforcements. Addressing one of the pleas to “The People of Texas and All Americans in the World,” Travis stated that the Alamo was surrounded by more than a thousand Mexican troops and that it had sustained 24 hours of bombardment without loss of life.  He proclaimed “I shall never retreat or surrender” and signed off with the now-famous “Victory or Death” knowing that it almost certainly would be death.  Only 32 valiant men from the nearby town of Gonzales responded to Travis’ call for help slipping through a gap in the Mexican lines that Santa Ana had purposefully left open hoping to lure more Texians to an almost certain tragic fate.