Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire After the Fall of the Alamo

One of the most famous icons of the Alamo is the eighteen-pounder cannon, mounted at the south west corner of the compound facing towards what was then the town. This was the cannon used by Travis at the start of the siege to defy calls to negotiate or surrender.

John Wayne did a pretty good job of depicting it in his 1960 version...



...except that the wooden mock-up he used wasn't nearly big enough. The real one, as depicted by fiberglass-with-steel-barrel-liner replica in the 2004 Billy-Bob Thornton version, was awesome....





(Tho I cannot find a good image without people in it).

The Alamo cannon arrived at the coast at Veslaco (due South of present-day Houston) with that company of the New Orleans Greys but had been left there when it was discovered no ammunition had been sent. Leaving it there was probably an easy decision as it was enormously heavy.

For point of reference, a brass 12-pounder Napoleon, pretty much the standard Civil War field ordinance, weighed 1,200 pounds and that was just the tube. Cannon, carriage, limber (two-wheeled carriage that pulled the cannon) and ammunition in said limber collectively weighed about 4,000 lbs.

The Alamo cannon was made of iron. I cannot find the point of origin but most likely it had been a naval cannon, if so just the tube alone weighed in excess of 4,000 lbs.

Prob'ly much naivete at the time thinking such a massive piece of ordnance belonged in an isolated stone-and-adobe mission not physically defending anything in particular.

Twenty New Orleans Greys were detached to go back and get the cannon from Veslaco and haul it 200 miles to the Alamo, said crew growing to 75 participants en-route.

I can find nothing describing this epic task, nor anything about how many of those 75 men stayed on to defend the Alamo. I do think that it must have been a considerable relief to those 75 men when the Alamo came finally into sight from the higher ground to the east wherein the road from that direction entered the town.

What happened to this cannon is a mystery. When the Mexican army withdrew from San Antonio after San Jacinto they spiked and knocked the trunions (mounting points) off of those cannon among the 19 active Alamo cannon they left behind to render them useless. These were left on the ground or rolled into the ditches. No word on whether the 18 pounder met that fate although it seems a certainty.

For 47 years beginning in 1870 what was almost certainly this cannon was on display at San Pedro Springs Park about three miles from the Alamo, that park in that era being a prominent social and entertainment center. That cannon was removed in 1917, nobody knows where it went, possibly it was melted down as scrap.

Birdwatcher